I am open to the idea of paying for stales if other pools do.  And on that point of invalid work, almost all of what all miners do is invalid.  Only the work that makes an actual accepted block is actually valid.  You are paying miners for making a good effort, so if you think a stale (within reason) is a good effort then it makes sense to pay for it.

That is fair.  I am really not in a position to compete on low difficulty work and my target audience is higher hash rate (or variance tolerant) miners.

Maybe you'll come back when everyone else is down after the ASICs hit.  In any event, good luck.

I'm changing the fee structure to encourage people to use higher difficulties.

I haven't made this take effect yet but probably will today or tomorrow.

That server was litterally turned off by a cat last night.  It will be up very soon and processing will resume.

There is a process that goes through and calculates values and puts them in the DB.  My guess is that it isn't running.  I'll check on that.  You'll get credit for them all.

Yeah, permissions should be set correctly.  Note it is in us-west-2 so you have to use the Oregon region.  If you try it from us-east-1 (default) you are likely to get that not found error.

I don't know, what miner software are you using?

Only explanation I can come up with was blockexplorer temporarily reporting the wrong difficulty.  I should use the local bitcoind for that number.

Yeah, that was me kicking over the pool daemon.  I changed the code to use difficulty 2 for anyone who wants to use 1 until I get that bug worked out.  It should be fine now.

Yeah, I was talking about my pool specifically.  My difficulty to target code is pretty stupid (as evidenced by my bug with difficulty 1) and certainly only works with integers.

Yeah, there is a bug with difficulty 1.  I'll figure that out, thanks for letting me know.

Ha.  I thought other mining pools tried to hard to look all business and wanted to have a little fun.

It needs to be an integer but doesn't need to be a power of 2.  However, I wouldn't be surprised if some not very smart mining software didn't handle it correctly and did something stupid.  I've only tested with cgminer and it works very well.

I can have a few hundred BTC on hand if there is interest.  I'll sell for around MtGox 24 hour low unless the market is going crazy.  Cash only.

Email fireduck@gmail.com to setup a meeting.  I should be there part of the day Friday and most of the day Saturday.

I have an awesome green Nyan cat shoulder bag.  It isn't for sale, but will help identify me.

I will have preprinted addresses from bitaddress.org which I can give out, but obviously having your own address and not trusting me would be more secure.  Please bring address as QR code.

I've done it.  I put the parameter in the username, it was just easier to ship that around.  See http://hhtt.1209k.com/:

If you would like a difficulty other than the one listed above, use a username like:

1FDkoGo8o9tmXD4cYpAqBZeWACJiYjMm3x_4
This specifies the address '1FDkoGo8o9tmXD4cYpAqBZeWACJiYjMm3x' with a difficulty of 4.

Allowable range is 1 to 65536.


Later I will implement a sliding scale of fee for difficulties. (More fees for lower difficulty).

Not very.   The difficulty is just sent out with the work unit and the result if submitted by the miner is checked to see if it has at least that difficulty.  Might need to plumb some new variables through but shouldn't be a big deal.  I might try to get that going today.

Ah, I was talking about if a pool allowed users to pick their own difficulty.  In that case there would be a possibility of a user finding a good hash and then claiming it as a higher difficulty share to get more credit for it. 

Negative.  For the same reason that it is impossible to mine on a pool and take any found blocks yourself.

When mining you are doing hash(DATA_FROM_POOL + NONCE + TIME).  Your client changes the nonce and to a certain extent the time.  The DATA_FROM_POOL includes a hash of a transaction group that includes a payment to the pool.  You can't change that without invalidating the work.  Pools also check that the work unit you are submitting is one they gave out.

That is a good idea and for some parts might be easier since then the username doesn't need to be manipulated.  I might make the password be a HTTP style parameter string in case more things need to be added.

Something like:
difficulty=20&magic_pony=true&whatever=something

Yep.  I was thinking about doing something where the user specifies the difficulty in the username, so it would be address_difficulty.  That way miners can decide what difficulty made sense for their rigs.  Then I would also define a sliding scale where higher difficulty means less fees.  This would allow me to encourage selecting a higher difficulty which reduces DB strain on my end.