Bitcoin Forum

I have started logging my experiences with mining on my computers. My adventures with ALT coins and my earnings. If you are interested in reading, check out my blog.

MY BITCOIN LOGS (http://maunderingcabal.blogspot.com)

A fun read.  Always nice to follow a miner's experience through the different pools.  I just had one comment, and that was related to one of your statements:

"After about 20 Hours (sleep for 8 hours and work for 12 hours) I came home to 0.0244958 BTC. That's pretty decent for my hardware, but I feel ready for some more regular small payments."

PPS is as regular as you could get for payments [paid for every share!], the limit being you can't continually withdraw extremely small amounts to your own wallet, which fits your statement.  My only comment is you should be careful about pulling out significantly small amounts from pools as payments.  This leads to a problem dubbed "bag of pennies", where you are unable to send your BTC anywhere without incurring above average fees.

With the way the bitcoin protocol works, the age and size of your coin inputs is what determines the fee.  Being able to spend a 0.01 payout will take approximately 100 days to be able to send without a fee [according to default rules].  Multiple small payouts like this can induce even larger fees as the size of your transaction grows.  On top of this, small transactions with many inputs tend to take longer to confirm, so spending your coins might take longer.

I didn't realize it worked like that on the network with small fees adding up. Right now I'm on bitparking, so the minimum I can pull out is BTC0.10, So this is probably more reasonable with confirmation time and fees right? It will take me a couple days to get a payout though. But all the ALT coins keep me busy till then.

As your inputs (payments from the pool) age, eventually the fees will go away.  Each payment from a pool is it's own input, and when you spend your coins, the bitcoin wallet will try to use the oldest coins/fewest inputs to generate a single output [payment/deposit somewhere else].  It's one of the ways the network helps reduce the ability to create transaction spam with insignificant amounts.

Is this why satoshi dice is so bad, because the flood congests the system with trying to find the oldest coins out of the huge amount of small transactions?

Not exactly.  It's the bitcoin client that does the work.  SatoshiDice introduced a big problem though, which is transaction size.

Satoshi Dice does have fees involved in its payments.  However, miners end up with MASSIVE wallets full of what amount to essentially unspendable inputs [lots of 0.00000001 amounts].  There really is no way to spend 0.00000001 inputs without incurring a fee greater than how much you're trying to send, unless you are able to mine your own blocks [solo mine].

The problem SD presents to the network is the size of blocks has grown tremendously.  Larger blocks take longer to verify, which means the time it takes blocks to spread across the network is increased [both due to the transmission size and the CPU time to verify before it is passed on].  This has increased the rate of orphan blocks.  At the same time, it has dramatically increased the size of the blockchain, which slows down how fast new users can setup and use the default bitcoin client.

I have updated my log! (http://maunderingcabal.blogspot.com/2013/02/bitcoin-mining-log-4.html)

I bought some silver from Shire Silver (http://shiresilver.com) partially with Bitcoin. Check them out, they are legit for offloading your coins for gold and silver.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H4oKsbYYyq8/UQ9x7LaYTcI/AAAAAAAAA3I/Dg6InaPx94s/s1600/silver.JPG

Another day, some more crypto coin.

Another log for today.