The rewards graph shows the last 500 shifts, that's currently the last 16 days. First 8 days are about average, some lucky, some not, and the last 3 were pretty unlucky. Now people are saying we didn't have one lucky day for an entire year.


If you actually have a reason to believe something is wrong, please let me know what leads you to believe that.

When there is some good luck "BitMinter is a very profitable place to mine" and when there is some bad luck "there must be a bug causing that". I've heard both of those a few times before.

Do you mean we have not had one lucky day for a full year? You know that's not true.

The actual is above the expected for part of the graph when I look at it now: http://bitminter.com/stats/rewards
And it has not been 1 year since this could last be seen.

The rewards graph is only the last 500 shifts. Currently, as I write this, it goes back to shift 14399 which was 2013-04-18 20:38 UTC. That's only 16 days. I'll agree the last 5 days or so were bad, but let's not go overboard.

I'll get some more data to show how the luck has been. In the meantime please give the FUD some rest.

You can go to "my account" -> "workers" on the website and set a new password. Also, both names and passwords are case sensitive. If you used capital letters on the server then you must also do so in the client.

If you still have problems, use the "contact" form on the website and I'll have a look in the logs. I can see if you got the user name and worker name right.

Difficulty is going up as more ASIC machines are mining.

Bitcoin automatically adjusts the difficulty with the aim that blocks should be created one per 10 minutes on average. So as more hashrate is added, and blocks are created "too fast" the difficulty gets adjusted upwards.

You'll have to ask other pools why they don't. There is nothing in the Stratum protocol to make merged mining any more difficult than it is with getwork and getblocktemplate. When I added Stratum and getblocktemplate I just didn't turn off merged mining.

Not all pools have their own software. Some run one mining server software they found on the net 2 years ago that supported getwork and merged mining, but isn't maintained anymore. Then they found a new one that does Stratum but not merged mining, and they installed that too. The result is a patchwork of unmaintained outdated software and a random feature set. Other pools do have their own software and just left out merged mining because the mergeable coins looked dead. That was a pretty good assessment too, until someone suddenly started buying very large amounts of namecoins, pushing the price higher than it had ever been before.


New work is pushed on Stratum when there is a new BTC or NMC block. New work is also pushed every 30 seconds to include new transactions.

That does not imply a restart, however, as there is no progress when mining. If you lost the lottery every week for 10 years it doesn't mean that your chances of winning are now magically higher.


I didn't have the impression we have been plagued with bad luck for months. I don't see that when I look at organofcorti's weekly pool stats.

And no, changing the data to be hashed does not cause bad luck. That's what your Stratum miner does when it creates new work anyway, it creates new data to be hashed. It doesn't even matter whether you change the entire merkle root or just 1 bit in the timestamp to create new work. Changing just 1 bit in the data being hashed will cause many changes in the resulting hash. This is called the avalanche effect.

Let me put it this way: if you can find a way to generate new work in a way that affects your success rate when mining, then you have found a loop hole in SHA-256 and you'll be a rich miner.

I'm not saying it's impossible that we randomly bumped into a weakness in SHA-256. But I don't think it's likely. It's not time to call Bruce Schneier just yet.  

This page only shows the last 500 shifts. Payouts have sometimes been much higher than average. I have on my TODO list to make it possible to go back in time on that graph, but I haven't had time to add it yet.

Not sure how much they fixed in the new rpcminer. The old one was pretty broken and unmaintained for a long time.

The old one needed a trick to work on BitMinter:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg1839189#msg1839189

Even the old one would be able to connect though, and your parameters look correct. Not sure what the problem is there.

No, it's not just a frontend like GUIminer. It's a real miner. It uses OpenCL directly to run its own OpenCL code.

Just like the server software, it's all custom built from scratch for BitMinter.

I've heard of many crashes with Catalyst 13.1 and 13.4, so I think those two versions are best avoided.

There's a lot of support requests lately from newbies and ex-PPS miners who mined 12 or 24 hours on BitMinter and were horrified by low payouts. Some even think I am scamming them.

Short version: BitMinter pays you much more than most pools in the long run, but there may be some days with low payouts and payouts are delayed several hours after you do some work.

Long explanation:

DELAY: On BitMinter your work gets paid when we find new blocks as long as it is in one of the 10 latest shifts. Since 10 shifts take about 7.5 hours currently, that's how long it takes for your work to be fully paid. If you also turned off the prepay perk then you must wait for the blocks to be confirmed as well before you get income from them. That takes about 20 hours.

VARIANCE: In addition to this there is variance when mining with a PPLNS reward system. This means you get high payouts on a lucky day (when we find many blocks) and low payouts on an unlucky day.

BOTTOM LINE: Over time you will make more money mining with 1% fee on BitMinter than 5% fee on a PPS pool. If the occassional low payout makes you nervous then you may want to go with a PPS pool, even if you lose a lot of money in the long run. But remember that PPS pools in general don't pay out transaction fees, so you lose 1% to 2% more. Most don't have namecoins, so you lose over 8% there too (with current namecoin prices).

What looks like a 5% fee is then in reality a 15% fee. That is NOT better pay than BitMinter.

There's 3 reasons to choose a 15% fee over a 1% fee:
1. You desperately need the payout very quickly
2. You don't want money
3. You don't understand how the reward systems work

If it is #1 or #2 then fine. But please don't switch to a 15% fee pool because you don't yet understand what's going on.

If you thought you were shocked at the payouts when you didn't realize there's a delay, imagine my surprise at seeing miners pay a 15% fee with a big smile on their face while they tell me that my payouts suck. It boggles the mind.

The website is trying to guess your hashrate based on how often you send in proofs of work. It's always inaccurate and for low hashrates may even report zero. As long as you are getting accepted proofs of work, it's working.

You get paid when blocks are found, that happens more often with namecoin blocks than bitcoin blocks because the namecoin difficulty is lower.

Thanks guys, nice to hear you like the pool and miner.


You can run multiple computers with the same worker account. If you want separate statistics for them you'll have to create multiple worker accounts, otherwise just use the same one.

Yes, adding more hardware will mine faster. Care is taken on the server side to never give out the same work twice.

The web server is just making an estimate of your hashrate based on how often you send in proofs of work. The accurate hashrate is the one displayed on your own computer.

I'll look into averaging out the hashrate displayed on the server over more time, to reduce the spikes.

The simple way to understand mining: When you are mining the hashes you get are random numbers. If the number is higher than the current network difficulty, then you have a valid block.

Only two things influence success at mining. The difficulty (the number you are trying to beat) and the hash rate (how many numbers you produce per second).

Other people's mining will only influence future difficulty, because they cause more (or fewer) blocks per hour to be produced, which is the deciding factor for the next difficulty.

Video of the latest BitMinter client beta version running with a BFL Jalapeno:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107253423193517853418/posts/PQuAMcQnq6g

New beta version of BitMinter client is out, with BFL ASIC support.

Here's a video of it with a BFL Jalapeno: https://plus.google.com/u/0/107253423193517853418/posts/PQuAMcQnq6g

Yes. It's working nicely.

New beta version of BitMinter client is up. Only new thing is BFL ASIC support.

Video here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/107253423193517853418/posts/PQuAMcQnq6g

Does it leave a hs_err_pid file on the desktop? Most likely your graphics drivers are crashing. Uninstall, run driver sweeper to clean up properly because AMD uninstall doesn't actually work, then reinstall a good version of Catalyst. 13.1 is no good, never install that. I'm running 13.3 beta. I see now on amd.com that 13.4 and 13.5 beta are available. Haven't tried those, so I'm not sure how stable they are.


There is some info on the front page http://bitminter.com how to use with cgminer.


Try driver sweeper when you uninstall Catalyst. The Catalyst uninstall has never actually worked, it leaves behind all sorts of nonsense.

Any changes on your computer, upgraded Java or antivirus/firewall?


The real hashrate is on your computer. The website hashrate is an estimate.

Mining bitcoins is like going through billions of lottery tickets. There's nothing to abandon, we're not staring at the same lottery ticket all this time. We just had some bad luck playing the lottery today.

Each hash your computer does is one lottery ticket. There is no progress towards completing a block. If your lottery ticket is not a winning ticket, then you throw it away, it's completely useless.

Welcome to BitMinter. I have tried to make it as easy to use as possible


Yeah, that would do it. I wonder why it was saved as bitminter_jnlp

By the way, if Java is disabled in your browser then you can try starting from command line instead:
You can type that in the input field of the Windows start menu, or in a terminal window if using Mac OS X or Linux.