Past luck doesn't affect future luck.

This is very important to understand. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

You can't switch to a luckier pool, and switch back when luck returns. That's not how luck works.

There is no such thing as pool X having good luck right now. There is only: pool X had good luck the last few hours, but noone knows what luck they will have in the next hours.

If you can tell what luck someone is going to have in the future then by definition we are not talking about luck but something else.


The last few days we had some bad luck. But the last month overall was lucky. You have to expect a few unlucky days. Not all days can be lucky. "I'm not lucky every day" does not mean the same as "I'm unlucky every day". Even if it may feel that way sometimes.

Yes, the payouts have been good, and that's probably the most important thing to a miner.

I understand it's frustrating when the unlucky blocks take a long time though. We'll need to increase the hashpower to make them pass faster.

Install this driver: http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBtoUARTBridgeVCPDrivers.aspx

You can run it with Bitminter client.

To control the clock settings click the little green arrows to expand the U2 display, then the wrench to access the device settings.

Recording of some data for the block at height 310997 was delayed. It's now listed with much more work than was actually spent, meaning the calculated CDF and average hashrate for the round are also too high. The next block we find will come out with numbers too low. I'll correct the work amounts recorded on the blocks manually after that.

Note that this is only an issue for statistics. It doesn't affect payouts in any way.

Some data about who made that one block is not updating properly. Will be fixed soon.

It doesn't really help with payments. Higher difficulty means you use less bandwidth (less network traffic), but also your variance will go up. That means the daily variance in your earnings will vary more, depending on your luck in finding proofs of work, than if you had a lower difficulty.

The mining server will automatically adjust your difficulty to a level that is a good trade-off between bandwidth usage and variance. Normally it starts you on difficulty 4 (currently) and ramps up the difficulty from there. By setting a minimum difficulty you can make the first minute or two of mining smoother by starting directly at a difficulty that fits your miner. The minimum difficulty is also useful for broken mining clients (like on the Dragon ASICs) that use a difficulty from their web interface configuration and ignore the difficulty the server is telling it to use (a complete violation of the Stratum protocol). In this case make sure you set the minimum difficulty for your Bitminter worker to the same difficulty in the Dragon web interface. Otherwise you may lose most of your work and mining income. And/or ask the manufacturer to repair their software.

General advice, set your minimum difficulty to your hashrate in GH/s divided by 1.4.

Info on difficulty, work submits per minute and the easy mode perk:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg3142713#msg3142713

Maintenance 2014.07.18 14:00 UTC. Expected mining downtime 1 to 5 min.

Mining server needs a bit more work. Miners will get disconnected for a short moment. I expect you probably won't really notice this.

Are those on the same network, same IP address?

Minersbox (formerly Minerscube) looks like a total scam. Don't give your coins to scammers.

It should not be confused with ASICMiner Cube, which is a real product.

When you are buying mining hardware please remember that most offers are scams. Most mining hardware "companies" are scams. Not a few. Most. The safe route is to buy from companies that have delivered in the past and where the customers have been happy. If you pre-order from a company that has never delivered anything before, then you have to be very careful and do some research. Most of those are scams, remember?

If their WHOIS listing is anonymous ("privacy protect", "whois guard", etc), their website has no contact information, their machines are faster than all competitors, their machines use a fraction of the electricity of competing products, their prices are way too low, their webpage has a paypal logo but they don't actually accept paypal payments (see their FAQ), their emails to potential customers (which you can read elsewhere on bitcointalk) reveal that they don't know which proof-of-work algorithm bitcoin uses, they don't seem to understand what an ASIC is, and they give some crazy stories to explain the other suspicious aspects..... add all this up and you should realize it's a scam. Not just a scam, but a poorly presented scam by an inexperienced con man.

Even if you wanted to get scammed, there are better ASIC scams out there.

Yeah, last 1.5 week has been pretty good.

Although some would disagree, as they go by these rules:

We have awesome luck: "things going as expected"
We have good or average luck: "luck is awful right now"
We have bad luck: "this is statistically impossible - something must be wrong"

It's surprising how many people think this way, as I have learned from running Bitminter for over 3 years.

Thanks to TaggedYa for slamming in a second block after just 7 minutes.

CDF 0.8% means:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Sxv-sUYtM

When you're buying mining equipment, make sure you compare price per GH/s (remember to add power supply, if not included), electricity usage, etc.

There are some very bad deals out there, which can never break even. Whether you pay $10 per GH/s or less than $1 per GH/s is important.


Last 10 days we found 19 blocks, so 1.9 blocks per day. The average we can expect with our hashrate currently is 1.6 blocks per day. I wouldn't call 1.9 "crap". Or 1.72 blocks per day the last 11 days, which is still good. Depending on whether 1.5 weeks is 10 or 11 days.

Try not to focus only on the unlucky rounds. It will make you think you are having bad luck when you're actually being lucky.


No, past luck has no impact on future luck. Thinking so is called "gambler's fallacy", which you can read about on Wikipedia.

Every time you play the lottery or roll the dice your chance of winning is the same. It doesn't matter whether you won or lost the previous time(s).

Reward graph is looking pretty good (last 500 shifts):

https://bitminter.com/stats/rewards

So payouts have been good lately.

Unlucky blocks take longer than lucky blocks. That can give you the impression that you're having bad luck all the time. Don't let that fool you though.

It's a real pain that every manufacturer is inventing their own protocols for this. I don't have time to add them all.

It looks like the Rockminer R-box is a popular product, I may look into that first.

You'll need to get that device running with bfgminer or cgminer. Maybe someone here has the same machine and can help?

Those are not supported (at least not yet) in Bitminter client. You'll have to try bfgminer or cgminer. There are links to those on the front page of bitminter.com.

Upgrades (as previously announced) went smooth. Looks like most miners came back after being disconnected for the upgrade. If yours didn't, you'll want to have a look at them.

The rest looks normal and works, but the gauges have disappeared?

This has happened before with some old Linux distros.

Which operating system are you using, and which version of Java?

Maintenance 2014.07.11 14:00 UTC. Expected mining downtime 1 to 5 min.

Software upgrade on the mining server. You should probably not even notice this. But if you've had problems with your miner(s) crashing when they get disconnected from the pool, then you'll want to watch out (and report the issue to whoever makes your software).

I have no idea what's causing that. It doesn't look like other users are having the same problem.

If you want to test that things are working, connect with putty and paste in these two lines:

Alternatively, replace test with your own user_worker name.

You'll see the pool setting the difficulty and sending you work data for mining. You'll get disconnected after some time, for not doing any work, but it should work well enough as a test.

If that's working but your miner says the pool is dead, then I don't know ...

Trace is looking good. Could you also try pinging for a while and see if there is packet loss? And try a telnet to mint.bitminter.com 3333 if you can, and see if you get connected or it times out.

Could you do a traceroute on mint.bitminter.com next time this happens? From the same network location as your miners. Hopefully that can reveal where the problem is occurring.

Also could be useful to know if you are getting timeouts or other network errors. But I guess bfgminer/cgminer just says "pool X is dead" without any further information.

Doesn't look like it's related to the ddos protection. Last ddos attempt was a full month back.