The earlier message may have been a bit cryptic. There was a block chain fork: http://bitcoin.org/chainfork.html

We were on 0.7 the whole time so we were on the "correct" side of the fork. Everything ok.

For more details about what happened, there's info all over bitcointalk. You may also want to look at the transcript from the bitcoin-dev IRC channel: http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2013/03/12 - I guess it will be all over the news today as well.

Sorry for the short downtime. We are on 0.7 and everything should be ok.

BitMinter mining on 0.7

I will look at litecoin when I have time. I see it is popular.


The big livestats seems more popular than the popup and the button looked a bit misplaced there. It's still available in the statistics menu. Was it useful having the button there?

I'm making some small changes to the website. Internationalized version almost ready. Will need some translators. If anyone is willing to translate to another language, let me know.

Be careful or we'll orphan your blocks!

By the way, if you have a tie with blocks A and B and

25% evil hashpower working on block C (prevblock A or B)
37.5% good hashpower working on block X (prevblock A)
37.5% good hashpower working on block Y (prevblock B)

then your 25% evil hashpower still has only 25% chance of creating the next block. This doesn't change because of a fork.

By choosing A or B as prevblock you do skew the odds for which past to keep as reality though (62.5% vs. 37.5%).

Erasing a lost bet at SatoshiDice by double spending would still only have 25% odds as the other 37.5% hashpower working on the same side of the fork are likely to include your lost bet in the new block.

That's most likely due to buggy AMD graphics drivers. Which Catalyst version do you have installed?

Is it stuck downloading, with the progress bar stopping just before completion?

You're sure it's not the anti-virus or firewall interfering?

Thanks for the support, guys. That's good motivation to keep improving the pool. Much appreciated. 


We are running with standard block limits and no filters on satoshidice transactions.


I will consider whether to add Litecoin support after I deal with a few more items ahead of that on my TODO list.

Nice to hear you like the pool Welcome aboard!


BFI_INT is an instruction on AMD GPUs (except some older models) that is useful to speed up bitcoin mining. If you don't have BFI_INT (or don't use it) then you must use multiple instructions to do the same thing BFI_INT can do.


It seems to be a problem with the Catalyst 13.2 beta drivers. Several users had this exact problem.

Look here for the solution: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22432.msg1572983#msg1572983


Probably a GPU is overclocked too much or not well cooled. There are many ways things can fail because of this. Bluescreen, everything locking up, spontaneous reboot, artifacts, graphics driver crashing (and Windows restarting it if you are lucky), etc. etc. If you are right on the edge you may see occasional miscalculations, shown as bombs in the client, or screen artifacts, without crashing completely.

Yeah, several days of bad luck. Hope it turns around soon.

The website is up. I'm accessing it through CloudFlare right now. But it seems CloudFlare at the same time tells some users that the site is down. I'm not liking it.

There will be a new version to support BFL ASICs. You'll need to restart the miner to upgrade it after the new version is out.

It may also be possible through a web proxy using the CONNECT method. But the pool may have to accept Stratum connections on port 443. Without really knowing what I'm talking about I bet most web proxies only allow tunneling raw TCP connections to destination port 443, for SSL. But I don't think any miners support this, nor do I know of any pools with Stratum on port 443.

With a naive implementation of rollntime this could be a problem, yes. I don't know if it is worth the effort to improve any existing rollntime miners that don't deal with this properly. Energy is probably better spent elsewhere.

The important part is Stratum vs. GBT.

When it comes to getwork its only advantage over Stratum is that it is easier to run through an HTTP proxy, if that's your only internet access. I don't think getwork is going to last, long term. Even if you are behind a web proxy that doesn't allow the CONNECT method (or only allows it to port 443 destinations) so you can't tunnel Stratum, you could use GBT.

That depends on your definition of "better". GBT and Stratum have very different goals.

Stratum's goal is to make mining more efficient. You will see much lower bandwidth usage and somewhat lower ratio of rejected work, compared to GBT or getwork.

GBT's goal is giving back control to the miner with transparency and things like the ability to filter out transactions you don't like or even add your own. It can also better detect an evil pool op trying to abuse your hash power to do a double spend and take the coins with him to some southern island. With palm trees. And drinks with little umbrellas in them. Right now I think no mining clients or pools support the advanced features of GBT, just the basics. Without those features GBT has no advantage over Stratum yet. But you may want to lobby miner authors and pools to implement more advanced GBT if you care about those issues.

getwork with rollntime should be good enough for ASICs and compatible with all existing mining software. It uses more bandwidth than Stratum, though.

At BitMinter I decided to support all three protocols. The choice, my friend, is up to you.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it will switch from GBT to Stratum and try that, but if it has the slightest problem it will switch back to GBT until next restart of cgminer?

It may be a better idea to use a stratum+tcp URL if Stratum is what you want to use.

Looked like a botnet was bombarding the pool with getwork requests, the load was insanely high. So the server was responding a bit slowly for a while. Maybe that has something to do with the problem you were having.

Your work is not registering at http://bitminter.com/shifts ?

Maybe we were just having a long round, see the blocks at http://bitminter.com/blocks

You may want to watch what's going on live at http://bitminter.com/livestats/big - you can see how much work you got registered in the current (incomplete) shift, among other things.


I would recommend you buy an ASIC and not GPU rigs. Tomorrow GPU mining will be like CPU mining is today.

If you want to GPU mine profitably then you have to be prepared to sell off the GPUs in a couple weeks when profitability takes a nosedive from the difficulty increase caused by everyone mining on ASICs.

Sorry for the spam today. Just wanted to let you know a small website update just went out.

The luck and rewards pages are now much more responsive.

I also added Bitcoin Stats for iOS (iphone, ipad) to the third party apps list. Thanks for supporting BitMinter! It's becoming a nice list of available apps now.

If anyone wants to know exactly what happened, here's the post mortem report from CloudFlare about the outage:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515

Phew. We (and half the internet) are back. I hope this is a rare occurrence with CloudFlare.

Edit: That's a lot of websites that went offline:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/03/cloudflare-is-down-due-to-dns-outage-taking-down-785000-websites-including-4chan-wikileaks-metallica-com/

CloudFlare is dead in the water. Unfortunately we use them for DNS, so you can't look up any bitminter.com hostnames right now.

Some miners are still at the pool mining. You can use 176.9.104.178 instead of mint.bitminter.com and keep mining. But remember to change it back once things are in order again, otherwise things won't work the next time the mining server moves.

I hope CloudFlare will get their systems up shortly.

Apologies for the inconvenience.