Yes, the following block would have a higher CDF if you didn't count stale blocks. So the CDF tells you how much work it took to find a block solution, not how much work it took to find a block and get it accepted in the block chain.

We could change this so a new round is not started when finding a stale block. But CDF still wouldn't be the amount of work it took to get a paying block. That's because of orphans. We could even get two orphans in a row. We could have a block go orphan and then later be on the longest chain again (no longer orphan). To make CDF only count paying blocks the data would have to be changed when blockchain reorganizations happen. It's doable, but I don't know if it's worth the effort.

There's always some stale work and blocks. The time since the previous block was found and the difficulty both don't influence stales at all.


That's a good point. I should probably either show the status for the block, or hide the bad ones from the livestats page.

Nicely done, sir 

I was just kidding. Didn't know if you guys were joking or not.

Yesterday I saw over 100 cars on the road that I didn't recognize. I think it's safe to say that it was the same guy driving all of them and that his name is "Unknown". He must be very rich to have so many cars. 

Namecoins are made at a faster rate than bitcoins because the namecoin difficulty is lower. The namecoin difficulty is lower because not everyone mining bitcoins are merged mining namecoins, so the namecoin hashrate is lower.

You can read about namecoin at namecoin.info - they are intended for .bit domains, plus there are some other ideas for their uses.

Website is up and everything looks normal.

Maybe a Spondoolies SP20 or an Antminer S-series.

Google OpenID Connect will take over for Google OpenID 2.0. So you won't notice much, I'll just update the website a bit.

But I'm wondering if I should support OpenID Connect in general or begin slowly phasing it out in favor of user name and password (with support for 2-factor auth).


When a block is found the last 10 shifts get paid. This means that if it takes a short time to find blocks some shifts get paid many times. If it takes a long time some shifts don't get paid at all.

If you mine 24/7 this doesn't matter, 1% of the pool hashrate still gets you 1% of the coins.

If you keep coming and going the short shifts we have now means you could get zero pay or extremely high pay for a couple hours of mining, and then you leave again. So since the shifts were made shorter the luck element is now stronger for part time miners. I understand some people mine part time, for instance if your electricity price changes depending on the time of day. I will make the shifts longer once we have a larger portion of the global hashrate again. They were made shorter so that it won't take a whole week from you do an hour of mining until it is out of the last 10 shifts and fully paid.

Good stuff

I spent a lot of effort trying to make Bitminter easy to use for beginners. So you could give us a try.

That said you'll probably find most pools fairly stable and fairly easy to use. So it probably comes down to personal preference.

If you try a couple different pools then you can easily observe stability and ease of use. But be careful when you compare payouts. Most beginners don't understand the different mining reward systems well and forget that daily payouts depend a lot on luck with most of them. Another popular misconception is that if you have hashrate X then a certain pool is best. The hashrate doesn't matter. The questions you are asking are much more relevant and that's a good start already.

Good luck

Be careful out there. 

But yeah, that was lucky. Good start on the new year.

Happy new year! Hopefully we'll see the BTC price go in a different direction this year.


There's always room for one more. Welcome to the pool!

Yes. It's cool that 300 000 people have used Bitminter. It would be even cooler if they were all mining right now.

Makes me wonder how many people are mining bitcoins right now, globally.

If you think most pools are scamming their miners and pocketing 40% of the mining income, and that you are the only person smart enough to realize what's going on.... chances are that you misunderstood something.

OMG. Epic face palm.

What Eleuthria said.

No bots, that I know of.

Milestone: we now have 300 000 registered users!

Disregard everything cyberpinoy is saying. CEX is a cloud mining service with huge maintenance fees. Certainly not a zero fee PPLNS pool, or any other kind of mining pool. It's not a pool.

It never was a mining pool anyway. But I see what you mean, people buy cloud mining there not to actually mine but hope to sell it to newbies at a higher price.