Reminder: a bit of maintenance coming up now.

CPUs are ASICs designed to do a very complex task. They have to interpret machine code and execute those instructions. A lot of work is just finding out what to do. CPUs can do a large variety of tasks, but they do them very slowly. Bitcoin started with CPU mining in 2009.

GPUs are similar to CPUs but with more limited instruction sets and running an instruction even slower than a CPU. The advantage is that they can perform one instruction in parallel on many sets of data. This was a great advantage for bitcoin mining and killed off CPU mining in 2011.

FPGAs are chips which logic can be changed. They are slower and cost more per chip than ASICs. But they don't have the huge start-up cost of getting a new ASIC chip to production. You can take an off-the-shelf FPGA chip and make it do bitcoin mining. This gave mining a boost until Bitcoin ASICs arrived.

ASICs are application-specific, they do one thing. The application can be something very complex like executing Intel x86 machine code. Or in the case of bitcoin ASICs; bitcoin mining (a very simple task) is the only thing they can do - but they do it extremely fast. While your CPU is just beginning to find out what to do ("oh, I'm supposed to add two numbers now"), the Bitcoin ASIC has already done many hashes. This killed off all other types of mining in 2013.

ASIC mining has driven up the bitcoin difficulty. It now takes a thousand years to mine one bitcoin with a "fast" GPU, or many thousands of years with a CPU. Not to mention that CPUs and GPUs are extremely inefficient and would cost a lot more in electricity to run than what value they are able to mine.

To start as a newbie miner today, a 1 TH/s ASIC machine or faster is recommended for a small mining-at-home operation. 1 TH/s is 1 000 000 MH/s. Compare that to the few hundred MH/s that the fastest GPUs can do.

Yes, it's sad. Most of the old pools are gone now. BTC Guild is one of few that shut down cleanly. And Eleuthria is the only pool op so far that took proper action when his pool got too big.

Eleuthria, after shutting down his pool BTC Guild, is recommending Bitminter to his miners.

bitcoin.org is advising miners to use a pool that properly validates blocks. There is a list of bad and good pools at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools#SPV_Mining_.2F_Old_Bitcoin_Core

Maintenance 2015.07.25 at 10:00 UTC to 11:00 UTC.

During this maintenance miners will be disconnected one time, but able to reconnect after 2-3 seconds. Your miner should reconnect automatically after a few seconds, and you should not really notice this.

The website will have some downtime, expected to be less than 30 minutes, within the maintenance window.

Apologies for any inconvenience. I will try to make this as quick as possible. Thank you for your understanding.

One day...

Yep, that explains it.

Which URL are you mining with? If you are using getwork or getblocktemplate, please switch to stratum. Getwork/GBT support is being shut down on the first of august.

That means switching from http://mint.bitminter.com:8332 to stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333

You may also want to upgrade to a new bfgminer version - 3.10 is very old.

Why is that a problem?

This seems to be the way most miners choose a pool - they go with the biggest one. This is the reason Deepbit became too large, then BTC Guild, and later GHash.

Right now Chinese pools have over 50% of the hashpower. This means that just like the US government controls Visa and Mastercard, the Chinese government now controls bitcoin. This is a very bad thing for bitcoin.

You may also want to consider that there is a warning at bitcoin.org to not use the pool you suggested because they are mining blindly: https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv-mining

If you care about what happens to bitcoin, then think about how you use your hashpower and how it affects bitcoin. The future of bitcoin is probably more important to you than it is important to be doing the same thing as everyone else (why is that even important).


Do you care about the fee or the final payouts? 1% is not much and there are many other factors involved. Some pools don't pay out income from transaction fees, have a high orphan rate, pay for stale work (using your mining income to subsidize miners with bad internet connection), or don't have merged mining.

I had a large miner (at the time) who was very happy with the customer service and other things at my pool but he felt it was unfair that my pool had profits, so he left for Ghash. Then Ghash scammed a casino (they say the employee who did it no longer works there). And their payouts were about 10% below average, probably because they had a vulnerability that some miners used to get their work counted multiple times. 10% is a lot more than 1%.

I understand that miners will not take all these complicated factors into account though. I guess the fee has become like the pixel count of cameras, it's a product reduced to a single number to make it easier for you to choose. Maybe it would look better if transaction fee income and namecoins were kept by the pool, but the fee was reduced to 0% ?

Pool URL: stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333

As user name put your Bitminter user name, an underscore, then a worker name, e.g. DrHaribo_asic3. In case you have firewall issues, port 443 and 5050 (Stratum) are also available. There is no password check, any password is accepted.



Why? What's wrong with my pool?

This is a very common misunderstanding. There is no slow rampup before you get paid, and when you disconnect there is no special punishment with PPLNS.

You do some work, and how much you get paid for that work depends on how many blocks the pool finds in the near future. That's all. See things this way and you will understand how PPLNS actually works. That is why I added a per-shift statistic at Bitminter that shows how much 1 TH/s got paid for 1 hour of mining during that shift. You did some work between 2 and 3 last night and the pool was lucky/unlucky so you got a high/low payout. End of story. That is how simple PPLNS is, and this point of view enables you to understand it correctly and make rational decisions.

A lot of people focus on how much they get paid per block. This is what leads to these misunderstandings, which is why I removed a display of "what you can expect to get if we find a block right now" from the Bitminter website. Watching this "magic" pay-per-block number changing and not understanding where it comes from has lead to not only the belief of ramp-up, drop-off and special punishments for part-time miners. It is also what leads to some confusing beliefs that you should be in a big/small pool if your own hashrate is high/low. This is also utter nonsense. See http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10731/mining-pool-hashrate-effect-on-a-miners-income

No, being a part time miner does not mean PPS pays out more. On average you will earn more with a PPLNS pool with low fees than a PPS pool with high fees. PPLNS has variance, which is what you pay extra to get rid of by using expensive PPS services. But there is no special punishment for part-time miners.

Even from the confusing ramp-up/drop-off way of explaining PPLNS, the ramp-up and the drop-off are equally fast. The reason the drop-off looks faster is purely psychological. You see one good thing and one bad thing. It's common for people to forget the good thing and focus on defending themselves against the bad thing, which often makes the bad thing seem bigger.

Thank you for adding support for Bitminter. It's a cool app - I hope you will see some new users now

Yeah, the live hashrates will not be reliable now at extremely low hashrates. Mining still works though.

I would not recommend starting with 1-3 GH/s. At 3 GH/s you are mining $3.12 worth of bitcoin in a whole year. Minus electricity. It probably comes out negative as those old miners are not very efficient and also require a PC (although you could run them on a raspberry pi).

1 TH/s is a better starting point.

Is your S4 not mining? I'm not sure what the problem is. Any errors?

Default diff is 512. You can set 1024 as minimum diff if you prefer that. Look under "my account" -> "workers" in the website menu and click the gear icon to access the settings.

Another third party app added Bitminter support: http://cryptoglance.info/

Now listed in tools menu at bitminter.com

So for the first 5 blocks there is no PPLNS payments. There is only 1 BTC if you find a block.

It's the same as solo mining, but you get 1 BTC instead of 25 BTC for finding a block?

No, sorry, I haven't had time to work on this.

Please read! Worker diff changing, getwork/gbt closing.

2015.07.11 at 10:00 UTC:

Your miners will get disconnected as this change goes live but will be able to reconnect immediately.

Default worker difficulty when miners connect: 512 (was 16)
Minimum worker difficulty: 64 (was 4)

This is to better support fast (1+ TH/s) hardware, some of which is very unhappy with low difficulty.

For old and very slow (40 GH/s and down) ASICs the new difficulty may be a bit high causing the live hashrate on the website to become very inaccurate. This may cause false alarms from the idle worker notifications if you use those. Mining will still work though.

2015.08.01:

Support for getwork and getblocktemplate (GBT) mining protocols will be turned off. Only Stratum will be supported. If you are already using Stratum you will not be disconnected or otherwise affected as this goes live.

What do you need to do if you use getwork/gbt today? Change the URL from http://mint.bitminter.com:8332 to stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333

If you need help with this, use the contact form on the website to ask for help.

That was F2Pool, not P2Pool.

Some of you may have heard about a blockchain fork today, with F2Pool and Antpool mining on the wrong side of the fork.

In case anyone is worried:

Bitminter has been mining version 3 bitcoin blocks for a while now, our bitcoin nodes are the latest version, and we only mine on top of blocks we have validated locally - we do not trust others to validate blocks for us.

So you can safely continue to mine at Bitminter.