Beta 7 is out. I have rewritten serial port reading to work around yet another bug in the serial port library. It was causing timeouts on Mac OS X. If you were having timeouts, please try this version. Getting close to finished now.

Thank you! It took a long time to get there. This is a big milestone for BitMinter.

This guide is the same for every OS:

• Install AMD drivers from amd.com
• Install Java from your distro or java.com
• Click the start button at bitminter.com
• Winning!

Trying to finish miner support before you get them

Version 1.2.0 Beta 6:

• Always show devices you connect while the miner is running. Still hide devices you hid during the previous session if they are there at startup.
• Limit which serial devices get scanned on Macs. Hopefully takes care of the last crashes.
• Improved error recovery and error messages on BFL units.
• Small tweaks in serial communication.

Yeah, that's tough. Take a look at the oldest page of the block history. That was BitMinter in its early days. Difficulty even higher than now, and tiny hash power. We still managed to grow (slowly) but many other pools shut down.

It has happened once before. Seems exactly the same this time. myopenid.com is so slow that logins don't work. I hope it won't be long before they fix their site.

One time Verisign OpenID services were (completely) down for a while too.

Safest thing (once myopenid.com is working again) may be to register an extra OpenID from a different provider. You can do this at the BitMinter website by going to "my account" -> "logins" in the menus. If you have only registered one OpenID and the provider is down or even permanently down (going out of business for instance) then it becomes difficult to log in.

OpenID has many advantages, but unstable ID providers isn't one of them.

Yay! Congrats everyone, we made it This should help with recruitment of new miners.


Detecting which miner software people are using is already done, but whether they mine on FPGA/GPU/CPU is more difficult. I could make BitMinter client report it (make it an option maybe), but other miners won't.


I like this idea. That would give an extra incentive to donate during the race, which could hopefully cover some of the expense of prizes.


Yes, I think that might work better than the number of proofs of work. Best proof of work = the proof of work with the lowest hash. I like how this is verifiable. If your miner reports when it creates a block (bitminter client does) then you can verify that blocks you created are credited to you. You can double check the hash on blockexplorer if you want. Lowest hash wins. Maybe call it "finest quality minting".

Anyone can get lucky and create the "best" block. But more hashes means a better chance to win.

Only downside is, if someone creates a block with an extremely low hash, others may give up as they see it as impossible to beat. So the race might effectively end near the beginning.


You are right. What do you think of "best proof of work"? It may strike a good balance between hash power and luck. It's the same thing as with creating blocks. The race stats could even show "difficulty to beat" for the 3 best blocks.


The 50/50 donation draw suggested by Fefox could work as a kind of raffle.


Hmm, yeah. That is a cool prize. blockchain.info shows the generation coinbase interpreted as text. The winner could get to include a message in a block we create after the race is over. Maybe put some restrictions on it so offensive messages are not allowed.

What, 19% above expected? BitMinter did 42% above expected.

Watch us do it again next week! 

Thank you, sir, and welcome aboard

In other news.. I'm thinking of arranging a Mint Race. Probably over a weekend. With bitcoin prizes for the top 3 winners. Now question is, what should miners get points for? Only proofs of work, making it a pure hash rate race? Or work, plus X points for making a bitcoin block, and Y points for making a namecoin block? Points for other things?

Any thoughts on length (48 hours?) and how big the prizes should be for it to be fun? (10 btc for 1st place?)

Beta 5 is out.

Changes: able to recover from more error situations. Also changed the communication with BFL devices a little and the error messages.

If you had timeouts before then it may run better, or at least give some useful messages in the log. Please let me know if it runs better now or if you get errors please cut and paste them in a message to me.

Please try it out:

Multi-pool support, at least back-up pools, is on my TODO list. But it's a very long list.

Beta4 is out. It can retry commands if they fail or time out. Click the wrench to modify the timeout and the max number of retries. Please try it out if you had problems with timeouts before. This change should make the miner much more robust.

Once you join the dark side, you can't go back. 

But yeah, Ztex is a good candidate, I think there are quite a few of those boards out there.

Beta3 is out. Restart the beta miner to get the new one.

New in beta3:

• In options, automation tab, added "other devices". If you check this then new devices you connect will automatically be among the "automated devices".
• In options, automation tab, added "when new devices connect". Allows you to decide whether to automatically start new devices that are plugged in.
• In options, FPGA tab, disabled "rescan for added/removed FPGAs". Unfortunately a bug in nrjavaserial (the serial port library) causes the miner to fail (too many file handles) after a while with this on. Had to be disabled for now. To detect new devices use the Devices pulldown menu.
• Fixed bug with hashrate sometimes showing too high around block changes. Note that the hash rate can drop a bit when there is a block change (long poll). This is because the current work unit is aborted (it is stale) and the work that was done on it isn't counted. Not sure if other miners show this, but it is a real loss that can't be avoided due to the way the BFL units work.
• Fixed bug: FPGAs can now auto start when the program is started, just like other devices.
• + some small tweaks

Testing status for beta2: successful BFL mining on Windows, Mac, Linux. One success with BFLs connected through USB hub and one failure with USB hub. Two reports of BFL units timing out (with low temperature). Not sure yet what this might be.

Good find, Phraust.

Quick update on the ongoing work for FPGA support.

Serial port access in Java is in a sorry state. The latest release of the rxtx library is a few years old and full of bugs. It often causes the entire app to crash. Apparently they have bug fixes but can't be bothered to make a new release. RXTX was in beta1 of the miner and it was no good. Beta2 contains nrjavaserial which is a fork of rxtx with many improvements.

Unfortunately nrjavaserial has a few bugs too. One is that if you are mining on X serial ports and rescan the ports, then it will leak X file handles. After a while you hit the max number of file handles and networking ceases to work in the app. Therefore I will have to disable the "rescan" feature, at least for now. So it will be "click in the menu to detect FPGAs." An automatic solution may appear in the future.

Other than that the necessary features are implemented and all known bugs fixed. I'll be releasing beta3 soon which hopefully will be the last before 1.2.0 final.

This took more work than I thought it would. But now it's done and adding support for more FPGA devices is pretty easy. At least if they run off of serial ports. Any suggestions?

I always thought OpenID was a great concept. I have no idea why it is not more popular. Some developers are very surprised when I tell them Google supports OpenID. They see SAML as this great "enterprise" thing, and OpenID as something insignificant that "noone" uses. It's a bit old, but here's a blog post about Stack Overflow's experience with OpenID: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/openid-one-year-later/


I don't think they have any boards ready yet, but I'll contact them. I think it would be pretty easy to add support for more FPGA products in the BitMinter miner if they are controlled over a (virtual) serial port, like the BFL ones, and the one you mention.

Any other FPGA products that I should add support for?

Good idea. Fefox already posted in the BFL thread. I now opened a separate thread in the FPGA section.

Seems it runs fine on Windows and Mac. I wouldn't expect any problems with Linux, but would be good to know for sure that it works. And Awesome with a capital A would be if it works on the raspberry pi.

It should work fine with the BitMinter miner (assuming the Nvidia drivers are ok).

Awesome. Could be a perfect mining host. If anyone has one of these and a BFL I'd be very interested in hearing whether the BitMinter miner will run on it. It should in theory run on ARM systems (untested though). See recent beta announcement for the miner.

The BitMinter miner now has BFL support in the new beta version. Hopefully a tad bit faster than other miners due to faster work dispatch. Reported to run well on Windows and Mac. Still needs Linux testing!

It should also be able to run on ARM-based systems. I'd be especially interested to hear about this if you are able to test it.

Please try it and let me know how it runs. Just click the button to start (requires Java):

After starting it choose Devices->Probe all ports for FPGAs in the pulldown menus.

If the BFL devices don't show up as serial (COM) ports on your OS, you may need to install drivers: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm (Thanks Phraust)

We're having some awesome luck right now. Bitcoins pouring in!