Yeah, and as we can see there we aren't always unlucky. The problem was that during the nice lucky period when bitcoins were rolling in quickly, pool hoppers came and took a big share of them. You can see how the hashrate increased. When the lucky streak ended and we got some bad luck, they all left, and hashrate went back down.

This is what happens with a proportional pool. Pool hoppers take the big money from lucky rounds, and consistent miners that push the pool forward and help finish the unlucky rounds are left with the scraps.

I had to change the reward system to one that is more fair to the people who really support this pool. The average payout will now be higher than before for everyone except pool hoppers.

PPLNS does have some variance though. Sometimes a proof of work is paid 2 or even 3 times when lucky, and when unlucky it may not get paid at all. Still, if you mine some hours every day I think this will even itself out.


Yes, or maybe buy some bitcoins. The question is... will it go back up, or continue down?

That is a good idea, I think. More than anything bitcoin needs merchants. What we can all do to make it work is spend some coins.


Yes, you may be right about this. Building up the pool is slow going, so you can be sure I am considering making some changes going forward.


Thanks, I appreciate it.


Thank you. I will do that, although it will be in norwegian so I suppose it will only be interesting to scandinavians.

Yes, something is seriously wrong there. What amazes me is that it keeps working doing hashes all this time, but no accepted or rejected shares. And also no news from long polling.

On one machine I am running a GeForce 9400 GT at 3 MH/s with the bitminter miner and everything works fine. So it's not because your card is slow - this one is only 10% of your speed and still works.

I am confused with this too. I guess bitcoin.cz must be doing something different, that keeps Phoenix happy. I just wish I could reproduce the problem, then I could find a way to fix it. Phoenix runs just fine on my main mining machine. Well, maybe I should try it with the old GeForce.

I thought slush's pool didn't even have long polling? Or maybe it does now?

I see in the screenshot that you had some longpoll (LP) messages, the latest at 19:54, then nothing all the way down to 21:39. This tells me long poll has failed. You do have some rejected shares over that timerange, and that's probably the places where longpoll should have been giving you new (non-stale) work.

Maybe you have a router that kills idle connections? You could look in its configuration if there is a setting for how long TCP connections are allowed to be idle before they get killed off. This is the reason I made the bitminter miner restart the longpoll connection every 5 minutes.

Perhaps I should kill long poll connections also from the server-side after 5 minutes? I am working on getting TCP keep-alive in there though, much better solution than restarting connections all the time.


The server is just fast with long polling, that is correct. I don't really see another way the server can reduce stales.


Sure, I want all client software to work, and cgminer seems like a popular one nowadays.

Part of the reason you get such ultra-low stales is also cgminer I think. I heard somewhere that if it is about to submit a share and sees it is stale, it won't submit it. Something like that. And it makes sense, why submit shares you know are stale. I'll probably put something like this in the BitMinter program soon.

Yes, "even" a Java program can be malicious. And pool operators can steal your money. Anyone who handles your money can. You should probably not mine in my pool if you think I am not trustworthy.


I don't understand this. I think the people who created bitcoin want it to be used for profit. And since when is it wrong to make a little money from hard work? (If I ever do)

Do you also think deepbit is making money riding on "the backs of people participating in a p2p network in good faith"? I don't. They offer a service to their users, and I congratulate them on creating a successful business.

Or is only what I do wrong, because I offer an alternative miner?


I admit it, it's true. At one point in the future I would be happy if I was able to "whore" out a small profit from all this work.

The way BitMinter is different from other pools and miners is that it makes bitcoin mining easy. Easy enough for the average Joe - you don't even have to be a programmer to use it.   Yes, this is something that some people actually need. And this might get some more (non-technical) people into using bitcoins.

In a few days I'm being interviewed by a business newspaper, about BitMinter and bitcoins in general. I doubt the businessmen who read it are going to start mining in my pool. But it might help spread the word about bitcoins and create some interest.

There are also some other things planned, like P4man said.

I think I am already doing something to further bitcoin. I'm doing less well with the profit-whoring, but maybe someday.

What do you see as the spirit of the project? And do you have any suggestions as to how I may better further bitcoin?

Over 10% rejected is ridiculous. It could be a problem with long polling. Long polling should normally keep the rejected numbers way lower than that.

I hope this wasn't with the bitminter miner. In the last version I thought I made long polling pretty safe even with the routers that are most aggressive with killing idle connections.


Cool Just keep it open like on the picture or I think a fire will break out.

That's actually on my list already. I just have to find the time to work through that TODO list!


Hmm, yeah, that would be useful. Added to the list.


Hmm, yeah, I suppose I could make the miner report in the devices used and make some statistics on the server. It would be cool stats for sure. Just too bad it wouldn't work with other miners. Anyway - I put it on the list.


Yeah, everyone seems to want a bigger top hashrates list. The way you put it sounds like a good solution. Maybe a button to switch between 10/20/50. Added to list.


I don't think so. I run multiple workers all the time, and I see in miner stats that we have a few Phoenix users. I just tried Phoenix now and it worked fine.


Well, that does sound bad. Anyone else have similar problems?


You probably have "manual vectors" on with the bitminter miner. On nvidia things go much better with them off.

That said, I think there's a CUDA miner that might be fastest on nvidia. Can't remember what it's called though.. cudaminer?

P4man, nice job creating our first PPLNS block!

In other news, more stats available on the website. Live stats now have data on the current round. There's a new page under statistics showing which miners people are running. And you can see the CDF for each block we created - it's an indication of how lucky or unlucky each block was.

Added to my TODO list.


That's for you to decide. Obviously you decided against it, and that's alright.

The miner is just a benefit I offer you for free if you mine in my pool. You don't have to use it.

People mine with other miners at the BitMinter pool too. You can see which miners people use here: https://bitminter.com/miners

Still adding more stats...

Ever wonder which miners people are using? https://bitminter.com/miners

Some new stats available.

In the block list (https://bitminter.com/blocks) the CDF is now shown, which indicates the luck we had with each block. For block 17 it is 92.6%, meaning that when we started there was a 92.6% chance to finish with this many proofs of work or less. Or put another way, 92.6% of blocks are found faster than this one. That's pretty bad. let's hope our luck turns back to the way it was with blocks 11 through 14. The difficulty at the time the block was created is also shown.

The live stats (click live stats button at the top of any bitminter page) now has round statistics. This gives a pretty good idea of what is going on at any moment. The numbers are updated from the server every 5 minutes. In between that, local updates are extrapolated based on the pool hash rate.

Yes, I use that, and GNU/Linux operating system and libraries, and many other open source tools.


I'm sorry you feel that way about it.

So far I've only been giving away free money (paying 5% extra). In the future I will probably make it possible to donate for those who wish. Still, anyone who feels I am leeching is certainly free to set donation to 0%. And if using my software and rented server for free isn't good enough, there are many other pools to choose from.

At first the block income was split using PPLNS rules instead of proportional rules. It may be that you looked at the future payouts before I fixed it. These numbers were up on the webpage for some minutes before I noticed it was wrong. At that point I removed this data from the database and the block disappeared from the block list. After that it took me a while to write a program to parse the audit logs and create the payout data anew, this time with the proportional system. Then the block reappeared, now with correct numbers.

I feel it would be bad form to switch reward system in the middle of a block, so we had to get that last proportional block out of the way.

It could be that you saw these PPLNS-based numbers sometime between the time I posted the first message saying there was a problem, and the time I posted the message saying everything was fixed.

I'm very sorry for the bumpy ride switching to the new reward system. Everything worked properly when I tested it on my test server last sunday.

At least now we are hopper proof and the next time we are on a lucky roll the bitcoins will be distributed more fairly instead of being affected by pool hopping.

BitMinter switched to a variation of PPLNS today, so if you were pool hopping us you may want to remove us from your setup.

We'll still be paying 5% extra for over 40 more blocks, so we can be a good default, though.

BitMinter switched to a variation of PPLNS today, so if you were pool hopping us you may want to take us out of your setup. I don't want to "trick" anyone with the switch of reward system.

We'll still be paying out 5% extra for another 40+ blocks though, so we can be a good default pool to use.

Try it again. I had forgotten to update the unconfirmed balance after the PPLNS changes. Sorry about that!

What are you talking about?

There are 14 000 lines of code in BitMinter (miner, pool backend and web frontend), all written by myself. There is nothing open-source compiled into these programs.

Everything in order again. You can see your pay as unconfirmed in your account, or click the block in the block list and have a look.

By the way, if anyone would like the audit log for this or another block, let me know and I will get you a copy where IP addresses are censored out. You can use it to verify that the number of proofs of work for each user for a block is correct, and even check that every proof of work is valid (requires a little programming - but the complete block header is available in the audit log).

That was the last proportional block. We are now on PPLNS with shifts, and hopper-proof.

Block 17 was found this morning, but there was a problem with splitting the income. I am working to fix correct shares to everyone based on audit logs. More info will follow. Everyone will get correct payment, and next block will be split according to the new PPLNS shifts.

On one of my machines with 4 GPUs the hash rate drops from 1435 to 1415 (roughly), when I go from performance to detailed mode, which is a 1.4% drop. On a couple machines with single GPUs I can't really see a drop.

While I was developing the miner the drop was much higher until I put in code to update the meters less frequently.

But yeah, a drop from 750 to 720 does seem excessive. That's 4%. I don't think I've seen the meters cause that high a drop.


Yeah, on the machine mentioned above the hash rate drops from 1435 to 1360 with a youtube video running. But if I right click the video, go in the flash settings and turn off hardware acceleration, I get hash rate up to 1415 with a video running (have to reload the web page after changing settings though, to see an effect).