Those pools are not true zero fee pools. They keep transaction fees. This is like a 0.3% fee currently and after the reward halving happens (with tx fees also going up) will probably be like a 1% fee. Even though I run a real zero fee pool and think their advertisement is bullshit, I have to say that a small fee is not the end of the world if you like the pool.

I don't get the anger some people have with Graet or indeed anyone who might make a buck in the Bitcoin community. If everything was free we wouldn't need money, would we? Then what is the point of Bitcoin.

Do you get angry when you think about that he might not just break even but could get profits close to minimum wage for his and others' work on the pool?

If you go into a McDonald's and buy a hamburger do you get angry at the employees because they are paid so much money and inflate the price of your burger?

I'm sure many will be watching this closely, especially pool operators. Graet and the rest at Ozcoin, I must commend you on a brave move. Maybe the bitcoin community is ready to get past the "everything must be free" mentality, which I found quite puzzling as I got started with bitcoins, after all it is a community about (improving) money. With most other pools (except the biggest ones) being zero fee there was no other option for my pool.

These stats are a great service. Is there a donation address?


BitMinter is the largest true zero fee pool, with transaction fees paid out (plus namecoins). In fact there's only a couple left, plus the pretenders who don't pay out the (currently 0.3% and going up) transaction fees. Maybe things are changing.

The weekly stats show an average hashrate of 569 GH/s, but the last day we have been doing over 700 GH/s. We are growing quite quickly. The pool has been to 912 GH/s with fairly light load. I expect the current single server setup can take us to between 5 and 6 TH/s before it will be at capacity. More when I have dynamic difficulty ready for the server software. Perhaps then we can accommodate all of today's bitcoin miners on a single server? But yeah, it took quite some work removing bottlenecks and tweaking Linux kernel parameters and database parameters before it got this fast. Pools that have not been through this have some work ahead of them.

I'm sure we already got some "zero fee refugees" and there are more to come. But at the same time it will be interesting to see how many are willing to pay for a service they like. It would give me more confidence that it is worthwhile putting an effort into new non-free add-on services for my pool. Either way, very interesting weeks ahead.

Wow, the pool is growing at a crazy rate right now.

Welcome to all the new bitminters. Your support and choice of mining pool is much appreciated.

About the change of N in PPLNS, I will wait a couple more days so users can comment further. It looks like most users want this change, in which case I will announce it one week before making the actual change. I know this change isn't a big deal, but I think it's a good police to always give everyone notice ahead of time when making changes to the reward system.

Sure, it's just recorded as a manual donation instead of an automatic donation in your transaction history.

Anonymous donations can be sent to 15SSRJdHfhjcRU7woXR9sYKPUXNS4ScaaB

Thanks for donating, guys. I really appreciate it.

Current average donation levels are 1% BTC and 6% NMC.

This pool with all its software is quite an undertaking for one man to create, and I'll probably never get minimum wage for it. So I can certainly understand pools needing a small fee.

That said, things are going the right way. BitMinter is growing by leaps and bounds at the moment. Hopefully it keeps growing. Also there are more donation perks and other features coming.

It will be interesting to see how the change to 3% fee will be received at OzCoin. Some people even call me greedy even though I run a zero fee pool (because I don't release all the software as open source). But I agree, bills have to be paid, and after that there should still be something left to reward hard work. I think if OzCoin is your favorite pool and you like their work, 3% is not the end of the world. But I would have to ask if you have tried BitMinter.

Sure, that's not a problem.

So to give an example:

If you mine for one hour one day from 01:00 to 02:00 then pay for that work can come in until roughly 07:00. With the proposed change this work could get paid until 12:00. It's a bit annoying waiting longer to be paid but it also gives you a much more stable pay because the coins from a block get spread out across more proofs of work / time.

Put another way, currently when we create a block the miners who were active in the last 5 hours prior to that will get paid. With the proposed change miners who were active in the last 10 hours get paid. (number of hours varying with hashrate though)

It's the same amount of money and 24/7 miners probably won't notice anything. But it will help even out the tops and valleys of the reward graph which should be helpful for non-fulltime miners.

Interesting idea, organofcorti, varying N with hashrate automatically.

Nope. There's nothing you need to do, except voice your opinion.


Thank you, sir

Should we adjust the PPLNS payment system from N=Difficulty to N=2xDifficulty? More info in the main thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg1088116#msg1088116

We've been running PPLNS with N = Difficulty since the pool was tiny and lately it has grown quite a lot. What do you think about using N = 2 x Difficulty?

This means doubling the size of a shift, which would have a couple of consequences.

Upside: variance for a proof of work would go down. This won't matter to 24/7 miners, but if you mine part time in the pool you would get much more stable pay. Same thing for a GPUmax run; less chance of a big return but also less chance of small or zero return.

Downside: it would take twice as long to get paid for work you did (10 hours instead of 5 hours at the current pool hash rate). A bit annoying for everyone perhaps.

Opinions? Questions? Write in the newbie thread if you don't have access to post here yet.

Yes. I am in touch with BFL about that and my goal is to have a miner version out that supports it before you get your ASIC.

Sorry, there's no ZTEX support. I may add that in the future, it depends on time and priorities...

Because of the way the BFL FPGA devices work some hashes are wasted at every block change. This is why they are useless on p2pool which has block changes every 10 seconds.

Some miners may show a steady hash rate, counting the actual hashes being processed by the unit. I decided to show the effective hash rate instead because it is what really matters and it shows you what is going on. Thrown away hashes are not useful.

In the same vein the BitMinter pool hash rate is the effective hash rate. Many pools count rejected proofs of work for their hash rate, but I don't see the point in this, except that it makes their pools look faster.

I believe I read somewhere that the future ASIC units from BFL will work on p2pool. I assume that means they will have a better protocol for communication between PC and mining device, hopefully resulting in no wasted hashes and perhaps also lower CPU usage (using something smarter than polling).

We try to maximize our share of the daily 0.3% fee income. But yeah, 10% income from fees is rare, I was just using it to make a point.

Currently you lose about 0.3% if you don't get tx fees and about 0.5% if you don't get namecoins. Still only 0.8% but after the reward halving it will be much higher and could make 3% mining at Deepbit seem cheap.

Looks like there's no work registered from you for over 3 months. Username wasta?

Are you sure you are mining on the right account? If you are using bitminter client, click "settings" -> "account" in the pulldown menus and check that the username is correct.

When you are mining and you see proofs of work being accepted in the miner on your computer, you should also be able to see proofs of work increase on the website if you refresh the page (go "my account" -> "workers" in the website menu).

Back in Norway now. I don't understand Dutch all that well but your English was easy enough to understand.

Nicely done, streblo

Mini update on the website,

• Added pagination and block type filtering to /api/pool/blocks, also added block header hash to the data returned.
• Added pagination to /api/pool/shifts

Updated description at https://bitminter.com/api

This should be backwards compatible. Also fixed some links going to other sites that are no longer operational.

Of course not every block has 5 BTC in fees. But the transaction fees are steadily rising: http://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees

Something to consider when you think about mining fees.

From http://bitminter.com/block/btc/000000000000029b07f1093ad8bea755a4f30419d79118612d741f0ba2f860d7


If BitMinter didn't pay out the income from transaction fees that would be like a 10+% fee for mining this block.

What is zero fee? Can you even determine zero fee for PPS?

Are you paying a 10% fee at your pool?

At BitMinter we pay out all the coins that come in. You can choose whether you want to donate some back. That is zero fee.

Just added some commands for MintBot in the IRC chat room: !help !mtgox !hashrate. More to come later. But have some more important things to implement first.

And yes, a solution for pesky namecoins will come too.

BitMinter client 1.3.0beta3 is out: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31163.msg1078163#msg1078163


And thank you for your support.

Very nice to see the pool growing!