Aye.

The bulls have broken the line and the bears have fallen back to regroup.  The bears now have the advantage of terrain and have already established a serious fortification at $3.5.  Meanwhile, the bulls have broken the line but made little progress, their numbers are thin and are vulnerable to counter-attack!  Unless reinforcements arrive soon the bears will fall upon their enemies and force them back to the $2 zone!

Or maybe I'm just getting carried away.

The bears have had a good crack at the $2 wall but failed to breach it.  After building strength, the bulls have chared headlong at the $3 wall but the bears are holding their ground.

Which wall will fall first?  Exciting stuff!

Normally yes, there would be a correction to a rally.  But in this case the rally itself is arguably nothing more than a correction to the downward trend we've experienced over the last 3 months.  I wouldn't care to guess where the price will go from here.

I'm glad to see that you recovered swiftly from the hack.

I'm particularly happy to see that, since coming back online, the simplecoin.us PPLNS pool has been experiencing normal levels of luck.  I will be watching the stats closely and if this pool can maintain a stable solid uptime and average luck over the next two weeks then I may rejoin.

Much respect to the true simplecoin.us supporters such as RyNinDaCleM and the Simpson's guy for sticking with this pool in its time of need, may you benefit well from the promotions!

Agreed.  One cannot expect all merchants to also be speculators/gamblers.  This is very much like expecting all miners to mine solo.  Some merchants will only use Bitcoin if they are able to enjoy its benefits without taking on the risks.

However, speculators and traders colluding to create an artifical stable Bitcoin price is not a solution; this would be akin to building a house upon sand.  Instead, Bitcoin has to go through this phase of wild speculation where some win big and others lose big.  This will kill off the day traders who don't know what they are doing and leave those that profit and create drag on the price.  This process will take a long time but it is an essential step toward a healthy kind of stability.  I believe it is unlikely that a level of stability that is acceptable to most merchants can be reached in the next 10 years and so I expect a series of competing companies offering options to merchants (basically taking the sting of market volatility out of the equation for a fee) will arise.

Of course, this all assumes that Bitcoin manages to dodge various devastating scenarios such as being hacked past the point of recovery or being declared illegal to trade in most countries.

I don't know why but I get excited by this too.  The excitement is not unlike when Bitcoin went over $8/BTC and, unbelievably, kept climbing!

I question the logic of using the price points of $2/BTC, $1.5/BTC, and $1/BTC though.  I expect many people will have bids at these round rates.  Consequently it might be wise to use $2.01/BTC, $1.51/BTC, and $1.01/BTC (paying a tiny bit more to be at the front of the queue).

Best of luck to those of you that believe Bitcoin has a future and are willing to start buying coins.  I highly doubt we'll make it down to early adopter money (I bought most of my coins at $0.02-$0.04 and I still don't really feel like an early adopter).

The reason I ask is that my estimated loyalty bonus is not increasing as quickly as my estimated payout.  I was simply after the formulae used to arrive at these two figures.

Thanks.

I haven't mined at this pool for 24 hours now but I still have unconfirmed namecoins.  Could this have something to do with block 21,010 (or 21,011) listed in the PPLNS previous blocks which has 0 confirms?  Is this the cause of the unconfirmed namecoins on Lobomir's account too?

Have you had any thoughts on a possible cause for the crazy luck at this pool yet?  What happend for example between 22,391 and 22,645 on the PPLNS pool?

May I ask how the "estimated loyalty bonus" is calculated?  Should I expect my estimated loyalty bonus to increase as I add more shares to my total for the month?

When hashing (assuming a fixed hashing rate) the expected time to find a share can be approximately modelled by an exponential distribution.  This distribution has a "lack of memory" property.  This means that the expected time until the next share is found is independent of past events.  To say that one has lost progress towards a share is to suggest that it is possible to make progress towards a share; this is simply not compatible with the loss of memory property.  A miner can no more make progress towards finding a share than a pool can make progress towards finding a block.

One thing which can cause the illusion of partial shares at the end of a round is frequently seeing rejects at the very beginning or end of a round.  This is generally caused by setting high aggression.

There is no such thing as a partially completed share.

I've just discovered that I have the same problem with "en.wikipedia.org" so I started hunting for other bad sites.  Most sites I tried worked fine, including: "www.google.com", "slashdot.org", "www.gamefaqs.com", "www.bbc.co.uk".  I found that "www.ebay.co.uk" and "senseis.xmp.net" were also problematic so your site is not alone.  I know that networking problems are most commonly a computer settings, router, or modem problem, but I think at this point I suspect my ISP has screwed up.

Thanks for your help anyway, hopefully I'll resolve this issue soon and be back with you.

EDIT:  Yes, my ISP (Virgin Media, UK) is having major problems.  The problems are nationwide too!  I've set up a quick proxy for browsing but will wait until things are back to normal rejoining this pool.  I'm sorry if I caused you much trouble and thank you for the help.

It's possible that my ISP gave me a new ip address in the night and that simply asking for a new one (keeping the modem off for long enough) would get things working again.  However, it does seem strange that yourbtc.net can only handle certain ip addresses.

I'm using another pool at the moment but I'll be back when I can get onto yourbtc.net without trickery.

No joy.  Substituting 87.106.84.25 for yourbtc.net make no difference to site access, pool access, or ping.  Everything looks dead.  I'm fully able to use pretty much any other site.  Furthermore, the site and pool were working fine for me when I signed up and I got in about 12 hours of good mining.

I'm afraid I'm not on irc.

Thanks for the help.

EDIT: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/yourbtc.net says the site is fine.  Also, I'm able to ssh into a machine with a different ip address and ping yourbtc.net.  I just can't ping it from any of the machines behind my router/modem/ip address.  I've change no router or network settings in the last 12 hours that I'm aware of.

My ip address is 86.30.188.162 if that's of any help.

I'm not currently able to connect to the pool (yourbtc.net:8999, s15747378.onlinehome-server.info:8999) or the site (either http or https), nor do I get a response when pinging yourbtc.net.  Any idea on the cause?  Is this a common problem?

The Namecoin difficulty has just risen back up to 94`000 and so the income bonus of merged mining has dropped down to only 30%.  The market value of NMC/BTC seems to be holding a I guess this mining bonus will hold for the next 10 days or so.

I'm confused here.  I think the number of snake eyes in N throws follows a binomial distribution and the number of throws to result in one snake eye follows a geometric distribution.  Both of these distributions are built on the underlying base of independent identically distributed Bernoulli trials.  The Poisson distribution provides an approximation for the binomial distribution when n is large and p is small (and hence is an excellent choice in practice for handling bitcoin mining).


Ok.  I only brought it up because the assumption of many games in the past and future was not made in the question and did affect the answer.


I think you are wiser than I.


You're welcome.  I was briefly interested in spending some time (a full day) looking at all the reward systems mathematically, perhaps inventing one or two of my own in the process.  I discovered however that a decent body of work on this subject already exists.

Good luck with your competition!

Thanks for the transaction log, I'll take a look.  To be honest I very much doubt the problem is with transactions and I'm sure there is nothing nefarious going on.  All I'm saying is that, statistically, something is broken, whether that's the stats or something more serious.  It is not just a case of experiencing incredibly bad luck, I am able to predict incredibly bad luck.

For now I've moved my miners to another pool to protect my own interests but I'll look at the transaction log to see if I can find any clues as to what is wrong here.  I'll keep an eye on this thread.

Hi,

I've recently run into difficulties with my main pool and am in the market for a new one (I have 720 MH/s).  I thought I'd start here (for the DGM of course).

I was also thrown by the line
and although not as bad as the proportional reward system (due to the fixed round length of one month) it is definitely rather ugly.  I'm glad to see that this issue has already been raised.

I have many thoughts and questions but I'll keep them to myself for now, read around a bit more, and see how things go.

Hmm...  It seems I'll have to read up on that at some point, thanks.

This doesn't solve the matter of the stats though.  Either there are lots of missing blocks on the stats page or something is broken.  Compare the list of recent blocks for the PPLNS pool here with with, for example, the list of recent blocks for masterpool.eu.  In the last 24 hours we've had only 8 blocks and they've had 61.  This simply cannot be explained by luck or the difference in hashing power (they've had about 140% more hashing power than us for this period).