The proxy is a little more efficient as it runs only 1 Stratum connection to the server instead of multiple ones. At least I think so, I haven't tested it myself yet.

This is usually caused by antivirus, firewall or bad proxy settings. If you are running AVG or McAfee those are especially problematic. You could try whitelisting javaws.exe and javaw.exe with your security software.

Check whether your java proxy settings are ok: http://www.java.com/en/download/help/proxy_setup.xml (use direct connection if you don't need proxy)


Welcome! Let's try and see the glass as half full and mint some coins Bitcoin price looks to be on the rise again.

Don't mine on the CPU. CPU is too slow and it's extra slow as BitMinter client is not optimized for CPU mining.

If you have a computer with an AMD graphics card you should try that, it runs much faster than nVidia.

Welcome to Bitminter, guys, and thanks for the kind words.


The work you have done is paid whether you do more work or not. It will go in a shift and as long as that shift is among the 10 last completed ones when a block is found, you get paid for that work. This way a single proof of work is usually paid multiple times. If you go to the website and go "statistics" -> "rewards" in the navigation menu you can see this from the top graph. The graph looks like a staircase with different levels - that's from proofs of work getting paid repeatedly, sometimes many times, sometimes few.


Since work is queued up on the client side, there should be no waiting while grabbing more work from the server. If there is a problem getting enough work you will get a message in the log about running out of work and idling.

We had some minutes of downtime just now. Something not quite stable on this server. It's up again.

Will work on improving this situation tomorrow.

From that URL:


I read that to mean geforce 8000 series is the oldest that support OpenCL (see the last sentence).

I could be wrong, but I think geforce 8000 series is the oldest with OpenCL support. And 8000 series runs extremely slow.


The server runs great with ASICs. Support for BFL ASICs in the client is currently being worked on.

BitMinter client has options to start working automatically when you start the program, but it won't start up at boot or login by itself.

In Windows you can drop the shortcut in the "startup" folder on your start menu, on another OS you might set up to run the command "javaws http://bitminter.com/client/bitminter.jnlp" automatically when you log in.


Thanks, nice to hear you like it.

NMC merged mining is done for all protocols (Stratum, GBT, getwork). It uses the same shift data as BTC for payments. This may be a tiny tiny bit unfair because some users have high reject ratios on NMC work. But the effect of this is tiny and it makes things simpler.

NMC PPS can be easily calculated the same way as BTC PPS.

PPS = (1 / Difficulty) x NewCoinsPerBlock + TransactionFees

In the case of NMC: PPS = 50 / 1495881 + transaction fees

While transaction fees now are 1% to 2% for Bitcoin, I believe they are pretty insignificant for Namecoin and you may want to make things simpler by ignoring them.


I have this and some other nice improvements almost ready. But I'm working on 10 different things at the moment. Hopefully things will calm down a bit soon and some new features will be finished.

Sorry for downtime. We are back up.

bitcoind 0.8.1 seems to have a memory leak, it sometimes expands to several gigabytes of memory usage.

I'll see what I can do to prevent this in the future.

And yeah, backup pool support is at the top of the list, right after ASIC support for the miner.

Ah. It's the payment processor falling behind. That's also why blocks show as stale sometimes for several minutes.

I'll try to get this over to a faster server soon! Apologies for all the confusion it is causing.

If you turned on prepay after the block was found then that block pays without prepay.


Thanks for the support Will keep paying for orphans, but it will be a 1.5% donation on top of the 1% fee.

In larger pools you get less per block, but you get blocks more often.

If you want a really high pay per block you can try solo mining. You'll get over 25 BTC per block, but you won't get many blocks.

Sorry to see you go, MtRed.

Always honest with no hidden fees or other nonsense. Sad for it to end this way..

Edit: if you need to buy coins then watch the price now, seems to be totally crashing.. maybe that helps

Yep, emails will go out. It's on the website in the lower right corner under "news", but I will add something that is easier to notice.

Not sure if I should spam 40 000 people with it. Maybe I should limit it to users who were active in the last months.

So far the message has gone out on twitter, facebook, google+ and bitcointalk. It's the twitter message that is on the bitminter.com website.

BitMinter to take 1% fee - still most profitable of top 10 pools

Read details at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg1786756#msg1786756

BitMinter to take 1% fee - still most profitable of top 10 pools

BitMinter has been zero fee for a long time. Unfortunately this is not a sustainable way to run a pool because most miners set their donation to 0%.

We will be moving to a 1% fee on saturday 20th of april.

We are still the most profitable of the big pools, due to low fee, paying out namecoins (6% extra income), paying out income from transaction fees (1% to 2% extra income) and being safe from pool hopping.

What happens on the 20th of april:
- 1% mining fee takes effect (BTC and NMC)
- Prepay perk cost reduced to 1.5% (from 2%)
- Users with prepay on will have their donation reduced by 0.5%. Set it back up afterwards if you like.
- New users will have a 1.5% default donation (rather than 2%)

There will also be more perks coming, but I can't promise any timeframe on that.

Pool hopping is not possible on BitMinter. Yes, pool hopping hurts someone. The pool hopper get more than their fair share of the mining income. Everyone else who are not pool hopping get less than their fair share. Don't mine in a hoppable pool, there will be a hidden "fee" to pool hoppers.


The BitMinter payout system has the highest payouts of any pool over time. There are two things you need to consider.

1: After you did some work it takes time for the work to go through 10 shifts and get fully paid. Now the hash rate is up but earlier it took 10 hours from work was done until it was fully paid. No wonder after 12 hours that your pay is low. Wait 10 more hours and the rest of your pay will arrive.

2: PPLNS has variance. Some days we have high pay and some days we have low pay. You have to measure over more than 1 day to compare pools. If you want the highest payout over time, BitMinter is your best bet. If you need to be absolutely sure you don't get low pay at a bad moment when you must pay your bills, then go with a PPS pool. It will cost you some income in high fees, but that's what you have to pay for the service of PPS. As they say, it's expensive to be poor.


Yes, your work is eligible for pay from blocks for quite a while after you stop mining. You also can't compare pools with variance for a day or a few hours.

With Slush's pool you pay 2% fee. You lose some income to pool hoppers. Do you still get namecoins? Are transaction fee income paid out? Slush's pool also has variance, like BitMinter.

If you can handle the pay going up and down a bit from day to day, BitMinter has the highest payout of any pool.

Yeah, it's on my TODO list.

Currently over 1000 new users every day and a flood of emails with newbie questions. That's taking a lot of my time to handle.

If some experienced miners can donate a few minutes of their time to answer questions from newbies in the IRC channel (#bitminter on freenode) that would free up some time for me to improve the pool instead of answering the same questions over and over.

Getting timeouts? Which OpenID provider are you using?


Nice to hear you like BitMinter.

LTC support is much requested lately. I'll take a look at LTC after I finish some important BTC features. I'm currently working on support for BFL ASICs in the miner.