All pools are based on math formulas, some more complicated than others. While "hoppable to a lesser extent" is certainly true for slush's archaic method, modern methods are 100% hopping-proof.

SMPPS is not hoppable in the same way that proportional is, but it is not hopping-proof because the maturity time depends on the pool's balance. This is especially relevant because this kind of pool will inevitably collapse eventually, so high maturity time means lost payments.

This could also be because hoppers think the pool is hoppable. But if it's immune, it's safe to mine there even if they try.

Everyone noticed it, and I mentioned it explicitly.

mgtox. Cute.

This is why you should never access critical sites through a link in the mail, and why you should check the URL of critical sites. (Though they probably got your email from the DB leak which was mtgox's fault, so...)

In general there's no limit, number of coins is just a number and you only indeed an appropriate data type. With an implementation similar to Bitcoin, where units are stored in 64-bit integers and a coin is 100M units, you can have up to 184B coins.

I think this question belongs in the technical support section.

Sure you can, that's kind of what the whole Bitcoin protocol is based on. Give them some random number, and see how many difficulty-1 hashes they can generate in a given time frame with this number in the extraNonce.

Non sequitur. There is some memetic variety among Bitcoin contributors, and detractors should be invited too if they can demonstrate they have a clue what they are talking about.

Most of what people do for Bitcoin (or for anything else) has an altruistic component and an egoistic component, and mining is no exception. While most miners do it mostly for the profit, participating in the security of the network is usually also a consideration.

That said, quantitatively, a miner's marginal contribution to Bitcoin may be smaller than they think. By mining, they are increasing the difficulty, thus discouraging others from mining. Thus this is only a moderate shift of the equilibrium towards higher security. If many people stop mining, the difficulty will decrease to the point that others will easily come to replace them.

Also, for the purpose of the new forum, mining with a single GPU isn't indicative of sufficient involvement and understanding of Bitcoin to expect higher-than-average-quality posts. Mining with 20 GPUs might, so this could be treated as a sufficient contribution for entry.

Find a creative way to promote the forum without being too spammy. That's the kind of thing I expect you to do if I am to participate in your forum.

We need more. Mostly an indication of your level of commitment to promote the forum and proactively contact prominent figures about joining it. Chicken-and-egg problems don't solve themselves without strong intervention.

Whenever I post in a thread, it is added to my watch list. By clicking on the "Show new replies to your posts." link, I can see a list of threads in my watchlist to which a new reply was added that I haven't read yet. It is impossible to remove threads from the watchlist, so if I made a youthful mistake of posting in slush's pool thread, notifications of new replies clutter my view pretty much every time I look at my watchlist.

Is it possible in whatever smf version / mods / whatever you are using, to remove a thread from the list of threads that show up in "Show new replies to your posts."? That this is impossible is one of the major problems with bitcointalk. If this is impossible with smf, I recommend using a different software (though I've never been as active in a forum as here, so I should be careful what I wish for...)

I'll bite, but if you want active participation you'll have to provide some reason why we should expect this forum to be more successful than all the other alternative forums.

Does a meetup where 3 people show up (including myself) count?

I kid, my contributions to Bitcoin are overwhelming, as is my humility.

Being a hero member is a very bad proxy for making useful contributions, both ways. I don't think it will be good to start with this and then add exceptions.

+10, as much as many detractors get it completely wrong, groupthink and memetic inbreeding are a very serious problem with the Bitcoin community.

This is getting ridiculous. Are you even reading what I'm saying?

There is no attempt to detect hoppers, accuse hoppers, or penalize hoppers. I don't think you're hopping, you don't have anything to gain by hopping this pool, and I or participants in this pool couldn't care less if you're hopping since they wouldn't lose anything from it.

All there is is a scoring method which is mathematically proven to reward everyone fairly no matter if they're mining continuously, intermittently, hopping, or whatever. It has the unfortunate side-effect of having high variance, thus you could be unlucky and get much less than the expected reward, or lucky and get much more. This averages out over the long run. With the double geometric method it will be both hopping-proof and have much less variance.

Not in the middle, it says it right there in the original post of the thread:

Anyway, the proportional method is broken, why would you assume it is used in the absence of other information?


Who are you saying this to? Inaba doesn't have the bitcoins, they were distributed to those who mined in the time before the block was found.

On the other hand, he got 67 GH/s from people who have a clue about probability, don't judge pools over bad luck in a single block, and don't want 20% of their rewards to be stolen by hoppers.

*sigh*


They don't gain anything from doing that. The fact that the round was long does not affect the payouts of futures shares they submit.

They don't know when the round will end, so they don't know which shares are the last N. There's decay, but it's a step function rather than exponential.

No, it does not. For the past shares they will get the same reward whether they stay or quit. For future shares they will get the same reward whether they mined previously or not.

I think there's a misconception that decay only happens when you leave the pool. But past shares decay the same way whether you're in or out. The reward for future shares is independent.


No. You can mine for a minute and get paid, if a block is found a short while after it. With PPS is 100% to get 0.1 BTC, with score-based it's 1% to get 10 BTC. Mining continuously does help to decrease the variance.


This is the third time you've said that, and the third time I reply that no, this is how proportional pools work. It is not how score-based methods work. And score-based is better.

I guess a bit more information on the site about the system used is in order. But the OP of this thread clearly describes that this method is used.

No robbing of shares is done, any more than shares are robbed when you mine solo and don't find a block. Nobody can take advantage of this, the operator definitely doesn't gain anything out of the use of this method. It exists to make sure miners aren't robbed by pool-hoppers. That said, in the future a lower-variance method may be implemented, and then such cases of bad luck will be rarer.

There's no such thing as "incentive for people to keep mining continuously". Either the reward system is hopping-proof or it's not. If it is then anyone can mine whenever they want and get on average the exact fair reward for their contribution. If implemented correctly, PPLNS is hopping-proof. All currently existing PPLNS pools that I know of use a naive implementation that is only approximately hopping-proof, but still good enough.

It's not a penalty. You don't get penalized for mining intermittently. Your expected payout is exactly proportional to the number of shares you submitted. But the actual payout varies due to the random nature of block finding. Like I said, you were unlucky, you could just as well have received much more than the average.

There's probably some work to be done wrt providing the statistics necessary to verify everything is done honestly. It will probably be easier if the pool switches to a lower variance method.

This is a score-based method, specifically the geometric method. The reward depends not only on how many shares were submitted, but on when they were submitted. (You can read some background info here.)

On the face of it, it looks like you were unlucky and a block was found only some time after you submitted the bulk of your shares. But it's a bit weird, if you stopped mining I'd expect 0 shares in the last 5 hours, and if you kept mining I'd expect much more than 59... Can you confirm that these numbers make sense?

If you mined solo, found 269435 difficulty-1 hashes but no blocks, who would you blame for your lost 8 BTC?

Pools exist to alleviate the high variance of solo, but except for PPS they do not eliminate it completely. You just had bad luck.

Your calculation is only valid for the proportional method, but this method is known to be broken and is not the default for this pool.

(Of course, an implementation bug is always a possibility, even though we've checked it thoroughly. If you supply more details we may be able to double-check this.)

Hopping deepbit is easy. If a block is found in the network and you can't attribute it to any of the other pools, it's probably deepbit's. For even better results, calculate your efficiencies conditioning on the assumption that deepbit's last block is the last unknown block, that it is the 2nd last unknown block, the 3rd, and so on, and calculate the expected efficiency using the probability that an unknown block is deepbit's.

Yeah, that's another thing I've been thinking about for a while (even before Multipool did something similar), but
1. Why stop at feeless? You can offer above 100% PPS while still maintaining a large profit margin.
2. With enough proportional pools there's not much need for backup, but for a backup you'll probably want to use a hopping-proof pool rather than SMPPS.
3. This is of course more controversial than a non-hopping proxy.