If you and a friend walk into a casino, your friend bets 100 USD and wins 1 USD, you bet 1 USD and win 100 USD. How can this be right?

I don't think the casino would even bother to explain it. They would look at you for a moment, and decide you have had enough to drink.

It's random. This is why you mine in a pool.

Some users get a lot more pay than the blocks they find, some get a lot less. This is how pools work.

95% CDF doesn't mean there is 95% probability that the person is a scammer. If you mine long enough, it will happen to you. It doesn't mean you are a scammer. 5% of the time your luck is expected to be that bad.

Looks like Entropy has more than one account at the pool. I apologize to Entropy for saying he's not mining here. It was stupid of me to assume he's not mining just because he's not mining with his old account.

I encourage those who called flound1129 a scammer as soon as he hit slightly bad luck to apologize as well. That wasn't a good assumption either.

No, they can't keep the 25 BTC from blocks they find. They can send the block to the pool or throw it away. Only those two options.

They haven't found 4 BTC blocks yet. They did find two NMC blocks in quick succession which is good luck on their part.

Note that the CDF on the blocks relate to pool luck as a whole. Even though the second NMC block of those two I am talking about was unlucky for the pool as a whole, it was lucky mining by multipool to find it that quickly.

A long time ago the pool hit some bad luck. There was a similar discussion about how bad luck can never happen unless there are bugs (or block withholding attacks). Entropy decided that since the pool was having bad luck that must mean it is broken and so he left for another pool. He's not carrying any asses, fat or not.

Sometimes bad luck is just bad luck.

Most people can do simple math but have no understanding whatsoever of probability theory. Listen to what Organofcorti is saying. He is one of the very few people on this forum who does understand it.

Apologies for downtime today.

Looks like a network issue of some sort with one of the servers.

More redundancy is coming soon to prevent this sort of thing!

It's not supported currently. I don't have a unit or know much about them. I may add support if I get the time, but I don't have immediate plans for that at this moment.

Did you mean to say something?

The post I was replying to there, almost 3 years ago, has been deleted. But I believe it was someone suggesting that if only Bitminter client was allowed on Bitminter, then it would prevent DDoS attacks.

Glad you like it

You can read about namecoins at namecoin.info and get a wallet. Or if you just want to sell them for bitcoins, you can send them directly to an exchange that takes namecoins.

Yes, I am. Is there something I haven't done that you would do with every miner who is slightly unlucky, if it was your pool?

If a pool only allows miners with good luck, and kicks you out as soon as you have slightly bad luck, is there really any point to that pool?


Yes, I've been watching that. And today I read at Reddit that someone is doing the same with Ghash. On purpose. And encouraging others to do the same.

This is not a good development.

But accusing anyone who hits slightly bad luck is not the solution.

I believe there was a proposal to make block withholding impossible, but it required a hardfork. Maybe that's what needs to be done.

We had some good luck and then some even luck. We haven't been having bad luck for some time. Look at the reward graphs at https://bitminter.com/stats/rewards

The slightly bad luck I was talking about was Multipool alone. With their mining alone it is slightly bad luck that they haven't found a block yet. Which is completely normal.

The pool as a whole is currently having even luck, though, because others are finding blocks. Some miners in the pool are having good luck while others have bad luck. The pool is evening this out. This is one of the nice things that pools do.

The reward model at Bitminter does not punish you for coming and going. You can mine part time at the pool and the pay is still fair. Mining more does not change the pay you are going to get for the mining you already did. Like Blackjack, the hands you already played are done, there is no way to influence the winnings any more for those hands. But unlike Blackjack, the winnings have not been revealed yet. If you mine 12 hours per day at Bitminter, then you will on average make 50% of what you would get for mining 24/7. I say on average because the luck during the 50% you mine may not be the same as the 50% you don't mine. But over time that will even out.

Bitminter is not vulnerable to pool hopping. That's a technique where you hop between pools, timing it so that you get paid more than your fair share. The reward model at Bitminter was chosen specifically to make this impossible. Whether you earn more or less at Bitminter when you jump in and out of the pool is completely random. There is no way to predict whether mining pay at Bitminter in the next few hours will be higher or lower than other pools. Pool hopping was a way that some miners earned a lot more bitcoins at vulnerable pools, at the cost of the miners who were not pool hopping. I believe there are still a couple pools that are vulnerable to pool hopping. But the art/scam of pool hopping seems to be forgotten - I don't think any miners are doing it anymore.

You could try to switch between pools based on religious or superstitious beliefs. Maybe you believe luck is not random but related to karma or sin. Or maybe you believe that past luck influences future luck (this is called Gambler's Fallacy, you can read about it on Wikipedia). Maybe you belong to a Cargo Cult (also on Wikipedia) - you saw someone restart his miner and then he found a block. Now you believe restarting the miner increases the chance of finding blocks. All those beliefs go against all logic and science. I have never heard of anyone who is able to earn more bitcoins this way. But if you want to try it, you can. Bitminter won't punish your earnings for mining part time in the pool.

There's currently a 1% fee for all users in the pool.

No, you can't submit the same work to two different pools. It would just get rejected at one of the pools.

Yes, you CAN split your hashrate and mine in multiple pools at the same time.

No, you can't mine in a pool and when you find a block take the coins for yourself.

Yes, you CAN mine in a pool and when you find a block throw it away so noone gets it. Those guys mining at BTCGuild had a bug in their mining software that was throwing away block solutions. Their ASIC chips were finding blocks but their software kept throwing the blocks away.

With the work Multipool has done at Bitminter so far without finding a block, I guess the CDF for that is around 70%. That's slightly bad luck. No, it's not always a rat if you have slightly bad luck. Look at all the blocks we had with much higher CDF than that. For 3 years now some people have thought the pool was broken every time we had slightly bad luck. And many people were absolutely certain the pool was broken every time we had very bad luck. It turns out that bad luck happens once in a while when you repeatedly roll the dice. And slightly bad luck is extremely common. So far that's all we are seeing, an extremely common event.

Let's be rational about this. What we have seen so far is extremely common. It would be a mistake to interpret the numbers as "so extremely rare that it is suspicious". That would be very very far from reality. It would be like finding a sea shell on the beach and calling every news agency to inform them. You may think it's the same as finding a sea shell in outer space. They won't agree. They'll hang up on you.

Most people have a very hard time trying to understand probability. That's how Las Vegas was built. I'm not good at it myself. First step, do like me and admit it to yourself.

You can't keep the coins from the block for yourself. That is impossible. But you can throw the solved block away. This is what the broken mining software was doing with BTCGuild.

$14,700 for the miner and $1,280 for the pool, that seems like a steep fee. 8.635% fee?

I'll have to look into how much work this would be to support. I'm unsure if there is actually much interest, though, and probably only for hardware which have very low hashrate.

Yeah, this is the place


Not yet.


Working on some backend changes - haven't started on the next miner version yet.


It's hard to predict how miners react to fee changes. Also, most miners don't care if a pool gets too big. Sad but true. I'm considering a few options to grow the pool going forward. Nothing decided yet, though.

Do you type in the "stratum+tcp://" with the S1? Some software doesn't like the prefix and only wants mint.bitminter.com:3333


Thank you. Welcome to the pool

Strange that OpenCL crashes - there is no OpenCL support on HD 3200 I thought.

If you have some ASIC hardware (not the HD 3200 GPU) that you want to mine on you could try bfgminer instead. There's currently no way to tell Bitminter client to not check for OpenCL hardware.

If you don't have ASIC, look at the list here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ASIC

GigaBit, I didn't change anything on the servers. It may have been one of your ASICs not running well. If it happens again have a look at whether there's any hardware producing a lot of hardware errors.

Anyway, good that the problem went away. Welcome to the pool

You have broken graphics drivers from AMD. Try the latest drivers from amd.com, or if that fails try the latest beta version (same download page).

The server can handle a few hundred thousand more connections with no problem. There are fewer connections and fewer people/workers mining than in a very long time.

All Bitminter servers have hardware suitable for the job they do. Configurations, including Linux kernel parameters, have been tweaked to run well with the hardware in use and to handle high loads.

I never said higher bitcoin difficulty should mean that your hashrate is reduced. Your hashrate is unaffected.

Other miners are not seeing the problem you have. See for example what philipma1957 just posted.

When we reached 1 PH/s the load on the server was lower, not higher, than before.

Now imagine on your gaming server you had 10 000 people playing and everything is fine. Later, with no changes to hardware or software, you have 5 000 people playing and one of them is having a problem. If your conclusion is that this one person has a problem because your game cannot handle 5 000 people playing, then your conclusion is probably wrong.

The web server estimates your hashrate based only on accepted work. The most common reasons that you would see a lower hashrate on the web server than your actual hashrate is rejected work or hardware errors. Since you are not getting much rejected work, have you checked how much is lost due to hardware errors?