I don't know of any pool that charges you for withdrawing your balance. Nearly every site (which has fees) takes them automatically from your earnings and that's the only thing you pay for.

Note that if your pool operator pays a 0.01 BTC transaction fee for each withdrawal so his customers get their payments faster, it's rude to make withdrawals of 0.01-0.02BTC even if you are a small time miner.
That's shooting yourself in the foot, instead of waiting for a .10 or .20 balance, you make the operator .01 poorer every time you make tons of small withdrawals

(If it gets abused, that payment method will disappear and you'll get withdrawals slower at zero fee)

If there's no fee and payouts are sent out as-is, then the pool OP prob. is fine even with single bitcent withdrawals

It means you're solving shares ~10% faster than your card should be, in that timeframe.

You might also see it dip to 550-480 during unlucky streaks, that's normal.
As long as the submitted shares count matches the one displayed by your client everything is working fine

The only pool where I consistently get 99-100% of my expected earnings in the long run is Eligius with their SMPPS system. I'm constantly leaving prop. pools for other types due to the massive variance that occurs at current difficulties + losses from pool hoppers

I'm also looking into Mineco.in right now which has a PPLNS payment scheme,
far as I can tell from reviewing the idea for a few days, it's better than any other system in existence right now

Which is why PPS based payment schemes & it's variants (like on mineco.in and eligius & deepbit, 3 different PPS methods)
are superior and will eventually prevail over the long term.

When all shares are of equal value, you get paid for the work you do; Not for being opportunistic. Doesn't matter if the CDF is 0.1% or 99.9%, if the round has taken 2 minutes or 20 hours.

Is the whitelist based on last 24 hours or during your post?

Due to the downtime my tracked average dropped by multiple ghash.

Why does bitcoin attract so many loonies and mentally unstable people?

The million monkeys writing Shakespeare's full productions theorem is infeasible, because there is a practically zero chance (3.4 ×10^183,946) of it happening from today until the heat death of the universe even if all the million monkeys could punch in 1,000 letters per second.
http://skylla.wz-berlin.de/pdf/2002/ii02-101.pdf

A SMPPS pool running 500 BTC negative is a very real chance (while -5000 or -50000 is a minuscule, very improbable event). That would be enough to drive away most dedicated miners.

Satoshi has probably created his difficulty model upon the expectation that processing power will really double in performance every 2 years.

Think 1.6 million difficulty in January 2009, people would simply quit mining because even the most expensive GPUs back then before the 5xxx series was released, cost about $300-$400 and only yield about 100mhash/s.

Doesn't sound so bad now that you can buy two 5830's for about 200 bucks and stretch them to 600mhash/s.

Similarly 160 million difficulty wont sound so bad many years in the future when you can get a fairly cheap GPU doing 10ghash/s,
but sounds like a nightmare to someone who only has access to year 2011 gpus doing a few hundred mhash/s

I can't find Rosenfeld's post right now, but is it not true that the statistical possibility of a negative and positive buffer balance is equal?

(I.e. we could just as well be -300BTC in the red right now, and in the worst case, many thousands of BTC negative, because the buffer would stabilize to around +-0BTC only over a very large sample)

In the best case Eligius would have a buffer of thousands of bitcoins, and in the worst case during continuous bad luck, the buffer would run negative into the thousands which would make very many miners impatient & abandon the pool -> It would die from a lack of miners.

Obviously, it's very unlikely the buffer will run into thousands of BTC (negative or positive). I'm definitely not counting on it and neither should anyone else
But the possibility always exists which makes SMPPS flawed in the super-long term (years), unless you autorevert to proportional payout every time it goes too much into negative balance

If Moore's Law for semiconductors holds true in the future, then 9000mh/s dual GPU cards would become a reality (in theory) in roughly 7 years. Currently the best dual GPU does about 800 mh/s.

A 9 thash/s card will never happen with current silicon based GPUs. When we move onto 3d and carbon based resistors on graphene wafers after the 11nm process in 2015-16, we could see a limitless expansion of GPU computing power.

I haven't seen plans by AMD, but Nvidia is planning their graphene GPU technology 'Echelon' for 2018, the first chips are said to achieve 10 teraFLOPS of computing power, which is 400 times more powerful than a Radeon 6990. They will also use 20 times less energy than todays GPUs

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210815/Nvidia-describes-10-teraflops-processor

Prop. is vulnerable to pool hoppers, people who will be dedicated miners at your pool 24/7 will be earning about 10-15% less due to people who attempt to exploit fresh shares at the beginning of rounds then abandon the pool

In other words, your users are being robbed in the long run. It has been explained countless times, read Reikokus explanation on this topic.
https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24966.0;all

Share price based distribution models are the future, people only get paid for the work they do, not for being opportunists.
By mining 24/7 at prop. pools only, you might just as well be paying 10-15%+ fees just to get your fair share

Nothing wrong with mining proportional in general (I do it too), just don't put all your eggs in one basket

300BTC is not really that big of a buffer. It will be easily depleted within a few very unlucky rounds at current hash rate.

If it grows large enough (say 1000+ or whatever LukeJR is comfortable with), some of it could be redistributed back to users.
This has a problem though, it will encourage pool hoppers to jump on Eligius during good luck streaks (because they know the next few blocks will distribute extra earnings),
unless the extra buffer is only distributed to people who have consistently submitted shares to the pool in the last week etc.

Also, according to Meni Rosenfeld's theory, the risk/probability of catastrophic failure in SMPPS payment schemes reaches 1 (or 100%) given an indefinite amount of time. Which means the pool would revert to proportional, and nobody wants that.

Why are body parts porn for some people? Why is skin made out to be something dirty or objectable?
Do you walk around in a potato bag?

I don't see it as any different than the extremists who flog people (well, women really) in islamic states just for unveiling their face for a second to catch a breeze in the burning desert.

Fuck your world view. Really.
Go to Sudan, Congo or the Amazon and tell all those people they're indecent & lewd for walking around with no clothes in 55c temperature all their life.

Here. Here is some porn for you.


(I do realize the OP might be fishing, so no I'm not mad)

No you are not.
If someone is doing a valuable service to the community, they will be *asked* if they wish to recieve donations. They wont even need to advertise an address.

Begging for bitcoins on the forum is scummy and cheap.

Workstation cards like Nvidia Tesla M2090 are horrible for integer calculation like bitcoin mining. They will yield about 200-300 mhash/s but cost $7k to $20k dollars.

They have phenomenal performance for single and double precision floating point operations though (1 Nvidia Tesla M2090 card @ 1300gigaFLOPS equivalent to over 200 radeon 6990's)

Substantial amount of getworks per second & the use of VPN/proxy suggests an inefficient, large CPU miner network (very likely botnet),
probably selecting this pool for maximum efficiency due to 0% fees.

Maybe a script can be made which restricts getworks based on total valid shares being submitted from that IP range
(because bots will only be sending a few shares per hour due to a majority of infected computers being CPU's only, leading to a very inefficient workload which stresses the server)

you joined 4 days ago lol

Then again the buyer is shady as hell too, if the funds don't clear, I'd only send a card paid with BTC & refund or dispute the dwolla payment

Try us.mining.eligius.st, it should be working fine. I've had zero downtime for days.

ps. If you want to check your stats & whether miners are active just write http://eligius.st/~artefact2/5/[btc address] in a browser.

They are not "rants". I have mined on bitcoins.lc almost since day one and never had a single issue before.
I'm fully aware of the overall pool luck which is normal.
The troubles didn't begin at the start of 1.56m difficulty. It began maybe a week ago.

You might be mining just for fun.
Some people can't risk instability and 0.5+BTC losses per round (will you mine at this hash rate not knowing whether a long block is actually 3 different blocks when you need currency to keep your mining operations going in the short term?)

This is not some game.
Bringing up potential issues like downtime, missing blocks etc. so far have all proven to be correct so you have nothing to complain about.
Jine has in fact admitted those issues mostly.

You never know if the workers are even working on a block. Stales go through the roof.
Multiple rounds become stacked as a huge round & you never know if an ultra-long round is even genuine or if it's just variance.
Maybe 3 rounds disappeared for all eternity as unclaimed blocks, untracked by the software. Maybe they didn't.

I check up on workers, just to see they had 'connection problems' for the last 5 hours even after patches, and the pool is not even under DDoS.
It gets solved for a day or two & begins again.

The pool has degenerated into solving less blocks than pools 5-10x smaller.
http://pident.artefact2.com/pool/Bitcoins.lc

Fact is, I don't want to quit. Seems many other people are not quitting either.
But this stuff adds up to huge losses over mining at other pools & is soon not worth the 0% fee perk.

Not everyone is casually mining with a CPU, this is starting to cost hundreds of dollars in the short term
unrecoverable even by a few lucky rounds.