I am very happy to hear that! Do let me know if you find anything lacking.

Hehe. Now that really shouldn't happen. Are you sure you don't have it open in another tab?

But yeah, good day for it

Back to normal. Looks like only some users were affected and it did not last long.

The website is having some issues right now. Mining is working.

All bitcoin mining hardware should work with the Bitminter pool. If anyone knows anything that doesn't work, please let me know about it.

Connect your miners to stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333

As user name put your Bitminter user name, an underscore, then a worker name, e.g. DrHaribo_1. There is no password check. You can put X or 123 as password.


Yeah, it looked like about 1100 people reconnected within 2 minutes and about 100 people took longer. Out of those 100 people I guess some took a few minutes longer because they had a different pool as backup and their software takes some time to switch back, while others were disconnected for the full 50 minutes the server was out of operation because they have a broken DNS setup. I was not watching the whole time so I don't know exactly how many were in that boat.

I'd recommend doing like HerbPean and set a backup. You can use us2.bitminter.com:3333 and/or eu1.bitminter.com:3333 - especially if you were one of the few who had a 50 minute downtime. If your DNS isn't working properly (cheap home router with flaky caching DNS server maybe?) and you don't set backups then it is difficult for me to get you onto a working server again if something goes wrong. You may also want to add a different pool among your backups - for the good of bitcoin you will want to choose one outside the country that now controls 65% of the hashpower. No ill will towards China. Bitcoin just needs to be more decentralized than this.

How to mine with ASICMiner Blade: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg3046129#msg3046129

Main server having some issues. We're on backup server now.

If you didn't get reconnected after 1-2 minutes, you may have a broken DNS server that caches entries longer than their TTL. You can fix your DNS or add us2.bitminter.com:3333 and/or eu1.bitminter.com:3333 as backup pools on your miner.

Thanks - I'll see if I can figure out why that happens.

Thanks, that would be helpful. I'll need to look into why this thing is unreliable. Sorry about that!

You sure it's not the one BTC and two NMC blocks found today?

Making it only alert on BTC blocks and not NMC is on my TODO list.

Most pools stopped using the proportional reward method in 2011 because it is vulnerable to pool hopping.

See http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping

Profitable miners now are standalone machines that come with a tiny built-in computer with preinstalled software. This is making the Bitminter client software obsolete.

Currently Bitminter client is in a kind of "maintenance only" mode. I haven't decided yet where to take it beyond that.


Thank you - happy to hear it's working for you

I'd suggest getting a stand-alone machine of 1 TH/s hashrate or higher. You could find Antminer S-series models, or machines from KnCMiner and others on ebay and similar places. The only ones currently sold new that I know of are Antminer S7 from bitmaintech.com - it's a fast machine but maybe a bit expensive for starting out.

For a list of bitcoin ASIC machines, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

For a very cheap start you could get an Antminer U3. But at only 63 GH/s this is a very slow device. It's also not stand-alone and needs a PC to be able to mine. I don't know how likely it is to break even. You could run it with a low-power computer like the Beaglebone or Raspberry Pi to keep electricity costs down. That's basically how the stand-alone miners work, they have a tiny computer built in.

Don't go for old 1 or 2 GH/s USB sticks. These are useless at this point. They can never break even and they are so slow you won't really see much happening when mining with them. Although they generate less heat and noise, and use less electricity, they are similar to mining with a PC: ridiculously slow.

A laptop was OK in 2009, but that's a long time ago now. Yes, you will need to buy bitcoin ASIC mining machines.

It would literally take millions of years to mine a single coin with a laptop now.

You get paid when blocks are found. For more details, look here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824

We hit the mother lode!

For now you'll need to add https://bitminter.com to the exceptions list under the security tab of the java control panel.

Some users are having problems connecting to the main mining server. We are now over on a backup server. If you were having problems connecting then it should work again now.

Java cache disabled, fix: http://247support.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10166/~/enable-java-to-cache-files

I think the most likely danger from bitcoin hashpower majority being within one country or legal area is transaction censorship. Maybe something like what the US government have done or still does today within the old financial systems. They have blocked payments to Wikileaks, Russian banks, etc. It would be foolish to assume that the Chinese are so much nicer than the Americans and would never do such a thing.

When you have hashpower majority you can simply orphan any blocks that contain transactions you don't approve of.

You can also double spend.

I suppose it might also be possible that a nation would want to do lots of double-spends to make transactions unreliable, if they wanted to destroy Bitcoin.