Reposted this in the Pools forum... Please reply there.

What is the reason for multiple worker accounts within a pool? Is it technical or statistical reasons?

I am currently mining on Slush's pool and have a three machines (one with 2 GPUs, one with a single GPU, and one with a GPU and a CPU miner running on it - yes I know the CPU miner is basically worthless). At the moment I have a separate worker account for each miner per most posted instructions, but I am wondering why this is required.

I note that in this post http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7561.0 it is pool dependent and that deepbit doesn't require separate accounts for up to 10 workers. For other pools (like Slush) is there some state regarding the getwork issued that is associated with a worker account?

Thanks

Sorry for the loss. I should point out that you mentioned you found a couple of viruses that your virus scanner said were "cleaned". You also mentioned that you used your computer for other financial activities beyond BitCoin. This is a very risky situation.

From a security point of view if your computer is ever compromised by malware, there is no sure way to clean it, other than to wipe it completely by formatting the hard drive and re-installing the operating system from read only media. Using your virus software to "clean" the computer doesn't always work. Using the "recovery partition" on your hard drive doesn't always work. Once your machine has been rooted, there are all kinds of places that malware can hide itself that is beyond the reach of any virus scanner.

This by the way is true for both Windows and Linux / Unix environments. If your machine ever gets rooted, all is lost. You must reinstall from scratch if you need to be sure. If you have high value data on your computer, you "need to be sure".

I notice that when I have multiple pools defined (as backup pools) and when one of the primary pools goes down (GUIMiner reports "Connection problems"), the total hash rate down in the lower right corner retains the last seen hash rate from the pool connection that went down instead of zeroing it out.

Or in other words if I have two miners defined and one is normally running at 200 Mhash/sec and the other runs at 1Mhas/sec (lower priority), my total hash rate is reported as 201Mhash/second as expected.

If the first miner goes down with connection problems and the second minor ramps up to 200 Mhash/sec, the total reported is like 400Mhash/sec. It appears that during "connection problems" GUIMiner still thinks the downed miner is running at full speed.

Edit: 2 typos.

Requesting white listing per my post in the other thread: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15477.msg208675#msg208675. (Not sure if the old requests got transferred here or not.)

What is the reason for multiple worker accounts within a pool? Is it technical or statistical reasons?

I am currently mining on Slush's pool and have a three machines (one with 2 GPUs, one with a single GPU, and one with a GPU and a CPU miner running on it - yes I know the CPU miner is basically worthless). At the moment I have a separate worker account for each miner per most posted instructions, but I am wondering why this is required.

I note that in this post http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7561.0 it is pool dependent and that deepbit doesn't require separate accounts for up to 10 workers. For other pools (like Slush) is there some state regarding the getwork issued that is associated with a worker account?

Thanks

Requesting white-listing.

I read the forums and only post if I have something useful to add to a conversation. I am familiar with "netiquette" going back to mid '80s (BBS, BITNET, ARPANET, Usenet, etc.) PM me if you want a reference source forge identity to see historical sample posts.

So are the following true?

• In order for the site owner to get any credit for work (not necessarily coins, but just acknowledgement of work), a given page viewer must remain on a page long enough for one "getwork" request to be complete.
• In order for the site owner to get any coins (or fractional coins), the total sum of all site visitors must spend enough time on site pages to complete enough "getwork" requests to complete a "share" of work.
• Completion of a share of work must be done within a "round" or an attempt by the pool to solve a block.

What I am trying to get at is an idea of is how much traffic a website would need in order to get any actual BitCoin credit. If the above are true, then small or low volume web sites would not have chance of earning any coins unless some sort of fractional share model is introduced.

How long would someone have to sit on a web page in order to generate enough work that would result in any credit at all for the hosting web site?

For traditional mining pools the unit of work credit is a "share" which takes a GPU miner minutes to hours to generate. A JS miner hours to days to generate a traditional "share". Most people don't sit on a single web page for hours, they are typically only on a web page for seconds to minutes. Are the units of work assigned and credited smaller then a typical pool "share"? Does this system have the concept of a fractional shares of work?