Already discussed many times over. Locking thread.

Well this is really a bitcoin discussion and not mining but it's so integral to the mining discussion it's worth having it here which might be the only place miners look and miners really need to be informed to make informed decisions on what to do with their hashrate so I'll even sticky this thread. I do have an opinion on this so while I will try to summarise the situation, my explanation may be considered biased. Given the nature of this discussion and its ability to attract violent debate, flamewars and trolling I will be aggressively moderating this thread and trying to stick to discussion regarding the status and consequences of the hard fork. If that is seen as censorship then so be it.

The summary is as follows:

The New York Agreement (NYA) which led to the segwit2x idea was agreed upon by a number of economic entities and mining companies - most notably the large majority of the mining pools.

Jeff Garzik was employed to write the software for the segwit2x fork which has its own bitcoin client now known as btc1.

The bitcoin core project which consists of about 40 major contributors and ~400 ad hoc contributors did not have a single person agree to the hard fork in b2x.

The community at large is running the bitcoin client produced by the bitcoin core project.

Segwit was soft forked successfully on the bitcoin network based on the contribution of hashrate from NYA since it was made compatible with the bitcoin core project through the addition of BIP91.

Bitcoin core has continued to develop the bitcoin client separately from Jeff Garzik's btc1 client with many new features, performance enhancements, bugfixes etc.

There are no other developers working on the btc1 client and very little development has happened.

The 2x hard fork is due in about 2 weeks and is now completely incompatible with the bitcoin core client. This means that there will be a split of the chain, not a unanimously followed chain as happened with the segwit fork. Much like bitcoin cash this means that anyone who has bitcoin before the split will have equal amounts of btc and b2xcoin. However Jeff Garzik has insisted that btc1 is there to replace the existing bitcoin chain and refuses to add replay protection to b2x. This means that if you spend your coin on one chain, you might - or you might not - have your coin automatically spent on the other chain.

Most exchanges have agreed that there will be 2 chains and not a "replacement chain" as Jeff views it. This means they may or may not offer trade of both coins. However the larger exchanges are saying the bitcoin/btc name will be kept for the bitcoin core chain as we know it (there has not been universal agreement of what b2x will be called) though some are saying that if all economy moves to the b2x chain they will rename it bitcoin/btc (this is not the common standpoint.) Current futures exchanges value the b2x chain at only 0.2 x the value of bitcoin.

Of the mining pools that agreed on NYA, most have not openly said what they'll do in terms of mining power when the fork comes along, although many have NYA advertised in their coinbase signature. This is not a binding guarantee that they'll be mining b2x and changing the coinbase signature is often a process that requires restarting their pool software so even if they change their stance they may not wish to interrupt mining to change their signature signalling it. Currently ~84% of hashrate is still advertising NYA. Some have openly stated they will not be mining b2x and of the larger pools, that includes slush and f2pool. Of those entities that are saying they will definitely be mining b2x, they are insisting they are doing it because they agreed upon it and most are not open to even discussing why they wouldn't back out of the agreement. My pools - solo.ckpool.org and ckpool.org will not be mining b2x.

If the mining pools follow their current stance that means that initially the b2x chain will get 85% of the hashrate and btc will get 15% leading to a slightly slower block finding rate on the b2x chain until the first difficulty retarget and a much slower block finding rate until the first btc difficulty retarget.

If the bitcoin node counts measurable are accurate markers out there, almost all regular users are running the bitcoin core client or a light wallet that speaks to bitcoin core. This means that to them, they will only "see" the btc chain and any transactions they perform will only be guaranteed to work as expected on btc. If the bulk of the transactions occur on the btc chain, the perceived market value of btc will remain (though the instability of the network situation may lead to lack of economic confidence and affect price) and the value of b2x will fall.

I cannot predict what pools will do if they direct all their hashrate at b2x and the value of it falls dramatically but if bitcoin cash is any indication, they will simply flip back to btc to ensure they mine on the most profitable chain.

For miners this means that what pool you choose to mine on will be mining on one or the other chain after the fork. If they are not openly saying what they'll be doing you should be particularly concerned about directing your hashrate there as there is a good chance they are just assuming only one chain will exist or be relevant after the fork - unlike the segwit fork it is guaranteed that this will NOT happen. If you are mining b2x then it may be that you will only get paid on the b2x chain and if you have the bitcoin core client you will not be receiving bitcoin as you know it and will have to switch to the btc1 client.

As for this forum's position, only the btc chain as consensus agreed upon and contributed to by the bitcoin core project is considered bitcoin and any pools mining the b2x chain will be treated as altcoin pools. Btc1 is considered a hostile fork attempt to take over the network and there is no evidence of consensus in the community to support it as a replacement for bitcoin. The fact that btc1 more or less has only one developer working on it - Jeff Garzik - and he has recently announced plans for his own premined altcoin in addition to b2x, then it is actually hard to understand why the pools would even consider this a safe replacement for bitcoin and should definitely be considered when making your choices.

I cannot envision all the economic entities and exchanges suddenly flipping their position to support b2x as bitcoin, and all users switch clients to the btc1 client and only trade in b2x in light of all this information.

My personal opinion and advice to miners would be to only mine on pools that have openly stated they are mining bitcoin and not b2x. Of course I have a stake in this since my pools mine it but bear in mind that ckpool.org does not charge a fee so I make absolutely nothing from people mining there though it is a tiny pool. I expect other pools to switch as the fork approaches too, but given the mining vs value/difficulty coin switching that even the largest pools have been doing with bitcoin cash, even if they no longer agree with NYA and b2x, they can see another way to make profits.

Bitcoin cannot be meaningfully mined with GPUs in 2017. You need to purchase an ASIC to mine bitcoin such as either the avalon 741 or the bitmain antminer S9. If you're thinking of altcoin mining then you're posting in the wrong place.

I think that miner went onto the solo pool since there was a concomitant hashrate rise there. I guess he figured he was almost mining solo so he probably decided to formalise that fact.

Since btc.com is owned by bitmain, and bitmain are the prime movers on 2x, they're making it look on the surface like they're assuming it will become the dominant chain so it stands to reason that they would be referring to that chain. For the record, I think they don't believe it will succeed any more and are just sticking to it to give them yet another chain to mine according to profit vs difficulty like they're doing on shitcoin cash.

That'll change after the 2x fork...

You cannot meaningfully mine bitcoin with a laptop. Try the altcoin sections.

/locked

Indeed, and the return of a lot of hashrate that was dumped onto mining shitcoin cash instead. A lot of new hashrate may have been initially directed at cash instead for a while and has now started mining real bitcoin.

Bitcoin difficulty rose.

Bestshare resets for everyone any time a block is found by anyone in this pool. Best ever doesn't.

Happy 100% everyone. Keep on mining.

No, this is wrong. Asicboost increases power efficiency, it has zero effect on hashrate and luck. Also one pool's hashing has absolutely no effect on another pool's hashing.

This topic has been moved to Trashcan.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2310050.0
Dupe

Use their support thread.

This is not PPLNS, but is very close, with a score based variant of PPLNS. The window is 5N and so far we haven't even filled one full window. The LNS in the pool stats means Last N Shares and tells you how many are in the current window. Block finding has no influence on the window at all.

It's as CG says here, it is only for bragging rights, but if you wish to know what a good best share is then the following explanation will help you understand better.

After 100 shares, on average your best share should be 100.
After 1,000,000 shares, on average your best share should be 1,000,000.
After 1,200,000,000,000 shares, on average your best share should be that too, meaning you should have found one block with it. That's why on average it takes current diff number of shares to find one block.

If your best share is less than the total number of shares you've contributed, then your luck is a little low, and vice versa. It has absolutely zero bearing on your chance of finding an ultra lucky best share in the very next share, but it's interesting to watch nonetheless.

You're most welcome. I wish us all good luck!

Fees don't quite work that way as the fees get progressively smaller towards the end of the block and they're missing out on only the smallest 10% of the transaction fees. Nonetheless it is likely they screwed up and set maxblocksize again and forgot to set weight.

ckpool has only ever been on bitbucket unlike the rest of my projects. If I recall correctly the reason we started it there was the code was done privately for almost a year before it was released to the public and bitbucket had better private repo features at the time. I never really saw any point moving it to github after that.

Slush pool support thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976.0