As you may have noticed, ABCPool.co cannot be reached. Although the server is running smoothly, Amazon is reporting network connectivity issues in the data center that is hosting ABCPool (EC2 N. Virginia).

Once network connectivity is restored you may have to restart your miners.

You can follow Amazons progress in resolving this issue here:
http://status.aws.amazon.com/

As of yet, there is no estimate for when ABCPool will be up again. We are sorry for the inconvenience!

After reviewing the code, I found and fixed a bug involving PIN on the account details page. Could you try again? If you still encounter the 'invalid pin' message, let me know and I'll issue you a new pin (PM me if you have preference for any particular PIN).

st4rdust, I am going over all functions on our 'account details' page now to see if perhaps the new site design messed with some of the functionality. I'll get back to you on this.

Our new site design just went live, check it out now at www.ABCPool.co!

Hi Maxa,

I'll go over the differences you mention and describe their implications to help you make an informed choice.

Location
 Server location matters for round-trip time of work requests and share submissions. With todays fast internet connections however, the few milliseconds of difference does not make a noticeable difference in mining performance. There may be legal issues with some locations, but I'm not an expert on that.
Hashrate
Hashrate matters only for Prop., Score and PPLNS pools. Higher hashrate means more consistent payouts. For PPS, hashrate does not matter since the payout is fixed per share; no matter how high the hashrate is.
Reward Type
For me, one of the main differences between pools is trust: how much do you trust other pool members and the pool operators to treat you fairly? The score method for example needs loads of trust (or audits) due to its intransparancy. But for PPS, the 'other members' risk is completely removed. It also depends on the amount of risk you're willing to take. More risk (Prop., Score) generally means less fees, And lower risk (PPS) means higher fees. We've just launched ABCPool which combines all the positive aspects: ABCPool is a PPS site with a low 2% fee, without any risk of other members cheating.
Audits
For those pools in which your reward depends on the efforts of others, audits seem like a must-have. This is because without audits, it is impossible to know that the shares per round are reported accurately.  For PPS pools, it's  always easy to audit the pool yourself: just compare the number of shares reported by your miner to the number of shares you got payed out for.
Protocol
LP is a must, otherwise you're throwing away money. But almost every pool has it.
Launched
Older pools imply trustworthiness. However, I think that that is not necessary. With most pools (also at ABCPool) it's possible to have balances as small as 0.2 BTC payed out to you, so your risk of not being paid is limited to that amount. The older (bigger?) pools do seem to be under attack more than newer pools.

I would recommend PPS to anyone, and ABCPool in particular. But that's obvious, since..


[Disclaimer: I am one of the operators of ABCPool.co, a Pay-per-Share pool]

Today we touched the 5GH/s; We welcome our newest miners!

We have just lowered the ABCPool.co fee-boundary for both automatic and instant withdrawal to 0.2 BTC. That means you can now enjoy your rewards even sooner!

It could be that they charge 7%. But their site does not list that number anywhere as far as I can tell. The price per share they mention seems out of date given the current difficulty. Their price does not translate to a 7% fee when you do the math (at the moment of writing).

In our opinion pools should be as transparant as possible about mining rewards, that's why we provide the exact calculation of our rewards in our faq.

Anyway, our 2% is a lot less than their purported 7% fee

We noticed earlier today that under certain conditions, stale shares would incorrectly be labeled as 'invalid shares'. These conditions are now properly handled for future shares. This matters to our miners since we pay for stale shares, but not for invalid shares.

We did our first payouts today! To make it easy for our miners we have both automatic and instant payout.

The issue has been resolved. In the shares processing pipeline, some shares were sent back to a previous step. That caused them to be counted again when the next batch processing job executed. After deploying the fix, We've reset all share counts accumulated until now. This issue did not affect rewards; they were always right. Therefore, rewards have not been adjusted due to this issue.

Sirky, thanks for pointing out this issue!

I'm investigating it; we're seeing some other suspicious numbers too.

UPDATE: seems like some stuff is counted multiple times before being moved off to better places. The good news is reward calculation seems unaffected, but reported valid/stale/invalid counts are way off. We will probably have to reset those counts for our current users after this issue has been solved. Your balance will remain in place in that case.

Thanks for the hashes; you're chugging along nicely! As you can see your current stale rate is below 0.2% now, and those stale shares are included in your balance.
Our buffer is 'considerable', although we store most of it offsite as a security precaution.

We have no plans to stop the introductory period/fee. If we ever increase the fee, we will post it on the site and the forum at least 4 days in advance. We can't say at this moment what the fee would look like in that case: We'll need to run the numbers when it comes to that.

@Burp: Lowering the payout minimum is on our agenda. We'll have to review the tx-fee implications before we do that, so it will probably be done later this week.

We've just opened our site to everyone for registration. We'll probably be accepting about a dozen users at this moment. That way we can provide the best service while we iron out any wrinkles in our pool.

Thanks for your concern sirky! These are exactly the things that make operating a PPS pool a bit more challenging.

The malicious/buggy type of stales that you mention have certain telltale properties. These make it possible to distinguish between them and honest stales. We compensate all honest stales. Honest stales are the result of a delay in long polling and normal network round trip times.

NB: The site is currently counting down the time until launch, at which time we will put the full site online.

ABCPool is closing down

Dear miners,

The journey is coming to an end.

When ABCPool started out in 2011, we became the first share reseller of our kind. ABCPool pioneered the idea of converting the contract for a share from variable-reward to fixed-reward and reselling it like that.

The idea proved successful, miners liked the low risk and low fees which caused ABCPool to quickly grow to a significant share of the mining market.
Bitcoin is still in its infancy, and is evolving quickly. With the arrival of Stratum mining, part of the underlying technology for ABCPool became obsolete. As we expected, pool hash rate has been dwindling ever since.

After two years, we are now at the point that ABCPool in its current incarnation has to close its doors. The newly arrived FPGA and ASIC miners have diluted turnaround per GHash, and are pushing networking costs up. Hosting costs have become too high to justify keeping the service available, even if we’d increase fees.

We’d like to thank everyone who mined with us throughout the years, and everyone who has contributed their feedback on our forum. You guys made running the pool a great experience, thank you for that!

This Monday (August 5 2013) we will be shutting down the getwork server. Our website will stay up all through august for people to withdraw any leftover earnings. Any balances remaining after that will be treated as donations to cover the losses of the past months.

It’s not unthinkable that ABCPool will be making a comeback in some other form. Don’t hold your breath, but do send us a PM if you’d like to be kept in the loop.

As always, Happy Hashing,

Chlorine & MintCondition


---------------------------------------------
We’re proud to introduce ABCPool.co to you, the highest paying Pay-per-Share (PPS) pool, making miners happy since 2011-08-02.

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, so hop all you like!

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 1.5% nominal fee until further notice, while other PPS pools currently charge as much as 10% nominal fee! We can offer such a low fee because behind the scenes we share the risk of block-finding with other sources.

If you have any questions about ABCPool.co, feel free to ask them in this forum thread. If you are restricted to the newbie forum, please see our thread over there: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=36666.0

Too soon man, too soon..    

Actually I hope the modest balance I kept there will come out of all this unscathed. That'll be the moment I will transfer it out of Mt Gox, and after that they will never see a bitpenny from me ever again.

[Captain hindsight]But then again, the whole Mt Gox experience has always had a cheap feel to it for me. Combine that with the quick rise in daily transaction value and something was bound to go wrong. We should've never put so much trust in them![/captain hindsight]