Bitcoin Forum

I have been a bitparking (http://mmpool.bitparking.com/pool)  miner for a while, but the raise of the PPS fees from 2.5% to 5% made me look for other options.

Eclipse Mining Consortium (https://eclipsemc.com/) appears to be having a 0% fee on DGM shares.

If so, why do other pools impose any fee?

Why do miners are willing to pay a fee for participating a DGM pool if 0% DGM pools are available?

i thought bitparking wsa down neway?

The fee is to pay for costs of operating the pool, build reserves for operating the PPS side of things, and to pay for the time involved in support and upkeep of the pool.

You are complaining about the increase in PPS but higher PPS fees are necessary to keep pools in operation. Did you read the part of my "Upcoming Changes" that explained the reserve requirements for PPS pools? Do you have The 3,000 BTC necessary to keep a reserve for a low fee pool? PPS pools can pay hundreds of BTC of funds keeping the PPS pool going through the bad luck periods. I need to raise the fees to reduce the chances of pool bankruptcy. Just like all the other low fee PPS pools like Mt Red and Ozcoin.

Why do some other pools have 0% fees? I don't know - maybe they get subsidized hardware to run it. Maybe they have plenty of money and it doesn't matter to them what it costs.

As a miner you are free to choose where to mine. Have fun choosing.

+1

I read the upcoming changes and I think they are just fine, and necessary, if we want to see Bitparking survive.

While the changes may be justified with respect to the PPS fees, I am still puzzled about the DGM fees. How can other pools survive without imposing any fees on DGM?

To put it differently, what it is that bitparking offers that EMC does not with respect to the DGM?

You mean other than a trustworty op, highly stable pool, the only pool offering merged mining of 3 types of alt coins, good support, regular notifications and updates, backup stratum pools... maybe its best for doublec to answer.

No, really... i do not mean to come off as sarcastic.
Other pools have the same (and higher fees) without even a quarter of what bitparking offers.

EMC has:
-- a mining speed of 2500 GH/s (see https://eclipsemc.com/block_stats.php)
-- over 2000 miners
-- 3 servers
-- email notifications of changes and deposits
-- email notifications for failing miners

To be clear, I am not advocating for EMC (or any other pool), rather, I am trying to understand what bitparking has to offer that EMC does not have.

I like the fact that you can mine other currencies concurrently with your bitcoin mining on Bitparking.  It's like a little extra cash at the end of the month when I combine them and trade them for BTC's

I have used Vircurex to generate wallets for the other currencies that are mineable on Bitparking and have the payments sent there.  I found it just to be so much easier that way, don't have to frick around with all different clients etc etc to work your 'coins'.

Here is a link if you are interested.

 https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=263-4573

my Refid is 263-4573 if you wish to use me as a referral.  you should get discounts on your trading there too.

once a month or whenever, I will trade the other currencies I have accumulated for BTC, or play the market with them.  I recently did a deal where I got a bunch of namecoins for 2.5 cent each then recently sold them for 6 cent each.

Of all the pools, Bitparking seemed to have the lowest fees.  The ability to mine other coins was icing on that cake.

I do not know of any other mining pools that allow you to mine 4 different currencies at once.  If there are any, please let me know.


Some people may not care for that.  If that is the case, then you may want to switch to another pool if the fees here seem too high for you.

Aaron

Can you explain what you mean by "at once"?  If you use your GPU for one, you are not using for the other.  In other words, while your GPU is mining namecoins, it is not bitcoins, and vice versa. So, unless namecoin is more economic to mine, you are actually losing money when use your rig for mining something other than bitcoins. And if namecoin is more economic, then one should be mining that all the time.

Am I missing something?

By the way, http://coinotron.com has a large variety of coins to mine.

Yes, you are missing something. The pool 'merge mines', it doesn't mine each coin individually. This means a single hash from your miner is used to solve blocks across all the coins. See here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged-mining-work

So, what happened with my rewards for these shares in alternative coins?

I received rewards only in bitcoins, with no indication of any other rewards.

Did you register addresses for the other coins? You only receive rewards for coins you have registered. As it says on the registration form "Enter a namecoin address or leave blank to receive none."

EMC doesn't merge mine, so you are missing out on income from namecoins,devcoins, and ixcoins. EMC doesn't pay orphans, Bitparking does which eats into the fee quite a bit. It may be that none of this matters to you in which case, yes, EMC might be a better pool for you.

Considering we've had around 1.2 % orphan blocks during the last 12 months, a 1.5 % fee is next to nothing. And if I include losses from "accidents" like the blockchain fork a few weeks ago I'm quite amazed how some of the pools survived at all.

Can you explain how these rewards (in namecoins, devcoins, and ixcoins) are being calculated?

They are calculated the same as PPS in bitcoin, but with a 2.5% fee.

So, if I submit 1 share, then I will get each of the rewards listed, in the respective currencies?

Yes, if you've registered an address for them.

Each different currency has it's own hash rate, it's own difficulty, value, etc etc,  JUST like bitcoin.

When you signed up, IF you put in an address for these different currencies, you will be mining them along with your bitcoin.
If you did not put in an address then you will NOT be mining them.

No worries though simply re register with a different name and then add your wallets for these different currencies.
Then you can take payouts Of them to your respective wallets.

If you do not want to have to search out / download / install/ get working all the different coin type wallets.  You can goto an exchange like vircurex for example and create a wallet there.
The money goes there, and you can do what you want with it then.

Aaron

Can you elaborate on what it means to mine them along with my bitcoins.

What was suggested here (and I am not sure if it is correct) that the same computation can be used for both mining bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. In other words, that by putting addresses for more than one currency, I will not lose some of my computational capacity to mining things other than bitcoins.

If so, then for 1 share that I submit, I am to receive both 1 unit of reward for bitcoin mining, but also 1 unit of reward for each of the other coins.

Is this how it works?

If not, then now it works exactly in terms of rewards?

Yes, that is how it works: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged-mining-work

So, if converted (at today's rates) to bitcoins, what is the total reward per share on a PPS system (assuming 5% fee on bitcoins and 2.5% on all others)? In other words, what is the sum, in bitcoins, of all rewards received?

I don't know, sounds like a good project for you to investigate.

Right now  namecoin adds 8.13%, devcoin 0.62% and ixcoin 2.18% to your earnings in terms of the price ratio to btc.

And with that math if I'm not mistaken, if all your after is btc then this pool is paying out in excess of 100% compared to a btc only pool even with fees....

If so, then why do you charge any fees on bitcoins?

You could instead keep some or all of the rewards from these other currencies, and have a no fee BTC pool. Or at least offer such an option.

I think you will be better off at a different mining place.  You seem to act like this place is out to rip you off or something.

Why should he NOT charge a fee, running mining pools cost money, bandwidth cost money, hosting cost money.  A run of bad luck costs money.

If he took the money from the other currencies then you would probably cry that he is ripping you off by stealing your other currencies  ::)

Again, if you do not like the fees, you are free to go mine elsewhere.  Or better yet, open your own mining pool, maintain it and run it however you want to.

Aaron

I was not suggesting that bitparking is out to rip off anyone. I simply asked a question about an alternative way of recovering not only costs, but making profit for bitparking, namely, by retaining all revenue from alternative coins mined in the process, but not charging any fees for bitcoin mining.

If the information provided earlier is correct (that these alternative coins provide another 10% revenue), the pool operator would be much better off keeping this revenue, and not charging any fee for bitcoin mining.

My questions is: What is the reason that this is not how the pool operates? It would be a win for the operator (more profit), and a win for all miners, because the opportunity to do pooled mine at 0% fee would attract many miners. So, if the information provided earlier is correct, this would be a win-win situation.

I can give you the reasons why I don't do it, but understand that there is no right approach. Anyone can do whatever scratches their own person itch. The pool is designed to protect alt coin chains via merge mining and to distribute these coins to users who want to get them via mining. Their use of the coins will hopefully (if they don't immediately sell) help with the exchange rate of the coins. If I were to only provide bitcoin and receive fees via selling the alt coins then my selling would dump the alt coin market and drop their prices quite a bit. I'd also be tied to the risk that the alt coin prices drop, or the alt coins fail, making the pool lose money while offering a zero percent fee.

This is the last 'justification' post I'm going to contribute to this thread because it's completely unproductive. Any answer is a 'right' answer depending on individual miners wants and needs. That's why it's great having so many pools to choose from.

First, I wanted to thank you for providing some explanation. I am sorry if any of this discussion appeared to you as unproductive. I can assure you that I found it very interesting and informative.

I am particularly grateful for sharing with me the link https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf about the various pool reward systems -- it brings me back my kindest memories as an undergraduate student. I had a great professor for Probability Theory.

I wanted to toss out another, quote open-ended question (and again, none on this is directed against you or your pool in any way): Is there a "fair" way of rewarding miners without punishing those who may stop mining from time to time due to technical difficulties, faulty hardware, etc.?

No because the pool can't tell the difference between a hopper and one that is down due to technical difficulties on their side (at least that is what I would suspect)

Does hopping (in an optimal way) not have a very specific pattern that can be detected (specifically, by means of the time of the hopping)?