Hehe

What's the thing on top of the case? For measuring electricity consumption? I need to get me one of those.

I bet you're not the only one frustrated with mining. Bitcoin at $7 now! I remember when it was $30. I guess that's why the hashrate/difficulty is dropping - I bet a lot of people are unhappy with profitability now.

I don't think it would be creating blocks if that was the case.


I created the miner for the pool. It's meant as an incentive and bonus for mining in the BitMinter pool.

I wanted to create something different. I made my own miner, pool backend and web application. Of the three, the miner is the one that has been the most work so far. BitMinter is a major development effort. The goal is to create a new community and a new offering that stands apart from the rest. I didn't want to create yet another miner for DeepBit users, with 10 different forks on github. I also didn't want to create a new pushpool with exactly identical pools popping up like toadstools.

That is why BitMinter is closed source. This may change in the future. But for now, the strategy and goals remain the same.

About the hashrate, I never claimed to be fastest on all GPUs. BitMinter was fastest on a few GPUs. The speedtest in the original post is getting a bit old now, though. Most miners, including BitMinter, have gotten faster since then. Back when that speedtest was done, BitMinter was far behind the competition on Radeon 5xxx cards, and I never claimed differently. And more importantly, the miner showed clearly how slow it was. People would start the miner and go "damn this is slow on my 5970". It never showed an artificial hashrate. It's much faster on Radeon 5xxx now, but still useless on CPUs.

Although there are surely still bugs in my software, I never intentionally put anything incorrect or malicious in there. And I am not trying to deceive anyone. So far many are quite happy with the miner, and others mine at the BitMinter pool with different miners. All of them have been paid correctly and on time. I even gave them 5% extra out of my own wallet. I think we are off to a good start. But in the end, of course, who you trust with your bitcoins and your hashrate is up to you.

I have 3640 accepted and 2 rejected proofs of work at the moment.

The fact that you got an improvement tells me it is probably right that it is a router or firewall timing out the connection. But I guess restarting long polling every 10 minutes isn't soon enough.

I'll have to think about how I can improve this further.

I'd really prefer to turn on TCP keep-alive - just have to find a workable way to do that.

Alternatively I could make the long poll timeout configurable.

You get low stales with GUIminer against the BitMinter pool?

Could you try it again now? I just released a new version of the miner that should hopefully work better for you. Also some changes recently on the server-side should reduce stales a bit.


Why not give it a try? Let me know how you like it.

BitMinter client v1.0.0 released.

Changes:

• Faster on Radeon GPUs, especially 5xxx series (still working on improving this further)
• Minimize to systray option (under the "settings" pulldown menu)
• Remember settings for systray and verbose logging between sessions
• 10 minute timeout on longpoll connections. Should hopefully fix the problems for those few who get a very high number of stales. I suspect it is because you have a router that kills idle connections after only a few minutes.
• Get rid of Java login window if you mistyped name or password. A failed login should now re-display the BitMinter login window.
• Mining speed shown is now an exponential moving average. Should give more stable speed measurements, but may need more tweaking.

All changes have been tested a while as beta, so should be stable. Regular and beta on the server are now the same (v1.0.0) until a new beta is ready.

Edit: To get the latest version, simply restart the miner.

Welcome to the crew!

Cool pictures. When I look at that I understand why I am getting further down on the top10 list lately.  

I may change the stats to update more frequently. I'm just a bit unsure how much it will add to the server load once we have a lot of users, so I don't want to make it too frequent.

Anyone else with pictures of their rigs?

Just had a little downtime on the pool. I apologize for this. I was actually watching the top10 list now and then, but stupidly it keeps displaying the last data it has if the pool stops working properly. I'm going to change that and look at better ways to supervise the pool so I can react fast if something happens.

Anyway, everything back to normal again.

Try the BitMinter pool (bitminter.com). We have our own miner you can start just by clicking a button on the website. There's no installation. Works on Windows, Linux, Mac.

Now running latest version with bug fixed. It was a race condition that would happen rarely, but when it did it would cause a whole group of rejected proofs of work.

Parallel programming is fun once you find and remove the race conditions.

The pool server is now lean and mean. A good foundation to build on. For the future I'll add a new reward system, and probably support for roll-ntime.

A few people have that problem. It's most likely due to a router or firewall killing the long poll connection. The beta version has a shorter timeout on the long poll connection and will keep restarting it. That solves it, at least for some who tried it. I'm going to put this in the regular (non-beta) version any moment now.

Once I do, it would be great if you could check whether it solves the problem for you too. (Or try the beta now)

Figures. It produced less stales on the test network, but does the opposite on the regular bitcoin network.

I have reverted back to the old version until I can debug this. Sorry for the inconvenience.

BitMinterD 1.0 (the mining pool software) up and running.

Changes:

• Reduced use of server resources considerably - for future scalability
• Notify long pollers faster at block changes

So, only internal changes that you should not notice beyond slightly lower stales. It's been tested on the bitcoin test network and seems stable enough, but let me know if you experience any problems.

BitMinterD 1.0 (the mining pool software) up and running.

Changes:

• Reduced use of server resources considerably - for future scalability
• Notify long pollers faster at block changes

So, only internal changes that you should not notice beyond slightly lower stales. It's been tested on the bitcoin test network and seems stable enough, but let me know if you experience any problems.

I am currently considering this variation for my pool: PPLNS=Pay Per Last N Shifts

D = difficulty
N = number of shifts eligible for payment
D2S = difficulty to shift ratio

Number of shares that go in a shift = D/D2S

Stored for each shift:
Number of shares for each user

When receiving any proof of work:
Increment the user's number of shares in the current shift
Unless the total number of shares in the shift exceeds D/D2S, in that case start a new shift and mark the old as completed

When receiving a generating proof of work:
For the last N completed shifts, weight=total_shares_in_shift
Distribute income proportionally among shifts according to their weight, and proportionally within shifts according to how many shares each user has.

As long as shifts are weighted, it might work out ok to pay for last N hours as well. Just start new shifts every hour instead of when the current shift reaches a certain size.

Benefits:

• Fairly simple; easier to understand and to audit.
• More transparent; easier to display all the data from which a user's payment was calculated.
• Much lower storage and processing costs for server. Side-effect: easier to show live statistics and future payment estimates.

To avoid the time around difficulty changes from being hoppable it may be necessary to weight shifts also by their difficulty.

Any thoughts?

Yeah, we're on a lucky streak now 

Everything back up. Sorry for the downtime!

There's a problem with the pool backend... I'm working on it.

Finally! Good job solving that slow block, people. 

Finally! Good job, people. Always good when those slow blocks are finally solved. 

Probably. I haven't been able to get stable values when measuring OpenCL performance over short timespans.

I updated the beta of the miner just now:

• 10 minute timeout on longpoll connections. Should hopefully fix the problems for those few who get a very high number of stales. I suspect it is because you have a router that kills idle connections after only a few minutes.
• Get rid of Java login window if you mistyped name or password. A failed login should now re-display the BitMinter login window.
• Mining speed shown is now an exponential moving average. Should give more stable speed measurements, but may need more tweaking.

If you had problems with many rejected proofs of work or speed measurements varying a lot, please let me know if this helps.