Just signed up, and I wanted to confirm something real quick.

I set a donation amount to 0.5. The label to the left says "Donation %", so my assumption is that this would mean I've elected to donated half a percent. Is that correct?

Just making sure I didn't read that wrong and accidentally elected to donate 50%, lol.

I didn't realize this pool's had bad "luck" for 3+ months!

Not to get all conspiracy theorist here, but it does make one wonder if someone's dipping their fingers into the pot. When a pool has 6.3 PETAhashes (or 18% of the total network), you'd expect variance to level out sometime short of 1/4 of a year!

I'm sorry guys, a 3% fee and inexplicably horrible variance.... yeah, I'm outta here.

I'm confused, why are you wasting your money/time with GPUs?

1 and 2 TB drives IF (and big IF) you're assuming people prefer archaic rotating hard disks. For a LOT of applications people have moved to solid state drives. Having a 20GB mess of junk on my 400GB SSD is EXPENSIVE.

If Bitcoin is to attract the masses, we (collectively) cannot assume that everyone uses a computer the same way.

For me, the blockchain has gotten STUPID the past year and a half.

Current network hash rate is about 30 PH/s, so you're talking about a decrease in hashing power of 30 fold.

Difficultly adjusts so that blocks are completed on average about once every 10 minutes, therefore abruptly reducing the hash rate will result in blocks taking 30 times long... so blocks will take about 5 hours. Since difficulty only adjusts every 2016 blocks, it could take up to 420 days for difficulty to adjust to a sane level.

Yeah, we should probably keep hashing away.

You're right, but keep in mind that there are a lot of people who only want to "dip their toes" in Bitcoin at first. So, buying a $15 BE off ebay is actually a sane way to do that.

Now, continuing to do that once they're ready to swim out in the deep end is wasteful.

Thanks for posting how this works... it was very confusing to see it stuck at the same number, lol. Now I understand!

I'd expect a lot of stales. The Pi is a GREAT little device, but I doubt it has enough oomph to handle everything a pool server needs.

For example, bitcoind is going to have to be running in the background staying up to date. The memory requirements alone are kinda pushing it for the Pi, but you're probably good... but, then comes the disk access for syncing the blockchain. The SD card isn't going to take too kindly to that, plus the CPU is going to by busy verifying new blocks and any incoming shares.

All this, BEFORE even adding a pool server.

It'd be cool to try, and would for sure LOVE to hear how it goes, but I (personally) wouldn't give it high odds of working out well.

Starting to think paying 3% to BTCGuild isn't for me (I never make use of their notifications, etc).

I was curious how everyone likes it over here at BitMinter? Especially interested in opinions from those who've mined both here and BTC Guild for a good comparison.

It's never a good sign when the pool op goes dark, and payouts stop working.

I'd personally pull all my miners from deep bit (if I had any on them) until this situation is resolved.

X2

Good luck op, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over this venture.

Orphans to whom? Clearly they don't think they're orphans 

Bwahahahahaha

Thank you!

Out of personal curiosity, does anyone know of any schematics for a USB ASIC miner?

I'm curious about them, and was hoping someone either reversed engineered one of these suckers or that an open source (hardware) miner existed.

Well said, and exactly the reason I avoid bfgminer.

That said, I don't think the type of people who'd take offensense to BFG would likely be installing a miner.

Just my 2-bit-cents.

Let's do this!

this:


and:


To tie the second bolded text back into your first bolded text, it's not so much the +/- swing, it's that with smaller hash rates you're "rolling the dice" less often, and thusly (as you alluded to in the first bolded text) might not levelize for a VERY long period of time.

I'm sure you knew that, but since they were separated in your post I figured I'd point that out in case others didn't pick up on that.

The target your miner is referring to is the artificially lower pool share target. Unless your solo mining your miner has no idea what the true target (difficulty) of Bitcoin is.

Ummm... What?

Firstly, the "age of GPUs" has long since passed, and secondly if you're solo mining (even back in the "age of GPUs"), you might as well just play the lotto.

Sorry, but a few thousand kilohashes isn't going to find any blocks this side of forever.

No worries 

From crunching the numbers, I think I'd feel ok with the variance at 22 GH/s at current pool difficulty. It's just a hobby anyway, and it'll all even out in the end.