My apologies - Yahoo logins were not working for a little while. Fixed again now.

I upgraded many libraries used by the website to new versions and there was a compatibility issue with Yahoo.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The server watches how often you send in proofs of work, and tries to adjust the difficulty so you send on average 20 proofs of work per minute.

This number (20 per minute) may become adjustable in the future. Will see when I have time for that.

Hmm, BFI patch failing. Which AMD Catalyst release is this with?

Perhaps try reinstalling the latest Catalyst drivers, and you could also try clearing the java cache so BitMinter client gets downloaded fresh the next time you start it.

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/plugin_cache.xml


Faster hardware will speed it up. People are moving to ASIC-based mining equipment now. No point buying a faster graphics card for mining anymore. See the ASIC section on the hardware comparison wiki page. They will make GPU-mining unprofitable as they push up the difficulty.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

For ASIC mining you are likely to need variable difficulty (or at least high enough diff for your  ASIC), and one of the following: Stratum, GBT, or getwork with rollntime.

Some pools support all 3 mining protocols and you can choose.

The current situation:

• Stratum: uses the least bandwidth
• GBT (getblocktemplate): uses more bandwidth but has the potential to catch pool ops doing something nasty - such detection is not implemented yet by any miners, though
• getwork with rollntime: the old way of mining. Uses more bandwidth than Stratum with no gain. This protocol will likely die with time.

Note that getwork without rollntime is not an option, you'd be hammering the server with requests. Same thing with difficulty 1 mining.

The mint speed shown in BitMinter client is based only on your hashrate and the current difficulty. The difficulty recently went up quite a bit, but not that much. Also, BitMinter client versions prior to 1.3.1 assumed 50 BTC blocks. So if you were running an old version until today, that would explain most of it.

I changed maximum worker difficulty from 64 to 4096. There are some crazy fast miners around these days.

Let me know if there are any issues.

The way difficulty changes work under Stratum has changed. You'll see rejects that are below difficulty if you use old software. They typically submit all work, because of the weird way this used to work with Stratum in the olden days. Old cgminer will have rejects, new cgminer will not. Not sure what the status is on stratum proxies.

For those who didn't win any BTC trinkets during the last mint race, there's a good deal at Bitmit right now. A BTC/Tux keychain at half price. Offer still valid for over 23 hours as I write this.

https://www.bitmit.net/en/item/16732-bitcoin-tux-opensource-keychain

This is my first time buying at Bitmit. Looks like the site is really taking off, lots of stuff for sale. And, except for someone selling used underwear, it seems to be mostly useful things.

Looks like he's trying to make things right with Avalon ASICs. Hopefully that will work out.

In general I don't want to be some kind of mediator or investigator for every failed or possibly failing business deal that involved bitcoins. If the legal system isn't good enough, maybe the community needs to come up with an organised solution.

Also, how is it possible to lose bitcoins in the GLBSE shutdown? Did the operator steal all the deposits?

If you want to earn as many bitcoins as possible over time, go with a pool like BitMinter which pays out income from transaction fees and namecoins, and is also without mandatory fees.

If you worry about payments varying from day to day, you may feel that it is worth paying fees, and losing namecoin and transaction fee income, so that you know in advance what you will get every day. You will get less in the long run. But if you are on a tight budget and need those coins to pay the bills every month, you may need PPS to stay safe. As they say, "it's expensive to be poor."

When it comes to PPLNS pools, be aware that it takes some time before you have your work among all the last N shares/shifts. You don't get max pay for a block until then. After you leave the pool you are also still getting paid for a while until there is none of your work in the eligible shares/shifts.

I believe I saw somewhere a way for a server to ask a client to identify itself (software name and version). Is this something the current crop of clients support?

There seems to be an intermittent OpenCL issue on Mac OS X. If you get the error below, try rebooting your Mac, that should fix it.

I just got home from a trip to Sweden. Mailbox is full of support requests. And I have a lot going on at my other two jobs as well. So bear with me if things are a bit slow right now.


I've never even heard of bitbond before.


Admitted scammer or alleged scammer? Legally binding agreement and his identity is known? If so, isn't there a better place to deal with this? I'll have a look at those links though. This is the first I hear of any of this.


Nice to see things moving forward at BFL.

From what I understand they do.

No worries. With the Stratum vs. GBT war going on there is a lot of misinformation and it is easy to get confused.

I held back var diff for getwork to give hashpower.com a chance to support that first, that's why there was var diff only for GBT and Stratum at first.

Small website update:

• Added v1.3.1 under "tools" -> "bitminter client". Use it if you want to run v1.3.1 without auto updating. Auto update normally happens whenever you restart the client, if there is a new version available.
  
• Show "your score" with 4 decimal places instead of 2 in the livestats, both under "current round" and "latest shifts"
• Added new app under "tools" -> "third party apps": Bitcoin Mining Monitor, a Google Chrome extension
• Added Phraust's API wrapper on the API page
• Added franklin's API wrapper on the API page

The server choosing the difficulty to go with the work it hands out is supported by all the mining protocols in use (Stratum, GBT, getwork).

Variable difficulty means that this difficulty is not a constant number. At BitMinter this is determined (at the moment) purely from the hashrate of your worker.

The lower difficulty on your work the more often you find proofs of work. Good thing is that it keeps your daily variance low. Bad side of it is adding to your outgoing bandwidth usage, the server's incoming bandwidth and the server's CPU load.

In the future I am thinking about letting users influence the difficulty by preference, within reason.

Variable difficulty ("var diff") is now enabled for those using the getwork protocol. It was already enabled for Stratum and GBT.

Let me know if you have any issues. Some older miners may not be happy with it, but they should still be able to mine.

I am observing a decent drop in CPU usage on the server, so I am quite happy with it so far.

Max difficulty is still 16. This will be increased later as more ASICs turn up.


This is per worker. If you have a slow GPU and an ASIC then you may want to use different worker accounts for them. It's not the end of the world if you don't though, it just adds variance.

Var diff coming for getwork users tomorrow.

This should not be a problem if you are running a recent miner version. If you see a lot of rejected work then you need to upgrade your miner. You still get paid for the accepted work, though, so you don't lose any income. If there are any questions or problems, let me know.

BitMinter client 1.3.0 and 1.3.1 work fine with var diff. If you are using version 1.1.2 or 1.2.0 you may see it count miscalculations (hardware errors) that are not actual errors and count accepted/rejected work wrong because it doesn't take difficulty into account.

BitMinter client v1.3.1 now out

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31163.msg1491191#msg1491191

This should be stable on early (buggy) Java 7 releases. Even so, I recommend you grab the latest java too, if you don't already have it.