This is because of variance. On some lucky days we pay much better than average and on some unlucky days we pay much less than average.

More info on payouts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824

Yes, we had a couple of very unlucky rounds. But I don't think our unlucky block is what brought down our provider's entire data center. Although I suppose it could be our bad luck rubbing off on them.

Mining is up on a backup server while we wait for our main provider to fix their problem. DNS propagation may take a couple min to kick in.

I didn't change anything.

I'm not sure how it rips you off and benefits me. Why exactly do you think so?

If I was paying consistently 12-13% of what other pools pay, do you really think people would use the pool?

Status update. Our provider reports: We are experiencing a network issue with our provider. As we are fully aware of the situation, steps are being taken to work with our provider to resolve this issue in a timely manner. We wished that we can provide you an ETA for the network to be fully resolved, however, we will provide you updates.

Mining server unreachable at the moment. Other things than Bitminter are down at the same data center, so I believe it is a data center issue. I have contacted them about this and it is being worked on.

Apologies for the downtime.

Regarding the size of the shifts. Whether I make the shifts shorter or longer the payout is and will be quite fair. Over time your average payout is the same.

The choice between long and short shifts is an attempt to find a middle ground between two psychological reactions to mining.

Long shifts: it takes a long time to get paid for your work. Already there are new members on the pool mining for a couple hours and then complaining their payout is below what a mining calculator indicated as average. If I make the shifts longer this will get worse as you will get smaller payments for a longer period of time for the same work.

Short shifts: the shorter the shifts the faster the payouts, which is nice. But it also increases the chance of a shift getting zero payment. The average income isn't affected, but many users get a bad feeling that their work was for nothing.

The way the shifts are now I get only a few complaints of each type, which tells me the shift size isn't all that bad.


Awesome, you are the first to test this. Looks like it is almost working, but it's hitting too many errors and failing before Chili-compatible mode kicks in. I will see if I can get this fixed for the next version. It should not require manual intervention to start mining.


I didn't notice any attacks today. Maybe this is something else, or there was a small attack that I missed. Any error message?

I haven't made any change at all. It has always worked this way.

It's not that it isn't producing anything. Please read the link I posted it explains how the payouts work.

Variance will affect daily payouts. More info: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824

Some info here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824

Try organofcorti's suggestion. See if it's switching to backup pool or failing completely.

If you set 384 as the minimum, then you can still get difficulty 512. To lower the difficulty you need to increase the work submits per minute. If that setting is already at 20 (default) then you need the easy mode perk to increase it further.

Nothing to be sorry about. Thanks for discovering this bug. Indeed it required doing something few users are doing, plus having the right timing to trigger the issue. I'm always happy when I can fix such bugs without too much work tracking them down.


Thank you. That's much appreciated on a day like this.

Happy new year to you too! And to everyone else out there reading this.

A ddos attack started up not long ago, which is what dropped the hashrate by 100 TH for a minute as it started. The hashrate was quickly back up again but 3-5% of users were affected by the anti ddos solution and unable to mine for a few minutes longer. It looks like it is mostly getwork users being affected by this. I'll make it a priority to add stratum support to Bitminter client. I've just had too many other important things to deal with. After that it might make sense to remove getwork support from the pool server as well.

The ddos attacks are extremely heavy now around Christmas and new year's eve, just like they were last year. It might have something to do with many people being unhappy and/or angry at this time of year. Hopefully things get calmer as we move out of the holiday season.

The pool isn't down again, 9000 people mining. Do you get any error message?


I asked the Antminer people if there is any documentation on their USB devices. Hoping to get a reply soon.

After some investigating, I discovered an obscure bug. If you have two or more client instances connecting with different worker names that don't exist (resulting in the default worker being used), plus you have some bad luck with timing, then it can happen that one gets accepted and another one is rejected.

Workaround for now, either use blank worker name on all of them, or create the workers with those names.

This will be fixed in the next mining service update. Sorry for the trouble.

We found 7 blocks so far today and 3 of them are confirmed. So you should see some income already even if you turned off the prepay perk.

Do you see your hashrate on the website? In the live stats or on the workers page, or the shifts page?

Note that pay will seem a bit slow at first, more info here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824
But you should have something at this point if you've been mining since yesterday. If you want me to check into it more closely please use the contact page on the website to send a message, and make sure you fill in the correct user name.

Ok, so CPU mining which was obsoleted in 2011 has been disabled in Bitminter client. It won't use your CPU for mining.

GPU mining, while already obsolete, is still supported (it's useful to learn how mining works, even though the electricity spent will cost more than what you earn). But you don't have an OpenCL-compatible GPU (graphics card) on this computer.

Finally it looks for ASIC hardware. It finds something on COM3, but it's either not bitcoin mining hardware, or it's not functioning correctly.

This leaves you with no hardware to mine on.

See this list for suitable ASIC hardware to use for bitcoin mining: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ASIC

If you already bought some bitcoin hardware (maybe that's a block erupter on COM3?) then perhaps it's not getting enough power - that's a common problem with the block erupter devices.

Are you using F-Secure antivirus? It likes to block access to the mining server and causes that to happen. You'll need to whitelist the app/pool with F-Secure for it to work reliably.

Bitminter client? What happens when you try to start it?