Bitcoin Forum

BTCServ (http://btcserv.net/) - Official Forum Thread

Website: btcserv.net (http://btcserv.net/)
IRC Channel: #BTCServ on Freenode
Current PPS: 0.0000382342

Why Us?
Since our launch in July we have steadily increasing hash rate, page visits and user signups. Feedback was almost exclusively positive, but many people probably got bored because of the little hash power in the beginning. However, hash power increased and we have a stable base of around 20 GH/s now and our pool is growing more and more. Give us a chance, point your miners to our pool and I am certain that BTCServ will solve way more blocks in near future than currently.

Features

• Fairest Reward System: Pay-Per-Share - Hopping Proof
• Native Long Polling for Low Stale Percentage
• Auto-Payments (Full Precision)
• SSL Encrypted User Interface with Statistics
• Android App
• High Support Availability in #BTCServ Freenode

Pay-Per-Share (PPS)
Our PPS is the fairest system available because you receive an almost exact compensation of what your shares are worth. Solving a Block has a 1 / Difficulty chance for every share and we pay 50 / Difficulty for your share. Simple and effective.

Wishlist
Any wishes? Please let us know.

- Users can not change password.
- Users can not change miners data - both user AND password.

More "power to the people" is required. :)

- "pool" submenu on the left - none of the 3 options are working. Maybe you should check things before advertising them.

yea, the pool links are the dead links I mentioned. still newly born. resetting/changing password will come soon but I figured it's not that important in the beginning. Everyone who wants his pwd reset now can msg me and I can do that without much delay.

Is renaming miners / changing passwords important to users? For me it wouldnt, however if others think it is let me know.

Usability should be increased with new navigation now. Webchat has also beed added.

HAH!

First pool ever I've seen, except ours - that actually have a pleasant design.
Wanna start a club? :)

No but seriously, nice design.

thx, man. appreciated :)

Much less stales now after some changes and also only 1 real dead link left. Content might not be A+ or maybe not even B, but at least people have something to read.

Unfortunately still no Block solved. Give it a try. :)

Improved the pool further

+ Just finished an Android App (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.cf.btcserv), so members are now able to track their miner status quickly from everywhere without using the mainpage. For authentication a random key is used. Mobile website with same functions is soon finished too.
+ SSL Encrypted User Area

More to follow..

Please switch to a proper distribution model. Proportional is known to be broken since half a year already.

sorry, but care to elaborate?

Prop. is vulnerable to pool hoppers, people who will be dedicated miners at your pool 24/7 will be earning about 10-15% less due to people who attempt to exploit fresh shares at the beginning of rounds then abandon the pool

In other words, your users are being robbed in the long run. It has been explained countless times, read Reikokus explanation on this topic.
https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24966.0;all

Share price based distribution models are the future, people only get paid for the work they do, not for being opportunists.
By mining 24/7 at prop. pools only, you might just as well be paying 10-15%+ fees just to get your fair share

Nothing wrong with mining proportional in general (I do it too), just don't put all your eggs in one basket

ah okay. wasnt sure if you are refering to the pool hopping issue. but we will now start working on a feature which should work towards this prob.

I would really love to see this pool growing!

Let's get this first block solved and grab free Bitcoins from the promotion.

The android app is pretty as well, i use it everyday @work to check my worker stats.

Currently at 8 GHash/s. We are looking forward to solve the first block! Join now and earn extra BTC from the promotion.

The pool is getting more and more features, the interface and android app is very cool and handy.

I like how fast the pages load. Just clicking and the pages are instantaneously there :)

Feature request: Automatic payouts

I am sure automatic payouts won't be a big deal to implement as soon as we get the first blocks solved. The pool operator wtfman will take care of it!

Still 3 BTC bounty for the finder of the first block!

yeah wtfman.

Sorry guys,

I had a lot stuff to do out of my home in the past two weeks and didnt find the time to work on the site. Tommorow evening everything should be back to normal and I should have time as usual.

After the found block (hey congrats!) I have just noticed that the solved blocks are not displayed correctly at all and unfortunately I already need to wake up in 6 hours again. I am truely sorry that I cannot make it work right now, I will do it tommorow evening. But no worries, that I run away with the block.

Special congratulations to Sch**********er, who found the first block and will get 3 Bitcoins (also tommorow).

Current confirms 59/120 (9:04 am EST)

Just added my workers to your pool. Hopefully I find the other blocks :P

Like the site btw

Nice work! It's time to jump in now, the new round has just been started!

3 BTC for the previous block finder come today, as soon as i get home.

Happy mining!

Hi

I was just wondering, how long will it take for the btc stats in the top left of the page to reflect the btc I have earned. Or how long does it take for the estimated rewards to become confirmed?


I also noticed yesterday, that the estimated rewards decreased significantly from the value it was at before ? Was there any reason for this ?

Greetings,

The pool is running propotional payout at the moment.

Proportional ("Share-based"): Every time a block is found, its reward is split between participants according to the number of shares they submitted.

This means your estimated reward show how many bitcoins you would get if the pool finds a block at this moment. As long as your and the pools hashrate change until the next block is found, the shown reward can change.

Meni Rosefeld has written a nice document, which exactly explains how propotional payout works: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=32814.0

I was mining for the last round but don't see the reward anywhere for that. Is this a known problem?

Yes, the block is confirmed but rewards currently are not shown up in the web gui. Pool operator promised to fix that issue tonight. I know him as a serious guy, he can be trusted.

I'am sure payout should be possible in a couple of hours.

it's been more than a "couple of hours"


so are yall actually going to start to pay rewards?

When I get home I just need to do some final testing and minor adjustments, then Bitcoins will get credited. Sorry again for the inconvenience!

Can you update this text on the front page. It seems to be confusing people

Well, at least it's confusing me.

I think your pool might be losing miners because of the current stats display and payout situation. Looking forward to the fix over the weekend,  I have stopped minning for now.

Yes, agreed.   Need to see payment appear before returning to mine.   

All Bitcoins have been credited now and are ready to be withdrawed. Sorry for all the inconvenience again!

Soon more info follows to recognize payments of old rounds..

Umm, I still dont seem to have anything. Your site seems to be lacking in info in that regard, but to try to withdraw even the min your cashier says I dont have that in my account. I didnt have a lot of shares but I had plenty to get over your minimum. Not sure what your last line says
"Soon more info follows to recognize payments of old rounds..".. havent you only found the one block? Anyways I still have no coin in my account.... as far as i can tell.

yes, we have only found one block so far on 8th August.

edit: I have checked the logs right now and I have seen that your first active share was on [2011-08-08 21:17:2.739911], and the block was found at 23:05. The reason why you havent got credited anything is because the logs are -2 hours off, so actually you started 12 minutes after the block was found.

So this time I cant be blamed, yet :)

So check my logs. I know that I began mining you on or before August 4th yet I have nothing showing in my account either.

Where do you look? I can see that you have a positive balance, check top right corner.

Ah ok. Then it's just a usability error. The last place on a screen I'd ever look for my balance is the upper right hand corner. Especially considering I have a Cashier section (which seems a logical place to display balance), a Profile section (which also seems a somewhat logical place to display balance), a Miners section (which seems a logical place to display earnings from a worker), and a Statistics section (which seems a logical place to display earnings per round or block). The least logical place seems to be in the site header, since there is a User Area designated where I'd expect to find, you know, my user data.

Now, you might say "well, it's with all the other important information in the header" and you would be right if I were using an 800x600 monitor but since I (and I think a lot of people) now use widescreen monitors, the user data in the header get's shipped off to never-see-ville in the far right corner. And nothing in the big blank space in between informs a user that there is anything useful to look at way over there:
https://i.imgur.com/OG1p3l.jpg (http://imgur.com/OG1p3)

Sorry to be a hard case about this. But usability issues are a pet peeve and I can tell you are trying to be a usable site. I'd probably be less dickish about the usability stuff if, after all of this, I wasn't met with the following when I tried to cash out:
https://i.imgur.com/rdPVj.png

Somehow clicking the arrow down key didn't change my minimum withdrawal to 0.

So do you autopay balance after a week of idle like other pools or should I just consider my bitcents a donation to the pool?

I agree, that the usability overall can be improved. However, every one has noticed that some essential things were missing and also now there are still some more useful things to do in my opinion. I appreciate every feedback of course and I keep it in mind, but atm I dont want to invest too much time in details. When I put it in the top right corner, I thought exactly opposed to you. Since so many people have widescreen LCD displays I figured the top right bar is a good choice to place the balance, since there is only little scrolling.

But I've also added the balance to the cashier real quick. It is obviously true, that ppl expect the balance there.

I have no clue what makes the arrows appear in the error message, but it is meant to be just a message saying: Minimum withdrawal is ฿ 0.1.

Also we do not auto pay left balance after X time of idling (at least so far). If you are not mining with us any more feel free to check back at a later time.

 

Hmmm.. II guess i will have to take your word for it, as I dont keep as good of logs as hawks here, But i added you to the client we both use on the second a full 2 days before hawks. I'll try to find what databases I have here that i havent deleted but i really should have had shares before the 8th, concidering I was the first one to add your site.

hey joulesbeef, there was no crediting issue with hawks, he just did not find the balance on the site.

About the issue, which actually is none. The logs are probably the safest indicator to tell if you did mine before that date or not. Obviously you have to trust me on this one, since logs could be faked, but I dont really see much of a reason for me to do so, except if I would not want to get blamed for uncredited shares. But I could handle that even if I am afraid of this ever happening. ;>

Also in the DB I can see that you have signed up a week before the block was found. I checked your miners, which is only one and according to the logs he was first active shortly after the block was found. Also there is no possibility that the miner has been deleted or something like that, which could cause a loss of the data since the website is not able to do this nor are you able to mine with a random miner's username.

No need to worry. Your shares even have a higher value in the beginning of a round instead of the end, so theoretically you could be happy :P

edit: I do believe you I just thought it was odd. I appreciate you finally fixing the site. Looking back at the logs i do have which only go back to the 7th, i dont see any shares. SO I will accept that. I do think you should move some of that info. Like hawks was saying the upper right corner isnt the first place people look. I clicked everywhere looking, oviously looking for a number differnt than what i saw in the top right corner, but still it doesnt seem to obvious. Thanks again and good luck with the pool

feel free to show me whatever you got. dont want anyone to have doubts about the integrity of the pool, your logs could help clarify the situation.

sorry? Doesn't make sense on a proportional pool.
By this calculation all shares have the same value at the end of the block.
The only thing that can make a difference is the length of the round, shares in short rounds are worth more than shares in long rounds.

round #2 progress deleted?

no, seems like our 2nd block is found, but yet not shown in the ui. just wait to be confirmed from wtfman.

Yeh, would be great if you actually list the finished blocks and pending confirmation bitcoins earned.

yeah wtfman.

was out all day..
a block was found. 46 confirms so far. As you can see confirmation tracker is not build yet and listing all solved blocks also had a bug. fixed now.

also congrats to fydel, who found the 2nd block and will receive 2 additional Bitcoins.


of course every shares has the same value in the end when paid out, but nevertheless the expectation of btc per share is higher in the beginning of a new round than if the round is already filled with lots of shares. that's the logic behind pool hoppers..

- SSL Certificate Renewed.
- fydel's BTC 2.00000000 bonus paid out

I send 10,000 valid shares on the last round which had 1,109,135 total shares.

My balance is now 0,02 BTC where it should be at least 0,5 BTC.

What is wrong there?

as soon as the 2nd solved block has 120 confirms, it will be split among all miners. it has not been paid out so far. the 0.02 in your account are from the first solved block.

the logic behind pool hopping is to move from pool to pool hoping for short rounds , this does not mean " Your shares even have a higher value in the beginning of a round instead of the end" as all shares in a proportional round are the same value whenever the round ends.

Maybe I didnt express myself clear enough. The expected value of a share is higher in an early stage of a round compared to a late stage.

You don't say this is false, do you?

Not sure if some miners sometimes have problems connecting to the server. would be great if anyone would tell me if he experiences any issues.

btw: round/block #2 has been credited

btw, thanks for adding Balances to the Cashier tab. I'll put your pool back into rotation.

How do I request a higher limit on the number of workers?  It says that I have hit the limit.  In total I will have about 31 workers.

Thanks

please drop me a PM with ur username and I set it up for you.

Now PPS reward method implemented, which is also the standard now for new miners. Unfortunately, the PPS is not instantly rewarded so far.

Currently it works that way:

1. The PPS shares are stored in a queue with a timestamp (needs to be valid obviously)
2. Every 3 hours the system tries to credit the unprocessed transactions. This should suceed until the pool's balance cant handle any more credits, then the system tries again 3 hours later and so on..

Benefit right now is, that compared to proportional, you have a clearly stated value for each valid share instead of huge fluctuations. Also there is no reason not to start in a late stage of a round, since you always get the same value per valid share.

Every time the difficulty changes, the PPS value will also adjust to 50 / Difficulty and then rounded to the 10th decimal number.


Please note, changes to the reward method are effective immediately, no save button if youre looking for that.


Proportional payout still exists..

Some adjustments to the user menu have been made.

Just got notified about a major bug which caused that shares of miners with a length > 10 did not get credit. This has been solved now and all missing shares have been credited to the users. (only affected last couple of days)

Also new PPS value since difficulty update today, now BTC 0.000028125 per valid share.

this pool seriously needs more love

at this rate, it's hard to believe the pool will be sustainable given it's current hash rate

oh, so I should lower the rate and make the active miners leave too?

finally, brand new round!

server was down for an hour, everything working again now.

I have decided to stop offering Proportional Rewards after the next found block because it does not work parallelly to PPS without affecting it negatively. Even worse, it would cause losses if I would not severely cut one of the reward schemes, and thus offer significantly lower value than other pools, what is not what I want to do.

Currently I am calculating the rewards like this:


Problem with both reward schemes parrallelly running is that the PPS Queue does not even out after a long round and a short round. In short rounds, which have a higher percentage of prop shares, you save only a bit with what you can feed the queue, but in long rounds, which have way higher share of pps shares, the queue is getting quite big very fast.

I have tried some different calculations but did not get an acceptable result. I dont know how other pools with PPS and PROP calculate the rewards. Maybe they experience the same flaw, maybe not. If someone has a solution for this I would be glad to hear it.

Btw, I have decided to stick to PPS since I am convinced it is the fairest of all reward schemes available. It's not in my interest to lose the hashing boost of pool hoppers, but I want to achieve a steadily increasing hash rate from regular users and not short term 150 GH/s and as soon as a round is near 43% see everyone leave.

you just shutdown your pool, congrats!

Have you considered doing prop payout based only on prop shares, and pps payout based only on pps shares? It seems like the obvious solution. PPS will still have a problem with paying out right away on long rounds, so some users will still prefer prop.

Thanks for the input.

If I understand correctly, that would be like running two pools simultanousely, right? I did have that idea too but did not like it to split the minor hash power into two even lower hashes/s

Well to be fair, yes the hash power is minor now but it's going to be even more so if you remove prop.   The hoppers will leave and you'll just be left with the few miners you have now.    You'd need to do something pretty new and innovative to attract any new people as there's so much competition from other pools.

You'd be better off, in my opinion, doing as suggested above and taking advantage of the extra 250gh or so after each block.


Totally up to you, but I personally see PPS as the death of small pools like yours.

Round is over, Proportional is gone.

Btw, you can now add a note to your miners.

Upcoming: In next time I focus on improving the statistics for PPS, wanted to wait till Prop is gone, because also some changes to the database structure will be done.

Switched from Pushpool to PoolServerJ yesterday. Stale rate should have improved a bit.

Just wanted to say that I like the pool.  Splitting my miners between this and Eligius, with this as the backup on since it seems more reliable than Eligius =)

wtfman likes that

Currently by the way a solid buffer of 80 Bitcoins, that means until that is gone all PPS shares are credited within 1 hour.

Pretty sure you mean buffer. But it might have the same effect as a puffer for the asthmatics out there...

Anyhoo, just wanted to mention that I would donate 1% of my earnings to the pool if there was an automatic donation option. I have done that with every other pool I've mined, so it's only fair to mention it. I'd rather not have to manually choose donation amounts, like you've currently got the site set up for - perhaps you could allow both options.

oh, puffer is the german word for it. sorry for the mix-up.

There is an auto-donation feature which can be set up at account settings by the way.

Only a "little" question:
what about merged mining BTC/NMC in your nice PPS-Pool?

Both PPS would be great.
BTC->PPS and NMC->Prop. is alrighty too  ;D

Nice Pool, iam all in!

Cant give an exact date, but will definitely offer that.

Currently I am working on a couple of new features like detailed mining reports, auto payments (yes, finally), idle miner notifications and several nice-to-have user statistics. I hope it will be finished within current week, but even if not, next week I have holidays so I will have all day to finally get it done.

But still, I find the pool deserves some more love. the positive buffer (currently around 125 BTC) gives currently almost instant PPS (earnings get credited every hour). No real reason to mine with high fee pools. Server runs stable, website is fast. Just some lack of statistics currently.

Gief TOP 20 - hashrate in pool statistics.  ;D

soon you will be able to see complete list

Merged Mining implemented but not yet split in to Bitcoin and Namecoin payouts. Thus I have increased the Bitcoin PPS to 0.0000385 for now until this has been done.

3 Namecoin blocks have been found so far and turned in to Bitcoins to feed the queue.

By the way, I am kinda disappointed to see quite a few miners leave after the queue went from positive to negative and instant rewards have gone for now. Thus, I am thinking about changing the payout rules for the queue, so newer shares have higher priority over older shares. That would be in favor of active miners.

Everyone mining at this pool is getting very decent payout and has the freedom to decide how much he wants to contribute to the pool, instead of paying a fixed fee. Even though the rewards are not instant currently, the value still remains the same. If you leave as soon as queued PPS is active you just delay the payment even more.

try smpps way of splitting rewards between older shares and newer shares.

will have a look at it

read #65 & #66, and next time ask yourself some simple questions  - "what if ..."

lol, the pool hash power increased and is still bigger than it was back then.

why are you complaining then, maybe that 13M shares block is close and you know it.

dude, wtf are you talking about? what about keeping your non-sense for yourself.

I like the "active miners first" payout system, though I think it should be proportional to hash rate as you wouldn't want to give the bulk of payouts to a server-farm miner that has left the pool bar a token few hashes.

I'll look forward to some better calculations on namecoin payouts.

difficulty dropped. please update PPS value.

pps is adjusted automatically, unfortunately the value displayed at the site does not change.

Am I never going to get  1.19862518btc I have in my balance because I don't mine there anymore? I've been waiting forever for the balance to be moved from pending...

If you pay newer shares first, then does that mean you are just going to keep my btc hostage forever?  ???

wtfman?

unfortunately, that is true.

first come first serve is still active. sorry that you are disappointed but still everything caused by bad luck.

also even if newest shares would be paid first it wouldnt mean that you never receive your payout unless something is wrong with the pool. Should even out in the long run.

I guess I wait some more. I've been waiting since bitcoin was above $3 lol

Hey, happy holidays everyone.

Thought of dropping some info about the current state of the queue after the recent lucky streak. Still the queue is not evened out but we are currently only 3 blocks behind and not 10 anymore. Let us hope the streak continues so everyone receives their share more quickly.

What rates are you currently offering for NMC -> BTC and how often is it updated?

The last of responses and participation from the pool operator in this thread... is worrying.

I have never offered rates for NMC -> BTC and are not doing this currently aswell.


Ah cmon. I know that I am not really present currently but everyone is always being paid properly and the pool is running stable.

I should've phrased it better.
Your earlier post implied that you are currently receiving both BTC and NMC from the pool, but since you do not have the infrastructure set up, you keep the NMC and pay out more BTC instead.
What I was wondering was: how much more, and do you alter it based on the current BTC <-> NMC exchange rate?

I'm really liking your pool so far. ;D 

Is there any way to put my bitcoin address in permanently or do I always have to put the address in manually when I wanna get paid?

Also what is the current pool buffer?

Is it located somewhere on your website?

Thanks!

Auto payout does not work. I was close to implementing it once but decided to not develop the site until I overcome some problems. Definitely put an too unhealthy amount of time into the site, so I decided to completely stop for a while except for maintaining the uptime. But it looks like I will start again in maybe a month. Probably not earlier.

Current pool buffer is 100 Bitcoins. Not listed at the website.

Thanks for responding so quickly. I think it would be a good idea if you could post the pool buffer on your website so miners know what they are dealing with.

Does this pool pay for invalid/stales as well? Hopefully because I have a high stale rate on this pool.

well, no, BTCServ doesnt pay for invalids. sorry that 0% pps is not enough for you. currently there are like 0.20% stales for all users.

It is enough for me, its just a bummer I have an avg of 1% stale rate =/

Is something wrong with the pool right now? My miners can't connect and I noticed on the web interface the pool hashrate has dropped almost in half.

We experienced some unusual high CPU load which probably caused the hashrate to drop dramatically. When trying to restart the daemons we experienced some unexcepted errors. Now we are working on it, but unfortunately cant say when it will be up and running again.

I am sorry for that inconvenience.

Thanks for the info! On a backup pool for now.

Pool is up and running again. Big Thanks to p2k who also made it possible that BTCServ probably runs with the best pool software on this planet now :)

I directed my hashing to you in october-november i'd like to try again but i forgot my password and there is no password recovery feature

pls send me a private message with your registered email address

Hi!

 I just join some of my miners (3.5GHash by now) into your pool...

Tks!
Velox

expert decision :) thx

Injeting more poweeeer!!    ;D

Any plans to add Merged Mining support?!

Tks,
Thiago

Have a look at post #81. Looks like MM is already there.  ;)

Having trouble connecting my GUIMiner to the pool?

host:  http://btcserv.net

port: 8335

Username/Password are the same one displayed under "Mining workers" in my account.

GUIMiner status just says "Connecting..." and sits there.

But the pool is gone... I'll give a try to bitparking right now...

Website says pool got hacked and all their BTC is gone. Looks like I lost about .5 BTC, which isn't too bad, I made regular withdrawals. Hope a way works out for the miners to get compensated for their BTC in limbo.

I lost about 2 Bitcoins...   :'(

Wow I was seriously considering joining the other day. I am glad I waited and sorry to hear about all of you who lost coins.

> All your Bitcoin are belong to us!

AWESOME!!! LOL

Not nice, had no idea how many i had there. 1,2,3?
Do you know what the hole was?

Also did the hacker got our own data, like passwords?

http://blockchain.info/tx/e266dd4a5aba8c848c2d66016c3716f2e08e8939e605edc4c80cf7643e95c3d3

shows the transaction.  Blockchain.info shows a relayed IP coming from S.C.

What is the significance of this.  Is this just the relay that first told the blockchain.info node?

if found pool ... go us ... pool.itzod.ru  )))

This had /partially/ been talked about before: when a pool operator rarely does maintenance or participates on its own forum thread because "things just work", you can't expect him to be actively watching for endpoints, vulnerabilities, or even to find out he has been breached until the week after. :P

If you invest little, your return is compromised.
It is that simple.

bitcoin7

Hello, I finally got some time to write this.

Development is proceeding slowly as my calendar is full of appointments in this month. At least I can tell you that the new server has already been purchased and was set up with some extra security measurements. However, there is no pool software running and the front-end is also far from finished.

You can find the new server temporarily at http://btcserv.p2k-network.org/ because I couldn't reach cuqa/wtfman yet (he seems to have even less time than me).

For the relaunch of BTCServ.net, we are moving in completely new directions in the areas of server programming, databases and security. An attacker will have a very hard time breaking in and also, by enforcing auto-payouts, no large amounts of Bitcoins will ever linger around on the payout server anymore. Beneath the front-end of the new BTCServ.net site, practically nothing will be the same as before.

p2k

Any chance of the unpaid BTC at the time of the hack being returned to the miners once the new system is up and running?

I miss that page :( http://btcserv.net/bitcoin/history/

Yeah give us back that page u owe us that much.

BTCServ.net - Bitcoin Mining Pool


Status:

- Feb 10th, 2013: Slowly working on relaunch

 :o I thought this topic was completely dead.

BTCServ.net - Bitcoin Mining Pool


Status:

- Mar 17th, 2013: s/slowly/sloooowly/