Bitcoin Forum

UPDATE 03/Aug/2013:  MaxBTC.com Pool has closed indefinitely.  Payouts will be processed within the next 48 hours.  Big thanks to all our miners!  Hopefully, we can continue our relationship over at Kraken.com (http://Kraken.com)

Hey guys, we've just opened our Bitcoin mining pool up to the public.  I hope you give it a test run and let us know what you think!

https://www.maxbtc.com

Features:
Merged mining with NameCoin
Zero Fees
Double Geometric Payout Method
Long Polling
Automatic & Manual Payouts to 8 Decimal Places
Configurable Idle Miner Notification
Email & Wallet Locking/Unlocking
Mining on Ports 8332 & 80
SSL
API
Two-Factor Authentication with Yubikey and Google Authenticator (HOTP and TOTP)
Support Ticket System & Community Forums
Awesome Stats & Graphs
Direct & Instant Payouts to Ogrr.com


Coming Soon:
Withdrawal to PayPal & Moneybookers

Nice Website. I wonder which Double Geometric Variables you are running (f, c, o)? Found nothing about that on your website.

it's in the work payouts (https://www.maxbtc.com/statistics/block) and somewhat in the mining activity (https://www.maxbtc.com/statistics/pool) under average fee.

I joined today!  Nice pool, eta on namecoin?

BTW, Your stats are the best I've seen.

Thanks and welcome aboard :)  Shooting for merged mining with Namecoin to launch at the end of next week.  I'll keep you posted.

Just joined. You might want to make the auto-payout feature dependent on the user inputting a wallet address first. I don't know how your system is designed to handle sending payouts to nothing.

I've been mining here since the beta.  It's been amazingly stable.  btcx has been very responsive to suggestions to improve the pool.  Plus, he's just a nice guy (which sadly can't be said about some other pool ops).

I give the pool 9 thumbs up!

Thanks for joining, and for the suggestion.  Currently, if you don't have a wallet address and you enable auto payouts, no payments will be sent but I do agree that we should probably just disable the auto payouts option (and direct users to enter a wallet address to enable it) for users who don't have a wallet address set yet.

edit:  this is now implemented.


Thanks, rando :)  Your suggestions and help with testing have been great.  Also, your mining operation is awesome!

We certainly had a major luck streak today!

Four blocks in two and a half hours!  Booyah!  ;D

Round     Block        Duration     Shares
38          172199      0:04:45      13,098
37          172198      0:52:49      118,498
36          172189      0:33:11      74,516
35          172183      1:01:34      143,499

Very comfortable site indeed! Wishing the best of block luck.

I notice you plan to process payouts via moneybookers, just be cautious since they refuse to deal with any bitcoin-related trading.

Just came over to the pool last night. Site looks great.

Submitted 270k shares in the last round and got paid .06 BTC because I left before the round what over.  :-\

What kind of DGM settings do have have to decay shares so quickly and why?

Thanks for giving it a whirl.  You must have left pretty early in the round, which required 2.2m shares.  The values can all be seen here:  https://www.maxbtc.com/work-payouts?w=41 (https://www.maxbtc.com/work-payouts?w=41)

currently: f = 0.0505, c = 0.01, o = 0.8

edit:  actually, c is way too low, giving a disproportionately large value to shares submitted near the end of the round.

starting round 43, the values will be:  f = -0.1555, c = 0.1, o = 0.8
bonus is reduced to 4%

I'm open to suggestions, discussion on what those values should be.



I have another business that does 1000+ txns/day.  I was planning on funneling the Bitcoin withdrawals through that account.  Technically, withdrawing to MB or PayPal isn't really the same as selling Bitcoin.  We already have the Bitcoin.. we'd just be paying you for your hashing contribution with dollars instead but it's probably best to obfuscate the transaction just in case.

So if I mine with the 3.50% there is still technically a -2% fee with the 4% bonus ('Cause of invalids counting).

Good idea making special features require people to donate, I haven't personally seen that before.

Oh and I love the website's stats pages, they are very organized and easy to read.

Thanks :)  It'd be a -0.88% fee (0.88% bonus).  The bonus is applied first and then donations are taken out.

From my account:

That is truly fucked up. I received 0.00000025 BTC for my avg 222 MH /sec, whereas someone mining 10x less shares got 10,000x more reward that round. Even if you adjust the parameters I cannot see how it would be more profitable than deepbit for anyone who mines intermittently.

Oh, btw the pool rewards graph is one day early. Unless it's March 26th somewhere already...?

Sounds like a tobic for organofcorti's upcomming edition of Neighbourhood Pool Watch!

Which block was this on?  c being too low was fixed as of round 43, and the adjustment to the parameters was actually huge, despite the numbers looking small.  Round 45 was extremely long.. 4.8m shares, though we did end up paying out 57 BTC for it.  The further from the end you dropped out, the further reduced your rewards would be.  Also, it may take a few rounds of mining most of the time for your score to stabilize.  This is the nature of DGM.  If you're just mining for 10 minutes at a time here and there, a DGM pool is probably not the best option for you but you'll have to try it out and see.  Another feature of DGM is cross-round leakage.  As an example, GigaVPS stopped mining hours before round 45 was over but still got 0.67 BTC at 329k shares, and he hasn't mined at all yet on round 46 but if the round ended now he'd receive 0.31 BTC for it.

I believe that the graph will show anything mined on the current day UTC as belonging to the following day.

It was round 41 block 172375, before you made the fix. Got so disappointed that I dropped out for a few rounds, happily not for good!

Yea what a strange system, still got to get my brains over it. You are probably correct in that DGM is not good for intermittent mining. However, I would be surprised if the peculiarities of DGM didn't leave room for more advanced and profitable strategies than the standard pool hopping, which of course would be (and will be) another topic.

well, i was present all of block #47 and was issued .54 bitcoins for 4911 shares, the person right above me received .61 for 1685.

i first started in block #46, reached 5,901 shares, and received .38 bitcoins.  some fellow named NoodlesMcGee received .41 for for 5,499.. fair enough, since it seems like he's been around for a while.  in block 47, he received .32 for 1039 shares, vs (as mentioned earlier) .54 for 4911.  miners were running the whole time.   

i shifted some off after  seeing that, seems a bit extreme. 

the only time I came out ahead on a pool with a similar system was after I stopped mining

looks like you picked a good time to take a break.


With block #47, we don't know what that person above you contributed in prior rounds.  You have to look at how many shares it takes to solve the block too.  You will have some earnings that carry over to the next round as well, as you pointed out.

very fancy.  i've decided i like it!

ed: oh, I did notice that work #49 was confirmed some time ago but is still showing as unconfirmed on account total.  not sure if that's something intentional or what

thanks for pointing that out.  we broke something in a recent update but it should be fine now.  btw, merged mining with namecoin has been running for the past 2 days.  we're just working out the UI for it now.  the spoils should be available for you to see soon :)

UPDATE:  Merged Mining with NameCoin is now active.

Actually, it's been active for about 40 blocks.. we just got the UI done.  If you've been mining, you should already have some NMC rewards!

Logged in and saw my namecoins.  UI is nice and clean and I was able to withdraw my nmc with no issues.

* Don't forget you need to set a nmc wallet address before you can withdraw

Did something break? Workers showing 0 mhash, top miners now at 0 and #72 an invalid block. Was so glad to see the block get solved too.

Edit: Looks like Btcx is already on it.

Thanks for the report.  We are tinkering around but the invalid was just a coincidence.  Bummer after such a long round :(  Separate email notifications for Namecoin should be up shortly.

No problem, I really like the pool. Best one I have used yet.

Wow the pools hashrate is higher then Eclipse's, that's amazing!

Ever thought about paying out BTC for Namecoins like Eclipse? For the people that don't mine to keep them.

mmm the pool had 400+ GH for one day now its back to normal 100-150gh , dont see how you could add 450GH as the norm.

It's been at 400 Gh for a while, peaking at like 700.  It appears there is a big hopper who goes in and out.

Good suggestion.  It's on the list of things to do but I don't know how soon we'll get to it.

 
Right.  Actually, the last number I had the title at was 250gh.  I believe a mod bumped it up to 459gh, which is probably what they saw when they decided to update the sticky list.

ah sorry ye I see it fluctuate alot between 100-500GH, probably gpumax traffic? :P

nup
abcproxy actually,
our hashrate (ozcoin) dropped by 400ghash at same time maxbtc increased, and about 15mins before diablo-d3 got around to updating the top9 to top10 - he looks at "current speed" so really top 10 is pretty inaccurate at times :/
hope thats a help
Graet

What is abcproxy anyhow?

It's a derogatory word used for ABCPool.  They ticked off a few pool operators and miners with the way they hid what they were actually doing until pressed against the wall.  They pool hop with their "pools" hash power, keeping any extra money earned from hopping on top of charging a fee to miners.

They've since come clean and openly stated how their pool operates, but there are quite a few pool ops that are still sour about their lack of openness from the start [mostly prop pool owners since they were the ones being hopped].

Man that is crappy. It seems to kill any small profit you might get as well when were on these unlucky blocks.  At least at my small mhash anyhow, I am adding more soon as my hardware arrives in the mail although I don't think it makes a lot of difference when they hop like that.

DGM, the reward method used by MaxBTC, does not suffer from hoppers. On the contrary, extra pool hashrate will only lower everyone's variance, smoothing earnings. You'll get less per block but that much more blocks will be found. This creates the same expected earnings but with less fluctuations each day. Of course the lowest variance is obtained from a PPS pool such as eleuthria's BTCGuild or forementioned ABCPool.  PPS pools usually have a fee to compensate the risk they take off your shoulders, while other pools may be fee-less.

Hope this helps,
MC

I see, that does clear things up.

Thank you

Doff

Well said.  I just responded to some questions over at Ogrr about this as well:  https://ogrr.com/viewtopic.php?f=373&t=2551&p=16217#p16217

Seems the settings here are more extreme than ozco.in.  I got paid for 2+ days (granted - very small amounts) after mining there with 10 Gh/s for about 3 hours.  Did the same here and wonder if I will even get paid for this block  ;)

According to Ozcoin's site, they use c=0.2, which should pay out for about 36m shares (~22 rounds at current difficulty).  MaxBTC uses c=0.1, which would be good for 16m shares (~10 rounds).  Increasing c would mean slower decay and less variance for miners but also more risk for the pool, which may be acceptable once we stop paying out the bonuses. 

Thanks for the info - much appreciated!

Beginning round 87, bonuses will be eliminated and c increased from 0.1 to 0.15.

DGM has 2 parameters. You can decrease variance at the cost of either operator risk or maturity time. If the decay is too fast you can increase o while keeping c fixed. Of course, then people will need to understand that their payment for mining now will be spread out over the next several blocks.


DGM is perfectly usable by intermittent miners, the average reward is not affected. There will be variance which has mostly a psychological effect (I'm not saying psychological factors shouldn't be considered, only that you shouldn't assume there's anything more than that). If the variance (even with optimal parameters) is too much to bear, go with PPS.


DGM is provably hopping-proof. Block withholding attacks (including lie-in-wait) are still possible, as with any other system.

This change appeared to have messed up the payments as well,

Block 87 (911000 shares) only rewarded 36 bitcoins
Block 88 (798000 shares) rewarded 40 bitcoins
Block 89 (1261000 shares, negative luck) rewarded 46 bitcoins

Thanks for chiming in, Meni.  If you see anything wrong with my reasoning/math here (or zvs'), please let me know.

Settings were changed from f=-0.125, c=0.1, o=0.8 in round 86 to f=-0.17647, c=0.15, o=0.85 in the rounds zvs is referring to.  
 
The pool appears to be doing what it's supposed to.  There is no standard on luck but it's set to 0% = difficulty.  The change in parameters and the big pool hopper not being on much in recent rounds is what's making the fee appear so high.  DGM lowers variance and tries to make payments fairly evenly over time.  People that understand variance mine at 0% DGM pools, and people that don't go to 5+% PPS pools and lose 5+% in the long run.

The change in settings would slow the decay and maturity time.  Twice the amount of shares would be needed to replace one of the previous ones.  Eventually it'll reach equilibrium and everything will be 1:1 again.  Also, those rounds are lucky so the pool takes more of the rewards that it had to pay out for the unlucky rounds.  The geometric method is based on p, which is 1/D as the probability that the block will be solved, so 1261000 shares would still be considered "unlucky".  Depending on the scores in previous rounds, it may pay out more than 50 BTC or it may pay out less.  In this case, there were two lucky rounds before it and one that was still better than expected.  The upward trajectory of the payouts even with fairly lucky rounds is expected as the new settings take over to find equilibrium.  Once equilibrium is reached, strings of lucky rounds will usually reduce payouts.

If DGM is implemented as described in the forum or in AoBPMRS, it requires score rescaling if the average fee is changed. If no rescaling is done, it means that people who mine shortly before the change will get on average less than a 1.25% bonus, rather than 1.25% as they were promised. This has no effect on people who mine after the change. I don't think that has any relation with zvs's observations, though.

Another effect, which is normal, is that changing the timescale means that miners have a new equilibrium score, which takes some time to build up to. This can cause a reduction in immediate payments, which is compensated by a higher later payment. Edit: On second thought, this effect doesn't happen on the global level. It happens per miner when the overall hashrate changes.

But from a casual examination, it looks like what zvs refers to as "messed up payments" is not related at all to the parameter change. The total reward of a block depends on the luck of several previous blocks. (This is the result of cashing out previous score, it has no affect on the profitability of mining new shares). It's possible that there were a few lucky rounds before block 87, causing a reduced total payout which slowly builds up back to the equilibrium.

Hmm, I think the change combined with the earlier lucky blocks probably made the payment less than it would have been than if nothing had been changed?   Wouldn't it cause the lucky blocks to stick around for longer when otherwise they may have been "passed" by the share count?

In any case, yeah, it definitely caught up or w/e.  It's paying out fine now.

It would be the other way around. Increasing c should make for a more rapid recovery from previous luck.

I don't think the rescaling is required.  The bonuses were meant to be applied for the rounds mined in.  So, if you were going to get 1 BTC with DGM, you'd get 1.0125 BTC instead.  It was easily accomplished with DGM without having to add any extra bonus code by increasing f by that amount, which would be the same as increasing the DGM payout by that amount since f isn't involved in calculating the score payout = (exp(lS-ls)*(r-1)*(1-f))/p.

The bonus you're referring to is for the lifetime of the share, which isn't how we're defining bonus (and I don't think most people would define it that way either), though what you're referring to is probably more fair and isn't exploitable.

I guess that's one way to look at it. To me a bonus implies that every share I mine during the bonus period gives me on average 101.25% PPS.

Why does the topic still say: "[459 GH] MaxBTC.com Pool ..."? We are below 100 GH now!

"Shhhhhh"

To be honest, we never considered that definition.  It's similar to how we do donations; the amount they want to donate is a % of what their income is for that round, not what their mined shares would produce for that round over its lifetime.  it's a lot easier for people to understand, calculate, and predict than it is to have the donations spread out over multiple rounds.  it also makes implementation easier since no rescaling would be required whenever they decide to change their donation %.

Why does the hashrate of your pool vary so much? Does that mean it's getting hopped?

You can parametrize the calculation in a way that will not require an explicit rescaling when changing the average fee to do what I described.

It hasn't varied much recently.  I guess it used to get hopped to on occasion because of the bonus?

Yes, and that's not a bad thing.


True.  We may consider that but we're not sure if people are ready to accept that type of donation method.  Basic DGM is already confusing for many people.

Can you add a way to automatically turn nmc into btc balance like in eclipsemc?

Yeah, it's on the list of things to do but I don't think you're missing out on a whole lot.  5gh should produce about $1 worth of NMC per month.

in the last week i've received 45NMC.  about 18hrs total downtime in there, some other periods where i was using a computer, so my guess would be it's ~4gh for that week..  anyway, i'm sure you could calculate out the exact amt you could expect to get over x time with x hashing power, but

those 45NMC sold for .40 bitcoins on btc-e (yeah, i was surprised when i checked the price too, it was close to .01 for a while)...    that's about $2 in a week

This pool is NUTS.  I'm not sure exactly how the mechanics work for payouts, I'm getting a good 15% more at this pool than any other pool I've tried (MtRed, DeepBit, EclipseMC).

That's cause the pool is lucky at the moment.

Yeah, we have had a streak of good luck the past few days.  Over time EMC's 0 fee DGM and MtRed's 0 fee PPS should pay out about the same as MaxBTC.  I'm not sure what method options/fees Deepbit is offering these days.

This Namecoin luck is just great!

I'm thinking about possibly trying this pool out with my 32 gh/s farm. What kind of reject rates are you guys typically getting here? Does this pool ever have any downtime?

I've been mining since the beta and had almost zero downtime.  Very solid.

Across all of my rigs with roughly 80Gh/s running through the pool I have 0.27% invalids.  I'm pretty happy with that ;)

https://i.imgur.com/vuwmJ.png

Edit:

I'm getting about 0.12% right now, been rock solid for me.

Can you add an option to manually create the password for the worker? It shouldn't be a security issue as long as it's a different pw from others. This way I don't have to change the set up of my rigs too much.

Thanks

did the server just go down? I can't connect to pool.maxbtc.com on either ports 8332 or 80. The pool's hashrate just went down to 0 as well with 0 miners :o

seems to be back up now :)

had an issue with the backups.  should have only been down for a few minutes.  all is well :)

I'm really liking this pool. The site is awesome and the stats are neat. Founds 2 blocks already, some great luck ( knock on wood, been quiet over the weekend ).

2 questions. Does autopayout work? Am I missing something?

On the block stats for the rewards, what does the asterisk mean by some people's names?

Auto Payout requires you donate at least 0.75%. For 1.25% I think you get email notifications about your miners, and 3.5% donation pays you for invalid blocks.

And correct me if i'm wrong, the asterisk beside peoples names has something to do with donating.

Thanks Aseras, and thanks for tackling those questions, Tittiez.  The * actually means that the reward has already been credited for that user (they donated 3.5%+) when the block hasn't been confirmed yet or is invalid.  If the block is confirmed, no * is shown since everyone should have been credited already.

This is the only feature I miss from other pools. If you can add this in, it would be perfect. ;D

I would second (third?) this.  There really isn't a security risk with letting a user choose their own password.  I've seen some pools that let you choose just one letter.  hehe

Geez, amazingrando... What kind of hardware are you running?

I have 768,000 Voodoo2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo2) video cards.   :P

+1 on worker password changes.

Is anyone else having problems with auto payout?  I'm above 0.75% for donations but it hasn't triggered.  I tried re-saving with another % value but it's still not working.

lulz

lol I'd hate to see your electricity bill :)

I just mentioned that. Mine has never auto paid, been at 3.5% since I started mining.

yeah, I have auto-notify on and it has never notified me about idle workers, either... so, I guess none of the notifications are working except for block solving..

anyway, some new development  for the last 8 hrs or so, stats are frozen on the top miners, personal workers section, etc.   dunno if that might also have some impact on it showing solved btc/nmc blocks

There have been some significant changes to the backend recently.  Because of that, auto-pay was broken since last Wednesday and we were unaware of it until greatwolf mentioned it.  Auto-pay should be fixed now and it'll auto-pay once the next solved block is confirmed if you're donating less than 3.5%.  If you're paying 3.5% or more, it'll pay out when the next block gets solved.

Here's a few things that were added/fixed:

- Payouts to Ogrr is now supported.  You can specify a percentage of your BTC earnings to go directly to Ogrr or manually transfer them over.  If you don't know what Ogrr is, it's a forum that allows trading with bitcoins.
- One-time donations have been added so you'll be able to do a one-time donation of coins you have in the pool to the pool.
- BTC and NMC donations/features are now independent of each other.
- The email/wallet locking mechanism has been tweaked.  Please make sure your email/wallets are still locked (or unlocked).
- Miner payout blocks shows all miners paid instead of the top 20

You'll need to turn on idle miner notification, which is currently off on your account.  Then you need to go to the workers page and set the parameters for which workers you want notification on.


We originally allowed this per worker but it was changed to a single generated password for all workers to prevent people from choosing weak passwords that can reveal their main password.  Also, unlike most pools, abuses on your worker accounts can cause the account to be temporarily banned from mining.

It looks like there are many people that want to be able to set their own passwords so we'll put a it back on the list of things to do.

Seems that the 'Top Miners' list hasn't updated since yesterday afternoon. 

yeah something broke, all my miners dropped ( at exactly 12:00am/0:00 ) but it appears they are still working?  My page shows we are on block 200? But the last payout was block 116, with data unavailable.

Stats weren't being transferred to the web server.  That should be resolved now.  The problems don't affect the mining activity.

12am is about when backups occur.  There has been a problem with the backup agent locking up the database and preventing updates to it for a few minutes due to the large size of the detailed shares tables.  The long term solution would be to queue up the logging to survive database problems like these.  To avoid downtime in the short term, we might have it skip backups of detailed shares information.  Most of the stats are stored into condensed versions so damage should be limited should a disaster occur.

Yay for 4M+ blocks  :-[

FINALLY!!!  nearly 6.4m shares to solve it.. our unluckiest round yet.

We have had some seriously great and seriously painful blocks on this pool.  If only there was a way to screen out these big blocks. :p

How many shares have you guys mined on this pool total so far? What's the total pay you guys received so far for those shares?

You could figure it out if you wanted to go through the stats for each summary page: https://maxbtc.com/statistics/block?coin=0

For BTC:

Work Count	117
Invalids	3
Average Difficulty	1,547,152
Average Shares	1,501,689
Total Shares	175,697,613
Total Block Amount	5,704.42345396
Total Rewarded	5,832.56766768
Total Donated	30.57293529
PPS	0.0000333706
PPS @ 50 BTC / Block	0.0000324421

These numbers are slightly off from the totals shown on the page because they're more precise.

thanks for the info. That devpage needs a username and password though?

whoops.  fixed the link.  just click on statistics > block statistics from the homepage to get there.

Yeesh, it's almost as if this pool is suffering from the same curse that MtRed suffered through a couple weeks ago.  It was plagued by a string of really bad "luck" that turned out to be the result of merged mining.  They disabled it and variance got back to normal. 

I think the higher variance lately is a product of the lower hashrate since the big hopper left.  Luck had been just about even until the last block and we've had merged mining going for several weeks now.  Did Mt. Red's bad "luck" begin right when they turned merged mining on?

I wasn't around when they enabled MM, but here's more info about it: http://www.reddit.com/r/mtred/comments/ry3ow/merged_mining_is_temporarily_disabled_info_inside/

Umm just thought you should know that the site is not allowing me to create a worker on my account

What error is it showing when you try to add it?  Have you tried a different worker name?  Perhaps it doesn't like some of the characters in the name.

shows no error i click save and nothing shows up in the list and when i try and connect to that worker with my miner i get an auth error

Can you PM me the worker name you're trying to add, browser you're using, and whether javascript is enabled?

I think it's fixed now.  It was an issue with IE8.

I'm confused on how to even make an account. Everytime I try to set it up I get '

"Password contains common text"

But I don't see anywhere where there are rules on the password other than length and I've tried just letters, letters and numbers, and letters with numbers and special characters soooo...

It'll let you know what the problem is.  In your case, the password you chose was considered weak because it contains some words it considers too common.  Passwords must have at least a letter and non-letter (number or special character), can be from 8 to 128 characters, can't contain your username, and must pass the common words check unless it is sufficiently long.

Well I highly doubt what I had is any sort of common word and it wasn't part of my username. I mean part of it was a name, and doing a quick wolfram alpha search, is not common at all. I'll play around with it and see if I can get anything to work.

If you absolutely must have a certain word in the password and it's complaining about it being common, you can increase the length of the password until it gets accepted.  For example, if the password "common123" was rejected, you could try "common12345678" instead.  Also, it's not only common words but common names as well.

So what determines something being common? Or is that something internal that you don't know the specifics of?

It's based on analysis done by others using leaked passwords on social sites.

The common words database used contains:

- Lists of top 20-100 words used in cracked passwords from various sources
- Top common names according to certain sites
- Dictionary words used by password crackers

Common names are on the list because the analysis showed many cracked passwords contained common names.

The list is English-centric so common international words will probably sneak by.

Thanks, I ended up doing something really ridiculous I'll probably never remember but I wanted to try out the pool ha. I see I joined when we're nearly taken 2 days to finish a block, not sure if that's standard here or just bad luck but I'll try it out, thanks for having this great pool with such an awesome interface.

Thanks for signing up :)  Luck is pretty bad on this round.  We're currently at 5m+ shares and the average should be about 1.5m.

Some tools for managing really ridiculous passwords:
http://xkcd.com/936/
http://keepass.info/
http://www.keepassx.org/

Ugh, about to break 40 hours again on another 5M+ share round... what a bad run of luck.    :-\

At least it's over now, yay!

Now that there's been a few blocks I have a question. Why does your estimated btc immediately drop after a block is solved and rewards are given out even if I've been continuously mining? I haven't experienced that at any other DGM pools.

So when will this be re-enabled? It sounds like you already have the code in-place to do this.

That's how DGM works.  Every time a payout is made, you lose some of your score/reward for the next estimated payout.  I'm not sure if there are any sites that show a graph of your historical estimated rewards or update the estimates as frequently as we do (approximately every minute) so you wouldn't notice it at other pools unless you kept track of it manually.

The amount of dropoff depends on the dynamic fee and cross-round leakage.  If you've been using Eclipse, I believe the leakage is 0.99, which will have little dropoff every time you get paid.  The lower the dropoff, the longer it will take to get your rewards to fully mature and you'll need to mine for a longer time period to reach equilibrium.

Meni uses the analogy of a capacitor:

It was removed and had to be re-implemented.

You should be able to change your passcode now.

Awesome! Thank you for adding this back in  :)

There's a DDoS in progress.  The network provider won't allow any new connections to the site but those that use miners that use keep-alive connections are still able to mine until the connection closes.

You don't happen to be on Rackspace do you? A bunch of our services went down for a few minutes until they nulled the offending IP.

yeah, i was checking that too.  it's rackspace,

Yup, rackspace.. though my other business has a few servers with them as well (separate account) and those were fine.

Hi everyone,

I am a newbie, but I am in, seems this is a friendly group. Is there any other way to find you guys beside bitcointalk?

Xin,

You can also find us at Ogrr: https://ogrr.com/forum.php?f=26

Hi there. Just wanted to say that I moved my systems (1GH) to MaxBTC because of the nice site (GUI / Stats are awesome).

One problem though, it looks that the idle miner notifications aren't working. I have enabled them for three workers, donated 1.25% and enabled underperforming miners notification in my account.

I wouldn't say that. In the language of the triangle (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54499.0), lowering the dropoff moves you away from the black line and into the blue line; while the black line is characterized by low maturity time, it can still be arbitrarily decreased on the blue line.

The main advantage of using aggressive parameters (high dynamic fee, low leakage) is decreasing the variance of small pools.

Thanks for joining.

It looks like you've set it up properly except for the test worker.  Was that the one you were testing the idle miners notification with?

Thanks for the correction and link.  I haven't seen that and it should help people understand how the different variables come into play.

I was thinking along the lines of sites with extremely high o and extremely low c (resulting in a low r/high maturity time) to explain the low variance the poster was seeing.

Added two-factor authentication to the site.  Yubikey and Google Authenticator (HOTP and TOTP) are supported.  You can set it up under Account > Password & Security.

Unfortunately, no fix yet for the rotten luck we're having.

High o and low c does not result in low r. Even in the limiting case o=1, c=0 (which is exponential PPLNS) you can have r whatever you want. r is determined by the ratio between how close c is to 0 and how close o is to 1.

Ahh yes.  I'm more used to dealing with log(r) and log(o) than fiddling with the other parameters.

Getting domain name expired.  :(

Same here, Go Daddy placeholder...   :-\

50.57.5.119

Thanks for reporting that.  The domain should be back up.  If it's not, clear your cache.  Apparently, GoDaddy waits until your domain is expired to attempt to renew, and if there is any problem at all in billing you, you're shut down.  Might be nice if they renewed a day or so before you expired so if there were any problems you'd have time to correct them.  Anyway, I needed a reminder to move after the SOPA crap so we'll be off GoDaddy soon.  I apologize for the inconvenience.

Still down for me too...

down for me as well.

try clearing your browser cache and cookies.  try a ctrl+f5 to force refresh

I am having issues aswell. The website works, but the pool.maxbtc.com address won't resolve.

Edit: Just made a static record in my DNS forwarder and pointed it to 50.57.5.119 for the time beeing.

It could take up to 24 hours for negative DNS caching to clear.

I just tried refreshing the DNS settings at Rackspace.  Please give it a shot now and let me know if it's working.

The website is still not working for me, it worked before, but not anymore.

All good now  ;D

great.  thanks for the update :)

Yea, mine is working as well. I will try to move my rigs here step by step. :)

Where is everyone going? I have noticed the number of miners have dropped off recently. I really like the design and functionality of this pool.

Thats what people do when things turn unlucky, being unlucky and losing more than half your hashrate tends to make things even worse short term.

Don't know about unlucky... Falling off the web for 2 days because the domain expired has more to do with it.

Same for bonuspool. Taking the server offline for hours to fark with it isn't good for business either.

Correct, but in my case I could leave it online and waste peoples hardware or take it offline and work on it while miners went to backup. I definitely think my approach was the lessor of the 2 evils. It worked out best this way and my pool is prring along great now :)

Tried to do a payout and I get an error "failed to queue payout".

how much are you trying to queue?  bitcoin or namecoin?

Well, looks like your luck has turned - Maxbtc had the highest luck and lowest average shares per round for the last week for any of the 17 pools I monitor:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77000.0

Trying to payout a little over 7.2BTC and I'm still getting the error.

I noticed!  thanks for doing those reports, btw.  pretty awesome.


ok, lemme pm you for more info.

dns updated for me in 3 or 4 hrs (err, well, 3 or 4 hours after I woke up... so maybe 12 or so max).   i wouldnt have noticed it except for the website, miners point to 50.57.5.119

Lots of invalid blocks lately.  It's starting to hurt.

Yeah, I'm not too sure what's going on but everything appears to be functioning correctly and in sync with the network.  The competing blocks have all been found within 20 seconds of each other and blockchain.info is seeing them (both ours and the competitors') within a minute after being found.  I'm not sure what the norm is but a quick browse of the orphans at blockchain.info shows a lot of orphans recently and seems to indicate that the smaller pool usually loses out against a bigger one.

Bitcoind was restarted to clear out a potentially slow selection of connected nodes and the number of connections were increased.  Hopefully Gavin's not doing another one of the required updates to bitcoind and not informing smaller pools.

Nothing mining pool specific, though there was a security update recently everyone should do if they haven't yet. (0.6.2)

Two sides to that statement, pools need to stay aware of what's going on and recently the devs have actually started posting in the mining thread if there is pool specific stuff - ie BIP16.


I idle in the developers IRC chanel and subscribed to the dev mailing list ages ago, just to keep up - informing pools isn't anywhere I could find in developers job descriptions ;).
There is talk of making a "poolop mailing list" so the devs can pass pool specific info along in a timely manner. talk...so far

Headsup - most devs care about bitcoin/bitcoind and no have interest in "monolithic pools", big ones or small ones ;) -I feel this has changed slightly over the last few months, mainly due to the devs need for consensus from miners to do the recent BIP changes.

the pool, i guess... my donation total is about 50% of what i've gotten from invalid blocks

though even if you threw out the invalids, the luck is about 2x what it should be

it's more blocks solved than eclipsemc over the last 4 days, w/ about 1/5th the hash rate

We've been at 0.6.2.2 since a few days after the announcement of 0.6.2, which we initially heard about thanks to you.

I like the direction the bitcoind code is going but it's hard to argue that Gavin hasn't fouled up in how he's been dealing with the recent releases, with many things being done in secret.  BIP16 was initially stalled after it was announced while network consensus was being done.  Then when Deepbit finally switched over to BIP16, he gives pools two weeks to switch over to an unstable beta known to have lockup problems.  A few hours before the BIP16 deadline, the "stable" 0.6.0 release is announced after 2-3 hours of the "it compiles and runs" release candidate testing.  0.6.2 comes out of nowhere and pools must update or else a DoS or fork may occur; have you seen the kind of changes 0.6.1 made?  That is a major change from a deployment POV and needs heavy testing to make sure that there are no deadlocks and that no corruption occurs.  How much stress testing did it really have?  I've already noticed one area in the code where the locking differs between 0.6.0 and 0.6.2, which may be due to bad code updating (it's very easy to mess up), but have not investigated it.  And I've barely looked at the 0.6.2 code.  Backports were mentioned but no info was given on where they could be found.  Were 0.6.1 or 0.6.2 really ready or were they rushed?  Given the changes to 0.6.1, it might have been better to have a 0.6.0.1 patch instead.  We were already (accidently) using a seemingly stable pre-0.6.1 build so the switch to 0.6.2 wasn't a big deal.  If pools/services were made aware of the risk with 0.6.1, I don't think many would have updated right away.


The mailing list would be helpful.  Even a sticky in all bitcoin subforums indicating the current version and its release notes would help.  New version or release candidate annoucements usually get drowned in the sea of threads.

Do you accept shares unconditionally? I'm getting quite a discrepancy between cgminer stats and your stats:

CGminer:
Gets:1116
Accepts: 7805 
Rejects:3
Discards: 155
Stale: 0

maxBTC:
Gets:1108
Accepts: 7066
Stale: 282

The displayed info is usually cached for about a minute.  To get an accurate count, you'll need to stop mining for about 2 minutes and then refresh your stats.

However, the cached numbers shouldn't be off by as much as you're showing.  Your stale rate is also much higher than most users.  I believe the majority of them are seeing < 1% stales.  Are you going through any proxies?  Can you reset the stats on your miners and see if it still diverges?

No proxies.
Just reset everything... See how it looks after a couple of hours.

High invalid rate aside... I'm still getting a very large discrepancy between CGminer and maxbtc reported invalid rate. It does seem that maxBTC it telling cgminer a share valid, then deciding it's not.

I've got less than 50 invalids in ~7million shares.  30 of those were from one card in a 6hr period because it was failing (100+oC).

systems that used to use poclbm but use phoenix (with phatk2) now:

3425484 shares
14880 stales

0.4325123736906909%

systems that have always used phoenix:

3269499 shares
3344 stales

0.1021741647857841%

total:

6694983 shares
18224 stales

0.2714648900294598%

current round:

9950 shares
11 stales

0.1104306796506375%

Sorry, stales, not invalids!

Can you turn on shares logging on CGminer for about an hour and send it to me?  An hour should be enough to show the discrepancy, correct?

Sure, I'll get that going a bit later.

I checked a few of the shares at the beginning and end of the log file and they are all logged on our side.  The share.log has 4314 entries and the server also logged 4314 entries so I'm assuming it's all there.  However, 41 of the shares are logged on our side as stale and the remaining 4273 were accepted.  All the shares in the share.log file are shown as accepted.  Cross referencing with the merged mining (NMC) side, the shares were shown as accepted and not stale.  Since only one result can be sent back to the miner, an overall accepted response was returned instead of the stale BTC one.  If all merged mining results were stale, you'll get back a stale response instead of accepted.  This is why you're seeing more accepted shares on your side than what the server is showing.

The log isn't showing any discrepancies in # of submitted shares as suggested in your original post.  If you have a log that shows that sort of discrepancy, go ahead and send that and I'll take a look.

Thanks for looking into that. At least now I have an explanation :)

Didn't mean to infer there was a discrepancy in submitted shares, just the rejected ones.

(as a corollary, I would prefer to have accurate BTC stats. Don't much care for NMC so would be quite happy if NMC accepted shares aren't reported when BTC is stale)

I'm having trouble logging in. I haven't mined in a long time. Would my account have been deleted or disabled or something?

What's happening when you try to log in?  Your account wouldn't have been deleted or disabled.  Did you set up 2-factor auth before?  You can pm me with the details.

'Failed to queue payout'

I have over 2 BTC waiting...

Try withdrawing only down to 4 decimal places, or hang in there while we look in to it.

Ah, that worked... changed it to a round 2.

What a great run lately. Living up to the name!

+1

Hey I was wondering if there was any way i could have my account ( Account name the same as my name here ) balance sent to me since it is below the threshhold and sent to my btc and nmc addresses that are on file since i dont use your pool anymore?

Eligius sends everything after like a week of inactivity...that would be cool.?

Thanks for the suggestion, Marty.  King, we'll be adding autopayouts on inactivity very soon.  If you're not dying for the cash, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mind waiting for that to go live and then you'd just receive the remaining balance automatically.  The required period of inactivity will probably be closer to 2 weeks as miners could potentially continue to receive payouts for up to that amount of time.

last payment i recv'd was

05-21-12 10:01:01 148 05-22-12 10:25:24 0 0.00000001 - BTC
&
05-15-12 17:54:16 218 05-16-12 11:58:32 0 0.00000001 - NMC

Hello,

Where can I find the DGM Variables (f, c, o) on www.maxBTC.com ?

Check any of the Work Payouts:  https://www.maxbtc.com/work-payouts?w=195

Epic round is epic.

Cr@p..it's a long one!  I hope it's over soon, cause I am die'n ova here! 

That's what she said?

It is a long one.. longer than we've come to expect lately but the number of shares isn't terribly terrible.  I'll go sacrifice a few more virgins and see if that helps.

so when is the inactivity payment happen?

soon?  ;)

Update: Make it Rain!

damn, block solved just as i swapped most my stuff back =/

Check your wallet.  It just triggered on my test account.

Yep got the payments thanks

Sure thing.  Thanks for being patient :)

np

epic

too bad i was wasting time with p2pool =/

sweet :)

Wheeeee!  Wow, it must be the Irish in me, cause we are lucky!  ;)

If this round becomes invalid, I'm going to cry.

I am already on the ledge!

Taking the 3.5% insurance helps!  Not too late is it?

What is the longest for this pool?

6.4 mil and 6.2 mil are the two longest in terms of shares

besides block #1, this is the longest one, though (ed: in amt of time)

so much for my 0.000034xx since may  :-\

i'll put magical worker 4F back to work, 2 bitcoin solves in 400k shares!

come on 4F, make it rain!!!!

4F needs another couple weeks to get to 200k, then it should have it solved =p

all but one of my non-busted gpus (a growing collection) are now in use.  using top secret methods to solve block, im rdy for bonus

No rewards in the last few days. What's up?

Not our luck!

Thanks for finally pressing the solve button. Now just put it on turbo.

100 hours! Yay!

Less of the invalid blocks pleeeeeese!

Bad stretch of luck along with invalids had me worried.  Luck has improved of late and getting closer to 100% PPS...

Hi maxbtc,

It seems your rollntime implementation is incorrect.


So the correct implementation is an http header like so:


Hope this helps.

Best,
gigavps

looks like above avg luck since 8/21

and rather freakish since 9/20!

Thanks for the heads up.  We're a bit busy right now but have fixed the headers and are adding a few more options.  We'll roll it out once they're tested and ready.

pool is down!

On it.  Thanks for the report!

we're back in action.  thanks again :)

wth, nothing against pool ops, just WTH with this round!!!!! the never ending round!

3rd longest round by # of shares yet.  Can it take the #1 spot?  Only 300k more to go!

Can someone solve the block now?

K, thks.

I agree with shep, , wow 111 hours at 150ghs, can someone explain why this block took so long? I was watching this a couple days ago and noticed that on the stats page of the block, on the left about 2/3 way down , it says "BLOCKS LEFT"  XXXX, I saw this go from 3 to 2 to 1 , then it went back up to like 1800 or something like that.  Does that mean we had to go back thru all the blocks again to find that one block that solves it? I am confused about this one. yeah 1.4 coins for 4 days worth of work. Bad luck all around this week.

You don't work on the same block. Everytime the network finds a new block, you start over. It's just luck.

As Aseras said, it's luck.  The good luck we had before had to eventually end and be offset by longer rounds, though these past few have been a bit too long.

The blocks left you mention are the number of blocks left before the next difficulty change.  Every 2016 blocks, the difficulty will be readjusted by the network so that it'll take about two weeks to solve 2016 blocks (or a block every 10 minutes).

We don't have any plans for it at this time.

GBT/Stratum/VarDiff shares on the horizon?

Vardiff just needs to be tested, which will be after we get 0.7.x tested.  Stratum, maybe.. more likely stratum than GBT.

MaxBTC has been neglected a bit lately as we've been focusing on the exchange, which is nearly ready.

Woah.

That was a long time coming :)

because i started mining here again!     oct. 25th to present, what is that, about +10%?    ;D

14 blocks solved and 380 paid out  :'(

finished!  hohoho

15,111,732

ANNOUNCEMENT

2-4 hour pool downtime scheduled for Sunday, December 23rd at 6am PST (-08:00 GMT).  Please plan accordingly.  A post will be made here when services are back online.  If you're connecting to our IP rather than domain, you'll need to update your settings to reflect our new IP, which will be provided in another post on Sunday.  Apologies in advance for the inconvenience.

We've had to push our downtime a bit.  The pool is still up now.  An update will be posted here once we commence with the maintenance.

Pool downtime starts now 24/Dec/2012 - 10:30pm PST.  We expect to be back up within 2 hours but I'll keep you posted.

Pool is back up:  https://www.maxbtc.com/  It may take a bit for DNS to propagate.  New IP is:  174.137.40.11

Still working out some kinks.  For the time being, you may experience lower latency back at the old IP:  50.57.5.119

Thanks for your patience!

Having issues with a payout that has been queued up for 3 or 4 days.

And the Contact Us page is giving this error: "SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate"

Thanks for the report and sorry for the trouble.  I'm looking in to this now.  Hopefully, I'll have fixes for you later today.

Payout and API difficulties should be resolved.  A few users received duplicate payouts.  If you could kindly return those it'd be much appreciated:  1M7nCDSNX4k1A5yaZL2dQXMYxbcy5k8mkP  Thanks :)

I get  
when trying to connect to site.

It's back!  Thanks for the report.

This pool looked great at the start and seems to be a casualty of war now.

No update withs stratum, vardiff, etc.  :(

Is MaxBTC on .7 or .8?

Looks like from the stats at the top of the site they are on .7

Hi! Did you already implement withdrawal to Moneybookers?

The ogrr forum link there doesn't work. The contact page also fails with:


when submitting a contact request.

Lastly, is there any chance of allowing dots `.` in worker names instead of hyphens `-`?

btcx,
ETA for stratum?  Can you reset my two factor authentication?  The site never asked me/promoted to set it up and now it is locked.


-Wave

Oh, and what are your DGM settings?

hi btcx,

with your pool i get stale rate of about 4.6%!  :'(  This is much to high, because it´s lost reward. with other pools, i am on stale rate around 0.16%. what can i do about it?

greetings, worker

wow apologies for missing all these replies to this thread!  I've gotta sort out my notifications.

Guys, to be very honest, the pool has been somewhat neglected as we've focused our attention on Kraken.com.  It will probably be 2 months before we are able to make any significant improvements (stratum, vardiff, etc) and until then we'll do our best at just keeping it up and running.  In the meantime, there are some other great pools out there that might better serve your needs but if you want to stick around, we're glad to have you :)

Please feel free to PM me directly if you have any trouble with two-factor, the support system, etc.  Actually, it's probably better to just PM me than use the support system at all.

DGM settings were discussed earlier in this thread:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68734.msg814952#msg814952


Possibly but could you tell me why that change is important to you?

I'll PM you now for more info.

It's really more for consistency as a fallback server. This way if I do use maxbtc as backup I only need to change the ip of my miner to point to it. Otherwise I'd have to change the worker name as well and that becomes another room for error.

Add both pools to the config with one as failover? Then you dont have to change anything.

Also,

 http://www.maxbtc.com now points to a godaddy web page, and https://www.maxbtc.com is completely down. As well as the pools randomly not working.


Probly would want to check into that, cause as though its not your highest prority right now, I would bet it isnt your lowest either considering its basiucally free money as long as its up.

--sh0cked

Seems this pool is being abandoned :/ That's too bad. I liked the way it presented all of the workers stats.

It's due to the current round, it's over 337 hours now, no payout. So people have left.

is the website like completely down too?

I had noticed in the last few rounds completion there is 1 big workhorse that contributes quite a bit of shares.. perhaps they are having hw problem or as u suggest have left. 

Yeah, not sure what happened to our big miner but with the global hashrate where it is, it's going to be a long time before we solve a block without him.  I think we'll need to add stratum support to grow the userbase/recover hashrate but at the moment, we're focused entirely on Kraken.

Don't want to see this pool die, best charts around!

I agree with the stratum support.  That will help.

In addition, though, it would be nice if the "Top Miners" section could be looked at and fixed.  Those numbers haven't updated for a very long time.  I think without being able to have confidence in those numbers, it's hard to be confident that the other numbers in the header and stats page are accurate.  For new miners considering joining and for users on the fence for leaving, I think confidence is very important.

Also, for that matter, the Forum tab points to something that doesn't exist and the Contact feature has another problem.  Perhaps the forum link should just point here and the contact tab be fixed or removed.

Hello,

I just recently posted in the Newbie forum about a VERY STUPID MISTAKE I made: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=248488

I have also PM'd btcx about this, but also wanted to post in this thread to get more thoughts.

MaxBTC mined this block last night:
https://blockchain.info/block-index/396076/0000000000000095818f4b04e36cda98661f591d6df448f5cdc9d7c1e793c017.

You might notice the anomalously large transaction fees, mainly coming from this transaction that I broadcasted: https://blockchain.info/tx/dbd7ae61cc8d15a6bdc853a72b3be6d52a3470ebacd83e61b34554f6335a8255


Does anyone here know if the transaction fee has already been distributed to the pool? The only possibility I see for getting my coins back is if the fees are in a reserve somewhere at MaxBTC, where someone can send me back my coins out of the goodness of their heart. If the fees have been distributed already, I suppose my only option would be asking for handouts.

Can anyone in this thread help me understand "how fucked I am"? I know I am the only one at fault, and I deserve the full consequences. I've learned a valuable lesson the hard way and definitely know to be more careful with raw transactions in the future.

11.86954877 BTC sent to 1Hxdz2CeoCw5gJ1LhRWc3ABLcmNiZgVEse
txid 44c369aa5a1dd80003d2fcdf7a6589bc182b3449e0748897d0290f648f37fbbd

GIANT PUBLIC THANK YOU to btcx for helping me out here!! I made a major mistake and was extremely lucky to have such an honest person on the other end.

I was already impressed by Kraken, but this is just further proof that Payward deserves my full support. I'm looking forward to some exciting things from you in the future!

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/youre-awesome.gif

Is this a first? Anyone else ever returned a fee in error?

btcguild.com returned a 100 BTC fee last year if I am not mistaken.

Yes, I vaguely remember that. Good show, all involved!

Hey all,

I regret to inform you that we'll be shutting down MaxBTC at 12pm PDT on Saturday, August 3rd.  Please redirect your mining effort and update your payout address if necessary.

If you're looking for another DGM pool, I'd recommend https://eclipsemc.com/

Hope to see you all again very soon for the launch of Kraken.com.

Jesse

Sad to see another pool closing
Good luck in your future ventures :)
Graet

Thanks, Graet.  It was fun while it lasted but fell victim to other priorities.  Good luck with Ozcoin!

The pool is now closed.  Funds will be disbursed within the next 48 hours.  Big thanks to all our miners!

Sorry to see it go. It was one of the better pools out there when I first started using it. Best charting around and merged mining was nice. I hope Ogrr is doing alright.

Hell yeah, I used to mine here just for the website design and charts. Maybe btcx should give the design to Bitparking. :P

Thanks, guys!  We handed Ogrr off a while back to another team who are still hard at work trying to make something of it.  For the time being, the only things we've got on our plate are Kraken.com and DATA:  http://info.datauthority.org/