Should be active again. If you need any more assistance, please PM me or Chlorine.

Nice catch! after the glitch during the transition that day we corrected the balances, but not the stats. I've just rerun the stats calculation for that period of time, it should look better now.
MC

Hi Clipse,
Please PM your ABCPool username to Chlorine and he will re-activate your account ASAP. Thanks for your patience, MC

Hi Wndrbr3d,
Those circumstances would indeed lower the BTC-converted costs of running the server. However, server costs are a small part of the fee. Our biggest costs are paying everyone for invalid blocks and stale shares; that way everyone gets back on average 1.9% of their fee. Those costs are in BTC, so they do not depend on BTC/USD exchange rate or pool volume.
Running a PPS pool is a risky business. To pay our miners a fixed amount per share, ABCPool takes the risk of (not) finding the actual blocks. The difference between the 2.2% direct costs and the 4% nominal fee is mostly due to the risk premium http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riskpremium.asp. You can think of the risk premium as an insurance against bad luck.

Hope this helps,
MC

As with any metric, both nominal fee and effective fee are open to misinterpretation. We don't claim we have the holy grail of metrics. Calling our effective fee 'very misleading' is quite an accusation, as we try to be as transparent about it as possible.

The fee for a pool is one of its key characteristics. Miners rely on that number, so it should be as comparable as possible. Many non-PPS pools silently withhold payment for invalid blocks and are still listing their fee as 0%. Due to the nature of PPS, it is impossible to withhold payment for invalid blocks without calculating it as a 'fee'. The amount per share simply isn't the theoretical (50/difficulty) BTC.

Therefore a 1.5% nominal fee PPS pool can be expected to pay as much as a 0% nominal fee non-PPS pool (ceteris paribus). That's not immediately intuitive, especially to people new to the mining scene. If a newbie sees a PPLNS pool at 0% nominal and a PPS pool at 1.5% nominal, he thinks the latter one costs more, while in fact they cost the same.

This proves that the nominal fee, while clearly defined, is open to misinterpretation. The notion of effective fee that we use is not very clearly defined, and that's a disadvantage which we try to mitigate by explaining what we mean by it everywhere we list it. While less clearly defined, in terms of USD costs it is a better fit than the nominal fee. Perfect? Certainly not.

On our site and in our initial forum post we list both the effective- and the nominal fee, and an explanation. From those pieces of information everyone should be able to make up their mind about whether it's a good deal for them. You may not agree with our interpretation of effective fee, but at the moment I don't know how we can be more transparent about it.
We would encourage anyone to build a tool that takes as input one's hashpower and outputs a histogram of expected payouts, in BTC or USD. Such a tool would combine all reward-influencing factors into one graph: nominal fee, the variance each type of pool has, and the effect of stale rate and incentives like invalid block compensation and stale share compensation. Maybe we'll even build it ourselves, because I'm sure we'd come out looking pretty good.

If you'd like to talk about some objective reward-efficiency metric that all pools can use to advertise themselves, please start a new forum thread for that.

You should! It's not immediately clear that 0% fee pools usually don't pay for stale shares or invalid blocks. IMHO, When people are shopping for a pool it's best to present them with a directly comparable metric that's as informative as possible. Effective fee includes hidden costs and bonuses, and is therefore more suitable than the plain nominal fee.

I knew we would forget something somewhere while doing the transition..   Thanks for pointing it out

If anyone sees any more references to 0% fee or the introductory period, please let us know and we'll change them. There's a lot of content on the site, and although we checked it all we may have overlooked something.

To add to this, we are not planning to obtain a certificate from a third party for now.

NEWS: Introductory period successfully finished

Happy new year everyone from Chlorine and me! May 2012 bring you happiness, good health, and lots of mining profits.

As indicated on the last week, the ABCPool introductory period would end in the new year: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33586.msg664079#msg664079

Today we pushed out the changes necessary to support the new fee of 4%. The PPS-amount has been adjusted as of this afternoon. You don't have to change anything to your mining setup, just keep mining as you've always done!

As part of the change we have also lowered all donation-percentages by 4% , so you won't be paying twice.

You may want to re-think your donation amount though. The fee makes sure we can pay for operational costs and time spent on support. Donations encourage us to further develop ABCPool.co with cool new features.

Keep them hashes flowing!
Thanks,
MC

They are indeed still wrong. We've identified the problem and the balances will be compensated within a few hours. No income will be lost, because sharecounts have been accumulating normally.
UPDATE: The balance issue has been resolved. All balances have been corrected to include the period between 14:12 - 16:17 UTC during which counted shares were not added to the balance.

Good questions, I'm sure you're not the only ones interested in the answers

Donations have always been voluntary, and will remain voluntary in the future. They are on top of the fee and go towards development of new site features. We'd like to encourage you to re-think (i.e. lower) your donation percentage with this in mind.

All existing site features are now available without the need for a donation, give it a try!

Looking into it! We're rolling out the new fee right now, probably has something to do with that.

Thanks for the suggestion. When the fee becomes active (in January) we will change the thread title immediately.

NEWS: Fee to be re-introduced

How are you enjoying mining with ABCPool so far? It's thanks to you, our loyal miners that we have got this far! Without your constructive input, your kind words and of course your hashpower we would probably not have been here anymore.

As you may have seen on the account details page, running a pool is not free.

When ABCPool just started out 5 months ago, there was an introductory fee of 2% for a short time. ABCPool was not always stable in the early months, and we did not feel justified to charge you at that point. Therefore we soon lowered the fee to 0% and paid server costs, stale shares and invalid blocks completely out of our own pockets.  Now that ABCPool has proven to provide a solid mining experience we feel that the moment has come to re-introduce a fee, 4%, sometime in the first week of  2012.

Charging a fee is necessary to keep on providing you with the service quality you have come to expect from us. Any pool that does not charge a fee will eventually disappear, because it will inevitably cost the ops money. Many of you already donate 2%-4%. With the new scheme, you don't have to worry about others not paying for their part, because other users will pay the same..

The fee will enable us to pay for the server hosting, motivates us to keep on improving ABCPool, and helps to offset the risk we take by offering PPS rewards.

From your perspective, you might consider the fee to be a 'risk premium': by being payed per share you know exactly what you'll earn every day. How much is that worth to you? In addition we shield you from invalid blocks and stale shares.

In the new year we will continue to provide the best service we can, to ensure that you'll continue to enjoy mining at ABCPool!

Happy hashing,
MC & Chlorine

Hi Crosby,
That message is always present, no matter what donation percentage you set.
The donation percentage is not forced at ABCPool. You should be able to set it to 0%. Did you include your PIN? What is the message that is displayed at the top of the page?

MC

That's right. However, we made the announcement and the change on the same day.
ABCPool is running fine, and we're not going away. Please read our statement carefully.

Since the beginning we have advised miners to keep their balance and therefore their risk low, no matter at which pool you mine. Be safe and cash out regularly. Or better yet: use autopay.

We expect to continue offering you the best mining pool out there for a long time!
Thanks,
MC

That observation is spot on! We have defined certain events that trigger a registration close. That way we can create a stable situation from which we may evaluate whether additional spare capacity or performance tuning is necessary. Limiting growth at certain thresholds allows us to keep offering a quality mining experience to our current miners.

If you'd like to sign up during a period of closed registration, you may PM Chlorine or me at any time. We'll then give you a heads up when registration opens again! This time, we anticipate registration will re-open on monday.

MC

UPDATE: Due to our growth, ABCPool balances are now not guaranteed
Dear miners,
In the short history of Bitcoin, there have been several services that could not fulfill their promises for various reasons, be it theft, incompetence, malice or simply bad luck.

As you know we do our best to protect our services and the Bitcoins involved, and we are committed to keep doing that in the future. No one is immune to setbacks however, not even ABCPool. If anything does go wrong, we'll do our best to set things right, like some of you have experienced first hand early november.

As ABCPool continues to grow so do your combined account balances*. We would like to guarantee that these funds are safe with us, but we cannot. The amounts involved are now starting to reach a level where that would be a hollow guarantee. To make that clear, we have changed 'balance' to 'balance at risk' on the site.

That sounds scary!
Well, yes. But it does not have to be scary at all. Just regularly withdraw your ABCPool balance to your own wallet or a third party wallet service. That way your hard-earned BTC is safe, even if Chlorine and I would suddenly be hit by a bus!

We have made it very easy to withdraw. Either use manual payout or configure automatic payout. When using auto-payout, you will be payed in multiples of the configured amount twice a day.

Please take this opportunity to think about the safety of your BTC; not just those at ABCPool but for all Bitcoin services you are using!

Thanks for your attention, and keep those hashes flowin'!
Chlorine & MC

*: _{We keep almost all of the account balances in a 'cold storage' for added security.}

MAINTENANCE:The maintenance will start now.
UPDATE: Maintenance was completed at 01:45 UTC (took +- 5 minutes)

Please verify that your miners have reconnected!

MAINTENANCE: There will be some downtime in the next 28 hours because our cloud provider needs to install some patches for which the server needs to come down. We are using the opportunity to make some changes to the server configuration. The downtime could take anywhere from two minutes to two hours.