Sure, also with McDonalds there is that effect from many people eating there. But they also have a low value reputation pulling in the other direction. Some feel ashamed and don't want anyone to see them eating there. Others feel the need to make up excuses to eat there, thinking McDonalds becomes more socially acceptable if you have a good excuse.

It's kind of like mining in the biggest pool. A lot of people are doing it so you assume it's the best (?), but on the other hand you know the pool is getting too big and reducing the security of bitcoin. So then you make up an excuse, maybe something like "I don't understand this bitcoin stuff, I just run this machine and money comes out." Or maybe you make up a new user name so noone knows it's you, and you tell all your friends that you mine at a different pool.

Quite a lot of miners do not know what variance is. They pick the biggest pool because it is the biggest. If it is the most popular then it must be the best. People pick their bank (and basically anything) the same way.

Sure, all you need is some bitcoin mining hardware.

You could buy some USB sticks for mining and run them with Bitminter client on your computer. It will not be profitable and you will never earn back the cost of the USB mining sticks.

You'll probably rather want to look into the bigger ASICs (with a much lower price per hashrate). Those have a tiny built-in computer and they don't need your PC to mine. Just use a browser on your PC to configure them. For the Bitminter pool use the URL stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333

Please use the contact page on the website to leave a message and I'll look into this for you.

Another milestone: On 2015.06.26 Bitminter had been around for 4 years.

In the Bitcoin world this is a long time!

A big thanks to everyone who support Bitminter and all who did in the past. I hope to see you around in the future as well. The Bitcoin adventure is only getting started.

The website was unstable for 7 minutes today. I didn't see any problem with the mining servers. But we have a couple big miners who keep coming and going, so the pool hashrate goes up and down a bit.

That's how it is with PPLNS too. If the pool is lucky you get a high payout, if the pool is unlucky at the time then you get a low payout.

Since you are probably paying more than the rented mining is expected to generate on average, you have a less than 50% chance to make a profit.


What you describe is the proportional reward system (except that those don't use shifts). It is vulnerable to pool hopping, where pool hoppers can rip off the other miners in the pool. Very few pools use proportional anymore (mostly alt coin pools). Ghash uses PPLNS.

PPLNS means Pay Per Last N Shares. A specific amount of work gets paid each time. The point is to not be vulnerable to pool hopping by making it impossible to predict future payouts.

You still get high payouts when the pool is lucky of course. The same work can get paid multiple times with PPLNS.

It's because your numbers are wrong. If your numbers show that Slush pays out more than other pools even when the other pools have better luck, then something is wrong with your numbers.

Bitminter client only supports Antminer U1 and U2, not U3. For U3 try bfgminer or cgminer, see links on frontpage of bitminter.com

Eleuthria, thanks for running an honest pool. And thank you for the endorsement. Good luck with your new projects. A game with bitcoin integration would be awesome!

BTC Guild shutting down makes me feel old. But at least I don't have to listen to you talk about plans to shut down anymore.

Sadly this also feels like another nail in the coffin for decentralization. Of the pools that grew too big in the past, only Eleuthria handled the situation properly. Consider that before you move your miners to the biggest pool and assume that decentralization isn't important for bitcoin. All miners and pool operators have a responsibility to keep mining from getting too centralized.

That night one of the central servers went down for about 15-20 minutes. Normally this would only affect the website, while mining servers would be fine. But it looks like we were hashing at a very low hashrate (about 10% of normal) for 10-15 minutes, and after that it took some time for the hashrate to go back up, probably due to miners taking some time to move back from their backup pools. I'm still looking into what the issue was with the main mining server. The website didn't recover right away and was down 30-40 minutes in total. I'm also looking into that.

My apologies for this downtime. A small amount of downtime on the website can happen, but mining should always be available.


Maybe I can squeeze in a "your % of the total work" thing just after the number showing your work (rightmost column today).

If space gets tight I could probably show the difficulty in billions instead of the exact number. So "49.7" instead of "49,692,386,354". Or perhaps the difficulty isn't even that interesting in the shifts list?

Yes, a column showing the number of blocks found would be useful. Perhaps showing "0 (still searching)" or "1 (still searching)" etc, for the 10 latest shifts?

Sorry, should work again now.

If you need the payout from one day to keep renting your miners the next day, then you will be out of coins the first time the pool hits bad luck. You run out of coins before we get some good luck again, like today with 3 blocks. That's not something I would recommend.

It could perhaps almost work if you kept the coins you earned when we had good luck as a buffer to cover bad luck later. But it will not work if you use the extra coins to rent more and more hashpower so that there is no buffer for bad luck.

The reason I say "almost" is that hashpower is always rented out at a higher price than the average you can earn with it. So the only way to profit is if you have good luck. Over the long term your luck goes towards average though, which means earning less than you pay to rent miners. We did have a lot of good luck. But sooner or later bad luck will strike.

The work you did in the last 10 shifts at the time the block is found is what will get paid. You can see your stats in the shifts here: https://bitminter.com/shifts (to see your own numbers you need to be logged in)

It is rare that we go this long between blocks though. 99.6% CDF on that round. So this is something that happens with 0.4% of the rounds. So one in 250 blocks will be this bad or worse.

This evens out pretty good for constant miners. For part time miners it can be harsh though, when we hit a dry spell.

Matt's relay network is pretty awesome. It can help speed up block propagation a lot.

Dude, stop messing around and get the block

No, sorry, only U1 and U2.

We are back on the usual server again. If you are mining at mint.bitminter.com you will get back on it again the next time your miners reconnect to the server. Until then your miners will be just fine on the other server.

Apologies for the problems this morning. Your miners probably experienced a few minutes of being disconnected until the switchover took effect.

There's a problem with the main mining server. DNS has been switched over to a different server while the primary server is being fixed.

Good riddance to 48 diff