By the way, thanks for wanting to mine responsibly. Many miners these days don't even know why decentralization is important for bitcoin. Even fewer have noticed that China has over 60% of the hashpower and what a problem this could be.

The idea in 2011 was to simplify things for users so they don't have to remember so many passwords. Nowadays people use password managers, so that is less of an issue. While some do like the "single sign-on" others don't want to link accounts for privacy reasons. Adding login with user name and password is on the TODO list. Until that is implemented the easiest way would be to create a separate account at Google, Verisign or similar only for logging into Bitminter if you want to avoid having any connection to your regular Google account.

Originally (in 2011) I also thought there would be less support requests related to login issues (no lost passwords). It turns out there's a lot of "I deleted my Google account. How can I log in now?" or "I got banned by Google". Not to mention angry emails accusing me of working with the NSA to spy on people. Or users swearing about how dumb the website is that doesn't recognize them, after they create an account with their own Google account, but are then unable to log in with their girlfriend's Google account.

A lot of users just don't understand OpenID, or even the "log in with Google" or "log in with Facebook" that many websites have. So yeah, name and password would probably have been a better choice.

That said, over 350 000 people have registered and most of them manage(d) fine.

There is no display showing the amount of work you got paid for for each block. You can see the payment for each block under "my account" -> "transaction history" in the website menu. You can see your work in each shift under "statistics" -> "shifts" in the menu. When a block is found the work that gets paid is the work in the 10 last completed shifts at the time.

If your 4 hours of work is still within the last 10 shifts (see shifts page), then it can still get paid from blocks we find until those shifts are no longer the 10 latest ones.

That's only for statistics. You can change the filter at the bottom of the table to show your work for all time or since last reset. The reset does not actually remove any work and has no effect on payouts. It works similar to a trip meter in a car.

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

If you got the silabs driver successfully installed and Bitminter client still fails to work, could you try bfgminer and see if that works?

After you unzip the file from silabs you double click that exe file to run the installer, which will install the silabs driver on your computer.

Yes, you probably have 64-bit windows so run the CP210xVCPInstaller_x64.exe
(run x86 if you have a 32-bit windows)

Did you install the silabs driver for it? http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBtoUARTBridgeVCPDrivers.aspx

Was this working on the computer before?

Sounds like it's having problems accessing the virtual serial ports while looking for ASIC devices.

Which ASIC devices do you have connected to your computer?

It's possible neither email went out if the hashrate never went above the threshold after activating low hashrate warnings. Contact me using the contact page on the website while logged in, then I can see your user name and check into it for you.

AOL fixed their OpenID service. AOL logins are now working again.

AOL broke their OpenID server yesterday and it is still broken today. If you use AOL to log in, you can use the contact page at https://bitminter.com/contact to ask for help with adding a different OpenID identity provider. You could also contact AOL and implore them to repair their OpenID service. To verify that this is not a Bitminter issue, try logging in with AOL at http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com - you will get the same blank page.

For anyone not using AOL; it's business as usual.

Useful observation: only Google has provided stable login services for the entire time that Bitminter has existed.


There is frequently trouble with getting these emails delivered. Especially to Hotmail and Yahoo which have extremely sentitive anti-spam filters. Did you get the initial mail saying that your hashrate is now above the threshold and will be monitored?

General advice: To ensure messages are not caught in your spamfilter, please add noreply@bitminter.com and operator@bitminter.com to your address book and/or whitelist them with your anti-spam solution.

We are back to normal. Apologies for the trouble.

Website is having an issue right now. I'm working on it. Mining is running fine.

A $10 USB stick for mining will easily beat 2 or more fast gaming PCs with very expensive graphics cards. Those USB sticks are at this point useless, but that gives you an impression of just how useless a PC is for mining. You could get one of those if you want to try mining very cheaply. Keep in mind that you never earn an amount large enough to actually cash it out from the pool and that the website won't be able to show a live hashrate for your mining because your hashrate is so slow that it is essentially zero.

x86 PC running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X will work.

These days though I'd recommend buying a stand-alone miner of 1 TH/s or higher hashrate. They come with a tiny built-in computer with all the necessary software. You use a browser on your PC to configure them, and after that you can switch off your PC if you want and the miner will keep doing its thing. There's no need for Bitminter Client or any other software on your PC. For Bitminter the pool URL you give the miner is stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333

Everything is working, it just takes a really long time to find a valid proof of work with a GPU now that the pool has minimum worker difficulty 64.

In 2013 ASICs took over and mining on a graphics card is now pointless. It would take over 10 000 years to mine one bitcoin with your PC.

Have a look at some ASIC machines instead, right now I believe Antminer S5 and S5+ are popular, but there are many options. I would recommend getting a 1 TH/s (= 1000 GH/s = 1 000 000 MH/s) machine or faster for a small mining-at-home operation.

Make sure it's not overheating, one possible cause of hardware errors.

U3 is not supported by Bitminter client, only U1/U2. Sorry. You'll need to use bfgminer or cgminer instead.

It should run just fine at high difficulty and that should not cause any hardware errors at all. This is odd.

It will go to 4096 diff after it serves you 1024 diff and your S5 finds many 1024-diff proofs of work very quickly. Normally I wouldn't expect this to happen, but rather that you would get 1024 diff all the time. It could be caused by batching proofs of work so sending them to the server is delayed, the way the old Avalon machines did it. But it's a really bad idea and I don't think any ASICs do this nowadays. So I'm not sure why this happens to you.

Normally I wouldn't worry about the difficulty going to 4096 for a few minutes and then back to 1024. It should not be a problem at all. But you say you get a lot of hardware errors. Are you sure they happen when mining at difficulty 4096 and not at 1024? It doesn't make any sense at all. On the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time an ASIC machine behaves in a strange way.