That's a shame. We're almost down to just newbie pools now.

Sorry, I was doing some upgrades on the web server and it put the unconfirmed balances out of action for a while. Should be back to normal again now.


I guess this is not what you'd like to hear, but when the pool was new and very small we had a couple 14-day rounds. Also at some point we had a block that took 11x difficulty amount of work. Luck that bad is quite rare though. But I believe there are pools that have had even worse rounds than that.

The difficulty keeps going up, so you earn less and less.

Almost everyone stopped mining on computers in 2013 when ASIC hardware made computers utterly useless for mining bitcoins. Well, many had given up on their PC before then, but that's when the best 300+ MH/s gaming GPUs finally had to give up.

I'd recommend looking into bitcoin ASIC mining hardware.

We work on bitcoin and namecoin at the same time, getting namecoins as a free byproduct with our bitcoin mining.

We are checking billions of different blocks per second, looking for a valid one.

If we were working on the same block it would just be the same hash over and over again.

Thank you


You get paid when blocks are found. Sometimes it takes a while. We've had awesome luck lately, but sadly bad luck is also expected to happen.

There is some more info on payouts here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824

Sounds like you had some downtime on your miners. Maybe internet connection down, or power outage, or something else. Have a look at organofcorti's profitability charts. If the pool was paying out just 50% of the expected average then the charts would look much worse.

You don't lose with a pool in general. Ghash has had bad luck for a long time though. Maybe Organofcorti can find out what's going on. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77000.msg10946961#msg10946961

This is called variance. This old post will explain it for you I hope: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824

It's not enough to be good at programming, you have to know how the domain (bitcoin mining) works as well. There are plenty of horrible mining client implementations. Things like using a 32-bit integer to hold the difficulty, resulting in accidental block withholding attacks. Or making the user select the difficulty to mine at (and throwing away most of your work) instead of implementing the stratum protocol correctly and listening to the server when it tells you the difficulty. Or taking forever (and producing huge amounts of stale work) when the server tells you to immediately flush old work data and start on new data. Or throwing away stale work instead of passing it to the server.

When a developer who is new to bitcoin touches mining code I am frequently surprised at how bad the results are. It's as if there is no testing or quality control.


One would hope so. But the reality is much worse.

As one of the biggest pools used their hashpower to scam and steal from a dice game, very few of their miners left them.

As the biggest pool grew too big (centralizing too much hashpower) and refused to do anything about it, very few of their miners moved their hashpower.

When new pools offer 10% or even 40% extra mining income, or investment opportunities offer 7% gains per week, people queue to sign up. If you ask for transparency they get mad at you because they think you are trying to ruin the good deal for them.

Please. I am quickly turning into a bitter old man. Those of you who are still asking questions and demanding transparency and responsible behavior - you are my last hope. 

Very good - thank you!

My mining servers also make use of multiple CPU cores. I never thought to market this as making miners 30-40% more bitcoins. Probably because it isn't true.


Seriously?

Have a look at this: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36725/btc-hashes-second-rates-for-various-pools/36747#36747

You're talking about a very short timeframe. In that case luck is the only thing that matters and you can't remove it.

Small pool lucky: you get a big chunk of coins paid out at the right time when the price is high. You make more than at the big pool.

Small pool unlucky: you get paid big chunks before and after the price spike. You make less than at the big pool.

There's nothing new here. At small pools luck has a big effect on the short term earnings.

If you are asking about which pools are more profitable, I took some time today to answer this here:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36725/btc-hashes-second-rates-for-various-pools/36747#36747

You will want to consider other things like is the pool reputable? If they ever reached a too-high concentration of hashpower, how did they handle it? Have they been involved in scams? Have they confiscated miner funds for dubious reasons? And which is your personal favorite? You may want to try a couple pools and see how you like them.

All of the above may be more important than a small difference in mining income.

Some quick improvement suggestions:

Wouldn't it be fairly easy to add pool fees to the profitability graphs?

Using the same Y-axis scale on the graphs might make them more readable. Currently some of them only have a mark for 100%.

BTCGuildPPLNS should probably be listed as BTCGuild at this time.

Hi,

I don't think it would run on 128 MB memory. You could give bfgminer or cgminer a try instead, they use much less memory.

Hi

Which model of ASICs do you have?

Auto generation of workers now available.

How to use:

• Make sure the team effort perk is enabled, under "my account" -> "donations & perks" in the website menu
• Go to the workers page, under "my account" -> "workers" in the website menu
• Turn on "Auto generate workers". It's a checkbox just below your list of workers.
• Now you can set your miners to use new worker names and the workers will be created automatically. No need to manually create each one at the website. Note that this only works for valid worker names.

Valid worker names are 1 to 20 characters long, consisting only of letters and numbers.

Auto generating workers make it much easier to set up a large number of miners or to move miners over from a different pool. If you have the same user name in both pools you can even move miners by just changing the pool URL. For compatibility both . (period) and _ (underscore) are allowed for separating user and worker names.

Auto generation of workers can be combined with a default worker. If you mine with only the user name or id the worker name you set is invalid, then the default worker is used.

If you use only the user name or an invalid worker name and you do NOT have a default worker, then there will be an authentication failure and mining will not be possible.

Auto generating workers?

Coming right up.