I don't really follow but the market value does seem to still be rising.

Also, the Namecoin difficulty has dropped 4-fold to 23508.98 so, as has happended twice before, Namecoin mining is now more profitable than Bitcoin mining.  This means that merged mining is more than twice as profitable as normal Bitcoin mining.  Don't expect this to last for long.

I'm sure we all are.  I have my finger's crossed that we once again have a solid and reliable server for simplecoin.us but no amount of promises and explanations from the data centre are going to convince me I'm afraid.  Only time will tell.


I'm sorry you've had some confusion and worry with this pool.  The fact is it's still in active and rapid development so you're experiencing teething problems with the rest of us.  I trust that mike is being very careful with the actual earnings and share records because he has been good with them historically and has clearly put a lot of time and effort into this pool.  General bad luck and data centre woes haven't helped and some users are beginning to spread FUD about this pool.  There's no getting around the fact that small pools require trust, patience, and mental discipline.  All I can add is that the PPLNS pool here remains my favourite and all of my hashes go here.

How have I gone this long here without discovering this information?

I've skimmed through some of the material you have and learnt a lot.  I'm disappointed that the difficulty changes are exactly the problem with PPLNS for fixed N as I was hoping for some cool new probability fact.  To me, the essential idea behind PPLNS is solid but one does have to be careful when changing parameters (here, both N and difficulty are parameters and I completely overlooked difficulty as a parameter in my original post ).  I'll read your method for coping with adjustments of these parameters but I'd guess there's only one way of doing it.  I have so little time these days for this kind of fun (1.25 am here) but reading your work is certainly not a waste of my time.

Thank you very much for this treasure trove of information!  As I said, I've not had time to look at these methods carefully but have been operating mainly on instinct.

I'm very interested to read about unit-PPLNS and why PPLNS for a fixed N is flawed.  As I'm writing this I'm realising that when I fixed N I somehow fixed difficulty in my mind too.  It seems that given the lag involved in PPLNS (when N is greater than 1) that miners could take advantage of changes in difficulty to hop the pool (I'm fairly sure this could be easily patched up).  If the flaw with non-unit PPLNS with fixed N is nothing to do with difficulty changes then that is fascinating and I hope to learn something new.

Such a shame.  I wonder how they managed to convince themselves that their reward system was good.  I must admit that when I first read this reward system it seemed bad (just as with BitMinter and it's shift system).

Agreed.  I just meant to suggest that changing the parameters without due care can change the expected values of certain shares in a way might be exploited by hoppers.  I'm almost certain that some PPLNS pools are sufficiently careless about this.


Hmm...  Again I'm operating on instinct so I'm happy to stand corrected by someone who's done the work.  When I read SMPPS it felt as though the severity of pool hopping would be significantly reduced (compared to proportional) but I could easily be wrong here.  "perfectly fine to use" is perhaps a little strong but I only mean to suggest that if you restrict yourself to only "correct" reward systems then you must reject almost every pool in existence.  When selecting a pool with low variance it is more helpful to know which of the pools have less of a hopping problem (factoring in: the percentage hoppers can ideally expect; preventative measures bought in by the pool such as hiding information and banning hoppers; and the difficulty in hopping it).  Personally I'm interested in using correct reward systems and don't mind high variance.

Man, that was some serious downtime!

It's good to see that the pool was scoring blocks that weren't being shown.  We already had bad luck but since the first outage things quickly became suspiciously bad.  With the backdated blocks in place we are back to simply experiencing bad luck.

Caution: I would strongly recommend that if you mine here that you have a good backup pool configured for yourselves.  I've been saying that this pool is good for it's server reliability and uptime, and indeed over the past month it's been excellent, but having two recent serious outages in the last 3 days is very poor.  The simplecoin.us servers are certainly not reliable now and it will take a long time for this reputation to return.

Please keep us updated on the data centre madness Mike.

It's interesting to see some buying pressure for Namecoins right now.  The pool DDOSing seems to have slowed down Namecoin generation a lot but I'm still surprised to find that the last two updates I've made to the income bonus stat have been to increase it!

Ah, I see.  I've not been paying attention to the bitcoin mining for a while now.


As I understand it, the teams are there for entertainment only (much like with folding@home).  I'm sure some people would love for you to join their favourite team.  It won't make a difference to your income.

Interesting, rather than simply misunderstanding terms it seems we genuinely have different philosophies on freedom and morality.

I would see buying a hash similar to, for example, buying a laptop (ignoring intellectual property for the moment).  I don't feel that I need explain to the seller exactly what I intend to do with the laptop before a "fair price" can be agreed upon.  Instead, I really believe that a person has a right to buy the laptop from one person and then, shortly after, sell that laptop, second-hand, to someone else for a profit (without informing the original seller).  If asked by the seller what I planned to do with the laptop I feel I have a right to not disclose my knowledge (lying raises moral problems).

Yes, I fully see a submitted share as a 'proof of work' as this term is defined by the pool.  This is just a mechanism for arriving at a price for the hash.  The pool specifies exactly what they pay out in exchange for these proofs of work (the reward system).  The difference is, I don't believe that the pool should have to tell the user what they might do with the purchased hashes before a fair deal can be reached.  If a pool suggests that it is a Bitcoin mining pool and it doesn't actually use the submitted hashes to mine Bitcoins then this is dishonest dealing and very wrong to me.  However, I believe a service would have a right to simply advertise itself as paying bitcoins for CPU time and use the hashes for something undisclosed (such as mathematical research).

I can certainly appreciate your apparent belief in a more transparent market though.  Truly fair prices would be much more common and people would be very much protected from losing out in a trade but this comes at a significant cost of freedom, one I would find difficult to bear.  I know I'm a little unusual in my views though (insider trading and data protection have always been grey areas for me and the less said about copyright the better).

Hidden fees (the way I understand that phrase) is very wrong indeed, this is dishonest dealing and I do not condone that in any way.  Merged mining is worlds apart from hidden fees in my book.

Anyway, I can see I'm a troll on this thread so I'll leave you guys in peace now.  PM me if you want a response.

+1

This is exactly what I'd do.  It's not as if you're going to get blocks very often.  The network link and configuration to make both computers use one wallet is just another thing to go wrong.  You might find that two instances of bitcoind will end up using more bandwidth than one but I would only address this if it becomes a problem.

Although it doesn't count for much, I would be interested in this too.

mineco.in is my secondary pool (mainly backup but sometimes I split resources for low variance and I would move the bulk over for a sufficiently good promotion).  Recently my main pool (simplecoin.us PPLNS) had a reboot to upgrade the merged mining implementation to Luke Jr's and my miners consequently switched over to this pool for 2 hours or so.  I'm very much in the market for a second solid merged-mining PPLNS (or double-geo) pool.

I also used to highly recommend this pool (I converted some users, such as bitkoyn, from BTC Guild to mineco.in) but these days I can only recommend merged mining pools.

Anyway, just some thoughts from a fan.  The true userbase comes first of course.

Man!  I should really trust my instincts.  Thanks for this!

I actually drafted that last post and said that I wasn't 100% sure that SMPPS was hop-proof but changed my mind because it looked like I was promoting my favourite pool too much and who was I to tell people that there might be a hopping problem with a reward system designed to be hop-proof!

Yes, it is definitely suspicious and I'm glad to have a little confirmation on this from someone that really knows what they are talking about.  I'm simply too busy to look at all the reward systems carefully and evaluate them mathematically (I reject unnecessarily complicated and inelegant systems out of hand).

The double-geo that I remember coming across a while ago on the other hand feels very much like a mathematically sound reward system.  I'm afraid I haven't looked into this in detail either but I'd be very surprised to learn that the double-geo reward systems have a hopping problem, at least with certain parameters fixed.

PPLNS is absolutely solid for a fixed N.  It is quite possible that a pool is varying N with time (as difficulty changes) in a naive way which would allow some mild hopping opportunities but I expect most PPLNS pool operators would make any changes to N gracefully (possibly accepting a bit of risk to themselves).  The same problems could be faced by starting and ending a PPLNS pool (a naive implementation will be a trapezoid scheme but a graceful one will avoid this).

Honestly though, my instincts tell me that most of the reward systems out there, even though hoppable, are perfectly fine to use (very few hop them correctly and make very little for their efforts anyway).  The proportional reward system is to be avoided though.  It is very hoppable and a 24/7 miner will lose out in a big way.

Agreed.

Just to clarify, if you use a pool with a proportional reward system and you do not hop you are losing out (possibly by as much as 20%), even if said pool pretends to stop pool hopping by hiding statistics.  I would recommend a simple PPS pool with low variance for a beginner as it's easy to understand and carries pracitcally no risk and instead usually comes with a heavy fee (deepbit PPS for example), however if you are prepared for higher variance (high variance in absolutely no way affects your expected return; you just have to have the mental strength to be able to mine for a few days and receive nothing sometimes) then you can get a much better return elsewhere.

One thing worth mentioning is a new kind of mining called 'merged mining'.  This has been available for a few days now and few pools are using it.  Using it gives you namecoins for free as you mine bitcoins (at the moment this provides an income bonus of a little over 30% but expect this to fall in the coming weeks).  There are a few pools which use merged mining such as slush's pool so have a look for 'merged mining' on the forum if you're interested (namecoins can easily be traded for bitcoins).  Again, if you don't intend to hop, it is highly recommended that you choose a hopping-proof pool.

eligius.st - merged mining with SMPPS.  hop-resistant (technically hoppable but with limited effect) and with fairly low variance.

simplecoin.us - merged mining with PPLNS.  hop-proof and has a big promotion but with higher variance (shamelessly recommended because it's the pool I use and I want others to join so I get lower variance ).

Pro tip:  Sometime soon the Namecoin difficulty is going to fall sharply and at this time merged mining will provide approximately double the income of a normal Bitcoin pool.  This period will last for 2016 Namecoin blocks.

I don't get it.  Why are the next 106 blocks (Bitcoin or Namecoin) important?

That reminds me, I hope you all ensure your setups are solid and make sure your miners are picking up namecoins.  It would be good if we were all ready when the Namecoin difficulty drops 4-fold (176 Namecoin blocks to go).  If the simplecoin.us pools manage some moderately good luck and maintains no downtime at all for the next round (hard to imagine it lasting longer than 36 hours) then it could mean a big boost for the pool (if namecoins are more profitable to mine than bitcoins then merged mining will definitely stand out).

The nice thing about this difficulty drop is that the difficulty will only be able to come back up 4-fold for the next round and so we'll have another 2016 blocks at difficulty 95000.  It won't be until Namecoin block 24192 that we finally have a 6-digit Namecoin difficulty!

Good luck to us all!

We'll be fine.  Simplecoin is too small to fail.

I'm glad to see work on the pool is progressing swiftly and smoothly.  I very much expect you won't risk server reliability with solidcoin this time.

I've just calculated that I actually lost funds from having a reliably backup server configured.  Instead of being 2 minutes without mining at all I've spent 2 hours mining at a non merged-mining pool!  Ah well.

Yes, the 40% bonus was applicable at the time of my post.  In the long term future the income bonus for merged mining will be precisely the market value of a namecoin divided by the market value of a bitcoin, maybe around 2%.  Right now that is 28% and falling.  In a small number of hours from now the income bonus will shoot up to around 100% (due to the falling Namecoin difficulty) but this will only hold for a day or so before returning to the mid 20's (my best guess).

That said, the income bonus should remain relatively high so long as the big pools don't use merged mining.  This will pressure the large pools to switch and we will soon reach a stable point where most pools are using merged mining.  I very much expect the proportional reward system will still be popular (why it's popular baffles me but it seems to be holding) so the miners which profit the most will be ones that have pool hopping software which takes full advantage of merged mining.  I don't doubt that in the mid-term that pool hopping will dwarf merged mining in terms of income bonus but right now I think merged mining is more profitable than pool hopping regular bitcoin pools.

I personally have no desire for such software as I mine PPLNS.  I just wondered whether or not hopping software could easily take both blockchains into account for effective merged mining pool hopping.

Good work on the Namecoin block trasp!  You and dookdook are really boosting this pool.

Cheers!

From the two largest non merged mining pools in existence:

deepbit
Admittedly they also have a proportional pool to which they pay out for each block less 3%.  As I stated earlier, if they mine Namecoin blocks with this hashing power and keep all of the namecoins this is dishonest.

btc guild


I completely agree and have never said otherwise.  If a pool says that it is giving you a "fair split" and then gives you an "unfair split" then they are cheating or incompetent (my problem with some of the proportional pools).  If they simply imply that the deal is fair but, when read carefully, it is not specifically state to be fair then it is dishonest or incompetent in my opinion (just like most advertising put out by large companies these days).  I'm much more interested in hearing what people think about a pool which explicitly states "We pay x BTC per share you submit" and nothing more.  Do you believe that they are guilty of fraud if and only if they use those shares to generate namecoins?  Is it really any business of the miner what the pool does with the hashes they have accumulated if there has been no agreement about what can and cannot be done with the hashes?

Thanks, it's good to get confirmation on this.

Bitcoin pools agree to use the hashes you submit to generate Bitcoin blocks and, in exchange, they send you Bitcoins.  What else the pool does with this hash is irrelevant to this agreement.  They could publish an article about Bitcoin containing one of the hashes you submitted as an example and make a lot of money from this publication.  By what you have said I'm guessing you would feel entitled to some of this profit.  The only way I can make sense of that is if you somehow feel that you "own" the hashes you submit to the pool!  This is, of course, ridiculous.


They are not taking your work; you are offering it in exchange for bitcoins.  Do you actually claim to own the primes that you find?  I defend your right to discover a new prime and keep it a secret from the world but not your right to make it common knowledge and require royalties to be paid to you for its use.  The prime itself does not constitute art so not even intellectual property laws will give you this.

Are there others out there that actually believe that they can own a hash or a prime in this way?  Do people actually believe that one could own a logical fact such that it would be immoral for two other people to exchange this information with one another without the owner's consent!?