Shift size has been reduced to 0.1x difficulty (10 shifts = 1x difficulty worth of work). That is 25% of the former shift size. This means the delay from you do some work until that work is fully paid will be much shorter than before. Because of the increasing difficulty this delay had grown to over 5 days. The new shift size should make the delay more reasonable.

The downside is increased short term variance. This doesn't matter if you are mining in the pool 24/7. It's the same coins being paid out, and if you have 1% of the hashrate then you get 1% of the coins. But if you mine in the pool part time then you may notice greater variance with your part time mining, meaning you can notice the good and bad luck swings more than before. The chance will be higher for shifts with very good pay, but also shifts with zero pay. This can be painful for part time miners if they mine at the "wrong" time, and don't mine during the high-paying shifts. If our hashpower increases in the future we will increase the shift size to reduce short-term variance again.

No problem - good luck

Instead of looking at how much you get for a block, it's better to look at how much you get per proof-of-work that you mined in each shift. To shift the focus over to this view, which people can understand, and away from the confusion that pay-per-block makes, I should probably remove the "expected per block" info on the website, and add info about what the pay was per proof-of-work in each shift.

Seeing this from the point of view of the work you are doing, not the blocks that are found: there is a delay from you do some work until it is fully paid. If you mine for 1 hour, we find a block, and you get a small payout, what does that mean? It doesn't mean you got a really bad pay for your 1 hour of work and you need to work for 5 days until you start being paid properly. It means your 1 hour of work just began receiving pay and it will take 5 days until that 1 hour of work is fully paid.

You also see this when you stop mining, and you keep getting paid for 5 more days. That's not the pool compensating you because it punished you in the beginning. It's the delay from work to pay.

If you do some mining on monday, you won't know what pay you get for it until friday.

Reducing the size of the shifts so you get paid 1 to 2 days after the work is done instead of 5 days and some hours later, will make this look less bad for people who misunderstand. And the website changes I am thinking of above will make it less likely that people misunderstand.

I want people to think "I did X amount of work in shift Y. How was the pay for that." Seeing mining from this angle leads to sound logic.

I don't want people to think "I got X pay for this block. Looks like I have to ramp up to full hashrate in 10 shifts before the pool pays me properly." Seeing mining from this angle leads to utter confusion and misunderstandings.

I don't think there's any pool hopping happening anymore. Probably not enough pools left that are vulnerable to pool hopping.

I use PPLNS (with shifts). You may also want to look at DGM. But I think PPLNS is simpler than DGM to understand and also simpler for users to verify. So in my opinion PPLNS is better.

The shift size isn't going to affect pool hopping, PPLNS is still safe from pool hopping.

Making the shift size extremely small I think would be a bad idea. It would scare the ones that are shocked to see a shift with zero pay. I have to balance between that and the people who think if 10 shifts take 5 days it means they have to mine 5 days with lousy pay before proper pay starts. So I try to keep it somewhere in the middle.

Here's how the psychology of variance works.

The situation: you work for one hour and get nothing, then you work another hour and get double of normal pay.

People perceive this in different ways.

Overly negative person (very common): "OMG! I worked a whole hour and got nothing!". Those people can earn millions and still feel they are losing, because there was that one little thing which was not perfect. That's why they paid a 10% fee to mine PPS at Deepbit. After months of mining it felt like nothing had gone wrong, there was not a single moment with horrible pay. That was their only focus and they were happy. Overall they got the lowest mining payouts in the history of Bitcoin.

Overly positive person (common with gamblers): "I got double pay! I really hit the jackpot this time!". These people can gamble away their entire life savings and still feel that they are winning, as long as they get a small win every once in a while in between the huge losses. That's how casinos make a lot of money. They let players win small sums frequently. That keeps them hooked and makes them gamble away all the money they can get their hands on. Even the casino making it look like the player "almost won" counts as a win in the head of some players.

The reality? Overall you got average pay. This is where rational thinking is, and this is where you want to be.

Notice how those other two people looked at only part of the picture and then got very emotional about it, while you looked at the whole picture and stayed rational. This difference is important. There are entire businesses built around taking advantage of the psychological weaknesses of those other two people.

This change reduces the time it takes from you do some work until it is fully paid. That's a good thing. Also, 10 shifts taking over 5 days has been a problem for newbies and for people who (wrongly) believe you have to work 10 shifts before getting proper pay. With the new setting it will happen more often that there is a shift without pay, but also shifts with very high pay. However, this doesn't change anything if you are mining in the pool 24/7, you earn the same anyway. It only creates short-term variance.

The size of the shifts is not really a big deal. If you have 1% of the pool hashrate then you get 1% of the payouts. That's not changing.

I'm mostly trying to find a balance between the wrong belief that "short shifts give me unfair low pay" and the wrong belief that "long shifts give me unfair low pay". So I don't have to explain things as often.

For those who prefer Linkedin, a Bitminter Linkedin page has been created at https://www.linkedin.com/company/bitminter

Friday October 3rd we'll reduce shift sizes to 25% of what they are now. That means the amount of work in 10 shifts will be 1x difficulty rather than the 4x difficulty we have presently.

It doesn't help when you drop minimum cash out to 0.0001 BTC. I've had very angry complaints from users with $0.01 worth of BTC.

Yes. This is called pool hopping. Pool hopping gives you more profit and the 24/7 miners in the pools less profit.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping

It only works if the pool's reward method is vulnerable to pool hopping. It works with the proportional method and Slush's score-based method.

Note that pool hopping is by most considered an abuse of these reward systems and very bad form. Deepbit used to ban users for pool hopping. They never switched away from the proportional method like most pools did in 2011.

Most pools stopped using this reward method in 2011 because it's vulnerable to pool hopping.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping

I guess stratum rolling wasn't such a bad idea after all

Cool! Gonna give this a try

Thanks, guys. That is very much appreciated.

And thanks to all who mine here - you are the pool

No worries. If you have any bitcoin hardware or buy any in the future, give Bitminter a try.

Bitcoin has gotten further and is having more success than ever before.

The price jumps up and down as people speculate about the future. (and manipulate markets?)

All Bitcoin mining machines are supported. All Bitcoin mining clients (software) are supported.

But ZeusMiner Blizzard is a machine for making Litecoin. Bitminter is a pool for making Bitcoin.

This is a Bitcoin mining pool. We don't do scrypt (Litecoin & co), sorry.