Bitcoin Forum

Closed.

Automatic Payouts are now working.

Fairly lacklustre response so far, is there anything in particular you guys would consider a crucial feature before considering this or any pool?

i think with the abundance of pools out there, the one thing that sets you apart ist the availability of connections thru port 80.

which, btw, stopped working yesterday.


hope someone's in IRC (zzzZzZZzzzZZZzz....), if I'm not around there when y'all wake up, PM me here^^

hum, we do have one user currently mining through port 80 so it is working. I'll be on IRC all day today, pop in after you get back from work and we'll see what's up :)

Edit:
Made a few tweaks, also please ensure that you're using pool.rfcpool.com if you're trying to use port 80, NOT rfcpool.com or www.rfcpool.com in your miner config. Port 80 will only work on pool.rfcpool.com

Up to 6GH/s.

Idle worker notifications are now active.

API development underway, pool stats available, user stats next :)

10GH/s bump.

Done some tuning and tweaking on reducing stales too, try us out and see how low your stale ratio can get :)

Realising that our site looked like it was designed by programmers (it was), we have started over with a new design which is hopefully a little easier on the eye.

Still looking for more miners, we're peaking at 12GH/s at the moment. We do offer PPS if you don't want to join a round so far in.

Third block found! Jump in near the start of our 4th block now :)

Fourth block found, and our luck continues because that's all of them found way faster than the current difficulty suggests :)

We also have great fun on the IRC channel (freenode #rfcpool), so if your current pool's channel is full of bores or nutters, join ours  :D

We've just passed the 20 GH/s mark.  Nice job guys.  Onward and upward.

Tonight we moved the pool to the first of several bigger servers to better cope with growth. It pretty much went completely flawlessly with only a few minutes of outage.

The only hiccup was idle worker notifications were sent out when they shouldn't have been, so I apologise for the false alarm in your email.

In other news, almost at 30GH, and 5 blocks now found.

7% PPS seems fair given your only pure PPS competitor in the BTC market (deepbit) charges 10% of all earnings.

Variance swings are massive at this difficulty level and only 29ghash/s though.
Do you have a stable enough buffer to guarantee PPS payments in the short term?

95th percentile rounds are nearing 10 million shares soon.

The pool has earnt about 3 BTC to keep in reserves so far. Clearly that won't cut it, so I have 150BTC sat aside in the event it's needed, and I'm prepared to buy a few hundred more if the proverbial hits the fan in terms of round times.

However, given the current takeup of PPS compared to Proportional (one or two low MH people are using it, last I checked) it's not yet anywhere near to being a problem.

Nice site guys. Any chance of a pool api that includes total shares?

Cheers!

organofcorti, that already exists - try https://www.rfcpool.com/api/pool/stats

You can append ?xml=1 to get XML if you prefer.

That'll give you hashrate, number of workers, and roundtime. More detailed per-worker stats are coming soon with an API key system etc :)

sorry, i only get:


but not round shares - is that at a different url/feed?

Apologies, read your post a bit too quickly :)

round_shares has now been added, bit of an oversight really, sorry about that :)

great, cheers!

Um, any chance of the api being made http instead of ssl? Can't use it via commandline.

Ta!

Done, requests to /api will no longer force SSL on you.

And continuing with the API theme - the API has been expanded and will now give you per-worker stats with the API key system.

Getting balances and submitting withdrawal requests through the API will probably come tomorrow.

Couple of updates to first post; API is maturing and getting useful now, we have per-worker stats, user balances and estimated reward, and pool stats APIs all up and live.

Also enabled switching between prop & pps for any user with no shares in the current round so new members can start on PPS right away.

Current long round is long :(

An addition to our policy: invalid blocks will now be paid out to 1.5% (or more) donators. This is the first perk that actually requires donation, everything else is free.

I came across your pool today, seems like the only other good PPS (I don't really like deepbit that much) so I'm pointing my measly 112 mhash your way now. :)

Thanks :)

Actually considering dropping proportional. There's two dozen other prop pools out there and I don't think we really add anything new to them. Few people have to guts to do PPS properly, so that might be our USP.

It won't be done without quite a lot of thought and warning for those miners on us with Prop though :)

API updated. /api/user/account now contains total_earnings, total_donation and sum of previous payouts.

Also updated it to full precision display (20 decimal places as stored in our database) which you can't get on the website.

Sweet, another block found :D

I am changing my account to PPS, the fees are the cheapest available anywhere!

Was the last block orphaned?

Blockexplorer link shows nothing and it seems only a couple of PPS users got rewarded.

Ok, we found our first invalid block. We hadn't found one on live before so it didn't know entirely what to do with it.

Updating our scripts to cope with it.

Awww unlucky, sucks to be those 200k+ share holders ;)

Should all be looking ok now. 1.5% donators have been paid (funds available immediately in confirmed balance), others have zero reward.

Just making it a bit more obvious on the pages that it's invalid.

Correction: fixing PPS payouts in a minute also :)

Oh, didnt know you pay out donators on invalids, should mention this somewhere :)

First post cleaned up a little, invalid payouts were mentioned there before but perhaps it was buried in my rambling. It's a bit more concise now.

Trying to scale up our operation to cope with more GH - the last influx of pool hoppers showed us that we didn't scale well enough. I think at our next new block we'll do far better, I've been working on pushpool quite extensively.

I have a question to ask.

How comes the value of a share changed midround on PPS?? It was at .0000275 and has now changed to .0000246!! Thats a bit naughty when we have already started on a block!!

We cant go between pps and proportional mid round so how can the price change??

Any feedback please?

Price change based on difficulty. Difficulty changed mid round and an actual round is only important to prop miner and not PPS since you are working on a per share based and across difficulties the share payout can change and only affects you from share to share.

If you didnt get credited with PPS rewards immediately this would be unfair and wrong but afaik PPS users dont wait for blocks to clear so you got your fair reward at the previous difficulty per share and now the price change only affects shares from new difficulty.

Actually you both have a point here. PPS users rewards are currently calculated and paid on block find, which is wrong. I'm updating this now so they're paid in realtime into confirmed rewards without waiting on blocks, as Clipse says.

As compensation for doing it wrongly so far, the price per share has been put back up to the value before the difficulty change today and will be honoured until we find this block.

Nice one. Cheers. Sorry to have been so pedantic but when i checked this moning I had over 1btc then checked this evening and had like .95 btc and I was like whats gone on here lol.

Cheers for changing it back and keep the site looking as ace as it is. Thats another reason for me to mine with you guys you support your miners

Cheers

Now done - PPS are completely decoupled from blocks as they should be. You get confirmed rewards updated every 5 minutes for the shares you did in the past 5 minutes.

Edit: in addition to this, rfcpool will be discontinuing proportional payouts entirely at some point. The date is undecided but there will be plenty of notice on the website.

Given that I'm inclined towards dumping proportional for being the ancient unfair payout system that it is, I don't really think it's worth putting the coding time in to allow individual workers to change reward systems. It would massively complicate things further than they already are maintaining two reward systems :p

Please, just make a second account.. please :)

Block #8 found, and PPS  payouts remained at the previous level as promised.

They've now gone down to what they should be for this difficulty (0.00002461897887581132).

Yea that was spot on what you did there. Im out of mining for now. My psu blew running my rig so im having to wait for a new one to be delivered, its gutting.

There is some serious ghash's on rfc at the moment when I looked on my ancient lappy earlier. Block 9 should get knocked over very quickly if they dont all hop!!

They were mostly hoppers I'm afraid :) We see an influx of about 130GH/s after a block at the moment.

We do offer PPS though so if you don't want your payments to be affected by them, there's the option.

Do you have high downtime?

I'm sick of paying 10% to deepbit but can't risk a super-volatile 0% pps like btcpool24.com that goes down 5 times a day.

Not at all. There's 3 people behind rfcpool and all of us are systems administrators and coders, so we know a thing or two about running a service.

I shan't name any names but it's rather concerning seeing the quality of some of the pools popping up recently, with admins who use a prebuilt frontend having no idea how it works, and asking for help on how to build/run pushpool. Seriously, if you're going to run a pool, you should be able to figure this stuff out on your own. You'll run into far greater problems with pushpool once you grow than how to chuffin' compile it.

So yeah, Jack, you're right to be concerned, every new pool recently including ours has to prove themselves. I however, will let the pool speak for itself and don't feel the need to try and force it to grow by offering rewards and bonuses, or pimping its 100Mb superduper fibre-optic line (lol?) like it's something special that nobody else has.

Rant over I think. :p

I think since launch near the end of June we've had under an hour of downtime in total. That's actually a pretty bad record for me but I'll put it down to growing pains.
We're still on a single server (the pool size doesn't warrant anything more) but there's decent redundancy within it, I can restart one of our multiple pushpools for instance and you wouldn't even notice.
Hardware failure would be our big achilles heel right now but I'll invest in duplicate servers once the pool earns itself some money (currently we're 30BTC down thanks to an invalid).

Ok, abrupt change on policy I'm afraid. We are dropping PPS from the end of this round; the maths doesn't really add up for us and we've been haemorrhaging BTC for the last few blocks now.
Having to watch the pool constantly and keep on topping up it's balance (we're about 50BTC down) is getting old. And I have real work to do, which isn't getting done ;)

All PPS users will be moved over to Proportional when the block is found so if you don't want that, you will need to find another pool.

Pure PPS is supposed to 'hemorrhage' BTC every now and then (negative balance) with a small buffer. It's bound to happen.
With 7-10% fee you ensure long term profitability just like a casino that runs house-edge games.
 
There is only one winner and that is the operator.
smpps pools like eligius go down by even ~400BTC in one weekend then make it all back in a few days.

But I wish you luck, that's your decision

.

I was supposed to earn some amount on the last block but it isn't showing up in my unconfirmed balance.  ???

Block #9 is already in your confirmed balance - block #10, ironically found 4 minutes after I reset the round to remove PPS, should be in your unconfirmed.

Also sigh, I think everyone got paid twice for block 9, enjoy your windfall :P

Sad to see your news.
A honest and fair poolowner drops by the wayside :(
Best of luck in your future endeavors :)

Why not at least put back up the sign-in page and the account management page so that we can view/update/set our wallet address?

Also wanted to say that its a shame to see the problems youve run into... Was just over to look at the site a bit ago because im a huge fan of the design of it and was shocked to see the note you put up.   Best of luck getting everything back up (if you want that).   Enjoy your vacation!

If you wanted to proxy your traffic thru to us temporarily,  im sure we could set something up and work out a agreeable arrangement if you were interested.  A shame to see the traffic go back to one of the big ones.  The smaller pools need to stick together! :)

Thankfully a number of users have come over to ozcoin rather than move to a big pool - much appreciated guys :D

I agree.

IIRC, was the frontend written in Symfony? Or was it node.js?
In either way, would you want to release the software publicly? :)

Of course with big exclamation marks of "DO NOT USE" etc, due to the issues you had.
But it would be fun to read someone elses source except my own. (I do not count simplecoin as an actual readable/usuable source, it's horrible.)

heya,

any date when you'll pay us? and will you pay for your last 4min block - i did donate so i think i should get this money even if it was an invalid.

btw. i really loved your pool. as a developer i was impressed how your pool did handle the load-changes from pool hoppers :)

i hope you'll continue your work (maybe with smpps or something?) as i do love your design and your stability.
if you want to open up again and need some help with a few nice graphs - just pm me :)

are there any other port 80 accepting pools?

i use eligius for that
and yes - its official (but eligius seems to hiding that fact a little).

atm i am using this:

http://17AJs6hqdJaDEiHb42GULKy6zwjVbaSQYk:x@mining.eligius.st:80 which worked flawlessly the last month

Sorry about the delay, was away in the peak district for a few days with no mobile signal and no Internet. Doing the balance payouts in the next few hours.

Yes, the final 4 minute block will be paid out, of course :)

Very sad this pool closed. It had _the_ best bitcoin pool website which was clean, easy to use, and had nice statistics.

I liked rfcpool. they had a bit of clue  ;D

Just got my final payout which was way more than I was expecting. So thanks for being honest, running a tight ship while it ran and shutting up shop cleanly when you couldn't. I wish you the best of luck.

I'm formally placing my vote that the pool should re-open.  If you agree, please do the same.

Vote +1  (3 GH/s)

Vote +2

+1 as long as the same crew do it. I'd give a solid 5% for a pool that doesn't treat part time miners as criminals.

Got the email about payment being sent out but not the payment yet. 

voting for re-opening!

+1 (2GH/s)

:D

Well, apparently sending lots of transactions at once with no fee causes some of them to be lost into the void forever, being trapped by some internal flood detection.

This morning quite a lot of them were stuck at 0 confirmations, and the money appears not to be in our account or yours - nice one bitcoin!

So I've resent them, this time using a fee of 0.005 and sendmany - bitcoind reported a transaction id of c8ec198e8ba4a99eee14b370baddd1467dae475c268d2ecc15bd07658eacb4cf for these. As of yet it has not appeared on blockexplorer or in the unconfirmed transactions list.

Frankly if that doesn't work, then you'll just have to pop over to Solihull in the UK and collect your earnings in cash, because I just don't trust any more money to this system. Good money is now disappearing after bad and I'm done with it.

I'll publish a dump of our listtransactions if anyone wants, I don't think there are any privacy issues with it - all the information is freely available anyway?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=35214.0

check that tool, it could help

It's sorted. After calming down somewhat and recreating the wallet from the private keys, the dead transactions disappeared and I was able to send the BTC again, and this time the network has accepted it.

Everyone should have their earnings now, without exception.

Yep, I got mine.. Thanks.

Sad to see this pool go

Shit operators.  Keep it closed.

Wtf? These guys have been some of the most honest and hands on pool operators I have come across.

Indeed

Huh. Wizards can be trolls, too.

I got my payment. Thanks.

me too, cheers :)

Back open?

Yep, lessons learnt, new reward system, backend scripts being tidied up, etc.

Main issue at the moment is what to set the 'N' in PPLNS to. It's 0.5 but subject to change, considering PPLNH with a 48 hour H actually. Maybe I should do a poll for this?

I wonder how pool hopping would affect pplnh? If you were to get slashdotted and got a boost of 200Ghps with a pplnh set for 20Ghps, you'd have much shorter rounds which apart from the "no reset at boundary". This would make h a lot larger than n=0.5. Would that matter?

Welcome back rfcpool!  :D

No, it shouldn't matter - N being at 0.5 right now isn't set in stone, it's just to get us going; I didn't want N too high at first because it would then take ages for the initial reward estimates to ramp up.

Using H instead will just avoid having to tweak N when the pool hashrate varies.

Good to see you guys back.

Sorry, was up late when i wrote that and i didn't really explain myself well. what i meant was that pplnh will need tweaking when the hashrate varies won't it? if hashrate varies significantly you'll have very short rounds which makes the h comparatively larger. I just don't see any advantages over pplns unless it's to make calculations easier.

For clarity:

rfcpool just found a block after 688718 shares (excluding stales, which are obviously worthless).

N was set to diff*0.5 (902850) so obviously if you do the maths you'll see that our total payout for that block would have been under 50 BTC (clearly we weren't going to include blocks 10 and below in the calculations, they were rewarded under Prop/PPS separately)

For this reason, N was set to 688718 as a one-off, meaning that the full 50 BTC was paid out. If you were watching your estimated reward in our stats, you'll see a big jump in the final rewards table for this block now: https://www.rfcpool.com/stats/block/11

These rewards will be added to your balances shortly, I'm just checking scripts over first.

N has been set back to diff*0.5 now. If you check your estimate reward in My Account, you can see that the next payout, at the moment, will include shares from block 11 and the new ongoing one.

Hope this answers any pending questions.

Glad to see you guys back Cas.

Ive shifted my miners back now after the unfortunate break.

Looking forward to making some btc.


Cheers to Jezzz for the heads up also

Hey Caes,

First off,  nice to see you back! :)

Its maybe none of my business but Graet from OZcoin publically announced you were joining their team a few days back... can you comment on how this ties in with rfcpool being back up and what exactly you are doing with ozcoin?

Im just curious (as a fellow pool op) whats going on in general with the other pool ops ;)

Cheers,
Anni

Nice to have you back ChrisLandin :D

AnnihilaT, yeah I think we're still up in the air about that. Graet was lookng for more coders, I was at a dead end at the time so agreed, but then a day or two later my arm was bent far enough by old rfc regulars to reopen it.

Clearly this leaves us in a bit of an ambiguous situation - it's a slight conflict of interest to work on two pools at once, however me and Graet do get on well so if he's just after a bit of extra sysadmin help from time to time then I'm still happy to fulfill that, but the majority of my time (besides going on real, actual paying contract coding work I do for a living) will be on rfcpool.

To be very honest i am dissapointed to say the least, but i have spoken to Caesium and I understand what has happened.

In the past Caeseum and Ycros (from Ozcoin ) have collaborated to overcome issues both pools have faced, with a "pre-established" working relationship  it was easy to ask Caesium to join the team.

Best of luck to RFCPool and their relaunch :)

Thats prety much it. Better go put something in ozcoin  forum too :)

Thanks alot guys for clearing it up... was just a little curious even tho its not necessarily any of my business.   

First block has been confirmed and first payments for it sent out - we're officially back in business :D

Still looking for opinions on what to set N to. We now have diff*0.5 shares since relaunch so old shares are rolling out of the payment window. Current view is to set it to diff*2 once we reach that figure, then probably leave it for the time being. If you would hate this, shout here.

Hiya.

Could you do me a favour please and just explain to me how the new payment system works. I was fine with PPS because even my maths could cope with that haha.

Simple terms please, I mean whats N and you mentioned something about H in an earlier post im confused ???

Just the basic workings would be great Caesium please

PPLNS is simple. At the moment N=902850 (half of the current difficulty), so when we find a block, the latest 902850 submitted shares get paid (50 BTC / 902850) = 0.00005538015932406342 BTC per share. If the round is shorter than 902850 shares, then latest shares from the previous round(s) get paid again until we reach 902850 shares into the past. If the round is longer, then the oldest shares from the start of the round will not get paid.

This means that:

• if you mine constantly, your earnings will average the same as on PPS (but in the short term, luck is a factor)
• pool-hoppers don't earn anything extra
• if you stop mining for a while, your payout from future blocks starts shrinking (because the "payment window" keeps moving forward, and less and less of your shares are in it), but you may still get paid from multiple future blocks if the rounds are short
• when you start mining, your rewards from future blocks ramp up similarly as they ramp down when you stop
• there is no unfair penalty for intermittent mining on average, but the pool's luck does affect how much you get

The difference PPLNH makes is that instead of the last "N" shares, every share from the last "N" hours gets paid (not a fixed sum, but so that we spread the 50 BTC evenly to all shares submitted in the last 48 hours for example). Otherwise it's the same: old shares can get paid multiple times if short rounds follow, or not get paid if long rounds follow.

The exact choice of "N" shares or hours doesn't matter on average, but the larger it is, the less pool luck affects the payouts, but it also takes longer for the payouts to start or stop coming.

Thx Rennex.  Concise and helpful. 

Fantastic.

Thanks Rennex thats just what I was after, it seems like a very fair way to pay.

As of now, rfcpool distributes the block fees in each generated block to our miners.

Additionally, PPLNS N has been changed to difficulty*1. This makes our per-share value comparable to pure PPS pools (but remember, we are not pure PPS).

Hiya.

What happened to my reward overnight??? It went from 3.9 btc to 2.4btc. How come?? I didnt stop mining at all? All of a sudden it seems that people who were below me in the eligible shares list have had a lot added to there balance, why is this? I dosnt even look as though they have turned there miners back onto Rfcpool!

Thanks

Hi, don't worry, Caesium adjusted "N" to double what it was before (now 1*difficulty), making the "window" for payouts longer. So, your estimated payout is still ramping up - and the abrupt change of the "ramp steepness" moved you a little back. On the other hand, if you stopped mining, the payout estimate would ramp down slower.

The old value for "N" was suitable for a freshly started PPLNS scheme, but now that we've been running for a while it was sensible to increase it. We will probably increase it more in the future (up to a few times what it is now), but abrupt changes aren't good so we will look at gradually ramping N to the new value :)

rfcpool is now supported by MiningMonitor.com !

:D

So nice when things move right along...

Credit where credit is due: the pool's website is clean, uncluttered, and even has nice colours! ;)
Really, +++1 for the website.

I know most people don't care, but hey, just sayin' what i think.

Thanks m3ta :)

Dynamic forum signature now available, link to the image can be found in My Account (see mine for a sample).

You should see the important stuff.  That's where the goodies are.

When did i not say the important stuff is important?

What you are saying is that you're so narrow minded, that you can ONLY see the important stuff, and not what's "wrapped" around it.
Really, I hope you have a very intelligent wife, because according to your short-sighted ideals, she might be as ugly as a worm. Or even /A/ worm.

What I said, was an acknowledgement of the obvious time and effort the pool had in making "other" stuff interesting to the eye, not a bait to "goodies righteousness".
But hey, a troll is a troll is a troll.

lol.  Wasn't trolling.  I was just highlighting that the pretty site was just the beginning.  Take it easy big guy.

I think you may have misunderstood what he meant...  ???

OMG.. less QQ and more PewPew..

Yes i just made a WoW reference.. :) hahaha

Heh, yeah, i think you misunderstood him a little there ;)

O well, since im mining here, my stales are at a absolete minimum as i expected them to be.

I tried several PPLNS/ PPS and even prop servers, but none come even close to the stability of this pool!

<3 you guys, keep up the good work mkay!

I had a bit of stales at a larger pool just a few days ago.. This pool I have had maybe 2 or 3.. Its been fantastic. And the extra features is always a nice perk.. I like my RFC on my VM Desktop. Nice watching my workers do their damn jobs!

i like keeping an eye on my workers with the android app for RFC

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.laninsanity.rfcstats

Hey look its abracadabra. By his name alone should tell you he found yet another block :) Nice job AB!

Next one is for me though! :)

I see the pool is getting some more regulars! I can only look with a happy face to that!

Lets get to the 100!

Ab, that android app is pretty handy tbh! Not too much clutter and shows all i want to know in one screen!

+1 on the android app. Works just fine ;D

He's here, he's there, he's everywhere!!!!

 :o

Well everyone likes a dirty whore :).. they just don't talk abut it

We should never talk about whores publically tbh!
/me is searching for the next block!

Umm while you where sleeping pirateat40 said he was hiding it in his pants.. go get it

50GH/s !

Onwards and upwards  :D

I would just like to say good luck to the guys mining in RFCpool. Its a fantastic pool ran by some really clever fellas.

My mining days are now over as im relocating on Monday with work but I will keep an eye on the pools progress.

Happy mining guys and gals and I hope you knock over lots and lots of blocks real soon

 :)

Shame to see you go though!

Goodluck with work and all! You might need it ;)

Ps, we can always use some extra GHashies to push the poolspeed up a bit! <3

Ahh yes relocation.. I think we got to chatting once in IRC briefly.. wish you well Chris. I am sure we will see you once again soon.

54Gh atm guys, lets go for the 100!

Btw, hows your hashies compared with cgminer and phoenix?

Pushing 60 GH/s now :)

Nearly 70g/h when i just checked in to see how you guys were getting on. Plus you found a block too. Chris cries into his pint!!!!!! Bloody work grrrrr

Yeah, pirateat40 stole my block :(

NEXT ONE!

75gh atm

Impressive.

This Epic guy is faster than pirate too!! I hope he sticks around

Yeah, everyone is welcome though! Small or big!

Relocate faster tbh! I hope your back sooner then my new cards arrive.

oooooo!!!

What new cards??

Im thinking of  maybe getting a couple of the 6870 x2 cards on sale in the uk. They are £300 each but I have a massive credit with the etailer who got my sandy bridge order all wrong so they will work out around £400 for the pair

Thats nice!

Im waiting for 6950, they the same series as the one i have now, so should net 400 exactly again!

For some reason I can't mine on this pool it says problems communicating and no backup pools left.

what mining software are you using and when does it say this? Is it like after a LongPoll?

er very strange, that sounds like either authentication details server details are wrong. You are using pool.rfcpool.com port 8332?

And you've made a worker after making an account, and have specified that workername (in the format username_workername) in your miner? (password doesn't matter, anything is accepted). Just don't try to mine with your username alone, you have to make a worker.

If it's none of that, I'd suggest connectivity issues but if you can see the website it's unlikely to be that either..

Thanks for the plug on the android app.  Been busy with other tasks for the past few weeks, I do plan on adding more features in the future.

How can you better something thats awesome?
/me releases block 15

Another block found while i was cleaning the garage.. yeah i can live with that :)

And another!

These quick blocks are AWESOME with PPLNS!

:D

I am a very happy happy man.. all i need to say :)

How does this pool achieve practically 0% stales/rejected?     
After hashing in quite a few pools always got beween 0.5% to 2%  .

Here I have 70,000 shares with 0% stales and no disconnecting/restarting
 or any other kind of disturbance in flow of shares!   Just Amazing :)

Uhm... totally awesome coders ;)

Someone kick the block right in the gut please

lol.

Whats happend to Caesium? He stopped mining??

Miners are switched off at the moment - UK electricity prices don't really favour this BTC/difficulty ratio :/

Your right there.

The price needs to pick up something chronic!!

Plus point another block!!




















y

...and, the block is confirmed! :D

More cheese please

<3 new blocks

Ill take another.. thanks

i tried this pool and i like it so far. i do have a question though. i been mining for about 6 days, and i noticed i got paid more BTC than the expected theoretical. i ran at 1.5gh/s for a couple days, now up to 2.5ghz and in 6 days i got a little over 9BTC. is this because the pool has good luck at this moment finding blocks? or is there some kind of extra reward i don't know about? definitely not something i'm complaining about  :D, but just wondering where these extra BTC are coming from.

haploid23, it must just be pool luck - there's no hidden payments or surprises going on :) We had a couple of short rounds, but also a long one.. Swings and roundabouts, it'll even out over time ;)

In other news, short pool outage I'm afraid, hopefully be back in about 20 minutes.

Pool's back, sorry about the lack of notice on that one.

Hardly noticed any outage! So well done ;P

Welcome to the new names to the pool!

new to the pool, really like the website and irc channel so far :)

Welcome.  Glad to have you.  Bring your friends :P

FYI rfcpool have a poolserverj daemon up for mining at psj1.vps.rfcpool.com:8332  ;D

Averaging over 60GH/s now, nice!

Jumped on the RFCpool b/c of the simplecoin hack ATM. Like it so far

Great to have you onboard!  ;D

+ 2 blocks found in the last 24 hours, one was found by a 100MH/s miner, nice!

Hat trick!  3 blocks today.  Woot!

glad i switched at the right time :) but its so hard not to go back with merged mining. Any hope in enabling merged mining?

Stop by our IRC chan.  It's been discussed.  Not sure the final verdict.

Considering it. I want to see if MM has some staying power before I invest man-hours into it.

Also we're looking at migrating to poolserverj and shadders is currently in the middle of implementing it in that; so once proven stable it shouldn't be too difficult to do anyway.

As MMC closed over sudden its doors yesterday I switched to this pool and after my first day of mining I must say I'm loving it here. Great website and stats and even better: 24h of mining without a single stale share. :D Keep up the Good work!

Awesome!  Tell your friends.  The more the merrier!

There's some kind of sorcery  ??? going on with the stales.  I just don't get it.

 :D

I want a cool banner thingie :(

So just add it :)

Ok, conclusion after 6 days: the stale rate is still awesome (0.03%) but the pool seems to kind of unlucky. The last three blocks took longer then they should have. But hey, luck is a lady, I guess I'll stay.  ;)

Three blocks isn't much to go on statistically.
One thing I need to do is make it easier to work out our luck over any defineable timeframe but I'm not sure how to implement it yet.
If someone gives me a decent idea on how to represent it then I'll code it up :)

Those graphs which show a moving line of luck on recent blocks aren't bad, but I kind of want a number rather than a graph, IYSWIM

Some ideas (if you really can't be dealing with charts):

1. Number of blocks found in last time period (week, month whatever) compared to expected
2. CDF (like Slush's pool)
3. Average shares per block/difficulty

I  think the best looking thing would be a density plot of all round lengths compared to other pools, like this:

https://i.imgur.com/MwGr2.png (http://imgur.com/MwGr2)

LOL. Did I say something about bad luck? Never mind.  ;D

That'll teach you

Like BTCG   % above or below diffculty - was calculated per  difficulty ( was like that before they went pps)
They Also had 24h luck but I guess thats only good for a very big pool.

How about average number of times a share was paid over the x number of blocks? For a pplns pool i think that's your best indictor of luck.

for example your luck from block 8 to block 17 was 1.09 or 109%

edit: unless you change N again in which case you'd be better of showing (average payouts per share)/N to keep average luck at 100%.

I just died a little inside

Website and API is down, maybe more but I can't check from my mobile.

Update 13:38h: Pool seems up and running again but now my unconfirmed balance is wrong; pending payouts for blocks #45 and #46 are missing. Please check.

Yep, sorry, fairly major issues overnight and this morning, sorry about this. Our first serious downtime since we started though.

I'm aware of blocks #45 and #46 showing incorrect payouts, I'll fix this shortly.

Closing down the pool (yes, again).

Two main reasons:
a) I believe bitcoin is dying a slow protracted death, with falling hashrates and falling values it's only a matter of time before it's gone entirely.
b) we had server issues which led to the outage earlier on today, but believed them to be fixed - sadly not and we're now at a state where the pool server won't boot properly, and given my position on a) I'm not willing to invest any more time in fixing this and carrying on running it just to have it all for nothing in what I suspect may be a matter of weeks.

There was one block which hadn't confirmed yet, once it has I'll get it paid out. All remaining balances will be paid out.

It ain't coming back this time, thanks for the hashes over the past few months.

Pool's closed due to AIDS

I do understand your position, but why all the ..."lets make these cool graphs", "maybe time for some redundancy" etc..
It didn't seem that this is the direction you were going...
Oh well, I have no luck...  every small pool I've joined has closed down... maybe it's me...
Maybe i should join deepbit and see If I can do them the same ;)

Good Luck to you all at RFC

You can always join simplecoin.us. dont mean to thread crap but in this case it might be OK. Thanks for your pool.

I'm sorry to hear this pool is gone.  It was pretty good on paper and, were it not for the grace period for stales, might well have been my main pool.

Smaller pools come and go but many of them are easy to join and often provide better average income than the big pools.  If you like PPLNS then mineco.in is decent.  If your more interested in the merged mining then be advised that there are still teething issues so you should look carefully at the pools recent performance before joining.  Both simplecoin.us and yourbtc.net have merged mining with unhoppable reward systems at 40 GH/s or so (simplecoin.us offers PPLNS and yourbtc.net uses DGM).

Always consider recent uptime and luck before joining a new pool.

While I understand your position, if you're basing this decision on "bitcoin is dying" I'd recommend you reconsider.  Bitcoin is returning back to a reasonable value, and the latest difficulty adjustments show that.  Difficulty will -always- lag behind the price curve, since it's calculated reactively to the changes over the last 2 weeks, rather than as a prediction.

Every pool op has felt the pressure as the prices shrink, the problems rise, and the difficulty seems too slow at catching up to a reasonable level.  Obviously at these prices/difficulty, 0% is basically impossible.  Over the next few months you will likely see the majority of free pools either close, or change to fee structures.  Perhaps you should try implementing a fee and trying to keep your presence known?  If you play your cards right, who knows what position you'd be in if we see another bubble 6 months down the road?

Nice to see that the "competition"  would like the pool to continue.

Although the op has stated  "It ain't coming back this time, thanks for the hashes over the past few months"
maybe these words can help convince him. ( yeah  , wishful thinking)

I'm just worried about seeing a large number of small pool operators throw in the towel.  The big problem is most of these pools started during in the middle or height of the bubble.  There were only3 pools around when I started, but prices were trending up/difficulty was low, so 0% with donations was a very profitable setup and a good draw.  A few months later MANY new pools opened up, and by then it was basically impossible to obtain miners without being 0%.  Now that the bubble popped, it's scary as a pool operator to try to figure out how to pay your server bills when the old economic model doesn't work anymore.

The last thing Bitcoin needs right now are a bunch of pools closing down, forcing all the hash power to be consolidated into a small number of pools.

Well, eclipsemc.com is in it for the long haul and has DGM + merged mining.  I started the pool about a month after Eleuthria I think... so I won't say EMC has been around from the start, but closer than most. We are also 0% fee and plan to keep it that way.

The fact is that be it fees or donations, at the 60 GH/s that we seemed to have reached (or the <50 it was more recently), it doesn't amount to much. If Bitcoins were worth more, or if we had had more hashrate (say, finding a couple of blocks daily), it might have been worth the effort to keep going. But as things were, with Bitcoin value in the mud and the pool not really growing, it was looking improbable that the pool could ever even cover the server costs. It was an interesting project to develop, but in the end that wasn't enough.

We started about the same time as ARS and RFC and plan on sticking around, there is much more to BTC imo than its apparent "value", quite a few pools have come and gone (some come and gone, resurrected then gone) ;)

I respect Caesium as  a poolop and a person, I am dissapointed by his decision (we all must decide what is best for ourselves tho) and wish him well in his future endeavors :)

Actually there was no mention of it being an economic problem, but the feeling that BTC is dead and not worth the trouble anymore. 

Guess I'll remove the dead link from my sig.  :(

aww bummers, i finally noticed this :(. i think i still had a balance of a few BTC in the pool, were those ever paid out before the close?

They were working on payments last night, not sure if they finished or not, but it'll get done

Any news on this? Confirmation should be done for at least two days now...

Yes, sorry, it has just been done.

Apologies for the delay, I didn't want to rush it and get it wrong - transaction id is f89de013f710f07b89e09901ed86815ebe8f115c50579fda5d2d370af06779dd

Emails were sent out if you had email confirmations on.

Confirming that I received my final payment. Thanks for putting forth the effort to close the pool fairly and get unpaid rewards out to as many people as possible. From the IRC logs, it seems like it was more work than ideal.

Thanks for the final payout. I will miss the good days with RFCPool.

Yes, I can also confirm. Thank you very much for the final payout and for the great service while running the pool!
Caesium, I send you a PM a few days ago and would realy appreciate a (very basic) answer.

PM sent, probably longer than you wanted :p