I think not allowing other mining software would mean losing members.

Also, I think it's best not to let people know in advance whether a proof of work they submit will get a high or low payment, unless using PPS (Pay Per Share). From what I understand, what happened to Swepool was that they got a very very unlucky block, and almost everyone left the pool.

I think it works well if this is the situation at all times: If you do some work and submit a proof of work, you are very likely to get paid an average value for it, and there's some chance to get paid a lot or nothing at all. You can't know in advance how much value the proof of work will bring.

This way it always makes sense to keep mining, and things are perfectly fair for 24/7 miners. I think things are fair for casual miners too, although they may be unlucky and mine for 30 minutes without getting any pay (very unlucky).

It's not just the weight. Someone might call the bomb squad.   

Someone was running a lot of hardware on the test network, pushing the difficulty up, and now left?

I'm not seeing any problems, except it's sometimes a bit slow.

I posted some ideas for a new reward system at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg457927#msg457927

Please leave your thoughts on it here or in that thread.

As you may have noticed there are more pool hoppers these days, and tools for pool hopping. Therefore moving away from proportional payouts seems prudent. Of course we won't switch in the middle of a block, and the new system will take a bit of time to implement, but it's probably a good idea to switch soon.

Of all the payout systems people have thought of so far I believe PPLNS is the best. It's a good combination of fair payouts and not letting the pool become bankrupt or end up in some other situation where miners leave.

Basically PPLNS (pay-per-last-N-shares) works like this:

  payout = blockvalue * your shares among the last N shares / N

The people over at Eligius have a write-up on PPLNS with more details here: http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Pay_Per_Last_N_Shares

As for the question of how to determine N, I think N = 2 * difficulty might make most sense. In that case many shares will get paid twice. If choosing N = difficulty / 2 then many shares aren't paid at all. I think people will be more comfortable with most shares being paid 2 times, instead of 0-1 times.

One issue I have with PPLNS is the idea of storing million after million of individual shares in the database. This could become a bottleneck as the pool grows larger. It could also limit running statistics, and I would like to have a lot of statistics.

An idea I have to limit the load on the server is to group shares into "shifts" and pay per shifts. Just like some people work night and day shifts. Every time we have, say, a number of shares equal to 20% of the difficulty, that is stored away as a shift, and we begin on a new one. Whenever a block is found, the last 10 shifts are paid. This way the server only handles a handful of numbers instead of millions to display statistics.

It would be possible to pay the last 10 complete shifts, or the last 10 shifts + the current (incomplete) shift. Paying the current shift would make share payments vary in value with how complete the current shift is. This might make the system slightly hoppable. Not paying the current shift might feel unfair to some, though, especially as you might solve a block and not even get paid 1 share, if you don't have any shares in existing shifts.

Any thoughts?

It would also be possible to pay for last N hours, for instance last 12 hours. But I think this is a bad idea at least while the pool is small. If it takes a week to find a block, paying only the last 12 hours means a lot of shares aren't paid. And if we pay all shares from the last 7 days, then it gets out of hand when the pool gets larger.

The unconfirmed balance will be 0 until we solve a block, that's right. Because the pool is small that can take a few days, but I hope we get one soon now. I will soon add something to show how much you are likely to get when the block is solved.

Every proof of work that is accepted gives you 1 share out of the money that is split when a block is solved. Often the word "share" is used to mean basically the same thing when it comes to pool mining.

You should not have so many rejected. That is very strange. At the moment I have 90571 accepted and 138 rejected. The numbers should be more like that - rejected should be very few.

I wonder what could be causing so many rejected proofs of work. Anyone else seeing something similar? I've never seen high rejected numbers ("stales") when using the BitMinter miner.

Cool that you like it, and welcome on the team.

The only thing saved right now is name+password (if you check the little box in the login window). But it is certainly on my TODO list to save the settings! I hope to get that done soon, there's just a lot of things to do.

Just be careful if an exchange gets hacked, like MtGox

Some quick updates on the website:

• Fixed a bug where some workers would not show in the worker list if they had no shares in the current round. Thanks to Soak for reporting the bug.
• Block list now shows the average hashing speed for each block found.
• New LCD-display of the pool speed on top of each page (shows as normal text in old browsers)
• A "contact" page to send me an email, to make it easier to get help in case of problems

Thanks, Xephan, I replied in that other thread.

Just updated the website with a few changes:

• Fixed a bug where some workers would not show in the worker list if they had no shares in the current round. Thanks to Soak for reporting the bug.
• Block list now shows the average hashing speed for each block found.
• New LCD-display of the pool speed on top of each page (shows as normal text in old browsers)
• A "contact" page to send me an email, to make it easier to get help in case of problems

You could have a look at the latest exchange prices. For example look at bitcoinwatch.com. The price is of course always fluctuating. I see some shops recalculate their prices several times per day based on the exchange rates.

I believe both drivers and miners are included.

Thanks, Xephan!

The timeouts are really nothing to worry about as long as the miner is still doing work. You can see in the lower right of the window how many "work units" it has currently.

The long poll will just reconnect if it times out, so there's nothing to worry about. But I agree the messages are annoying. I guess some of the timeout values are set a little low - I'll address this in a later version of the miner.

Good stuff

Pool hashrate looking very nice now.


Yes, me too. Such unlucky blocks are hard for a small pool.


I wanted to make it look a bit like internet banks. Don't they usually show the newest transaction at the bottom? Maybe I should make it possible to switch sorting order.

Anyway, I plan to add pagination before we solve too many blocks, so you can jump from page to page like with a google search. Need to do the same thing with the block list.

Approximate speed is calculated from how many proofs-of-work you send in during the time of measurement. For every "work unit" you get from the server there are 2^32 hashes to check. On average 1 of those will be elligible for being submitted back to the server as a proof-of-work.

So if the server sees you sending in 1 proof-of-work (share) every second, it estimates you must be doing 2^32 hashes per second. That's about 4295 Mhps.

For payments that come from a block, what decides the value of a share (proof-of-work) is how many shares there are in total. The first, second and third blocks were lucky and gave high payouts per share, the fourth was unlucky and gave a low payout.


Welcome to the team, sir. Let us know if you have any problems or suggestions for further improvements of the pool.

Try it out and let me know if you have any problems or feedback.

Engineers at the datacenter finally fixed their networking after approx. 5 hours downtime. I will think about different hosting options. Sorry for the downtime!

Engineers at the datacenter finally fixed their networking after approx. 5 hours downtime. I will think about different hosting options. Sorry for the downtime!

Problems at the data center where the server is hosted makes the server unreachable from the internet. Sorry for this. I hope they get things straightened out quickly.