>1 difficulty mining is currently in development at BitMinter.

A very clear majority wanted the change for the PPLNS reward system from N = 1x Difficulty to N = 2x Difficulty.

This change is now in effect.

What does this mean for you as a miner:

 

• Variance is reduced. Pay from a block will be spread out over more work, so the highs and lows that a proof of work might get paid will be more evened out. This gives you more stable pay, especially if you don't mine 24/7.
• Payout time is increased. Since you can get paid for blocks found over a longer period of time, this also means it takes longer from work is done until it is fully paid. Before this it took about 3.5 hours for work to be fully paid, after the change it will take 7 hours assuming the same hashrate.

Thank you, sir


No, it won't help hashrate. Miners are quite happy without crossfire.


LTC doesn't support merged mining.

I have no immediate plans for adding LTC mining or more merged blockchains. It seems to me that namecoin is doing badly and the other alt chains are doing, well, awful. But maybe there is still a little bit extra income to be had from adding them?

LTC could be a special case after ASICs hit, if GPUs become worthless for mining bitcoins. On the other hand LTC looks like it was created for miners (to make GPU mining difficult). I don't see a point with having LTC. Why would anyone buy it? It doesn't solve any real problem. GPUs working well for bitcoin mining wasn't a problem.

But, by all means, if it makes sense for miner income I will consider it. I just don't expect the alt chains to live long (and many died already, mostly because they had no purpose other than to make rich the guy who copied the bitcoin source code and renamed it).

If an admin would sticky it, I'd vote for a post with your weekly statistics. But without all the discussion and new post every week - just one post edited for each update. Could still have graphs. Short and informational.

Some trouble with namecoind locking up during the night. Looks like we may have lost 4 namecoin blocks. That's why the namecoin CDF is so high as I write this. I'm running the latest version from their website without any patches or modifications. Not much I can do about this. I have restarted it and it seems to be running fine again now.

Luckily bitcoind is stable as a rock. I never saw it crash or lock up. We could use some better luck though.


Very good and just in time.. hopefully we'll have another mint race coming up. Details coming soon!

Thanks, narousberg! Let's get the hashrate back up to 900 and push through these blocks, back to good luck land

Maybe the GPU built into the CPU is disabled when using a discrete GPU and that's why it is not detected?

Anyone have any experience mining on both at the same time?

I hear you. It's pri 2 at the moment. Pri 1 is to make necessary changes to ensure the pool will keep working when ASICs hit the market. Hopefully I can have both done fairly soon.


Thank you


BitMinter client has a very slow CPU implementation. Since CPUs are next to useless for mining it is not a priority to improve this. If you really want to mine on a CPU you could look at litecoins or a faster CPU miner for bitcoins.

Glad you like the miner. Very nice if you can bring some friends over. We have moved to the top of the 2nd tier pools. We need a big push now to get to the 1st tier pools.


The miner works with any GPU that has OpenCL drivers. Maybe you need to install Catalyst drivers to get it working? Those computers should show both a CPU and GPU in the miner (separately).

Only the finest pools pay tx fees. It's an exclusive club. 

Hmmm. That is an awesome idea, thank you. I will think about a good way to implement this.


No, it wasn't completely down, but it wasn't accepting new connections. If you were running a miner supporting persistent HTTP connections and that already had a connection it could be able to keep mining perhaps the whole time the pool was having issues. I think by the time I fixed it half the hash power was still there.

Good stuff

Everything is back up again. Apologies for the downtime we had.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg1126935#msg1126935

Pool is up and running again.

I want to apologize that it was down for so long. I was on a guided tour of Batterie Dietl, german bunkers and coastal guns from WWII. I had only a cellphone and was far from my laptop. Perhaps stupid, but the pool was running smoothly and I thought it would be ok for a couple hours. Took a while before I was back to the laptop and could fix things.

Backup pools is still not implemented in BitMinter client, which of course makes downtime much worse. It is one of the top development priorities now, below supporting ASIC mining speeds better.

Not sure what caused the problem yet. But it may be the bug in cgminer 2.5 and below that we had problems with earlier. If you use cgminer please use the latest (2.6+) version. I am changing the server software to better handle a client bombarding it, but I haven't finished this work yet.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Edit: Yes, rollntime is implemented, but turned off for all miners except bitminter client and diablominer. I'll turn it on for all miners as soon as I have implemented some defenses against old cgminer versions that can suddenly bombard the server with thousands of getwork requests.

No, there's no reward, it's just for statistics.

I guess a reward could be taken from donations, but they are pretty slim already.

I may add a reward at some point. I am certainly going to add more statistics on the website.

Cleanup complete.

There's a big shift (score 2.0, vs normal 0.1) which I just have to leave like that so everyone gets paid properly for mining they did last night. In an hour it will be out of the last 10 shifts.

Also I don't have the info on who created 2 BTC blocks and 2 NMC blocks, so they are attributed to "BitMinter".

Sorry for the inconvenience and the weird looking numbers this morning. That's not what I like to wake up to. But it was fairly quick to fix and mining was running non-stop all night.

Some database issues during the night.

Everything running correctly again now, but I need to clean up some data, like who created those 2 blocks.. and also one block looks like it had 63 TH/s pool hashrate. I'm not sure if one of you guys was testing an ASIC, or..?

But seriously, I will clean up the things that look weird. Although the two blocks may have to be attributed to "BitMinter" as the info on who created them may be lost.

On the upside we were mining blocks while this was going on, no downtime there.

There will be an API for this sort of thing. It's not on the top of my priority list, but fairly high.


Some more stats also coming up, but probably after the API.


It should be ok, although it has not been extensively tested.

This was disabled because a bug in rxtx and nrjavaserial (the 2 serial comm libraries I used first) would cause it to leak file handles. Eventually the miner process had too many file handles and would crash. The beta is instead using purejavacomm, which seems like a stable library.

Reward system adjustment for reduced variance coming in 1 week. Details in the main thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg1116110#msg1116110

A very clear majority wants the change for the PPLNS reward system from N = 1x Difficulty to N = 2x Difficulty.

This change will be made monday the 27th of august, one week from when this is written. It will be done by changing the size of a shift from 0.1x Difficulty to 0.2x difficulty. Still it will be the last 10 shifts that get paid when a block is found.

What does this mean for you as a miner:

• Variance is reduced. Pay from a block will be spread out over more work, so the highs and lows that a proof of work might get paid will be more evened out. This gives you more stable pay, especially if you don't mine 24/7.
• Payout time is increased. Since you can get paid for blocks found over a longer period of time, this also means it takes longer from work is done until it is fully paid. Currently it takes about 3.5 hours for work to be fully paid, after the change it would take 7 hours assuming the same hashrate.

Why give 1 week advance notice before such a small change? I don't expect anyone will care greatly about this, but I think it is a good principle to always announce changes to the reward system ahead of time.