The mining server is currently hosted at Hetzner. For a while they had 40% packetloss on parts of their network. Not sure if it was a bad router or another customer being DDoSed.

They seemed to have fixed the issue now though. 0% packetloss.

Update: Hetzner confirms it was a DDoS against another customer on the same subnet.

Hetzner network seems to be ok again. Packetloss dropped to zero.

We are back in business.

Hetzner first gave me an explanation of how you can sometimes see packetloss when there isn't any. Great support! But they finally seem to have fixed their network.

I'll look at getting multiple servers with multiple hosting providers in the future.

Apologies for the downtime.

Update: Hetzner confirms it was a DDoS against another customer on the same subnet.

I do what I can to keep it up, but this kind of problem is difficult to guard against. There will be multiple mining servers at different hosting providers in the future though, which should help.

For backup pools, there is a pool list in the pools section of the forum.

40% packetloss. Looks exactly the same way when Hetzner had a problem with their routers - I'm guessing it's the same thing again.

Hetzner is the hosting provider where the mining server is located.

Back to normal. Looks like the network was having problems for a few minutes.

I have an experimental alpha version at http://bitminter.com/alpha/alpha.jnlp

Maybe that works better?

I have no block erupter to test on. I made an experimental version, tried to program (blindly) a fix. Maybe you can give it a try: http://bitminter.com/alpha/alpha.jnlp

That's odd, never seen that before. Anyone know?


Stratum support coming soon


The problem is not that they aren't getting work, it's that they are not returning any results. The computer sends them work but they never find any proofs of work.

Which version of BitMinter client are you running? And are these 10 devices block erupters or something else?

I don't have a single Icarus compatible unit, Block Erupter or otherwise, so it's a little difficult to improve support.

There's an experimental version now at: http://bitminter.com/alpha/alpha.jnlp

I'd like to know how it runs (if at all) on block erupter, actual icarus, and any other icarus compatible devices. Does it work, does it show the correct hash rate, etc.


You need to install silabs drivers.

http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBtoUARTBridgeVCPDrivers.aspx

Please help out Organofcorti by taking part in this miner survey:

https://docs.google.com/a/organofcorti.org/forms/d/1EgNjL-N6mMEfOsDup2Pr7I5B9sM2LUVZOGcddcBCEFI/viewform

That way he can keep bringing us awesome statistics at the neighborhood pool watch at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/


CloudHashing is interesting. It's important that there are a few different ways to take part in mining, depending on your needs. At the moment things are a bit slow. GPU mining is becoming unprofitable for most and only a few people are able to get (overpriced) ASICs. There are many people new to Bitcoin who want to take part in mining, but they can't really find an option that makes sense.

bfgminer and cgminer support ztex FPGAs.. links at bitminter frontpage: http://bitminter.com

This too shall pass. Hold steady men (and women)

72% CDF is no hell block. But at this difficulty even most lucky blocks will require a considerable amount of work.

No, only BFL and Icarus-compatible FPGAs are supported. You'll have to use another mining client for that.

Yes, maybe I add Litecoin when I have time. We'll see.


Contact me using the "contact" form on the website and let's see if we can think of something.

Yes, the mining server will cease to work if it is not able to record your work. That's done on purpose as a failsafe mechanism. If mining is working, then it is safe to keep mining.

The website is more stable, but there is still a third party bug affecting it now and then. I will see what I can do about it.

When your proofs of work are accepted by the server they are registered in the current (not yet finished) shift. Each time a block is found the last 10 completed shifts are paid.

After the shift is completed the work is now eligible for pay from any blocks we find. From then on, every time we find a block those proofs of work are paid from the income in that block, until 10 more shifts are completed. This causes a delay from the moment you do the work until it is fully paid and stops receiving payments.

Currently shifts take almost 1 hour. So it takes anything from a split second to 1 hour from the time you do some work until its shift is finished. And then it takes 10 shifts (10 hours) until it is fully paid. So the delay from you did some work until it is fully paid is 10 to 11 hours with the current pool hashrate and Bitcoin difficulty.

In addition, if you don't have the prepay perk activated then the payments are only set up when a block is found but not executed until the block is confirmed. This causes an additional delay of about 20 hours from the block is found until the coins hit your BitMinter account.

That's a total payment delay from 10 up to 31 hours.

And then there is luck... daily earnings fluctuate as we play the Bitcoin lottery called mining.

Yeah, sounded like some pretty fancy malware the hacker installed too. I don't know whether that has something to do with the network issues or not.

cpuminer should be much faster than bitminter client on cpu. Are you sure you're not getting 2 MH/s with cpuminer? Anyway, CPU mining is incredibly slow and not recommended. You can try it to see how bitcoin mining works, but it's useless for making a profit.

The high packetloss is caused by backbone connectivity issues at Hetzner: http://www.hetzner-status.de/en.html