Galaxy Mining Pool is shutting down due to insufficient hash rate.

We've been at a mere 7 Ghash/sec for the last 12 hrs.
The difficulty just jumped to 50,810,339.
As they say, you do the math.

All confirmed balances will be paid out in the next couple of days.

Thanks for that.

I have changed the pool's target share rate to: 1 share every 4 seconds (15 shares per minute).

I've been thinking of decreasing the minimum send threshold for a while now.
It's now set to 0.01 BTC.

I'm open to tweaking other parameters too, including the VARDIFF target share rate.
It's currently set to "1 share every 10 seconds" (6 shares per minute) which I am personally happy with, as a miner.
But I'm always open to suggestions.

When a block is found, the round is complete, and each miner gets rewarded an amount (the "estimated reward" gives a rough indication of this amount).

Because we're not finding blocks yet, don't be fooled into thinking that the "estimated reward" is all you've "earned".
The pool uses unit-PPLNS with a window length X = 2. This means, the estimated reward that you see right now will (on average) be given to you twice (but this will vary depending on how many shares are submitted during each round).

As for the Bonus PPS rewards, those are paid immediately into your confirmed balance, as you can see on your Account page.

If you want to discuss any of this stuff, feel free to hang out in the IRC channel, myself and others are happy to answer any questions.

The pool is back online.

It has been migrated to a new hosting provider, and is now located in the USA.

I have temporarily taken the pool (i.e. the stratum server) offline.

The pool has a much higher bandwidth/data usage than I had anticipated.
With the current hosting provider (who are top notch, but also expensive) this is not a feasible situation.

I will explore some options over the coming days and let you know what happens.

The issue that razorfishsl was having is unique to his situation, and does not affect any other miners.
The current mining system/software the he's running is more suited to a user-settable share difficulty, rather than dynamic server-controlled vardiff.


I don't have any immediate plans to implement merged mining, although it is something that I might consider in the future.

"above target" means that the submitted hash wasn't "below the target" number (which is the goal with Bitcoin mining).

Your issue seems to happen when VARDIFF kicks in, and the stratum-server tells your miner that there is a new share-difficulty.
It is possible that the mining software continues (for a short period of time) to submit shares at the "old" difficulty, and the server is rightly rejecting such shares (in which case there's nothing to worry about really).
At this stage, all I can suggest is for you to try another miner (e.g. cgminer) to see if the problem goes away.

I will report any further findings here.

You currently don't get paid for such shares. I will try to find out why these are happening. What miner are you using (and what version)?
Looks like you had 32 such shares within a short space of time, but most of your shares are fine.

In order to jump-start the pool, we are offering a second Special Introductory Offer (in addition to the first one):

For the first 5 rounds, the miner that finds the block will receive a 2 BTC bonus reward.

A number of new features have been added over the past week, including an API for monitoring your workers and a chart of the pool's total hash rate.

The new network difficulty has made finding a block even harder, so we need miners more then ever.

We are now 1.5 million shares into the Special Offer (which applies to the first 500 million shares, see above).

To get the ball rolling, Galaxy Mining Pool is offering the following Special Introductory Offer:

For the first 500 million shares submitted to the pool, each share will be awarded 5 Satoshis (0.00000005 BTC).
This is a bonus PPS reward, on top of the regular PPLNS rewards.

Bonus rewards do not rely on blocks being found. They are paid directly to your confirmed balance as you submit shares.

This is free money, on top of the normal block rewards, so get mining!

Cheers QG.

Getting the hash rate up will be a challenge.

The pool will hopefully be offering an introductory offer in a week or so. I'll say more about it when the time comes.

A public version of the "stats" page has now been added.
If you are logged in, this page will contain even more information.

Thanks for the request

Today we are pleased to announce the launch of Galaxy Mining Pool.

www.galaxy-mining.com

- Stratum mining interface.
- VARDIFF (Target rate of 1 share every 4 seconds).
- PPLNS reward system (window length: X=2).
- Hop-proof - optimal rewards for miners.
- Transaction fees distributed to miners.
- Custom built software.
- Https secured website.
- DDoS protected.
- Easy to use UI.
- Two APIs for monitoring (JSON format).
- Running on fast & reliable server infrastructure.
- IRC channel #galaxy-mining (on the Freenode network).

The pool fee will be 1% for the first six months of operation, and then it will revert to the normal 2% fee on January 1 2014.

SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY OFFER A:

For the first 500 million shares submitted to the pool, each share will be awarded 5 Satoshis (0.00000005 BTC).
This is a bonus PPS reward, on top of the regular PPLNS rewards.

Bonus rewards do not rely on blocks being found. They are paid directly to your confirmed balance as you submit shares.

SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY OFFER B:

For the first 5 rounds, the miner that finds the block will receive a 2 BTC bonus reward.

Thanks for the in-depth explanation.

After looking at this for over an hour, there is just 1 detail that I don't understand: For the final share (that only partially fits in the remainder of the window) how do we calculate the value of t?

Lets take the situation where a round has ended. (Network difficulty always = 240, block value always = 50, X=2, no pool fee)
The winning share is share number 28419 (which has share difficulty = 7).
Looking backwards from here, we begin paying out rewards with share number 28418 (which has share difficulty = 7).
....
We keep going until we get to a share that only partially fits in the remainder of the window: share number 28353 (which has share difficulty = 90).

When I calculate what I think is the value of t, the reward for the partial block ends up spilling well over the window boundary.
What would t be in this case?
(PS - This is actual data I have in a spreadsheet from a block mined on testnet)

Thanks for that explanation.

Regarding the small correction you made, I don't quite understand what's happening.
Are we talking about the "oldest" share, the one that may get a partial reward (in order to get the total score to exactly X)?
If so, I don't see how "t" is relevant to the calculation, if "t" is the score of the "winning share" (i.e. the share that we didn't even take into consideration to begin with).

My final question: Is X=2 an acceptable setting for real-world usage?

I am currently implementing the "correct method" PPLNS and I have one question.

When a block is found, is the "winning share" counted in the window? (the original post suggests that it isn't)
If it isn't counted, what is the reasoning behind this?

I'm a software engineer, currently developing a Bitcoin mining pool.

The pool is connected to testnet at the moment, with a private group of miners/testers.

Have done a lot of reading on the forum, but would love to be able to post soon.