Thanks for the support, notreplay, and welcome to the pool !

We have a new fast mining server up and running in Winnipeg, Canada.

This should be a good option for the new mining operations currently starting up in Canada. It can also be a good option for some miners in the US, depending on where they are located.

You can connect your ASIC miners to the new Canadian server at ca1.bitminter.com:3333

Thanks a lot for the support, ehawaii !

I see you already got some good advice for buying a miner. Good luck

Differences in payouts will be mostly due to luck.

We use PPLNS with shifts. Your work gets registered in shifts. When someone mining in the pool finds a block you get paid. Your share of the coins from the block depends on your share of the work done in the last 10 completed shifts.

All work is paid the same way. As long as it is among the last 10 completed shifts when a block is found, it gets its share of the coins from the block.

There is no punishment if you stop mining. But of course, if you stop mining then you do less work, so you get paid less. Your old work will be fully paid after a while (no longer in the 10 latest shifts). After that you don't get paid unless you mine more. All work is paid equally, but once it is paid, it's paid.

Bitminter is a smaller pool, but going for a comeback now. In the last 2-3 weeks we have gone from 2 PH/s to 4 PH/s. We're now on our way to 5 PH/s (5000 TH/s). Join us and help us push back up to a good hashrate.

Bitcoin Cash may get added in the future. But every new fork popping up will not be supported. Make sure you cash out your coins from Bitminter to a wallet where you control the private keys. You will then be able to follow all the forks that happen after that.

Today Bitminter experienced a critical failure with a central server.

The website was inaccessible for 1 hour 10 minutes. Mining was down for 13 minutes.

We apologize for the down time. Mining services are top priority and can normally be isolated from issues like this. But in this instance it was not possible to do so completely.

For smaller amounts please use "my account" -> "send coins" in the website menu.

There probably won't be a smaller amount than 0.01 where Bitminter will pay the transaction fee for you when you cash out.

An improvement might be the option of setting a lower auto cash out threshold but that in this case a fee would be deducted from your account when the auto cash out happens. On the other hand, many would probably be unhappy with this as it would sometimes trigger when there is extreme transaction spam, several hundred thousand backlogged transactions in the bitcoin network, and very high fees.

These days in bitcoin the transaction fees are either big or humongous. Automating paying fees at random times can be quite risky. Yes, Bitminter is doing this itself and when auto cash out happens during the worst transaction spam times it does get expensive for the pool.

If not for the fees there would of course be free auto cash out for amounts below 0.01.

Fee to use "send coins" on our website now adjusted to 0.0011 BTC.
There has been a flood of transactions on the bitcoin network and there is now a big backlog. We'll adjust the fee again once bitcoin is back to normal.

If you have stuck transactions, many are in the same boat. Thankfully the backlog seems to be shrinking - things may be back to normal within a few days.

Remember, if you have 0.01 BTC then you can cash out for free using auto cash out. That's under "my account" -> "overview" in the website menu.

No, we don't have solo mining.

12.5 BTC is not half a block, it's 100% of the new coins in the block currently. In addition to this there is also income from transaction fees.

Yes, it used to be 25 new coins per block, and 50 before that. This is halved approximately every 4 years. Watch the countdown on bitcoinclock.com

It would be possible to have a pool where you paid over 50% in mining fees and you got half the income from the block when you found one. But I don't think there's a market for it.

You can instead put 50% of your hashpower on Bitminter and use the other 50% for solo mining.

The fee to withdraw bitcoins with "send coins" has been reduced from 0.0013 BTC to 0.0005 BTC.

As always, if you have 0.01 BTC or more then you can withdraw for free using auto cash out instead.

Increased transaction fee for "send coins"

The fee to withdraw coins using "send coins" has been changed to 0.0013 BTC (was 0.0009)

This is necessary as bitcoin transaction fees have skyrocketed lately. For a while the pool was paying 0.0036 BTC for a small transaction. There is still 77000 backlogged transactions in the bitcoin system, but the fees are on the way down. If this continues we can hopefully reduce the fee for "send coins" on our website again soon.

The pool still pays the transaction fee for you if you use auto cash out instead. This requires a minimum balance of 0.01 BTC.

No, it's 0.003384 - you're missing a zero in there.

Perhaps a simpler way to estimate earnings, use a bitcoin mining calculator. Here is a simple one: https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator

The results will be much too low now though, as it doesn't include income from transaction fees which have become very large. Our last block had more income from transaction fees than from newly generated coins.

Does anyone know of a calculator that includes tx fees?

I'm not sure if there are any easily available stats on tx fees per block, but this one shows transaction fees per day: https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees
If we assume 144 blocks per day (difficulty not changing), then it is yesterday 4.27 BTC per block, 5.43 BTC per block the day before. If we get back to a more normal level where bitcoin is not completely overloaded then perhaps 1.39 BTC per block.

That's 34%, 43% and 11% extra earnings respectively, on top of the 12.5 new coins per block.

In the medium term I think I'd add 11% to what mining calculators say. It may look nice to earn 30-40% from tx fees on top of the 12.5 BTC per block. But I really hope this is not going to last. We have 100 000 backlogged transactions, transaction fees have skyrocketed and bitcoin has been almost unusable the last couple days.

Yeah, nicely done Indss. 25.9 BTC from one block - that's quite good.

Bitcoin has some bad scaling issues.

The Segwit2x hard fork has been cancelled.

It was announced here: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-November/000685.html

Those worrying about replay attacks and how to split coins can rest easy.

Good point. The replay attack could happen before you even try to send the new coins. I edited the post above and added another replay attack check, so the check is now in two places.

Thanks.

I took 5 minutes to write this suggestion on how to split coins. It may be safe or maybe you lose all your coins. Proceed at your own peril.

Splitting coins is a way to avoid transaction replays when a fork has no replay protection. See https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/61212/what-is-transaction-replay-and-replay-protection

Situation: Let's say a new coin, NOOB, forks off of the BTC chain without any replay protection. Before the fork you have moved all your BTCs to a wallet where you control the private keys.
What to do: To split your coins after a fork, move all the BTCs and move all the NOOBs to addresses where you control the private keys. Make sure all coins are moved.
Why: This way none of your coins will share an unspent transaction output (UTXO) on both blockchains, so transaction replay becomes impossible. Any transaction you make in the future will refer to outputs that do not exist on the other chain. The transaction is invalid on the other chain and cannot be abused there.

In detail, here is how you can split the coins. AFTER the fork happened:

• Make a new BTC wallet where you control the private keys
• Send all your BTCs from the old to the new wallet. Wait for 6 confirmations on the transaction. Your old wallet now contains 0 BTC.
• Make a new NOOB wallet where you control the private keys
• Import the private keys from your OLD BTC wallet into your NOOB wallet. Wait for blockchain sync.
• You should see the correct NOOB balance; the same as your original BTC balance. You may see a zero balance after syncing if there was a transaction replay attack. You can confirm this using a NOOB block explorer. Look up the BTC transaction ID or BTC address from point #2. If NOOBs moved to the BTC address there was an attack; go to point #7.
• Send all your NOOBs to new address(es). Wait for 6 confirmations.
• If your NOOBs didn't go where you wanted them, but instead moved to where you sent your BTC then you are victim of a transaction replay attack. You only lost the transaction fee though. Go back to point #1 and start over. Make a third BTC wallet. "old" now means the second wallet and "new" is the third. You don't need a new NOOB wallet though, just import the keys from your second BTC wallet after it is empty.
• All coins moved separately on the two chains? You made it. Celebrate with your favorite beverage.

Why do I need a new bitcoin wallet?

With the "bitcoin gold" fork there were fake wallets asking you to give them your bitcoins keys/seed to get your bitcoin gold. As soon as you did that they stole all your bitcoins. This scam can be expected to repeat every time a new coin forks off of the bitcoin chain.

Never give an altcoin wallet any bitcoin keys that still control bitcoins. Always move the bitcoins first and wait for 6 confirmations so that the keys no longer control any bitcoins.

I used a scam wallet and my coins are gone!

Be careful that you pick a safe wallet and not some malware. Malware can do other bad things besides the specific scam above. They can steal your NOOBs. They can attempt to steal a bitcoin wallet on the same PC. They can install a keylogger and other nasty things.

You may want to install new altcoin wallets in a virtual machine or an old garbage PC you have lying around. This way you can make it very hard for them to do any harm beyond stealing your NOOBs.

I have a better idea!

Post your comments below.

UPCOMING FORKS

It's becoming popular to make new coins that share a history with bitcoin. If you have X bitcoins at the time of the fork, then you will have X amount of new coins as well, assuming you control the private keys to your coins.

At block 491407: BTG (bgold / "bitcoin gold"). Although the fork happens at this time, the new chain won't be public right away. First the people behind it are going to keep it to themselves so they can mine lots of free BTG. After that BTG will go public. This type of "pre-mine" usually indicates that the coin is just a pump-and-dump scam.

At block 494784: B2X (segwit2x). Their intention is for all bitcoin users to follow this fork to support 2 MB blocks. Many say they will stay on the old chain though, so it looks like we will end up with two coins.

BEFORE A FORK

Move your coins to a wallet where you control the private keys. Find a wallet: https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

AFTER A FORK

If the new coin has replay protection you should be good to go.

If the new coin does not have replay protection, you'll need to split the coins while still within your own wallet(s) before sending coins to anyone else. Otherwise that other party could copy the transaction over to the other blockchain and receive the same number of both coins. They "replay" a transaction from one chain on another chain. For example, 1 BTG turns out to be worth $1 and you send 1 BTG to someone - they take 1 BTC too, worth $6000. That's not good.

Both BTG and B2X may add replay protection. Let's hope so - it would make this much less messy.

WHAT IS BITCOIN

If everyone and their dog switch to B2X (segwit2x) then that will become bitcoin. This does not appear to be what's about to happen.

It looks like we'll soon have 4 bitcoins. BTC/XBT (bitcoin), BCH (bcash), BTG (bgold), B2X (segwit2x).

WHAT DO WE MINE

We are mining bitcoin. We may add support for other coins in the future.

It is signed with an old certificate which has expired. You may need to reduce the security settings in Java and add https://bitminter.com to the security exception list (whitelist) in java control panel.

You can't mine bitcoin with that. Maybe an altcoin.

To mine bitcoin you need a modern ASIC miner. Forget graphics cards or old USB-based ASICs.

Sorry, there are no plans to support the PAC2.

Android devices are completely useless for mining. But there is nothing blocking them from mining at Bitminter. They are just extremely slow. The minimum worker difficulty is very high for such a slow device. If you mine for one month you should see a tiny bit of accepted work.

I would advice against buying more USB miners. They are very slow and now obsolete, including the PAC2. Today 1000 GH/s is slow and 14000 GH/s is the fastest miner for sale. The older miners are also energy inefficient. So even if you had 500 USB sticks with 2 GH/s each, the electricity usage would be high. The price per GH/s to buy these old miners is also way too high.