This is only for Dragon ASIC devices. I'm not sure if there are any other ASIC machines with the same problem.

The Dragon machines have a broken implementation of the stratum mining protocol.

With Dragon miners you have to choose in the Dragon miner's config which difficulty to mine at. The server will tell the Dragon miner to switch difficulty. Dragon miner doesn't care. Dragon miner will mine at the wrong difficulty and throw away most of your work.

Example: If the pool tells your Dragon to mine at difficulty 32 but the device's config is set to difficulty 512, then the Dragon machine will happily throw away most of your work and the pool will show you mining at a very low speed.

Solution: set the minimum difficulty for your Bitmitner worker to the same difficulty you have chosen in the Dragon miner config, or higher. You can do this under "my account" -> "workers" in the bitminter.com website menu. Click the gears icon to access the settings for a worker. Also contact the manufacturer and ask them to properly implement the stratum protocol.

If you have one or more of these horribly broken machines, make sure you follow the solution above.

If you don't have this specific mining hardware, don't worry about it.

That's position 1423 among the users, not the workers. But still, yes, there is a long tail of very slow users.

I don't understand how the dragons are even able to detect that they are sharing the same worker. That sounds impossible. So I don't understand how they can have a problem with sharing workers.

Just make sure you set a worker difficulty on bitminter.com for their worker that is the same or higher than the difficulty set in the dragons' configs, to prevent them from throwing away valid work.

Live stats improved.

• Your place on the top50 list is highlighted. If you are not among the top 50 fastest users you will appear at the bottom of the table below place 50.
• Timestamps (on blocks etc) are now replaced by dates when they are over 24 hours old.
• For the round stats, reject numbers are aligned with accept numbers.

If you're not seeing the changes after reloading the livestats page, try flushing your browser cache.

We'll now confirm blocks at 100 confirmations (was 120)

Stale work means stale blocks. It's not shown in most mining pools, they just throw them away silently. Stale work and stale blocks happen once in a while. There's no income from this.

New version up and running on the mining server.

Namecoin malfunctioning constantly rather than frequently should no longer affect us. Knock on wood.

I'm just fixing the Bitminter bug that is triggered by prolonged namecoin instability. I'm hoping someone else will fix the namecoin bug.

The problems with namecoin continue:

http://blog.namecoin.org/post/95529789755/aggregation-update

I have found an issue in the Bitminter pool software that is affected by the namecoin instability. I'm testing out a fix now.

You will get disconnected one more time later today (hopefully in the next couple hours) when the new mining server version goes live. Sorry for the short notice. It's only a downtime of 2 seconds though, and the purpose is to improve stability.

The coloring for CDF is 0-33% green, 33-66% black, and 66-99% red.

On average it is expected that each of the three colors will have the same number of blocks.

Some are reporting problems moving their namecoins. This is a general problem on the namecoin network right now.

Look at the blocks mined lately here:

http://explorer.namecoin.info/

At the time I write this only 5 blocks were mined over the last 5-6 hours. And they are all empty (only 1 transaction which is the coinbase, the transaction generating new coins).

The two blocks before that, with 139 and 249 transactions, were mined at Bitminter.

So the namecoin world moves very slowly at the moment. Transactions are piling up and not being included into blocks.

The problem is probably related to this:


With the namecoin software malfunctioning constantly at most pools it becomes difficult to mine any namecoin blocks.

Thanks, very useful info

Apologies - I had to disconnect everyone from the mining server. I have collected some data to analyse to figure out what the problem is.

Not sure if it is related to namecoind going crazy. For the last couple days all the namecoind nodes I have are very frequently running at 100% CPU usage and becoming unresponsive. Anyone else running namecoind seeing the same?

It sounds logical and I would have done the same, but the problem is that collecting lots of tiny payments in your wallet gives you a "wallet full of pennies" and you are forced to pay high fees to send those coins elsewhere later. This is because your transactions will be large when they are combined from many tiny amounts. Many people had problems with this after using "get free bitcoins" websites.

Unstable network at our hosting provider this morning. Looks like they are getting it under control though.

Let me know if you have problems connecting, please.

Sorry that I had to disconnect everyone from the mining server for a sec. Mining should now be ok again. Something was causing the pool software some instability.

It may be related to the namecoin software crashing about 10 times so far today. Although the pool usually runs fine during that, the namecoin software doesn't normally crash that many times in the same day, so it may be related. I'll track the issue down and prevent it from happening in the future.

Apologies for the bumpy ride this evening.

Happy to see miners quickly reconnecting after a disconnect though. It wasn't like that in the olden days.

Hang on.. looking into it.

Looks like we had a short issue where many miners got disconnected, but where quickly back on again.

2 @ 0.24

Runs fine on Ubuntu. Should be fine on Debian too.

You will need Java Webstart installed, not just Java itself. Ubuntu likes to split that off in a separate package - Debian is probably the same. Once you have Java Webstart working, Bitminter client will run fine.