I'm surprised by the stats at simplecoin.us which suggest that the pool is doing very well.  I've not been able to connect for hours.  How are you guys able to get through?

I can't connect to simplecoin.us to mine.

None of the following work at all:

simplecoin.us:8337
simplecoin.us:80
74.117.62.208:8337

I am able to ping simplecoin.us and can browse the site.

Thanks for the warning, my backup pool is mineco.in.  Indeed, I got booted off of the testing server a little while ago and was automatically pointed to mineco.in.  I'm fully aware that this is a test pool and I know not to expect any return while I'm using it.

I'm relying on your server logs to find any serious problems but I'll certainly be keeping my eye on my miner for the next few hours anyway.  Aside from one of my cards actually running cooler than my CPU everything looks healthy to me right now.

I've been testing with 74.117.62.208:8337 for a few hours now.  The reported hashrates for my workers at simplecoin.us don't seem to have changed.


It's too early to say much about the stales but it's certainly looking good (my ping is around 150 ms so 0 rejects in 2700 shares is better than average).  I'll leave this running overnight.

I've just started testing.  Things seem to be running smoothly but I'll leave it for a few hours and report back.

If all you want is the extra profit you can probably do without a Namecoin client and wallet.  Simply send namecoins directly from your simplecoin account to an account on an exchange.  If you want to collect and keep the namecoins then I'm pretty sure you need the client (and not an old version).

Merged mining will go live 37 Namecoin blocks from now (at block 19200 - see the Namecoin block explorer).  At the current rate this should take about a week.  I don't know when the simplecoin pools will move over to merged mining but I'm hoping it will be pretty soon after 19200.

Of course! and with a .02 BTC transaction fee to make sure it goes through in a timely manner.

I'm warming to the idea of having lots of options for mining.  The multicoin framework is what makes this pool stand out from the crowd and it's good that it's being used.  It seems many miners care deeply about variance and not so much about the reward system so I expect many people will split their hashing power between the pools to lower their variance as much as possible.

That said, I'm sticking with the BTC PPLNS pool.  I don't really mind even being the only one so long as when I stop mining and the pool goes to 0 Gh/s that the value in my recent shares is converted fairly into BTC and credited to my account.  I did a fair amount of solo mining before joining a pool (some before there were any pools and some more when the only options were 'Prop' and 'PPS - fee').  I'm glad that the BTC PPLNS pool is holding at 8 Gh/s for now.

I like the compactness of this latest banner, very clean!  I don't like "GH" for "GH/s" as it's just like giving the top speed of a car in miles (rather than miles per hour).  Kicking myself for not thinking of "Promo" .

Would it be easy to improve the "Est. Time To Find Block" and "Time Since Last Block" stats on the various pools.  Displaying hours and minutes is not good.  Instead, perhaps test on the duration and then display the appropriate units (so that the BTC PPLNS pool would be given in days and hours at the moment whereas the GG prop pool would be given in seconds).

Do you still consider the GG pool to be in testing?  If not, perhaps mention it in the banner line.  It seems to be attracting attention to the pool and we've just made it up to 30 GH/s again!  Here's my first thought but I'm sure you can come up with something better.

[30 GH/s][0% Fee][10 BTC Promotion][BTC(SMPPS/Prop/PPLNS), GG(Prop)] SIMPLECOIN.US

Excellent.  I'm glad the other pools are being slow to be honest.  Only 80 Namecoin blocks to go!

I'm glad to find the PPLNS pool over 10 GH/s again.  It's a shame that the low hashrates have come at the same time as some bad luck.

I'm glad to hear than merged mining is looking promising.  By 'it will be the norm' are you suggesting that the big pools will go to merged mining right away?

Excellent work.  I do hope more traders can keep shaving off these peaks and predicting this market successfully.  The volatility scares too many potential users off.  I'm often trying to send money to someone and asking if they accept Bitcoins.  In only four cases in the last few months have I had a positive answer from people that would otherwise not be involved in Bitcoin at all.

If the market were much more stable then more people would be willing to start accepting Bitcoin and I'd have a much easier time with payments and donations (Transaction fees and comission (GBP -> USD) are not fun when all you want to do is donate).  People who get into the Bitcoin market and trade purely for profit are doing Bitcoin a great service (provided of course that they are successful) and they have my thanks.

Any idea why the x-axis of the "Blocks Found Over Last Week" chart is ordered reverse chronologically? Ah well, I guess it's better than the alphabetically ordered dates that we used to have.

Buying and paying off a card in this climate looks very tough and cannot be advised.  However, if you already have the hardware and you aren't so worried about hardware deterioration then mining is surely still quite profitable.

My miner is still (price = 4.8 USD, difficulty = 1755425) just about beats electricity and not only do I pay the equivalent of about .17 USD for each kWh of electricity but my dual 5850 miner is currently housing an AMD Phenom II x6 1100T: overvolted, overclocked to 4.0 GHz, and running at 100% on all cores.

Perhaps some people have much higher electricity costs or are still trying to mine with Nvidia cards but I'd imagine the bulk of the miners are comfortably covering their electricity costs with their earnings.

Having thought about it a little more I see that it is very likely that you thought about this problem already and have stored Bitcoins from the first N shares in order to pay off the holders of the last N shares.  In this case no merging is necessary, the pool can simply be closed at any point and everyone will receive their fair reward.  I also see that this is the correct way to handle changes in N (i.e. changes in difficulty) for otherwise there would be a minor pool hopping problem.  Man, I've gone such a long time not appreciating this deeper elegance to PPLNS; my apologies for the previous post.  Indeed, this completely and perfectly solves all of my apprehension about large values of N and it seems the only factors are variance and payment lag.

There was I thinking there was 12.5 BTC worth of debt in the current PPLNS pool and was worried that that value had been mistakenly given out to the submitters of the first N shares!  *slaps forehead*

If the pool operator of a PPLNS pool also publishes all of the submitted shares (probably requiring a much higher share difficulty).  I can see now how it's fully possible to have a reward system which is completely fair to both user and pool operator, with no risk other than share variance and no required trust on either side!  Just this realisation has made my day.

Some thoughts on merged mining and PPLNS:

For merged mining I hope you are planning to essentially extend one or more of the existing pools rather than create a new pool.  Creating a new PPLNS merged mining pool would almost certainly kill the existing PPLNS pool which would mean a great loss for the simplecoin users who have submitted a great deal of the last difficulty/2 shares.

I would naturally want to use the same value of N for both Bitcoin and Namecoin for simplicity.  Is there a good reason why this would be unwise?

When merged mining hits, most Bitcoin users will be much more interested in the income bonus than in the namecoins and will naturally gravitate to pools which simply offer a 20% bonus to their BTC payout than to those that just give them the namecoins.  Personally I feel that a good pool should not try to also be an exchange but good links and instructions on how to trade earned namecoins into bitcoins will probably be very helpful.  Ideally, people should be able to mine and profit from namecoins without ever having to download the Namecoin client or create a Namecoin wallet (easily send coins straight from the pool to an exchange).

May I ask why with PPLNS you use such a large value of N?  I see that larger values of N can reduce variance (if the pool is big enough) but it also increases the risk (each share only attains it's full value if the pool survives for another N shares).  PPLNS (where N is independent of pool size) is a trapezoid scheme and I think it is prudent to keep the height of the trapezoid as low as possible.  Even values of N greater than 10`000 make me uneasy .

To be honest, I don't understand what the 'estimate' score actually measures.  For the PPLNS pool it would be nice to know how much I'd receive if a block were suddenly found.  Currently I do not have enough information to work this out.

If there's one thing I like about this pool it's the stats.  More stats are always welcome in my book.

Yeah, the proportional pool is already more than 50% the size of the PPLNS pool!  I also like that I can practically see your stales rate in the proportional pool efficiency.


Awesome news!

Man, I was wondering who put that massive bid wall up.  This is going to have us stuck at an artificially high BTC price for days!