Bitcoin Forum

If you aren't aware of MT.Red, we are a pool spawned off from the great community of folks over at Reddit.

It is our goal to make the most functional mining environment for you guys, with the absolute best must have features.

So what do you wanna see in a pool?  How can we get you to mine with us. You can see a feature list in my sig, and on the site https://mtred.com/

Thanks and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
RR

I LOVE MtRed, but I just can't stand the variance that comes with the last few difficulties.  I think in order to attract more people to the pool, adopt some of Deepbit's features, such as:

• the ability to adjust the timeout alert threshold for each worker
• total BTC generated for the last 24hr window
• SMALLER fonts.  Not to pick nits, but with MtRed it looks like I'm visiting a video game site when I'm at work.  With Deepbit it's all business and doesn't look too out of place in a work environment
• more lines per page on the "Found Blocks" page
• instant updates of worker shares instead of once every 5 minutes

That's all I can think of now :)

Well for one, you still use use a broken reward method (prop is just wrong, PPS is insane in the long run unless you have fees that make it not worth it). Also, I can't see any mention of a fee percentage on your site (only the parts accessible w/o logging in).

But hey, I may be nitpicking since I'm not really mining on your pool, so do what you want with my answer (and if this is inappropriate, I'll delete this message).

[Edit: just noticed you now allow anonymous users to see the found blocks. That's a nice improvement! It was ineffective (https://github.com/Artefact2/pident/blob/847c24e5e1e14d084a8d3f2a850a7b7a9999a7d7/lib/inc.pools.php#L73) anyway.]

I'd love to see some kind of anti pool hopping. I admit that I (manually) hopped a bit for a while, but now with bithopper and stuff being widely adapted there's no way for a non hopper or even a casual manual hopper (like I was) to come out even.

I'd suggest going with the tried and true delayed block announcements that deepbit and now btcguild also use - people already know this method and it's easy enough for the non mathematical mind to understand, so they'd probably trust it more than other solutions such as pay per last N shares.

With your pool size you'd probably need more than one hour for it to be reasonably effective, maybe four hours or so.

Otherwise, keep up the good work! From here in northern Germany, MtRed's server is among the very fastest as far as time between establishing the HTTP connection and receiving the getwork or getting confirmation of the share submission is concerned, only some small German pools such as the new (and I fear non-viable) BTCpool24 are faster. I like that as it keeps miners running more smoothly. Also your stale rates are pretty low.

Delaying announcements is NOT going to help anything.

As soon as 3-4 bigger pools run delayed (currently only 2 huge pools run delayed prop.) there will be measures against this. The only ones who loose are the regular miners again, as they get less transparency but still get hopped.

Also a code change like this might introduce bugs while only being a temporary measure. Please rather invest your time and ressources in implementing a safe payout method instead of trying to secure an algorithm that is broken by design.

Can you describe those measures? What would they be like? I honestly don't know.

there's a thread that isn't stickied but lives at the top of the mining software subforum. Start around page 140 or 145. Or you can read all 153+ pages if you are interested...

Just had a quick look to confirm that the two offered reward structures are proportional and pay-per-share.

I personally like to think that some bitcoin miners have a grasp of probability sufficient to understand the fundamental flaw with the proportional reward structure.  No amount of obfuscation can prevent pool-hopping.

For now I'll continue to mine solo.  I'd consider joining this pool for PPLNS.

Off the top of my head I can't think of other options that wouldn't put the pool operator out of business almost immediately.  Any proposals?

JSON API which has the same information as on the My Profile page.

PPLNS perhaps.