That's the reason for the change. It should be ready soon.

Quick website update.

Now you can use /api/users in addition to /api/users/USERNAME to retrieve your stats.

I think including the username in the URL is more RESTful, but this simplified URL makes it easier for 3rd party apps to add BitMinter support.

Yep. Some miners like seeing more blocks come in, while others don't like seeing their "pay per block" go down. But the way it really affects each miner is to reduce variance.

Not really. Because he said "no" to higher hashrate increasing the odds of finding blocks. That's clearly incorrect. Higher hashrate does increase your chance of finding blocks. Otherwise I'd be CPU mining right now.

But the end result of the increased hashrate is lower variance, that is true.

Anyway, I hope we can find something more useful to discuss today.

It already shows how many shares are mined. That's the "accepted" and "rejected" numbers. If you are logged in there will also be accepted and rejected numbers showing how much you did in the current round. Your efforts and total pool efforts would be the hashrate?

We can't show how much remains of the current round in work or time. Every proof of work is like a lottery ticket. We don't know how many more tickets we need before we find a winning one. It could take 1 second or 100 years to finish the round. So the CDF value will never reach 100%. In the livestats it will stop at 99.99% but in reality of course it will get more and more nines.

Yes, that's the next upgrade I'm working on right now.

There was a problem with shift updates last night. A rather large shift is now making its way down the list. All work is registered and will be paid when we find blocks. This will have the effect that the N in PPLNS is much higher until this huge shift is out of the last 10 list. So if you have work in this shift it will take longer than usual before it is fully paid.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yeah, the old record was 18. Very lucky day. 

Maybe not the best example for a pool to use. Remember when they stole from their miners? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50779.0

For some reason some people keep mining there.

17 blocks already today. We could break the record!

You're right. The reason I wanted to do multi-server first is because it better allows testing all these new features separate from the main server. It was a bit of a hack the last time I did this (running a test port).

I'll do it in two phases though. Just some quick changes first so I can more easily run a test port. Then I'll get in the var diff, GBT, Stratum. After that I'll add full multi-server support and actually set up more servers. Finally comes the multi-server and multi-pool support in BitMinter client, which is probably the most complex piece.

Great to hear the new server changes are working out

Yes, variable difficulty will be coming soon. I'm currently working on some changes to support multiple mining servers. I thought that might be a good idea to do first as it will make it easier to test var diff.

It could also be useful to have a couple more servers when ASICs turn up.

Thanks for the donations, guys. They are much appreciated. And yes, namecoin donations help, they're worth much less than bitcoins but they're not worthless.


I can't really turn off people's perks or raise their donations without giving advance notice. I don't think that would be good form.

If orphans go up to 5% or whatever for a short time the pool can survive that. Might need a backup plan if the orphans get completely out of hand, though. Maybe announce ahead of ASICS that prepay may get disabled if orphans get too high? I think most likely the orphans will be manageable, though.

Small server update today:

• Increase shift size (PPLNS with N=4x difficulty). This should reduce variance for part-time mining and if you have some downtime on your rigs.
• Implemented getwork "midstate" extension. Most miners support this now. It reduces bandwidth a little and also CPU usage on the server.
• Small speedup for long poll
• Small speedup in checking proofs of work

Only shaved a few percent off the server CPU usage this time, but every bit helps.

EDIT: most browsers  of course I meant most miners support this now. Also, if your livestats don't show shift progression correctly (100% when only half done), try clearing your browser cache and reloading the page.

Phoenix 2 is spamming the wrong password 10 times per second, just like Phoenix 1. Maybe you can fix that?

Sure it uses long polling, or it would cause a lot of rejects. But it goes through the web server. Not recommended unless you really need to use port 80 because that's all your firewall allows.

A bit of russian DDoS attack on the web server currently taking place. Sorry for the instability. Mining looks fine so far, though.

Actually it's me asking that question on the bitcoin stackexchange. So yes I am thinking about it. 

I'm guessing orphan rate will go over 2% and the pool will lose some coins. But it shouldn't be that bad, and I will be doing what I can to keep the orphans at bay.

Some server changes are in. CPU usage reduced by 20-25%. The server is now also using Luke-jr's trick of sending pre-computed "empty" blocks (only transaction is the generation transaction) through long poll. So now the load spikes from abusive miners are greatly reduced and long poll is faster. This results in much fewer rejects than we've seen in the last few days and the delay you would sometimes see with getting work after long poll seems essentially gone.

At the moment for the current round I have 0.04% rejects. Pool wide rejects are 0.43% though. I would have hoped to get this lower. Let me know if you still have a high reject ratio and I'll see what I can do.

Namecoin rejects are sometimes very high. I suspect some miners are configured to ignore namecoin long polls. Not a big deal I guess, with namecoin value being what it is.

Note: every round starts with rejected work. If you see 10% rejected in the first second of a round, that's normal. Round data is more useful to look at after it has gone over, say, 30 minutes.

Now you can see what MintBot is talking about, Isokivi's outdoor rig: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhqCcQlIEMI