Of course I care. I built everything alone from scratch, including all the software. I've been working on the pool for over five and a half years now. I worked extremely hard the first two years, where I barely did much else, apart from working a different full-time job. I still work on the pool, and a loud alarm, WWII air raid siren style, still wakes me up in the night if there is an issue with any of the servers. The alarm is always on and my laptop is always within reach. I do what I can to ensure our mining never stops. But I do sleep more and work less than before. I was burning out and it was not possible to continue like that.

Here is what remains of the old (2010-2011) pools:

Slush: 124 PH/s - the one that invented mining pools
Eligius: 2.25 PH/s - the one that wanted to pay you directly instead of going through a pool wallet
P2pool: 1.7 PH/s - the one that wanted to decentralize the pool
Bitminter: 1.4 PH/s - the one that wanted to make mining accessible to everyone, with a GUI
(Bitminter had 2.7 PH/s before this unlucky round)

Yes, at this point it looks like the three smallest are dying and there will be only Slush left. So you can think that these other three must really suck and those pool operators don't give a damn. There is a survivor bias here. You think a survivor who is not doing so good sucks, because you have completely forgotten the dead.

So many pools started in 2011. So many pools have come and gone from 2010 till today. Most you probably never heard of. Some I can't remember anymore. What was the name of that Swedish one? I think it was the first to add IPv6 support. I just can't remember its name. It feels like a hundred years ago. All those pools I worked so hard to be able to compete with. I thought some of them would just crush me. All those old battles. All forgotten now.

Some pools just suddenly disappeared. Some are still listed in the bitcoin wiki although their websites have been down for months. Those are the pool operators that didn't care. And I can understand that after they put a lot of effort into their pool and it still died, they don't want to put any more effort into it. But they should leave a short goodbye notice and give people a little time to cash out their coins before shutting the servers down. That's a minimum obligation you have when you run a pool.

Unlike most pools, Bitminter didn't die yet. Because I do care. And because the miners care, some who have been here for years, and a few even all the way back to the beginning.

But yes, it looks grim. We have never before had this combination of extremely low hashpower and extremely bad luck at the same time. The result is that we lost half our hashpower in a month.

I'm sorry to hear you are so unhappy with the pool that you want it to die.

I did run some ads back then, as was suggested, but this is not easy to turn around with ads.


The old Bitminter thread is still there. You can look it up and read all the posts if you want. Here is why a new (self-moderated) Bitminter thread was started:

In the old thread people were spamming misinformation and refusing to stop. It was an open thread where I had no power to delete posts and control the madness. I asked admins if they could make it self-moderated so I could stop these things repeatedly derailing the thread. They said they can't change an existing thread, I have to start a new one. So I did.

One issue was some people kept harassing new miners in the pool, keeping it from growing. If a new miner had less than average luck the first few days, the accusations of block withholding got completely out of control. This made it difficult to get more hashrate in the pool. Who wants to join a pool where people harass and hate on newcomers? I should add that most Bitminter users are nice and helpful people. It was just a couple that had gotten very scared of block withholding after it happened at BTCGuild and Eligius - a big miner there had made their own mining client with a bug that caused the block withholding.

Another thing that kept happening was people who were insisting they could earn above average from pool hopping the pool-hop safe mining pools. Instead of math, like pool hoppers used in the olden days, these guys insisted they could predict the future. At times people who believed such superstition would take over the thread and make it hard to discuss other things. I also felt obligated to keep correcting them so newcomers don't get tricked into believing yesterday's luck can be used to predict today's luck.

You are the first to complain about the switch from the old spammy thread to the new thread where I delete the worst garbage. Among the earliest messages in this thread you can see positive feedback from people who were tired of what the old thread was becoming.

Who knows, sometimes some of the smallest miners would win when we had mint races

About abandoning the block, many have suggested this, but this is already what we do. Every hash is already a different block. We are trying billions upon billions of different blocks per second. If we kept hashing the same block then nothing would happen. We abandon every block after just a single try. But it can take many attempts before we find a valid one.

Thanks th1nk3rs! If we can finally find the next block and get some more hashrate in then we get things going again.

Discus Fish, which you see on the list, is an alias for F2pool.

jonnybravo0311 is right, the "pay tx reward" column is a very important one now. In the case of Discus Fish, the 4% fee becomes roughly 8% when you count the lost income from transaction fees.

By the way, GHash.io has been shut down and can be removed from the list.

CDF is the chance that you would have found a block with a certain amount of work at a certain difficulty.

With bitcoin you are never 100% certain to find a block with any amount of work.

As the amount of work approaches infinity the chance you would find a block approaches 100%

Work never actually reaches infinity. You can never do an infinite amount of work. So no matter how much work you do you are never certain to find a block. But with huge amounts of work you can get very close to 100%

Currently we've done 1547 billion work and difficulty is 253 billion. So we're over 6x difficulty. The worst we have seen in the pool was 11x difficulty. We had a larger share of the global hashpower though, so that amount of work took less time back then.

Thankfully these events are very rare.

Mining luck is completely random.

When something is random there will be runs of the same sometimes - that is just how randomness is. If you couldn't have runs of the same luck, then it wouldn't be random, would it?

You can't predict tomorrow's luck based on today's luck. That is gambler's fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

But over time the randomness evens out. See the law of large numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

That said, some miners believe they can predict completely random events in the future. We have had such people try to pool hop Bitminter. When you come and go in a pool that is safe from pool hopping, it is completely random whether you get good or bad results. Of course if they got good results then they took that as evidence that they could indeed predict the future. No. If you play roulette, put your money on black and win, that doesn't mean you have magical powers. You were just lucky.

So there will be people coming back to the pool after the next block is found, thinking they are able to predict that "the luck must turn now". And maybe they will get lucky. But that doesn't mean they are people with magical abilities who are abusing the pool. It just means they were lucky. The thing is, with our reward system, when you do some work there is no way to know how well that work will be paid until later. Also, all work is treated the same, whether you are a 24/7 miner or part-time miner. So the reality is that they were just helping to search for a block, and their work is paid the same way as everyone else's.

You don't have to worry about big miners abusing the pool when good luck returns. The reward system is completely safe from pool hoppers, because you never know in advance how much you will get for your work. Your payouts depend on future luck. You can't come and go based on what the future luck will be, because you cannot know what it will be. The luck yesterday does not in any way influence luck tomorrow.

More about pool hopping: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping

If you mine in the pool 24/7 then the size of the shifts don't really affect your payouts. With 1% of the hashrate you get 1% of the coins that are paid out.

For those who mine here part time longer shifts would even out the variance in their payouts. But on the other hand it could take a month from you do some work until it is fully paid. That's not good. But yes, if we had more hashpower so the shifts wouldn't take so long then I would increase the shift size to even out payouts for part-time miners.

Enough with the namecoin blocks. Let's hit some bitcoin!

Thanks

https://twitter.com/oocBlog/status/781259179470249984

Mining income from transaction fees is becoming important.

You think you are mining PPS with a 3% fee? When the pool doesn't pay out transaction fee income, the actual fee is over 6% !
Mining PPLNS with 0% fee but no tx fee payout? You are actually paying a 3.1% fee.

A new block now has 12.5 new bitcoins and an average 0.4 BTC from transaction fees. An average mining income of 12.9 BTC per block. The 0.4 BTC is 3.1% of this.

Tx fee income will likely be even more than 3.1% in the near future. Check your pool's reward conditions today.

P.S. If you mine at a pool that frequently mines empty blocks, then there will of course also be reduced income from transaction fees, even if they are paid out.

I just noticed Bitminter is listed as 0.5% fee. Must be an editing error. I'm pretty sure it was correctly listed as 1% before.

Could we get that corrected to 1% ?

Thanks guys, the support is much appreciated.

Well, I don't get rich. But the pool lives on.

At least 1 TH/s (1000 GH/s). I think Antminer S9 and R4 are sold out at the moment from bitmaintech.com - but there are used miners available at ebay and similar places, so that can also be an option. I don't think anyone else is selling new miners at the moment - someone correct me if I'm wrong.

You earn a couple satoshis. You can never cash them out. To reach the minimum cash out limit would take years. And we have the lowest cash out limit of any pool, as far as I know. (when you use "send coins", not auto cash out)

40 MH/s was extremely slow even in 2011, about CPU-level speed, and would not be recommended even then. In 2011 most people mined with gaming GPUs that did around 300 MH/s.


Not sure what you mean here. If you mine with the correct user name then you should see accepted work being registered, although it may take many hours with such a low hashrate. You will not see a live hashrate though. At 0.04 GH/s you are mining so slow the website can't tell if you are mining, and even if it could it would be rounded down to 0 GH/s for the live hashrate display.

Unfortunately graphics cards are no longer even useful to test how mining works.

PCs are useless for mining. You need to buy ASIC hardware. Popular right now are Antminer R4 and S9 from bitmaintech.com
There's also used mining hardware on ebay and similar places. But don't buy outdated USB-based hardware that is both extremely slow and extremely expensive per GH/s.


The work (shares) you do is registered in shifts. When someone in the pool finds a block the coins we earn from that block are paid depending on how much work you did in the last 10 shifts.

Some more details on how the payouts work here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824

Look at the first post in this thread for a list. Bitcoin uses sha-256.

There are several good pools. As to which is the best; this is probably not the correct thread for that - there are weekly threads where people fight over it.

Average for the whole pool is 0.08% right now, which is normal. Maybe you're hitting some turbulence in the interwebs somewhere?

A big thanks to VVulf1992 for finding that block. Hoping for some quick rounds now.


No, that's why we are using PPLNS - it's safe from pool hopping.

More on pool hopping here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping