Ouch.


Automation options (like auto start mining when the program starts) will be coming soon. I'll work on the miner after a few more NMC-related updates on the website + doing the dynamic banners.

I just restarted the pool server process again. I fixed a bug that would tell you your password was wrong if the credential checking code was unable to get your hashed worker password from the database. I also fixed a bug in creating the so-called auxiliary proof of work that allows you to create an NMC block even though you were mining BTC.

This was a bug that caused NMC block creation to fail when the BTC block it was mined with contained many transactions. Of course that rarely happens on the testnet - you don't see a lot of transactions there.

Perhaps I should take the time to create my own testnet with transaction activity to mimic the real net. But I really have enough to do just implementing what's necessary. Merged mining was a lot of work.

I so hate to see something fail in a production system. Thank you very much for your patience, I really appreciate it.

Damnit. Very sorry for this. A bug decided to return 401 Unauthorized instead of 500 Internal error. Looks like that was enough to knock half the miners off the pool.

Working on that one too.

Yes, I just saw in the logs something is going wrong with NMC block creation. Sorry guys.

Difficulty is so high on NMC testnet it's not easy to test merged mining well. After a full day of no errors and 7 created NMC blocks, it looked pretty stable.

Sorry for short downtime just now, I was restarting the pool backend.

Working on fixing this now..

Yes, it puts a little more load on the server. But for creating the most blocks this is the best option.

The miner has no idea how many chains you are merged mining on the server. It doesn't know whether its proof of work is stale or valid for those chains. And it doesn't know if it passes the difficulty of those chains either. Best it can do is just send in every proof of work.

This will make the number of rejected proofs of work go up on both client and server. So it won't look so pretty. But it's the best option for creating the most blocks.

When merged mining this is a bad idea. The proof of work may not be valid on the bitcoin chain, but it could still be valid on the namecoin chain. One might potentially throw away a proof of work that would have been able to create a namecoin block.

By the way, it is now possible to enter an NMC cash out address on the website and collect your namecoins. More website updates coming soon.

I'm going to pay 5% extra per BTC block until we have 60 BTC blocks. So 3 blocks to go as I write this.

I think it would be sneaky for me to switch the promotion from BTC to NMC. NMC is very low value compared to BTC. I just need to update the website to say 60 BTC blocks instead of simply "60 blocks".


Sounds great! I just need to update some things on the website to reflect the changes from merged mining. After that it is banners, and then some updates for the client (miner).

No kidding. I just finished a big rewrite of my pool software to get merged mining going.

The worst part is that there is almost no documentation. After Luke-Jr started the page at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Merged_mining_specification there is at least something. I mostly had to read source code to figure it out.

Well, we finally have merged mining up and running, and we made a block after 1 minute. 

BitMinter just started merged mining. And we got a namecoin block after 1 minute.

I just put in merged mining and restarted the pool backend.

jay9228 made a namecoin block after 1 minute. Nice work, Jay - we are off to a good start!

Still TODO:

• Make it possible to enter an auto cash out NMC address on the website. Hopefully this will be working before the first NMC block is confirmed.
• Make the BitMinter client react to long poll notifications even when the bitcoin parent block hasn't changed. The server is currently registering a lot of NMC stales because of this.

Looks like it came back for a minute or two, then went away again.

It appears for a while we've been getting many times the normal amount of getwork requests on the pool server. Could be that someone connected a botnet and left when they saw the server couldn't handle the load.

I think OpenID is convenient for most users. But yes, I could add password login as an option. My TODO-list is very long though, so I have to prioritize. Anyone else who would like login by password please let me know. Higher demand means higher priority.


Merged mining needs a little more testing before it is ready. But I am almost certain that we start merged mining sometime today.


Sweet! 

Back to normal. Sorry for the instability.

It stopped after a few minutes by itself, before I could really figure out what it was. If it was a botnet visiting, sorry, we can't handle that kind of load yet.

An issue on the server causing some lag. Working on it.

Thank you, that's a great idea!  Added to my list.

Perfect explanation, Aexoden.

Averaged out over time zero-fee PPLNS pays the same as zero-fee PPS.

Yes, PPLNS has higher variance than some other payment methods. I still chose it as I believe it strikes a good balance. It gives miners fair payments without risking the pool going bankrupt.

Variance is probably the biggest factor, but there are some things to consider.

If your pool is being abused by poolhoppers than your income is probably taking a massive hit. Avoid this - don't give away your money to pool hoppers.

If your pool is slow in serving out new work through long poll when there is a block change, that's a small loss.

If your pool does merged mining and serves out new work through long poll any time there is a new block on either chain: block changes twice as often = small loss in BTC income. NMC production = sizable plus to your income.

If your pool does merged mining with long poll only on BTC chain: no loss in BTC production, but NMC takes a big hit with massive stales. As long as NMC stays above "worthless" value, this is probably not a good option.

I don't think there's a direct equivalent. If I'm not mistaken, the miner programs that use "insensity" put a certain amount of load on the GPU and how laggy things get depend on how fast the GPU is. Intensity 9 could be very choppy on one computer, and smooth on another. I wanted something that works independent of how fast the GPU is. So 90ms work intervals just say "try to create work loads that take 90ms on my hardware."


I think it will be done before block 60 is completed. But I don't want to give any specific dates, as I just don't know. But here's a quick update on the progress.

This is done:

• Modify database to support merged mining and other cool features that will be revealed at a later date
• Rewrite existing code to work with the new database schema (running on server now)
• Support for pool backend to watch multiple block chains for new blocks, maturity of our created blocks, etc.
• Pay in correct currency when blocks mature
• Create block headers ("work units") for miners built on the necessary merged mining data

This is what remains:

• Create blocks when miners find a good enough proof of work
• Auto cash out for non-BTC currency
• Testing, so I don't deploy something completely broken

Maybe I should get merged mining running before cash out of NMC is working. Better to get some NMC today and get cash out feature tomorrow, than to get nothing today and cash out feature tomorrow. But after I get block creation working I will need to do at least a little testing. The server is running nicely now creating BTC - I don't want it to stop working because of bugs.


Not sure what the problem is there? But I have never used cgminer.

Sorry, no donation mechanism yet. But among all the changes to the database yesterday are some things to make donations possible. So I have started to pave the way for it.

I still have some other things to implement before donations, but it's coming. Thanks for wanting to support BitMinter - it will soon be possible.

Yay! We now have 1000 members!

No.1000, benderfry, gets 5 BTC to start with.

Sorry there were a few minutes of downtime. I was making updates to the database to support merged mining (coming soon).

I had some unexpected errors when doing the upgrade, which is why it was down long enough to notice. Sorry about that.

Please let me know if you notice anything out of the ordinary. The changes right now are just to make room for merged mining and other upcoming features. There's no significant change that you should be able to notice.