You are free to try for now.

NB: I have changed hashrate computation code to include only valid shares and stales. This should still give a good approximation while also preventing inflated numbers due to invalid shares.

To all other Bithopper users: I recommend to switch clients or to use another pool while this issue persists to avoid excess strain on our systems.

Welcome to ABCPool flower1024!

Your invalid rate is indeed abnormally high. Only you and one other (<100Mh/s) user are currently experiencing through-the-roof invalid rates, so I would suspect the problem is with Bithopper. I have traced your submissions through our accounting pipeline, and everything checks out: In addition to the reported valid and stale shares you submit lots of invalid shares.

Note that you are effectively DOSing our servers  . But at such a low rate, we'll let it slide for now  I do suggest you use a different client.

Hashrate reported by ABCPool is currently based on all shares submitted, even the invalid ones. With this we intended to approximate the rate reported by mining clients. For clients like Phoenix the current approach approximates client-reported hashrate best, because those clients have actually done the work for invalid shares they submit.

NEWS: ABCPool Registration is open again until we reach our next threshold.

Our systems have been operating normally all day, hashrate has been stable and system load is low. We also have some of our own rigs hooked up to the pool, and these have not experienced any connection problems for the past day. We're currently seeing 99.42% valid shares reported over the past four hours, combined for all users.

I suspect there may be a problem with your setup or your internet connection. Perhaps you can find out more by inquiring on the guiminer thread. I hope you'll succeed in fixing it!

Yes, we like them too

NEWS: With mixed feelings we have to announce that due to the overwhelming demand we have to close down registration for now. That way we can keep on providing the best quality service to our current miners.

Leave a message in this topic or turn on notification and we'll let you know when we are once again welcoming new miners!

Welcome Alfalfa!
Thanks, that's what some heavy modifications of pushpool and bitcoin can do
ABCPool user stats are quite sober at the moment, we hope to extend those next week. Thanks for your input!

Thanks for the suggestion bal3wolf. We have the two times a day policy in effect to protect our members from high transaction fees, although each user could also do this himself by increasing the auto-payout amount.

Therefore, if no one objects to it within a few days, we'll increase payouts to four times a day.

Earlier this day we had an issue with the pool that caused some of our members to spend several seconds idling on several occasions, and caused a higher than normal amount of invalid shares. We've since added countermeasures against this and adjusted pool parameters. Everything is now back to normal. Our apologies for the hickup.

To support users that are new to Bitcoin we have started a forum thread in the Newbies forum. If you are still a restricted forum user ('newbie'), you may ask your questions regarding ABCPool over there, and we will regularly check it to provide support.

NB: Established forum users, please post in the main ABCPool thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33586.0;all.

This thread is the ABCPool.co support thread for new forum users. It exists because new forum users are restricted and can therefore not post in the main ABCPool.co thread.

If you encounter any problems or have questions regarding ABCPool.co, please ask them here.

Also see the main ABCPool.co discussion thread in the 'Mining'->'Pools' forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33586.0;all

--------------------------
ABCPool.co has some advantages that are hard to find anywhere else in the same combination:
* Predictable Income: Pay-per-Share (PPS) means you know how much you get.
* We pay for Stale Shares and orphan blocks: Because we think a pool should be responsible for delivering new work to you in time! NB: Proportional pools that offer this, always do so from your own pocket. With PPS, stale share rewards are a real bonus.
* Immediate payouts: no more waiting for ‘estimated/unconfirmed reward’ to become available!
* Come & Go as you like: Pay-per-Share is immune to pool hopping

Of course you’ll also find the common features at ABCPool.co:
* Long Polling & NTime-Roll support
* Less than 0.1% invalid shares on average
* No penalty for invalid blocks
* Automatic and Manual payout
* Up to the minute stats
* Easy sign-up


A bit of background: As creators of ABCPool, we have always had a preference for PPS mining. We’d noticed for some time that there was a distinct lack of Pay-per-Share mining pools. That's why we decided to fill that gap in the Bitcoin community by introducing ABCPool.co.

We only charge ABCPool.co a 4% nominal fee, which comes down to around 2.1% effectively due to stale shares compensation (0.4% pool-wide average) and orphan block compensation (1.5% average). (NB: Other PPS pools currently charge as much as 10% nominal fee)

If you have any questions about ABCPool.co, feel free to ask them in this forum thread, or see our main thread in the 'Mining'->'Pools' forum.

The pool is humming along nicely between 40-50GH today. There have been no service interruptions in the meantime.

We have one 'General Interest' announcement. This is not something ABCPool specific; you will encounter it in every pool, although it is not widely known. It's a bug in Phoenix (and probably other clients too) that we discovered while building the pool. It affects people that have multiple workers per GPU, or use slower cards that mine below 80MH/s.

**The problem**
Mining clients (Phoenix, maybe others too) use a workqueue which they fill in advance with new work, so that when the current work is done there is new work available immediately. This is actually a smart thing to do, but has as a side effect: the period between requesting work and submitting a share for it now becomes at least 2x the time it takes for your worker to complete a workitem. For slow miners (approx. <80 MH/s) this means it may take longer than 120 seconds to hand in solutions.

However, 120 seconds is the default cutoff time for pushpool-based mining pools. Almost all pools use the pushpool software. After 120 seconds have passed since handing out work, they will no longer accept solutions for it. That's a good thing, because it ensures the quality of the Bitcoin network. Your mining client should and could have asked for new work in the meantime.

But Phoenix does not ask for new work soon enough by default. You can force it to refresh its queue regularly at the cost of a lot of network traffic and server load. But that will only solve the problem partly, as Phoenix will never abandon work it has started unless a new block is found. So if your miner is slower than <40 MH, it will still take >120s for a single workitem to complete. Phoenix *will* produce some invalid shares every two minutes in that case, no matter which pool you mine with.

Again, this is a client-side issue with all pools and not with ABCPool specifically. It only affects workers <80MH/s, and can only be solved by switching to a bug-free mining client.

** The solution **
If you use multiple workers per GPU, make sure they never mine below 80MH/s. Maybe even consider 120MH/s as a minimum, just to be sure. If you have a slow GPU (<80MH/s), look for a mining client that is willing to abandon the *current* workitem instead of the queued one. If someone finds one, please let your fellow miners know about it.

Again, this is an issue with all pools and not with ABCPool specifically. It only affects workers <80MH/s.

You are right that ABCPool pays more than Deepbit PPS. At deepbit there is a 10% fee on PPS, so if you earn ca. 0.65 over there, you'll earn ca. 0.65 / 90% = 0.72 at ABCPool, because we have no fee. On top of that, ABCPool pays for stale shares, and deepbit does not  That will earn you an extra 0%-1%.
We do not mention it on the site yet, but automatic Payout runs two times per day: around 11am and 11pm UTC. That way we prevent a lot of small transactions and tx fees. So your 0.5 BTC should be there in just a few minutes.

As soon as we roll out the next website update, payout times will appear on the 'my account' page.

Welcome to ABCPool bal3wolf! Those 24 hour stats are an excellent idea. It shouldn't be too hard to implement either. We'll put it on our todo list for next week.

You're welcome. In the end I tested your address on my own ABCPool.co account and it actually said it was invalid. So that took care of testing the validation logic and solving your problem at the same time

The promised site improvements have been deployed successfully. That means:
* Fixed auto-payout delays because of invalid Bitcoin addresses
* Validation of Bitcoin addresses entered into account details
* Improved feedback for bitcoind errors
* way better backend-accounting (invisible to you
Jack, as it turns out the Bitcoin address you have configured in 'my account' is invalid. That's why the payment could not be processed. In order to withdraw your funds, please re-configure the address and try again.

Thanks to the site improvements, from now on you will be told about an invalid address as soon as you enter it. That's a lot better than the cryptic error message you encountered during payment.

Happy Hashing!

UPDATE on the payout problem: We have a pretty good idea what the problem is. We have prioritized some other payout-related work on our todo list to combine it with the fix for this problem. This will also improve records-keeping on our side so we'll be better able to troubleshoot any future payout issues.

Thanks for your continued patience.

We're looking into it now. It would help if we knew:
* what the particular error message is you're getting?
* whether  you are referring to automatic or instant payout?
We have not verified the issue yet, so it's hard to say. If the issue was temporary due to the connection problems, it may already work again. But maybe it's something else. Payout issues are tricky; you don't want to introduce extra bugs when fixing them. Therefore it will probably be a couple of hours from now to get everything fixed and tested.

I hope you are not in too big a big hurry to buy those alpaca socks with your hard earned BTC

Amazon has now confirmed that they have indeed resolved the connectivity issues. Connectivity was lost for somewhat less than half an hour. Although every minute not mining is one too many, Amazons response time is pretty good I guess.

Again, we are sorry for the inconvenience.

ABCPool just resurfaced on the Internet it seems. Please verify that your miners have started mining again.

NB: Amazon is not confirming yet that they have resolved the connectivity issues.