Congrats on finding your fourth block!

The diff starts at 65535, but will drop to 8192.  Really anything over 25 is fine.

Good luck!  Crack the block before we cross 110% and get 1BTC bonus from me

Good luck!

This is SPV mining... why would we want to take this approach?  It leads to the kind of crap AntPool, f2pool, etc are doing - i.e. empty blocks.  We are already suffering enough unconfirmed transactions - or did everyone forget the recent backlog that caused such a ruckus?

This is especially nonsensical since pools that fully validate their blocks before providing work to miners already exist (see ckpool).

$650?

I'm in for 2.

Phil, you might want to clarify the power supply is the wall wort for the Pi - not a PSU for the Avalon.  Unless you're including the Avalon PSU in the $650 price, which would be unbelievable.

For the love of the gods, do not mine on AntPool, or any other of the SPV crap cheating pools out there.  There are plenty of good pools that actually care about bitcoin, and are run by folks who know what they're doing.  Phil's given you a great starting point: kano.  He and -ck wrote the software that your miner uses, and the pool software, too.  If you want to try your luck with a smaller pool that is trying to grow, check out mine.

We just crossed 100%.  You've got to solve the block before the pool crosses 110% to get the 1BTC finder's bonus.  So, get your rentals on and crack block number 4!

Yes, I have addressed the share calculations.  When we find a block, payouts will be calculated based on 5N.

Yes it is the same fee regardless of which payment option you choose.  I have automatic payout set for myself.

When a block is found the payout cron calculates everybody's share and applies it to your balance.  If you have setup automatic payments, then if your balance is above the threshold, your balance will be sent to you when the block confirms.  If you haven't setup auto payouts, then you have to do a manual payout.  When you request the manual payment, the pool will create the transaction and send you the amount you requested.

LOL... I'd be quite content if my 20TH didn't even show up in the top 100 miners

I'm not entirely sure I understand your reply.

If miners want to effect change, they certainly can, in exactly the way I stated: stop mining on pools that either don't pay fees, or take shortcuts like SPV mining and producing empty blocks.  There are plenty of options available to them, my own pool being one.

Where does a union fit into things?  A union exists to empower laborers who would otherwise have none.  Miners have a choice of where to point their hash, and where to spend their money purchasing that hash.  If you don't like the way a pool operates, or the way a cloud mining provider operates, don't utilize their services.

AntPool keeps the transaction fees, not the 25BTC from the block.  Empty block = no transaction fees.  They have plenty of incentive.

The short answer is empty blocks are caused by lazy coding shortcuts in pool software.

1) Because there are plenty of unconfirmed transactions to include in a block. (6500 as of this post)
2) There is a min: 0.  Well, technically it's 1 because the coinbase transaction generating the block reward.  There is no excuse whatsoever for any pool to submit an empty block, yet plenty of them do.

To the user trying to connect as "avalon6", you aren't doing it properly.  You need to create an account, then create a worker called avalon6 with some password.  Let's say you create an account name of BravoMiner and a worker of avalon6 with a password of x.  To connect to the pool, you would configure your miner as follows:

URL - stratum+tcp://stratum.bravo-mining.com:3333
Worker - BravoMiner.avalon6
Password - x

Thanks!

Some of you might have noticed a failover.  I did a very quick restart of the stratum servers to enable port 3999.  This is a static diff port with a difficulty set to 999.

If you use an S2 or similar device, please point your miner to:

Hopefully this will help your miners with the abnormally high reject rates.

Hi LASERminer,

I don't personally own an SP20.  However, I did own an SP10 a couple years ago.  If memory serves me correctly, when entering the URL in the Pools tab of the miner UI, you put

Pretty sure multipool.us fits the bill for you...