Updated Auto Payout rules slightly, you can now enter multiples of 0.1 instead of whole bitcoins.

I stated earlier:  I wont' implement MM until it has a close to 0 effect on BTC mining, regardless of whether the tradeoff is 1% loss of BTC for a 5-7% gain in profit due to NMC.  Shadders is implementing a change to PSJ soon where the getwork creation is prepared within PSJ, rather than relying on bitcoind which has always been the bottleneck at longpoll time.  That change should reduce the performance impact of merged mining enough to be worth implementing.

Shares are still being logged right now, don't panic.  Looks like daylight savings time is messing with the speed calculations, should clear up shortly.

Not until shadders releases the final PSJ which includes built in work generation for merged mining.

Added Pool Block History page, API for it will be coming soon as well so web services can scrape our block data.

Regarding bitlane's post, yes, there was about 15 seconds of downtime last night for a pool restart.

It's been long overdue, but automatic payouts have finally been added to the pool.  They're implemented slightly different than what you may be used to:

1) Set your automatic payment threshold either through the My Account page, or the sidebar.
2) Only whole numbers are accepted.  Set it to '0' to disable the automatic payouts.

Automatic payouts are processed every hour.  If your unpaid rewards are equal to or greater than your threshold, you will be paid the amount you set.  This is different from some pools, where an automatic payout might be your full balance once it crosses the threshold.  I chose this method because it allows users to keep their wallets clean with whole numbers for timed payouts, and people using automatic payouts are planning on continuing to mine (otherwise they'd just cash out and leave).  You always have the option for an instant payout which includes your full balance.

Item 1 finished early.  Wallet Lock is now active, and is replacing the previous 24 hour Payout Lock feature.  By enabling Wallet Lock, you are PERMANENTLY locking your bitcoin address in your account.  This means even if you are hacked, an attacker cannot do anything to your account other than change your worker names or email address (unless that is locked, which should be available in the next few minutes).

UPDATE:  Email lock has now been added as well.  If you combine these two security features, your account cannot be drained.  At worst, somebody who has your login/password could mess with your worker names, or continually reset your account password if they have access to your email.  However, they cannot change the email, so you will ALWAYS be able to change your password back, and they can't change the wallet under any circumstances with Wallet Lock.

BTC Guild will be ready to support the change as soon as shadders has had time to test the compatibility within PoolServerJ.

I will be adding the following features tomorrow:

1) Permanent Wallet Lock
2) Permanent Email Lock
3) Automatic Payouts [may be Saturday instead of Friday]
4) Pool Block History
5) Pool Speed/Performance History


I originally didn't think much of adding a Pool Block History, since its irrelevant to the users income.  However, I was reminded in IRC this morning that by not showing our blocks it isn't transparent regarding merged mining (or lack thereof).

Merged mining is still eventually planned.  The big problem with merged mining is the increase in BTC stale rates due to extra long polls.  It may take 0-2 seconds for a long poll to finish being issued to all miners, and it may take an extra 0-1 second for a miner to react to it depending on their latency.  Merged mining more than doubles the rate of long polls, meaning there is a higher risk of BTC stales.

I think I have been very clear in the past that I am not a fan of namecoin.  I understand the niche, but I don't think it has much future.  Because of this view, my priority has always been BTC, and I will not implement MM unless it has a close to 0% effect on BTC hashing.


The good news is that shadders is close to finishing an update to PoolServerJ, which fixes the biggest limitation pools have had:  Speed of generating work at long polls.  Even with JoelKatz' patches, bitcoind can vary randomly, producing anywhere from 500 (worst case scenario) to ~5000 getwork/second.  Generally due to the overhead of the initial block chain update within bitciond, the client normally produces around 1500-2000 getwork/second for a moment after a new block.

The next version of PoolServerJ will be generating the work within the pool software, which will drastically speed up the ability to send out thousands of getworks once a new block is found on the network.

NMC are now being produced mostly by people that have no actual interest in namecoin.  They are essentially worthless to them, and they will take whatever they can get.  You can't expect them to remain valuable when people get them for doing literally nothing they weren't doing already.

Update:  Performance charts now scale based on the amount of history available.

1-24 hours = 1 hour intervals
25-48 hours = 2 hour intervals
49-72 hours = 3 hour intervals
73+ hours = 4 hour intervals


This keeps the charts from becoming too cluttered with data points, and smooths the overall graphs out by providing speed estimates in larger intervals.  I'll come in later this weekend and create an option to show the full detail graphs (1-hour intervals) for those would prefer more accuracy at the cost of less responsive graphs (fluid javascript charts for hundreds of datapoints do tend to respond a bit slowly).

And people wonder why slush nearly shut the pool down for good... bitching about known issues doesn't exactly help them get solved faster.  All you're doing is adding more stress to the admin who does significantly more work than miners and at these prices probably doesn't make much more than them.

Should be fixed now, was sorting the log records from earliest to latest instead of latest to earlier when calculating your shares in the last 24 hours.

Your solutions/shares are specific to a set of headers for the block.  When you're solo mining, the headers include YOUR payout address, so any random nonce you try will produce a different hash, even though that same nonce/extraNonce has been tried by someone else.

In pool mining, the work is distributed so everybody is trying difference nonces without overlap.  That overhead is handled by the pool and its bitcoind.

24 hour stat is a slight estimate and also lags behind by 1 hour.  ~4-5% is not an unexpected amount of variance.  If you look at your performance graphs, you'll see that your miners effective speed varies up/down hour by hour.  This can have a net positive or net negative trend in a 24 hour period, the same way that a proportional pool has variances in luck.  The difference in personal miners is the number of trials they're running (shares), meaning they tend to average much closer to the "perfect 0" in a 24 hour period.

I'll be re-adding the extra row to show your rank if you're not in the top 25, but it will probably not be until Friday.

Fixed a bug in the API:  The current difficulty/PPS rate in the API was not properly updated when the difficulty switched (it was using the highest difficulty rather than the most recent difficulty).  Also fixed the API to not include commas in the hash rates.

If people could go to one central place and clearly see how much of a scam this FORK is, they'd likely never download the client other than to make sure it wasn't a joke.

Rackspace is well regarded, but completely insane on pricing compared to just about any other provider.  OVH (and Hetzner that I used and Deepbit still does) is the opposite: Budget hosting, shitty support.  High quality providers really aren't an option for running pools.

I'm just worried about seeing a large number of small pool operators throw in the towel.  The big problem is most of these pools started during in the middle or height of the bubble.  There were only3 pools around when I started, but prices were trending up/difficulty was low, so 0% with donations was a very profitable setup and a good draw.  A few months later MANY new pools opened up, and by then it was basically impossible to obtain miners without being 0%.  Now that the bubble popped, it's scary as a pool operator to try to figure out how to pay your server bills when the old economic model doesn't work anymore.

The last thing Bitcoin needs right now are a bunch of pools closing down, forcing all the hash power to be consolidated into a small number of pools.

The graphs have been fixed and are a bit more fault tolerant if you have miners that turn on/off.  It's been changed back to 1 hour intervals for speed averages.

24 Hour rewards will be shown on the My Account page later today, now that the extra logging has had a chance to run for a full day.