It's not down, nor has it been down.

No, it is a terrible thing, and anybody claiming otherwise is a fool.

Should be fixed now.

Giving the post a little bump since I've noticed when the thread gets a new post there's a spike in the number of users that finish closing out their accounts.  45 days since the annoucement, 28 days since the pool shut off.  A little over 2 months left before the servers are shut down and removed from their racks at the datacenter.

I hope you're not planning to actually make any money on this...doing your research before wasting money is generally the proper order to do things in.  You'll find no shortage of people ready and willing to take your money for services which will not produce as much as what you paid them.

You bet.  Being able to sleep and leave the house without fear of a phone alarm going off because a server is under attack is a pretty nice feeling!

Even if those sites had a million users with some satoshis left over, it's barely enough to add up to more than a rounding error in the big picture.  It's hardly "profiting a lot".  They made orders of magnitude more off of 0.01-2%(+) fees off a few large users than the combined dust of every account.

Should be somewhat fixed now.  The settings page was reworked a bit with the closure (and edited a few times since) to try and make it idiot-proof.  The NMC wallet area was removed for accounts which didn't have NMC displayed.  Looks like somewhere I also ended up hiding the ability to make it show up again.  It's now under settings "Show Namecoins".

I don't see much point in B.  I doubt there has been a time in 2015 where a block has ever been solved with the mempool being *empty* of valid transactions that the pool would not include if it were operating without purposely making empty blocks to make up for poor optimization.

Similarly, I don't see why A would matter much when it's already being expressed as a percentage of their blocks solved.  The network is so big at this point that it is virtually impossible for a pool to have an empty memory pool.  Pools don't push out block templates every time they see a new transaction, so the only way it could possibly happen is if the pool pushes out a block template including their entire memory pool, and a miner solves the block, sends it back to the pool, the pool verifies it, and broadcasts that block clearing their entire memory pool before a single new transaction arrives.  Yes, it could happen, but the likelihood of that event happening enough to actually taint your results seems slim-to-none.

Just going to point out that the quote above with my comment on SPV mining is not directly related to 1tx blocks.  You can do 1tx blocks without SPV mining.

I do think that 1tx blocks are completely stupid and bad for network health, but SPV mining is at the malicious level of recklessness.

Bowing out after this response...I hope it's proven wrong, but the last 3 pages have been a nightmare.


This is a new pool that spent "days" working on their pool.  They claim to have a team of programmers, admins, and investors.  Meanwhile it took almost 2 full pages to clarify the payment method and fees.


1) Who is going to invest money into a new pool that can't even get a proper first post for its release with relevant information?  Even when there were only 3 pools back in 2011, when new pools opened up they were very clear in how they were going to pay, how they worked, and only had teams of 1 or 2 people.  These days you've had almost 5 years of pools existing to draw knowledge from, and we get a post that is clueless.

2) Who is going to pay for "programmers" that are doing nothing more than deploying something that an first-year CS student could deploy over a weekend?  This isn't a custom built pool.

3) What kind of idiot would be an "investor" in a new pool without any clear business plan or prior knowledge?



Nothing about the content of this thread thus far adds up, and if somebody actually points hardware at this pool they deserve everything that comes (or more likely: doesn't come) from it in the long run.

Yes.  Most DSL providers in the US only give 768kbps - 1.5 mbps upstream.  It is very rare for DSL to provide higher than that in the US.  If you're in an area with a cable alternative, you can get maybe 3-5 mbps upstream.  Upstream in the US is EXTREMELY low compared to downstream across the board, normally a 10:1 ratio of downstream to upstream at best.

Fiber is rolling out in VERY few areas in the US, and due to the country's size, you're unlikely to ever see it outside of larger cities, not counting the "test cities" that are lucky enough to get rollouts in smaller towns.

Wireless internet (4G) isn't an option because our data caps are also absurdly low.  While many US wireless services advertise unlimited data, ALL OF THEM are lying.  They ALL throttle you down to 3G (and even 2G) after about 5GB of data on their "unlimited plans".  Want more?  Well Verizon can sell you a 150GB 4G LTE plan...if you want to pay $750/month.  All the other carriers are similarly absurd in their pricing if you want more than 5-10 GB/month over LTE.  Oh, and that's up+down combined.

PPLNS doesn't care if you were there 100% of the block, it pays out based on share submissions over a specific time period (or in most cases, specific number of pool-wide share submissions).  The payout range on this pool is 5x network difficulty.  So your average speed over the last 247 billion share submissions (5x network difficulty) was 2.6 Th/s, because you probably have only been mining for the last ~150 billion shares (as of the last rewarded block).

FYI:  If you were to stop mining *right now*, you'd continue to get paid for your previous share submissions until 247 billion new shares have been submitted to the pool by the other users, even if 30 blocks are found before that happened.  You have a period of time required to build up your percentage of the last N shares which you were/are in.  Similarly if you stop mining, you still have a percentage of shares left in the Last N shares for a period of time.  Don't fall into the misconception that PPLNS is short-changing you when you first start.  It builds up your reward slowly, but it has a symmetrical period where you continue getting paid after stopping, the result being it doesn't matter what your mining patterns are, the expected payment for each share submission is never penalized/increased based on prior/future activity.

Doesn't change that you're advertising a 0% Fee PPS pool...and are not paying PPS in any way shape or form.  If the users have to wait for a block to be solved, it's not PPS.

0% PPS means every share submitted is paid (25 BTC / network difficulty at time of share submission).  It doesn't matter if the pool finds 50 blocks or 0, every share submitted is paid that amount.

NMC was dropped to 0.001 because of how many people were bitching about their trapped NMC worth *less than a penny*.  It was also updated so all automatic payout triggers paid out the entire balance down to 0.00000001 a few hours after the pool closed for the same reason.

Slush, Eligius, then BitMinter, in that order, at least counting the "active" pools.  There may be some between Eligius and BitMinter that are still running, but are basically abandoned and simply continue to run the owner and maybe their friends' equipment.  There was a big explosion of new pools between May and July 2011 because of the introduction of the pushpool software and the first major Bitcoin bubble.

Based on the latest post for F2Pool, they haven't stopped accepting v2 blocks.  Hell, they will accept ANY block even if it's completely invalid, because they are continuing to mine using an SPV client.

Hint:  If anybody finds out how they're listening (most likely they simply have a stratum client connected to other pools), they can broadcast a completely fake block header to the chinese pool's SPV listeners and they will begin trying to mine on this "new block" even though it doesn't even exist.

Another very good reason people should not mine on Chinese pools.  This is EXTREMELY bad for the Bitcoin network.

Can't help on this one unfortunately, I've never used p2pool so I don't have any idea how it assembles work, same with merged mining via p2pool.  Different drives for the coins is definitely one good way to split the load when new blocks hit though.