Thanks, glad you like BitMinter

Namecoins:

Read more and get a namecoin wallet from http://dot-bit.org Get a namecoin GUI from http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=341

You can sell namecoins at exchanges:
[1] https://btc-e.com/
[2] https://vircurex.com/

(If you just want to sell then just send your namecoins there, no need to set up a wallet program)

Just a quick note since there was talk in this thread about BitMinter's luck being so bad that something must be wrong.

organofcorti has performed a thorough audit: http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/05/131-bitminter-and-luck.html

The results are in: BitMinter pays better than most pools even when we have bad luck (PPS miners are sad). And when we have good luck it's just awesome (PPS miners cry).

Back to your regular programming.

organofcorti has done a very thorough audit of BitMinter's payouts:

http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/05/131-bitminter-and-luck.html

I'd summarize it this way: when we have bad luck we still pay better than most mining pools. When we have good luck we pay a lot more.

Can you really ask for more?

Thanks to organofcorti for the excellent work. If you need to make sense of numbers he's well worth the price.

organofcorti has done a very thorough audit of BitMinter's payouts:

http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/05/131-bitminter-and-luck.html

I'd summarize it this way: when we have bad luck we still pay better than most mining pools. When we have good luck we pay a lot more.

Can you really ask for more?

Thanks to organofcorti for the excellent work. If you need to make sense of numbers he's well worth the price.

Thanks for the kind words, that's a good motivation to keep improving BitMinter.


Sounds like the OpenCL drivers are broken. Did you try uninstalling Catalyst and reinstalling again?

I've heard many reports of driver crashes on Catalyst 13.1 and 13.4, so you may want to be wary of those releases.

New blocks are showing as stale, I'll get this changed to "processing" or something like that soon.

Why are they like that for more than some seconds? Because while the mining server has a lighter load than usual, the payment processing system is lagging badly. I'll improve this soon.

Apologies for the confusion it causes to show so many "stale" blocks, especially with all the fast blocks we had today it looked crazy.

The funny thing is that the load on the mining server hasn't been lower in months. I guess some slow miners gave up and were replaced with ASIC miners. With var diff it's the number of workers and connections that matter, not the hashrate. Whether you have 1 Ghps or 1 Thps doesn't matter to the server - the load is the same.

Probability theory and statistics are not my fields of expertise. The smart thing for me then is to rely on people who are good with this.

If people like organofcorti or Meni Rosenfeld, people who understand numbers, tell me that the numbers look strange, then I worry.

When miners see bad luck and let their emotions run away with them, I ask organofcorti to perform a calm and thorough analysis of the data and present his findings so everyone can see what the situation really is.

If you want to make the most coins, read his report when it's out. When it comes to money, math beats emotions every time.

By the way, we just got 5 blocks in 22 minutes.


I'm sorry you feel disappointed with the 1% fee. I was a bit worried about introducing a fee, but surprisingly I got mostly positive feedback.

Last december a string of orphan blocks killed all the profits of the pool, back to the beginning. So the pool had zero profit. Server costs were not covered. What about lost income from the 1.5 man years of work I had put into this. As a skilled software developer and web security specialist, that's .. a few coins. BitMinter was a disaster. I couldn't keep working my ass off to help others make money, while I only had losses (server costs) myself. A minimum wage job would be a dream in comparison.

So now we are the second cheapest pool, after P2pool. That's a much smaller pool with much more variance. If you think the luck swings on BitMinter are bad, then you'll be running away screaming. But if you set p2pool donation to zero, set up merged mining with automatic restart of namecoind when it locks up daily, and ensure you have good and fast connectivity to the most important nodes on the bitcoin peer-to-peer network to avoid orphans, and pray that other p2pool users have the same, then you should come out a little bit ahead on average. If you're lucky. I'm hoping that what BitMinter has to offer is worth more than that.


Thanks, that is much appreciated!

This seems to be for checking whether the web server is up, not the mining server.

Why is bad luck strange? Wouldn't it be more strange if we only had good luck all the time?

Ok, true, more users in the pool affects your work reject ratio, but the difference will be tiny.

The BitMinter server orders long pollers by hashrate for getwork and getblocktemplate (GBT). For Stratum there is no ordering when pushing work (at least not yet).

Currently at each block change work is pushed to 7000-8000 Stratum connections in 0.01-0.03 seconds. 8000-9000 long pollers (getwork/GBT) are notified in 1.5-1.8 seconds. A few more ASICs running Stratum won't really make any difference.


Yes, the server software is closed source. And it wouldn't make much difference if it was open source, because you would never know if the source code I gave you is what I was running on the server.

Not sure what you mean having to pay for the miner. There's no extra fee for using BitMinter client over other mining clients.

There is some confusion lately that having big miners in the pool means the smaller miners get paid less. That's not how it works. Your average payout is determined by your hashrate, the difficulty, and fees/donations. Other people's hashrate does not influence this at all.

If someone joins the pool with 10% of the hashrate, then the pool will be pulling in 10% more bitcoins, the new user will be doing 10% of the work, and the new user will get 10% of the payouts. You don't make more coins by mining in a big/small pool, and you don't make less money mining in a big/small pool.

But a higher pool hashrate reduces variance for everyone in the pool. That means you will have smaller variations than before in your daily payouts.

Which app do you mean?

Does anyone know when it is safe to send a client.get_version request from the server to the client?

Some miner clients seem to interpret it as a response to their auth request and see it as auth failing.

Since clients can send auth requests at any time this means it is never safe to send a request from server to client?


Never had that with my Stratum implementation. Which codebase is this?

Sorry, a new version of the mining server was not playing nice with all miner versions in use. I quickly reverted back to the old one.

Welcome to all the new miners


No. But I'm going to investigate LTC soon. So maybe.


Yes.

Sounds like a world where one "winner" controls everything. That's a world where Bitcoin is dead. I hope you're wrong.

Yeah, both are on my TODO list. I just have to get around to them.

Sorry, there was a few minutes downtime as the server was overloaded. Running OK again now.

I wouldn't call namecoins a waste of time when they give you more than 8% extra income. Especially at this scale 8% is a lot of money.

I'm not saying it will stay that way forever, but that's where namecoin income is today.