Is there a plan to include a way to donate a percentage of my gains to the pool automatically?

I'm glad to see such serious miners joining this pool.

For me the PPLNS reward system is the primary reason for mining here but I'm also grateful for the new server and the various top-30 lists (which, for me, creates a sense of community).

May I ask why other people are joining this pool all of a sudden?

Heck, even I'd like to see a price surge over the next week!  Hopefully the BTC Conference in New york city will ignite a fantastic rally!  I simply believe that 20 USD before September is unlikely and am not afraid of a little gambling.

You really are quite deep in Bitcoin these days aren't you Vladimir.  Where we all speculate on BTC, you seem to speculate on GBP.  My hat goes off to you sir.

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it.

Sorry, I have the bad habit of editing my posts in a non-obvious way.

Alas.

You'll be happy to know that my stales are down to about 0.12% (for the last 10000 shares) with phoenix 1.5 and phatk 2.2, so there is some hope for other popular mining software.  I doubt location makes much of a difference either; I'm in the UK.

A thought on this: I guess it would be pretty easy to add '[below average]' to the right of a users stale percentage whenever this is so.  This might be more annoying than anything else though so probably not a good idea.

Right now I'm interesting in promoting the pool and trying to bring it up to 90 Gh/s (about 1 block per day at the current difficulty).

Yes, what he says seems solid to me.  Combining this with the fact that you don't lose anything from guessing deepbit incorrectly but you do gain something from guessing deepbit correctly means you can make significant gains.  Throw LP into the mix as the following post suggests and you have even higher gains.  Indeed, you could almost certainly use LP knowledge from all of the proportional pools together to improve your gains even further.

Honestly, 36% accuracy doesn't seem so bad given how many different pools there are.  I agree that if there were only two pools and every block came from one or the other then 36% is worse than flipping a coin.  Perhaps pident already makes use of the LP information from all of the pools to make their best guess.

I dislike this race to the bottom on hiding information.  It is reminiscent of copyright holders trying to prevent people from copying disks using all manner of trickery and obfuscation.  Hopefully you guys will be successful in overcoming the defence put up by proportional pools and make some BTC in the process.  Best of luck!

I've put a 1 BTC bounty on the pident thread for inclusion of this pool so you may be contacted by the pident developer at some point.  Hopefully little or no work will be required on your part and the inclusion of this pool on pident will be a plus.

Also, congratulations on reaching 99% pool efficiency!

Excellent, more hashing power is always appreciated!  It's good to see some competition at the top of the hashrates list, even the likes of loderunner is having to work hard!  I only have two 5850s to my name unfortunately (as you may well know as I've been quite noisy on the mining forums in the past).  This pool is growing so quickly!  Soon I'll be knocked off the top 30 hashrates list.

Do you think it would be difficult to add simplecoin.us?  It's not a pool which is trying to hide information and the site is being actively developed but I don't know the API situation.  It's been at 50 Gh/s recently so is big enough to be worth considering.

I offer 1 BTC for the addition of this pool.

The developers can be easily contacted here.

I must admit I am not fully aware of the current pool-hopping capabilities and am speaking in general.  I thought that one standard method that big proportional pools used to try to reduce pool hopping is to try and hide when new blocks were found by the pool.  I only meant to suggest that even if they are perfectly successful and it is impossible to tell when a certain pool has found a block you could still use the idea behind pool hopping to make some gains using only the information in the bitcoin network.  If you have any information on when a pool finds a block beyond the bitcoin network new-block announcements then you will certainly do better with the standard method.

A quick look at pident suggests that it is quite easy to tell when a certain pool has finished a block so I assume that the remaining problem is finding a pool which doesn't detect and ban pool-hopping behaviour.  Again, I know little about the existing practical situation and am speaking purely in terms of theory and mathematics.  I'm sure if I mined with a proportional pool I'd know more but I'm with simplecoin.us (which uses PPLNS) specifically so I don't have to worry about implementing pool hopping.

The "guess thing" you describe is a good idea when you have partial information.

All I meant to point out is that if one would like to pool hop with a big proportional pool and is having difficulty with the LP aspect then they can at least make some gains by using the information on the bitcoin network (if the pool is sufficiently large).

Take your time and enjoy.

I've just visited the pool stats page and was amused to see that the three most recent blocks have been found by the 28th, 29th, and 30th fastest miners.  Tsk tsk you guys near the top of the hashrates list; it's quality not quantity!

I've added a 20 BTC bet against you GoWest.  Best of luck!

Ok.  I just didn't know whether or not you were aware of this.  I'm very glad you are being careful with the bitcoins you control.

Excellent, I'm looking forward to this.

Along these lines I would be interested to see a top-10 lowest reject rate list.  This would perhaps further encourage people to try and lower their rejects further and ultimately the pool will be able to boast an impressive "pool efficiency".

I have 5 BTC ready to donate to the pool following enhancements as you describe.

Nice to see you're on top of things.  I'll make some noise here when I see a problem.

My balance is now about 7.5 BTC and no attempt has been made to pay out automatically to my BTC address.  Perhaps I've not checked a box somewhere or have misinterpreted one or more of the fields on the account details page.

Hmm...  I'm going to assume you really do have an instance of X running.  What's the value of $DISPLAY returned by the terminal window in which you are trying to run aticonfig


You should get something like
I've found no way of managing the cards without an instance of X running.  At the very least I need a simple xorg.conf which points out my two cards and to run xinit in the background.  When I ssh into my miner I need to run before aticonfig is fully functional.  sudo will help to an extent but there are still some things you will not be able to do.

I think it depends a lot on the server.  I think 1-1.5% is typical but you'd have to check with your specific pool.  That said I would personally consider anything over 1% too high.  I'm using phoenix and phatk 2.2 on two 5850s and they currently read:

[355.12 Mhash/sec] [5143 Accepted] [5 Rejected] [RPC (+LP)]
[377.12 Mhash/sec] [5411 Accepted] [8 Rejected] [RPC (+LP)]

so about 0.12% rejects.

Kernel versions can affect rejects and aggression makes a small difference too but the server was the key thing for me.  I mine with simplecoin.us which has just rolled out a serious new dedicated server (pool.simplecoin.us).  Big pools use several servers so perhaps try switching between them.

Also, I don't believe phoenix discerns between shares rejected because they are old and ones rejected because they are invalid.  If your rejected shares are clustered around/after new work units are pushed then try different pools/servers; if they are scattered at random then try lowering your cards core or RAM clocks and/or trying different kernels (there's plenty of variation between all of Diapolo's and Phateus' phatk versions).

Where you mention fees on the home page I would like to see it made clear whether or not transaction fees are included in the reward.  I assume transaction fees are not included but if it is not difficult to include them perhaps the good will generated by such a gesture will earn the pool more in donations anyway.  I would certainly increase my donation in response by 1%.  If very few people are donating more than 0% (unfortunately quite likely) then I understand the necessity of keeping the transaction fees.

Also, a feature for the future: It would be nice for a user to be able to specify a transaction fee for withdrawal.  Some pools are not as generous to 0-fee transactions as this one is and I've found transactions with a fee of 0 can sometimes take quite a bit of time.

If you are having difficulty determining when deepbit or BTCGuild have completed a block then you could try adopting an alternative pool-hopping approach of fixing one such pool and mining with them for the 5 minutes following every new block on the network.  For each block found by the pool in question you are getting 5 minutes at the start of the round, very profitable.  Blocks not found by the pool are essentially 5 minute chunks selected at random and, in the long term, won't be better or worse than 24-7 mining.  The rest of your mining time should be spent with a temporally agnostic mining method such as solo (high variance), PPS (high fee or griefing problems), PPLNS (recommended, check out simplecoin.us for an example); mining at another proportional pool will nullify the advantages of this method.

This method will give a better profit margin than solo mining for moderately sized 0% fee pools, more for larger pools, but is unfortunately inferior to a pool-hopping method which can use the pool's block discoveries to it's advantage.  If BTCGuild and deepbit are effective in hiding their block-discovery information however then this might be the best method.  I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with bitHopper to explain how to do this but I'd be surprised if it is difficult.