Pretty sure it did. It affected a few users on most pools. You can see a list of pools they targeted at the bottom of the page (URL above).

Yeah, newbies buy at these prices. Some newbies even buy hardware at 10 USD per GH/s. I'm pretty sure they didn't look at the numbers, like you are doing now.

Even 2 USD per GH/s is a horrible price. Then add on the maintenance fees.

Buy your own hardware at under 1 USD per GH/s and host it yourself if you can. That will make a huge difference with profitability. This also helps to keep mining decentralized, which is a very good thing.

So if you didn't find the block, you pay some of your income to the one who did.

Psychologically it may feel great to have a block bonus, but what it means is that you earn less all the rest of the time (when you didn't find the block). Your average earnings are the same, but the variance is increased.

There's an ad for one from spondoolies now on bitminter.com - less than 1 USD per GH/s.

Looks like Antminer S3 can also be had for under 1 USD per GH/s.

Are there more ASIC machines at a good price per GH/s ?

There is no luck debate, just like there is no debate on what 1+1 equals.

If you want to know how it works, they teach this in universities. Coursera.org has a free course on probability right now (https://www.coursera.org/course/prob). Unfortunately (if you don't speak it) it's in Chinese. Maybe some of their courses in english also cover probability. They have free courses from top notch universities around the world. I highly recommend trying them out.

There are a few miners who need to sell their bitcoins every month to pay bills. An unlucky low payout could mean having the electricity shut off or even becoming homeless. I've always recommended those people to mine in a PPS pool rather than Bitminter. In this case you just have to pay the high PPS fees to secure steady payouts, because a low payout is unacceptable, even if a high payout comes next (at which time, for them, it's already too late). Unfortunately a lot of things work this way, when you have little money things are expensive, if you had more money things would be cheaper.

Looks like Deepbit is dead. Last news was two and a half years ago. Only 229 GH/s mining there. Average time to find a block is about 1 year. They may never find another block again.

If you can get a hold of Tycho (who runs the pool) maybe he can set something up for miners to withdraw their funds.

No, calculators give you the expected average. But because of variance you don't get exactly that, but instead sometimes more and sometimes less. Unless you're mining at a PPS pool (if those even exist anymore).

So when it wasn't you that found the block, you pay a 0.5% fee to the block finder? That will just increase your variance, not give you higher payouts overall.

No poolwide issue on the 9th. Perhaps an issue on the internet between you and the server at that time.

On the 5th we had a few seconds of network instability at the server site. This causes some miners to get disconnected from the pool. It looked like all/most reconnected quickly though.

Were you not able to reach the mining server for an extended period of time?

If your client crashes when it gets disconnected, try upgrading it to the latest version. If that doesn't help, ask the people who made it if they can fix it. Unfortunately the internet will never guarantee that a TCP connection won't break at some point, requiring you to reconnect. Client software needs to deal with this, same as server software.

Some of Bitminter's backend systems are being rewritten. New live hashrates are now live. This is mostly meant to support future upgrades and users shouldn't notice much.

Hashrates below 1 GH/s won't show anymore. Mining at slower hashrates still work, you just won't see a live hashrate. The number of active users and workers shown in the live stats will also be lower as a result of this. Those below 1 GH/s are not counted.

Live hashrates should be a little more accurate.

API data returning MH/s speeds will always end in 000 (whole GH/s).

The live stats pages no longer show any decimal part on GH/s hashrates.

If you notice anything else, something not looking right, let me know.

Thanks for the kind words, Plysav.

I did put a lot of work into making Bitminter client easy to use, so that newbies would be able to mine bitcoins without first having to learn how to compile something, or even what the command line is.

You should look into ASIC mining hardware. Mining on a regular PC doesn't make sense any more. You'll pay more for the electricity than what you earn, and it will be so slow that you never get enough to cash out.

List of ASIC mining hardware: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ASIC

Edit: Note that the ASIC list above has some scams in the list, for instance Minerscube/Minersbox. Make sure you do some research first, and don't give your coins to scammers.

Server network looked like it was unstable for some seconds. Just long enough that some miners lost their connection.

If your miner(s) didn't reconnect quickly you may be running an old version of cgminer or bfgminer and need to upgrade. Old versions could get stuck on the backup pool forever or simply crash when the primary pool went down. Recent versions have much more stable backup pool support. Taking a minute or two to get back on the primary pool should be considered normal though.

Looks like the forum didn't like the URL.

Look under "my account" -> "workers" in the menu at bitminter.com. You'll see stats on your workers. Hashrates for each worker is shown as well as the work done. Change the filter at the bottom from "current round" to "all time" if you want.

Not which place you have in the list.

But your hashrate is on the live stats page: https://bitminter.com/livestats/big

So it's working?

The Bitminter mining server doesn't look at the password and a blank password is allowed. But many mining clients refuse to even try to contact the server unless you give them a password. That's why I tell people to put X, 123, or something else there. Just type something.


When you joined you got a worker, as you can see on the website. You can create more if you want.

You cannot set a password. The pool doesn't use passwords.

Pool address is mint.bitminter.com:3333

As "worker" in the avalon config you need to put your Bitminter user name, an underscore, and then a worker name. Like DrHaribo_1. If you are relatively new at Bitminter you will have gotten a worker named "1" that is also a default worker. When you have a default worker you can mine with just your user name as well. Your user name is in the upper right corner of the website when loged in. Your workers are available under "my account" -> "workers" in the website menu.

There is no password, put X or 123 or whatever you want. But don't leave it blank. Some miners refuse to work if you don't give them a password.

Sadly many miners say "pool is down" or even nothing at all if anything goes wrong. Anything at all. Very common is that you typed your user name wrong. Some users also try to mine with only the worker name. For example trying to mine with the name "1". But your user name must be in there to get the work registered with your Bitminter account.

Can you update the Bitminter minimum withdrawal to 0.0001 BTC? That's one more zero than what is in the list now.

From what I can see miners are being outright scammed by 50BTC these days. Maybe 50BTC should be removed from the list completely, or put in a "scam pools - do not use!" list at the bottom?

A couple users have told me they switched from Bitminter to Ghash because the 1% fee at Bitminter is too much in their opinion. Now they are taking a 1.5% to 2% loss to orphan blocks at Ghash and making less than they did at Bitminter. In this case profitability is the opposite of what you would think from looking at the pool list. They still look at the pool list and think their logic was sound. They may not even know what orphans are.

So here's a suggestion: remove the "pay orphans?" column and insert a new column "loss due to orphans" to the right of the "fee" column. For pools that pay orphaned blocks this can say N/A or "covered by pool". For other pools it can be the orphan rate over the last.. 3 months? Or orphan rate over a certain number of blocks.

If you wanted to get really advanced perhaps it would be possible to calculate a profitability value based on fees, loss to stale work, loss to orphans, income from merged mining, cash out fees, etc. This would be a lot more work though.

Try the bitcoin beer index: http://www.bbeer.org/

Welcome to Bitcoin mining

Note that CPU and GPU use more in electricity than what you earn. When buying ASIC devices make sure you compare the price per GH/s - it can vary greatly.

Hi,

that's not supported, sorry.

You can try bfgminer or cgminer instead. Connect to stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333