Pool outage was ~15 minutes, everything is working perfectly now. I'll add second server into cluster, change will be without outage.

Pool is down for a moment, I'm doing upgrade of main server.

Why should be nickname case insensitive?


?

MEGA hashes, not KILO hashes, guys :-)

I see your point, but it is absolutely not necessary. As I said, there is no reason why everybody should have some reward from every round. There are many rounds every day, it does not affect your reward in any way.

If I have correct info, bitcoin network itself forces at least 100 confirmations, but bitcoin client wait for 120 confirmations.

Of course it is doable. But why?

This means that another miner announced new Bitcoin block with  the same "prevhash" just a second before pool. This happen time to time and it is not related to pool.

You are right. Whole mining is still about luck, even with pooled mining. Just solving "difficulty 1" blocks (=shares in pool) gives you more steady payouts than solving full difficulty blocks. So yes, missing reward from some round is still fair, because  in longer average (day?) you still hit the same number of shares.

Simply said, with rising pool hashrate, members with constant power will earn less from every round, but more often. But this does not affect your daily reward.

Example: When I started the pool, I had round reward around 15 BTC for single HD5970. Now, with 4x 5970, I have much lower round reward, because my hashrate is smaller fragment of whole pool rate. But my daily reward is still correct.

So don't worry about round rewards, when everything else is fine.


Solving one share indicate that miner is working. Calculating rewards based on connections can be misused, because somebody can just connect to pool, but does nothing.

Pool does not change anything against small members. Workers still solve blocks for difficulty 1. But your hashrate is _extremely_ low. Can I ask you which hardware are you using? I'm guessing some Javascript miner or mobile phone... :-) Reasonable minimum for CPU mining is 1000 khash/s, it can be done even with old laptops.

With yours 4 khash/s, your average time to find one share is 1 week, 5 days, 10 hours and average time to find full block (50 BTC) is 323095 days, 8 hours, 2 minutes.

Which I'm and I'm proud on it. Again, again, again. All stats will be back. So what's your point? If I did not do anything to stop possible cheating, YOU will be the first person complaining I don't care enough.

And please STOP DISCUSSUON about this. Everything was written here, please read it before asking again.

I'm kindly asking you, geebus and FairUser, to stop trolling here again, as you did in m0mchil thread few days ago. I discussed those things many HOURS via PMs and on public forum and I'm really bored with you, guys, because you don't _want_ to understand.

Only short response to your misunderstoods: Solution as you are proposing isn't working right. Please read discussion about pool abusing.

Raulo, it is because current implementation - when worker find a block, I simply do +1 in its database record. There are no timestamps, which I can filter on those 2 hours, like in block history. There is even no database relation between worker and block record, because workers can disappear if user want it, so I cannot even filter this using joins on worker and block tables.

No, it is still here, "Forgot password?" on login page.


No "delete account" feature. Don't use it or write me and I'll delete it manually.


Anti cheating. 60% of blocks were generated by top20 users.


Provide fair pool for everyone.


Read previous posts and also thread about cheating on the pool. And I removed those stats at once, there is nothing as "less info every day".

It's always pleasure to read you.

I think you are quite right, but there are many unknowns inside, so I really don't know how much I can expect. This also depends on market price, 1% in December with slower pool hashrate was really under expenses, now with parity it looks better. If market prices, higher difficulty or whatever really need to set higher fees to make pool running, I'll probably do it, because I prefer higher fees for few satistfied users before closing the pool.

Hm, not really. Increasing hashrate does not bring much advantage for common users, except those with big % of current hashing power. Once the pool find few blocks per day, the payout are quite steady. Increasing hashrate leads to many blocks, but less block reward for every user.


I don't think that adding more and more bandwidth is solution, really. Current protocol cost not only server bandwidth, but also client's bandwidth, roundtrips and so on. It's the reason why I don't want to migrate to another server, because traffic is _still_ doable even on Linode and for final solution the Linode VPS is perfect service.

Thanks gusti for your support. Yes, I'm thinking about technical support, to have somebody who can repair service from trouble when I'll be offline. Now, there is already one guy with access to the server, for the situation I will be in troubles for longer time. In the meantime, I'm monitoring service pretty often, to be honest, it's only few times per week when I'm not online .

Colo server is quite difficult question. In fact, they are really needed only with current "getwork" stuff, which is bad for big pools at all. It is very network ineffective and roundtrips might play some role here. Once "pushwork" will be done (and I believe that it will be really soon), the colocations don't be necessary, as there will be only one request per minute for worker and the latency will be only the half of roundtrip. So I don't want to spend much time on building colocations, because there are some issues to solve. Building scalable pool in one location is another task and I did the pool with scalability in mind, so adding more servers to pool will be very easy when it become be necesary.

What's your nickname, please? Send me PM. This looks weird, I'll trace it in logs.

No, the traffic is OK. Before few minutes I had issue with free disk space, it was solved in one or two minutes. The right reason behind 'server error 500' few times per day is that application is forcing locks on database when block is found, to calculate rewards and clean up everything for new round. Then the timeouts of few requests in thread queues expires and the server return this weird message. The problem became more often as number of workers is rising (currently around 500 workers in every round). I know how to fix this, but in fact it is not real problem, just few requests experienced this everytime block is found. I just want to finally finish my anti cheating project and open server stats again. Then I'll work on this.

Hello,

I just come back from holiday, back from lagging wifi somewhere in Cafe to my working station. I know that my recent step with forced donations was quite controversial and didn't helped to PR of my pool :-). Firstly, many thanks to all of you who understood my situation and supported me here when I was away.

I just want to explain whole story and the reason why I setup fees (I know it isn't "donation" any more, I just re-used existing infrastructure for hot fix).

When I started the pool, there were only few pool members, mainly well known from the Bitcoin community. They sent me some donations for the beginning, later I set up voluntary donations and everything worked well. As pool hashrate went up, many users joined the effort, but they didn't feel they are part of pool community; they just used service which was paid by few first members. Pool was still financial self-sufficient, but I become little unsure if my business model will be still working with many and many newcomers. This is great example of disaster of the common; First users known that donations are needed to run the server and pay me for service support (yes, I'm not Mother Teresa and like to earning bitcoins). But new users just saw that there is cool free service and those already connected players surely pay enough to run the service also for them. So day by day, my earnings from pool dropped, but server resources and also my _time_ for running the service went up significantly, to many hours daily. I'm big Bitcoin fan, but running service for 5 dollars (on current prices) for covering server costs and few hours per day of my time for support and development, become on the edge of worthless.

The big break happen few days ago, when Bitcoin was mentioned in some Internet media. The "disaster of the common" effect become much more significant. The hashrate and server resources (and emails from users!) doubled in ONE DAY and the traffic still increased, but the daily donations dropped. Nobody (except two, three users?) from hundreds from new users set up even 2% donations! I tried to find the source of newcomers, find what was behind the huge step in traffic and found, for example, few Russian warez forums, where Bitcoin and the pool was mentioned as "easy money". This is definitely not what I like, but it fully corresponds with donation numbers which I see in on pool. I definitely don't think it is fair that few Bitcoin fans should support tens or hundreds of users which simply misuse the free service.

So because I was only on poor connection and had only few possibilities, I decided to set up those "minimal donations", fees, to cut down income of those 'unfair' users, to get some extra cash for scalability improvements and more server resources (I will set up second pool server this week, for example). Well, I cannot call the users with 0% donations as 'unfair', because I offer them the possibility of free pool, but the equilibrium of free/paid users changed dramatically in last days. Those problems pushed me to think about business model. Unfortunately, I see that donation model does not work well.

I considered solutions as running pool only for closed group of trusted users, basically the same mode as pool started in December. But I still want to bring the service for the wide consortium of users, because that was my big idea when I started my work on the service. I'm really enjoying people that wrote me they are happy with cents per day using their CPUs and see that they are supporting me with 6%. I definitely don't want to cut them from the pool, just because some of them are not such honest and don't want to pay even 0.001 from their 0.025 daily reward.

So I decided to keep fees on the pool up, just lower them from current 2% to 1%. I'm sure that cut of 1% (0.5 BTC from every 50BTC block) is far under anything which can be really recognized on user's daily reward. This is enough to run pool for all users without judging their motivation and without asking. I also remove 'voluntary donations' option, which effectively make pool cheaper for users which voluntarily supported service until now. I would like to say big THANK YOU for all of you which set up donations in times when it was really voluntary and I hope that users like the service enough to don't care about the minimal fees.

I will make this change in this week. But before this, I'll finish mass mailing of users to communicate this change better, few days in advance, than last change in fees. Once again, I'm sorry for the way how I did the communication few days before.

You are right, there was one problem with concurency. This does not affect anything than stats, it is fixed now (next blocks should have correct durations). Also notice that block id #1062 will be skipped because of the fix.