Sounds like some Steam internal problem. Try entering the code in the Steam client? Top "Games" menu -> "Redeem a Steam wallet code..."

Sure, I'll take one. Please and thank you

I've been waiting for my 1000 € for 33 days now. It still says "up to 3 weeks" on their site (and it said 2 weeks around the time I made the withdraw).

I guess they're not out of money or anything, but these kinds of limits from their bank are ridiculous. Maybe they should try a proper bank, or is their business too shady to be accepted elsewhere? 

The fact is that be it fees or donations, at the 60 GH/s that we seemed to have reached (or the <50 it was more recently), it doesn't amount to much. If Bitcoins were worth more, or if we had had more hashrate (say, finding a couple of blocks daily), it might have been worth the effort to keep going. But as things were, with Bitcoin value in the mud and the pool not really growing, it was looking improbable that the pool could ever even cover the server costs. It was an interesting project to develop, but in the end that wasn't enough.

Pool's closed due to AIDS

This thread is already too long, but I just gotta respond to that. I think you have that comparison backwards. I know I haven't signed any contract regarding bitcoin. In your example case, the transfer of information to the competitor is irreversible, like bitcoin transactions are irreversible. That employer can't do anything to make the competitor un-know the secrets, so they might try to force them not to take advantage of the information by utilizing laws. Laws that are meant to keep some fairness in society, not to undo things that are impossible to undo. Then your stance would be comparable to "you can't claim NDA, that information was transfered and there's nothing that can be done about it".

Cash changing hands is also permanent and non-fundable, but that doesn't mean that if a huge wad of cash falls into your lap, you can't get in legal trouble if you don't give it back when the rightful owner shows up reasonably soon...

Oh, why that particular pool? Something the other PPLNS pools don't have?


Their site seems to be down at the moment, so I can't compare stats, but ours has phenominally low stales too, and transaction fees are rewarded to miners  

That is not proper PPS though. PPS is supposed to be risk-free for the miner, but from what you describe, the miner is risking not getting paid for ages (or ever) if your pool gets long rounds.

We at rfcpool.com used Prop at first and then added PPS too. It started out tied to found blocks, but that was rather unfair so we soon fixed it, so that all PPS shares went instantly to the confirmed balance that could be paid out at any time. But the rounds were long and the pool was incurring losses. The owner paid the miners out of his own wallet, but eventually got tired of the losses and shut it down.

But since we had written the pool website from scratch and it was full of beautiful statistics and stuff, and the servers were robust enough to handle spikes well beyong 200 GH/s (no closing down of registrations for us ) - and the users that had to move elsewhere were complaining that the other pools' websites suck and they're unreliable and unsustainable - the owner got strong-armed into reopening

So now we're using PPLNS, because it won't bankrupt the pool, it's fair to regular miners (hopper-proof) while being easy enough to understand, and on average miners get the same rewards as on PPS. Everyone is welcome to check us out

Hi, don't worry, Caesium adjusted "N" to double what it was before (now 1*difficulty), making the "window" for payouts longer. So, your estimated payout is still ramping up - and the abrupt change of the "ramp steepness" moved you a little back. On the other hand, if you stopped mining, the payout estimate would ramp down slower.

The old value for "N" was suitable for a freshly started PPLNS scheme, but now that we've been running for a while it was sensible to increase it. We will probably increase it more in the future (up to a few times what it is now), but abrupt changes aren't good so we will look at gradually ramping N to the new value

I like my earnings to go up when the pool is lucky, and I accept them going down when it's unlucky.

PPS rewards are based on a completely neutral 50% luck, but several other payout schemes also average the same over a long enough period where luck averages out. Prop suffers from unfairness (i.e. not averaging the same as PPS), and I think some *SMPPS variants give miners the shaft when their money buffer has run out and they're getting long rounds.

I do think pool hoppers are a cancer that's leeching off all the non-hoppers. If everyone was a hopper, every prop pool would grind to a halt on the first non-short round. So yeah, I hope prop pools move to other reward schemes.

Since PPS carries a risk for the pool owner, you as a miner risk losing your last payout if the pool goes bankrupt. Granted, that's not a big sum typically - configure your auto-payouts!

PPS is also the most vulnerable to withholding winning shares. If you're a miner, there's really no incentive to submit the winning shares - you keep earning the same no matter what. Sure, a withholder is hurting the pool owner, but he's also helping himself by driving down the network difficulty, however slightly. If that advantage is worth more than the price of 1 share, any sociopath would choose to do it But in some other reward schemes, a withholder also hurts himself by preventing his submitted shares from getting paid from the withheld block, so they make withholding unprofitable.

PPLNS is simple. At the moment N=902850 (half of the current difficulty), so when we find a block, the latest 902850 submitted shares get paid (50 BTC / 902850) = 0.00005538015932406342 BTC per share. If the round is shorter than 902850 shares, then latest shares from the previous round(s) get paid again until we reach 902850 shares into the past. If the round is longer, then the oldest shares from the start of the round will not get paid.

This means that:

• if you mine constantly, your earnings will average the same as on PPS (but in the short term, luck is a factor)
• pool-hoppers don't earn anything extra
• if you stop mining for a while, your payout from future blocks starts shrinking (because the "payment window" keeps moving forward, and less and less of your shares are in it), but you may still get paid from multiple future blocks if the rounds are short
• when you start mining, your rewards from future blocks ramp up similarly as they ramp down when you stop
• there is no unfair penalty for intermittent mining on average, but the pool's luck does affect how much you get

The difference PPLNH makes is that instead of the last "N" shares, every share from the last "N" hours gets paid (not a fixed sum, but so that we spread the 50 BTC evenly to all shares submitted in the last 48 hours for example). Otherwise it's the same: old shares can get paid multiple times if short rounds follow, or not get paid if long rounds follow.

The exact choice of "N" shares or hours doesn't matter on average, but the larger it is, the less pool luck affects the payouts, but it also takes longer for the payouts to start or stop coming.

Fourth block found, and our luck continues because that's all of them found way faster than the current difficulty suggests

We also have great fun on the IRC channel (freenode #rfcpool), so if your current pool's channel is full of bores or nutters, join ours 

I got my account back a few hours ago. They wanted an estimate of the balance from me too... I'm not sure what I replied about the BTC amount, but my idea of the USD balance was way off. They didn't seem to mind  You'd think that the bank account details would be more convincing than some vague and incorrect recollections of balances, but I guess not.

Before the big sell-off, people's accounts were being logged into with the correct password (cracked from the leaked database) and all the money stolen. In addition to the rollback, I think those who got stolen from should be compensated. There's something fishy about the amount of bitcoins supposedly on one account, if they all were sold from the same account, but I don't feel like speculating about it. Anyway, the rollback only helps with the stuff that happened within MtGox - they should refund those who got their accounts stolen from by withdrawing the bitcoins somewhere out of the site. After all, no matter how the password database got leaked, they were carelessly hashed, which is the root cause of the problem.

Oh, and coincidentally, the current difficulty is the number of shares (or difficulty 1 hashes) that need to be found on average before a block is solved. So, 877227 currently, and much more very soon

Yeah, if you're solo mining then the bitcoin server you're connected to (your own client, hopefully) tells what address to send the coins to. Then the difficulty 1 hashes serve no purpose apart from showing that calculations are happening; they are "near misses".

When solo mining, there is no "progress." There is only sudden success by a stroke of luck, and if you keep at it for long enough, statistically you'll find a block eventually. Sometimes it takes 40000 shares, sometimes 1500000, or it could be even less or more. But if you have 40 so far, you'll probably be waiting a long time to gain anything

But for most people it's best to join a mining pool. I recommend Eligius!

Difficulty 1 hashes are found all the time, and the only use is to send to the pool to prove that you're mining (they're really easy to check, but hard to generate). The same work that's looking for hashes of the current "real" difficulty generates those low-difficulty hashes as a by-product. Mining pools call them shares.

When you stop guiminer, the progress isn't lost, it's saved (as the number of shares you've sent so far). The pool settings determine where the payouts are sent (and what the threshold is).

340 from my 6950, when I'm away from home or otherwise bothering to listen to the fans

I need to get me out of this newbie joint!

I am up 4 BTC from these Double Trouble type Ponzi schemes
+4 from DT3, +4 from "High stakes double trouble", -3 from triple trouble (that thing was a bust)

And -1 from "2.25x trouble": http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=21262.0;topicseen
But it just started! Join in folks, and gamble! I fully expect to get a payout, so I'll be at +5.25 BTC after that.