Using --load-balance to split 30% to hashco.ws and 70% to cryptoculture.net, the latter's showing overly high hashrate, like 750-880Kh/s, when I only have a total of 464Kh/s! Sometimes it does show the correct rate around 260Kh/s though. I can only assume that this is a result of the way cgminer does load-balancing.

Is this going to negatively affect me by giving me an unsuitable difficulty if it thinks my hashrate is higher than it actually is?

I don't know if it's the switching pools that are messing things up but from 09:37 on 6/12 (actually that's the first transaction in my wallet that day, so the mining period starts earlier than that) till 16:00 on 7/12 (today), using a split between hashco.ws (40%), miningpool.co (40%) and coin-base.org (20%) I've earnt a grand total of 25 SBC and 0.00055763 BTC (which is 2.414 SBC @ 0.00023095), so call it 27 SBC, which at 0.00023095 amounts to 0.00623565 BTC which at $729.659 = $4.55 for about 38 hours mining.

It's hard to accurately estimate my electricity costs, as I had my PC on for a lot of the day before anyway, so the 200W from the graphics card being fully loaded is the only additional draw and that costs me about 61p/day but I'm also leaving the PC on overnight and at other times when I would have put it into standby when not using it, so there's some additional expense from running the motherboard and CPU (even underclocked and undervolted to 800Mhz) for those hours, so call it 100w for 10 hours equals another 12.64p, so a total of 73.64p/day or $1.20.

As I only started on hashco.ws yesterday and it's a PPLNS, I might earn a bit more over the next 24 hours but coinwarz estimates I should be earning 27 SBC/day at the moment, which I'm clearly not reaching, so I'm doing something wrong.

Strangely I've been seeing a high percentage of rejected shares on miningpool.co but it varies per round (I don't think it shows the total % rejected for all rounds on there, so I can only check the current round from time to time). Certainly on coin-base.org it's always stayed very low for me. I don't know if the rejected shares could be caused in any way by my using --balance or --load-balance though.

2% isn't as bad as PNWMiners 3.5% though or hashco's 2% + 0.1 SBC withdrawal fee. I like to cash out at least once a day, so if I'm making 10 SBC/day on there, that amounts to another 1%, making it 3% in total.

Hi

I've been experimenting with --balance and --load-balance and posted my observations and some questions in my newbie thread here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=358711.msg3836730#msg3836730

I don't want to crosspost my questions again here but if anyone reading this thread is able to answer some of them, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks artos, that was a measured and helpful reply, which should help to allay some concerns.

I'd still like to see all clients signed in future though, so that we can verify that we've downloaded the developers code and not some malware that someone other than the developer has managed to replace it with. It's free to use GPG to do this, as well as being more secure than simply using SSL on the download site, which isn't foolproof as explained in the grc.com link I posted earlier.

You really don't do yourself, or this coin, any favours by reacting so arrogantly to any concerns people raise.

I can't really have "trust in the developer" as I don't know him. So I'm taking a chance on this coin and if something comes to my notice that seems at odds with what I'd read before, then I'm going to start having doubts and reacting by calling people "stupid and uninformed" just makes you sound defensive, like you're trying to hide something or bury discussion. Not saying that's what you're doing but you should know that it doesn't come across well.

Thanks. As the certificate had switched from being signed by a trusted CA, it could have been a MITM attack and I didn't want to take the risk until I'd heard something.

Mind you, it seems even with a proper certificate we can't be sure we aren't being spoofed, unless the site is using an Extended Validation cert and we're using a browser that supports them (Chrome, not IE), so we have to just try and be vigilant and hope for the best! https://www.grc.com/ssl/ev.htm

Well I wouldn't say it's a non-issue if someone can create a client update that devalues a coin in an instant, even if that is possible with any coin, particularly as most clients don't seem to be GPG signed (the liteclient is and I'd like to see all clients adopt this practice) to help prevent users downloading and installing a rogue client. More that it's an issue for all cryptocurrencies, rather than a non-issue. Sounds a bit worrying actually.

sbc.pnwminer.com is showing an untrusted certificate issued on 12/2013 when I open the page now, so I'm reluctant to login to it until that's explained or fixed.

Thanks for working that out for me CoinGeneral

It would be terrible if that was true but it's only the estimate from hashco, which I've only just started using today and is a PPLNS and I understand it takes at least 12 hours to get up to the correct amount per miner on those. It's already changed to 8.675E-5. I've also noticed this doesn't appear to include my SBC earnings, which show as 0.57 SBC at the moment.

I'm mining on a couple of other pools as well and in the past few days have earned roughly what Coinwarz estimates for me, which has been 44 SBC some days and 24 on others due to the varying difficulty. Currently it estimates 64 SBC but I doubt I'll earn that because of just starting with a PPLNS.

I only added hashco to my pools because of  int3ractivodular's comments that when they're mining SBC with their large pool hashrate (currently 878 MH/s) the smaller pools don't have a chance of finding a block or earning me anything, so it seems pointless mining on those whilst hashco is mining SBC. If that's true, ideally we'd be able to direct out all our hashrate to hashco when they're mining SBC and direct it to the other pools when they're not (maybe still leaving some % mining on hashco to get some BTC for the other coins) but it seems the only way to do this at the moment is to manually monitor what coin hashco is mining and switch our pools manually, which is obviously impractical.

I've noticed that there appears to be a bug in CGWatcher, where if I disable a Pool that works but if I later Enable it, that doesn't work and I have to Stop and re-start the miner to fix it, so watch out for that if you try it.

Another strange thing I've noticed is that I use MSI Afterburner to overclock and set my fan to 90% but when I stop the miner, the fan slows right down as if it's reset to Auto speed (probably about 40%) and when I restart the miner (via CGWatcher) it speeds the fan up again but only to 85% and I have to change it in Afterburner manually back to 90%. I'm not sure if CGWatcher or cgminer is causing this, so I'll have to investigate a bit more but I can't see any settings in CGWatcher that would cause it.

True, I have little knowledge of such numbers. Never mind then, I thought it was just a glitch.

Now hashco.ws is showing my est. daily BTC earnings as 9.677E-5. I wish , lol.

On the current round on Miningpool.co, it's showing 4796 Valid shares and 497 Invalid (9.4%), hashco.ws is showing 27 Accepted, 1 Rejected (3.57%) and coin-base.org is showing 76 Valid and Invalid (0.01%).

Can anyone explain why I'm getting such a high % of invalid/rejected on the first two but not on the last?

On coin-base.org it shows a list of contributors when clicking on the block number but that's not much help when I'm set to show as anon! There's no "Your share" that I can see and even if there was, it's a lot quicker and simpler to look at a list of the last 50 blocks and see your shares, as on miningpool.co. On stablecoin.miners-pool.eu clicking on the block number just gives me a 404 error!

I'm having a play with hashco.ws at the moment but I'm getting a lot of rejects it seems. I'm using --load-balance to split it 40% to hashco.ws, 40% to miningpool.co and 20% to coin-base.org and hasco.ws shows 143 Kh/s, 109 shares and 4 rejects (3.54%), miningpool.co shows 153 Kh/s and 0% invalid and coin-base.org shows 31 Kh/s and 0.02% invalid (I haven't stated the shares for these two pools as I was using them before restarting the miner with hashco.ws added).

You might be right that your method works out well, although it does mean that you're not benefiting from the reduced variance by splitting your hashrate amongst several SBC pools all the time as described here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=215735.new#new and here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=78031.20

Having said that, I'm not sure that method totally works properly, as I've mentioned in that first thread. In addition, overnight I left it on --balance split amongst three Prop pools and on one of them (miningpool.co) I can see that there were several blocks where I haven't contributed any shares, so didn't receive any credit for those, whereas I guess if I was only using that pool I would have contributed some shares for every block.

Mind you the other pools I'm using (coin-base.org and stablecoin.miners-pool.eu) don't appear to list how many shares I've contributed to each block, so it's impossible to say if it's any better on those!

That seems to be one of the problems when choosing pools, that the information they provide varies quite a lot.

I asked some questions in my newbie thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=358711.msg3836730#msg3836730, which I don't want to crosspost here but if anyone could take a look and try and answer some of them for me, that'd be great.

The weird thing is, my page shows ToFist in the create new user box but when I actually create a user, it gives it my proper username and I have been receiving credits for my shares.

But if you use one of those profit-switching pools, most of the day you'll be mining other coins that you probably don't want or don't think will increase in value much, when you could be mining SBC, so is it worth it just to ensure you get a cut of the blocks it finds on the occasions it does switch to mining SBC?

What do I know though, I seem to be looking at only mining 12 SBC/day at the moment, when I should be getting about 26!

Isn't this rather affected by these profit-switching pools now, which can provide a lot more hash power than the ordinary pools and thus get all the coins when they're on a particular currency? See this thread regarding stablecoin for example https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349198.440

Note I discussed the following in my newbie thread here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=358711.msg3836730#msg3836730 as I had no idea how long it would be before I could post in other threads but now it's unlocked, I thought it might be better to discuss it here. If you'd rather reply in that thread though, please do.

I've been experimenting with load-balancing amongst three pools with my 464Kh/s but I've encountered some issues. The readme suggestst that using --balance it should share out the hashrate equally between all three pools I've specified but when I was testing earlier, stablecoin.miners.eu (160-270MH/s) showed 101 Kh/s, miningpool.co showed 240 Kh/s and coin-base.org (13-25MH/s) showed No Active Workers, hashrate or difficulty, despite the fact that cgminer was showing a list of accepted for that pool (pool 2) and no mention of pool 0 or 1. When I refreshed the site, I could see that my Accepted was increasing on there (although a lot of Accepteds in cgminer don't seem to translate into accepted on the site), so I guess there's just some issue with the site not being able to detect the worker/hashrate when using --balance, although it does still accept shares (although I can't tell if it's accepting all it should or if some are getting ignored wrongly).

When I tried --load-balance, with coin-base.org, miningpool.co and pnwminer.com (the first two are Prop, the last PPLNS) and without specifying any quotas, which the readme suggests should split it equally, it seemed to allocate most of it to pnwminer.com, around 350KH/s, with miningpool.co getting around 85 KH/s and coin-base.org the rest. I don't know if it would work better if I specified quotas but that seems hard to do properly when the pools' hashrates vary a lot throughout the day.

Hi

I've just started mining and first I tried Litecoin and on the pool I was using, it was easy to understand as the Accepted and Rejected shown pretty much matched what cgminer showed.

Now I'm trying Stablecoin and it's a lot more confusing, as there isn't this correlation and cgminer might show A:10000 but the pool only shows Accepted: 10 (just an example, not saying this is what I'm seeing exactly).

I was first on coin-base.org, which is a Prop system but then I read that these are vulnerable to pool-hopping and so I might not be earning my fair share on there. It also only has about 13-25MH/s pool hashrate and I was seeing a lot of dropoffs, which might have just been people disconnecting for the night but might also indicate pool-hopping I think. I was using the difficulty 16 port as I'm only running 464 Kh/s at the moment. I also seemed to be getting cut off from there a lot and it was switching over to my failover but I don't know if that really matters with it being a Prop.

So I switched to pnwminer.com, which is a PPLNS system, which I understand helps to counter pool-hopping and so is more fair and has a much higher pool hashrate of around 150-270 MH/s but it's showing my difficulty as 184 so I'm thinking this might mean a lot of what cgminer is showing as Accepted is not getting accepted by the pool, so I'm wasting my time on there.

I've been using Miningpool.co as a failover although that doesn't seem to even say what system it uses, other than VARDIFF. Nor does stablecoin.miners.eu. These two each have a pool hashrate of around 160-270 MH/s.

Then I read this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=215735.0 and this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=78031.0 about using --load-balance to reduce variance, so I tried it with coin-base.org, pnwminer.com and miningpool.co, without specifying any quotas which the readme suggests should split it equally but it seemed to allocate most of it to pnwminer.com, around 350 KH/s, with miningpool.co getting around 85 KH/s and coin-base.org the rest. I know those threads explain that I should set the quotas manually depending on the pool's hashrate but it seems difficult to do that when it varies a lot on all of them.

I figured that if I could set cgminer to split equally over 2-3 pools, then I could see how much I'd earnt on each pool after 24 hours to compare whether one is better than another. It's very hard to do this by running one pool for 24 hours, then another for 24 hours as difficulty varies which affects the earnings anyway.

So my questions are:
1) Am I better off using load-balance and several pools or should I just stick with one PPS pool, even if it has a low hashrate, like coin-base.org?
2) If it's better for me to use several pools, should I exclude any PPLNS pools from the selection?
3) If it's better for me to use several pools, what quotas should I use for each pool?
4) Why is my difficulty so high on pnwminer.com and will this negatively affect any returns I will make?
5) Does anyone know what system miningpool.co and stablecoin.miners.eu actually use?
6) How can I understand if I'm getting a proper amount of accepted shares on a pool when it differs so much from the accepted shown by cgminer?
7) If using a PPLNS pool, will it have much impact if I stop and restart the miner on occasion?
Would it be pointless using a PPLNS pool if a couple of times a week I have to stop the miner for 3-4 hours?

I'd be grateful if anyone can help a newbie like me get to grips with these issues

EDIT: Just changed my post to make clear coin-base.org is a Prop, not PPS. I think Prop is still vulnerable to pool-hopping though, i.e. someone jumping on late in the round with powerful hardware and submitting a load of shares, thus getting a large chunk of the reward to the detriment of constant miners.

I've also found out that miningpool.co is a Prop system. Still not sure about stablecoin.miners.eu but as it doesn't specify, maybe that means it is a Prop too. So there doesn't seem to be much choice other than Prop pools, except for one PPLNS pool which has high fees (3.5%) and is probably not suitable for someone who can't guarantee the miner will run 24/7.

I'm just trying --balance instead of --load-balance and that seems to have a quirk. It should share out the hashrate equally between all three pools I've specified but stablecoin.miners.eu shows 101 Kh/s (was 218 Kh/s a few seconds ago), miningpool.co shows 240 Kh/s and coin-base.org shows No Active Workers, hashrate or difficulty, despite the fact that cgminer is showing a list of accepted for that pool (pool 2) and no mention of pool 0 or 1 at the moment. If I refresh the site, I can see that my Accepted is increasing on there (although as I mentioned before, a lot of Accepteds in cgminer don't seem to translate into accepted on the site), so I guess there's just some issue with the site not being able to detect the worker/hashrate when using --balance, although it does still accept shares (although I can't tell if it's accepting all it should or if some are getting ignored wrongly).

So this mode might be good to use but it's impossible to tell if all your hashrate is actually getting used by the pools combined, which I find a bit disconcerting.