No Animals were harmed in this chicken sacrifice.



Mine on

Looks like luckyant is failing over again. Pool hashrate climbing. Lets hope he cracks a block while he is here.

He is definitely a lucky ant.

Definitely a right fat bastard!

Block! Thank you BlockBadger!

I wouldn't run it at home, at least not long term. It would definitely be destined for my hosting facility. I would run it here at first to test it and see if I like it. It's pretty heavy on the power, so I'll run it from the dryer circuit. But I run very little gear full time at home, an R4 in my home office that's doubling as a space heater and Ebit E9 in the garage since they don't draw as much power and are on different circuits that keeps the garage warmer on the cold mornings. All of my other gear is hosted.

I'm not crazy about the efficiency. It's great for a 28nm miner, but doesn't really compete with the current 16nm gear. But I believe we have to support smaller manufacturers, or we are going to get stuck with more of the same from Bitmain. I am willing to buy and run one of these, even if I only break even on it. Though with my power rates it should ROI in less than 5 months.

Flashy was probably an incorrect choice on my part. I think just something that looks more polished and slick than just our text and numbers. I know that we have WAY more info available to us about pool performance than any other pool. And I wouldn't want any of that to go away. Just maybe moved to the background and our front end more newbie friendly. It is what we get judged by when a perspective new miner comes to check out our pool. And we want them to feel as welcome and at home as possible. Like, yeah ok, I get this. They can find the details later. Then once they know more about mining and see what is under the hood compared to other pools, they'll be hooked. Maybe even make a different link for those of us who like the simple front end we have now.

I, for one, will probably buy one based on the review, just to make sure Bitmain gets some competition. If I like it, I'll buy more.

If you calculate in a modest 4% increase in the difficulty, it pushes breakeven out to mid July with .10 power. And going obsolete when the Difficulty reaches 4000G.

Thanks Fuzzy!
I must admit I didn't see it at first. I personally didn't care about BCH or see it as a threat at first. I figured, meh... If that's how they wanna waste their time, then whatever. Another alt crap coin, oh well.
So when they put their miners up for sale with a BCH only payment option. I thought...hmmm... Hey something do with all that useless BCH I have from the fork. It's like christmas, getting a bunch of free miners. Damn, I must be the luckiest guy on the earth. I wonder why they fixed the exchange rate at $500 per BCH when it's only trading around $300. Sweet, I must have caught it at just the right time. I am the luckiest guy on earth. They can have their useless alt crap coin, I'll take some free miners please.

I just wish that Avalon could have gotten the new miner out sooner.

It runs that way sometimes. In August, just after the halving, it was a slow dismal fight with lack luster performance. Then last November sucked something terrible. After that December came and it was even worse. January look like it wasn't going to do anything, then ended up pulling it out to almost 100%. Then boom, February hit and we kicked ass and I bought 5 more miners. March sucked again. In April we kicked so much ass I made enough buy 10 new miners. There's just no predicting it. It's just luck.

To me it always seems like every time I buy a new miner, luck turns to shit. Or every time I have an important transfer, we run into 50 minutes network block and the mempool backs up and I wind up getting my transaction stuck for an unending period of time.

So it comes down too this. Do you trust that the pool op is doing his job or not? If not, find a pool where you feel that way. If you do, then mine on and sacrifice some damn chickens.

I for one will be happy to see the accounting portion done, as it think it will make it more newbie friendly. I would also like to see the pools web front end look more polished. I know we got way more info available than any other pool. But I think the newbies, for the most part, aren't gonna see that. They need something flashy to look at. Coz we gotta grow as a pool or the variance is only gonna get worse. Surely there have to be some web page designers among us that would be willing to pitch in.

I doubt they will do that. They are creating demand for their coin. It's really the only place you can use it.

It goes like this. There is buzz that an Avalon 8 is coming out with efficiencies that could rival the S9, but maybe early next year.

The BTC price skyrockets, "someone" turns on about 2 Exahash worth of gear and drives the difficulty through the roof and creates a "gotta buy more miners" mentality. So Bitmain lists a batch of miners, but only offer BCH for payment. By the time you figure it out, too late. They sold out in 1 hour. You missed out this batch. Wait until the next one, coz now you are stuck with BCH. BCH price drops 50%, so you gotta get more to buy the same miner. If you're prepared, you buy enough to cover the short fall. If not, too bad try again next week. 1 week later, new batch comes out. Pay with your BCH.

Now for the next batch, you get prepared and buy BCH ahead of time. They are happy to sell BCH back to you for BTC. Thus creating demand. In the meantime everybody that wants a miner is buying BCH and driving the price up. We don't care as much about the exchange rate, just that the price we pay lasts long enough to be able to acquire our shiny new miner. So boom, we get the advance twitter notice and run to buy BCH so we can get more miners.

Lather, rinse, repeat...

The end result is that we helped drive up the price so that now, BCH now looks like a viable alternative. The profitability calculators kick in and tell us that we can make twice as much mining BCH as BTC. 70% of BTC hashrate switches over to BCH. It exposes BTC's "weaknesses"  and BTC becomes unusable coz the mempool backs up and the only way to get a transaction through is pay huge transaction fees. Of course, eventually our hashrate will stabilize and a new lower difficulty will kick in and the mempool will clear out. But the damage is done. The buzz for BCH has been created. How many BCH news stories did you read this morning from the "mainstream" media. I'd be willing to bet it was more than the last 3 months, since the Aug. 1 fork. The beauty for them, if it doesn't work then they try it again next week.

It's no coincidence that they have a new batch of s9's that has been available for 4 days when all previous batches sold out in hours.

So we did it to ourselves by continuing to buy Bitmain and not buying avalon or ebit miners.

BitCH crap coin's EDA just kicked in. Their diff just dropped to 190G from 522G.

Let's see how fast the hash leaves and drives transaction fees backup. Though in the short term, the high fees are good for us miners. But long term, taking too long to confirm transactions or making them too expensive will kill us. They really need to come up with a scaling solution that doesn't involve segwit. I personally love Kano's idea of 2 min block time as opposed the current 10 minute target.

I wasn't trying to single you out with my post. Just all the people who constantly post the same crap, most of whom don't even mine here. In retrospect, I probably should have picked one of their posts to quote, but I just grabbed the last one in the thread.

And I'm definitely not saying we shouldn't question what's going on with the pool. Since it is all our money we should always be questioning what's going on. When the pool op says, Ok I'm checking on it. Then reports back that everything is as it should be. You either gotta believe him or move on. Coz if you don't believe it now, nothing else they say is gonna convince you either.

This comes up at EVERY pool, anytime short term luck plummets. People come out with their conspiracies. Start pool hopping. Sacrificing virgins.

But really, in the end, it all evens out. If you look at the long term stats, they are still above the expected PPS return.

On a rare occasion, there is a problem like a block withholding attack or some other nefarious purpose/glitch in code. But at least here you know that here, the pool op is looking into it and updates you regularly with what is going on. If ever that stops happening, it is time to run. Like at Slush from dec 2015 - feb 2016. When everyone mining there got robbed. Finally after 3 months of miner complaints and being told everything is ok, they announced someone (I think it was Omega mining) with a large percentage of the hash was running hardware that could not find blocks. Then the pool op said basically, oh he didn't know. Let's just let him keep all your coins.

So really, if they can't handle the swings. STFU and move elsewhere where there will be less variance, or at least the long blocks don't last as long. But you'll be in in the dark as to what's going on.

OR Mine ON.

Oh, and sacrifice some chickens....

There are still over 100K transactions in the mempool.

Though the fees have come down some. They are nowhere near normal

BitCH crap coin difficulty just jumped from 130G to 522G.

Watch all the hash flood back into BTC. At least until their EDA kicks in, in about 1 or 2 days.

You have decide for yourself which is the most profitable to mine. As with a lot of alts, it is not that hard to game the system to manipulate price. So you need to decide what coin value will be when you go to dispose of it. Not just what the value of it is at the moment.

I think most of the people in this pool would be of the opinion that the other sha256 coins are scams that aren't worth bothering with. BCH, beyond being able to buy another miner with it from bitemain, has no proven long term value.

You need to consolidate your transactions. This is best done during a time when the network is not busy. Right now the network is clogged with transactions, so fees to transfer are very high. You can send them with a lower satoshi/byte ratio, but you will wait  for while to have your transaction confirmed. You can use a transaction accelerator like this one https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ and they would include it in the next block they mine.

Most likely it is that the first block found to start this month block originally started being worked on 10/28. So you would need to add those days in as well.

That all depends on how cheap your power is, how fast the difficulty rises, and how much the price of BTC increases. You can use one of the many mining calculators out there to figure out if it would be profitable for you.

Exactly. It is designed to prevent pool hoppers from trying to capitalize on short term runs of luck at the expense of the rest of the long term miners. 

In reality though, the ramp down period is the same 5nd. So if you leave or lose your connection to the pool due to power or network issues, the rewards continue over that period, at an ever decreasing rate, even though you are not mining.