Well, they went for a different way to communicate between computer and hashing device. No mining client supports those units as of yet. There will at least be a cgminer fork that will get support. Maybe normal cgminer and bfgminer will get support for them as well. I hope I can add support in BitMinter client too. They look poised to become a block erupter usb killer.


Yeah, working on an update that will tolerate stratum proxy's broken behavior. I'm not sure why this bug in stratum proxy can't simply be fixed, though? Has the project been abandoned?

Isn't it easier if Slush fixes this?

Those will not work with the current BitMinter client versions. I'm looking into adding support for them.

You can use them on the BitMinter pool using some incarnation of cgminer or bfgminer though (either the regular or a fork).

For prepay of both BTC and NMC plus the easy mode perk you need 2% BTC and 2% NMC donation - much cheaper than 4% of your total income, as the NMC is only a small part of it. Also, at that point you are at 2% donation so you could activate all perks through the "pro minter" perk.

Easy mode doesn't raise your income. It allows you to set a higher submits-per-minute setting for your workers, which will reduce your daily variance a bit. Read this where I explained how it works:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg3142713#msg3142713

Especially interesting is Organofcorti's analysis on how high/low difficulty mining affects your variance.

Coming right up, sir.


I'll try and find out. If they are Icarus compatible (like the ASICminer USB sticks) then they should work in BitMinter client.

Normally you can set submits per minute from 1 to 20. With the easy mode perk settings from 1 to 40 are allowed.

Lower values give your client higher difficulty. This means lower bandwidth usage for you, less server load for BitMinter, but higher variance in your daily mining income.

Higher values give you a lower difficulty. This means less variance in your daily mining income, but also causes more bandwidth usage for you and more work to do for BitMinter servers.

8 proofs of work at difficulty 1 are worth the same as 1 proof of work at difficulty 8. Both show as 8 proofs of work at the website. So the pay is the same, on average. Over time it evens out and it doesn't matter which setting you use (income-wise), but in the short run higher difficulty causes more variance in your daily mining income.

Organofcorti has crunched the numbers on this. You can read about it here: https://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2012/10/71-variable-pool-difficulty.html

I think the default setting at 20 is good. But some users have expressed concern that it still uses too much bandwidth for their taste. So now if you have an extremely slow internet connection you can reduce bandwidth usage even further than before. Other users have expressed concern that their mining difficulty causes too much daily variance in their mining income. Now they can get a lower difficulty and decrease their variance. But the easy mode perk is required for this because low difficulty mining is much harder on the server.

The website was updated with some new perks and worker settings.

Here are the changes:

• API perk cost cut in half
• New perks added for high work submits per minute mining (low difficulty), low hashrate notification emails, creating more than 5 workers (some users created several hundred workers which can be a strain on some operations), and a "pro minter" perk that gives you all the perks at a reduced price (you still need to activate them)
• Added "config" buttons for each worker under "my account" -> "workers" with various settings
• Worker setting "default worker" allows you to choose a worker that should be used in case you don't set a worker name in the client or you set one that doesn't exist
• Worker setting "require password" allows you to disable the need for worker passwords (any password is accepted)
• Worker setting "work submits per minute" allows you affect the difficulty the server chooses for you. 20 is default. Set lower if you want higher difficulty to save bandwidth. With the "easy mode" perk you can also set a higher value than 20 (up to max 40).
• Worker setting "low hashrate warning" will email you if your worker goes below the chosen threshold.
• Worker setting "stratum extranonce2" is a bit technical - really only needed for sub-pools
• Worker setting "merged mining stale flush" can be turned on if you don't want the server to tell your client to flush all work when there is a namecoin block change. Not much point turning this off if you are mining with Stratum + it will cause more namecoin work rejects. But could save some bandwidth with gbt and getwork.
• New users now automatically get a default worker with password disabled. The signup page now only takes a user name, plus optional email address
• New workers are now created with password disabled. You can click "config" and set a password afterwards if you want one.

TL;DR: Have a look under "my account" -> "donations & perks" and "my account" -> "workers" in the website menu. Let me know if you have any questions or problems.

Update: note that changes made on the website can take 10-15 minutes to take effect on the mining server

Look at the live stats under the "statistics" website menu, it shows data on the current round.

Ah. This is a weird bug I'm trying to track down. Sometimes the hashrate display doesn't update.

If you see the hashrate on the website and you see accepted proofs of work ticking up (yellow boxes in the client), then things are working. I'll hopefully figure out the broken hashrate display in the client soon.

The connect/disconnect messages are normal. The client connects and disconnects to the server on demand.

And no error messages about Icarus timing out, or so?

Does it show "Icarus (COM8)" in the device list above the log?

It should start immediately if name/pass is already entered, otherwise it pops up a window and waits for that.

Did you enter names and password?

Any messages in the log? If not, try turning on verbose logging in the "settings" menu and see if there are any.

I'll add an option in the next version to rescan the same ports over and over. It will be spammy but I think in your case it can help to re-detect the device after it apparently breaks down for a while and suddenly begins working again.

Is it possible for you to test it on a different computer, does it run the same?

We use our BTC hashes to also create NMC. NMC allows creating NMC blocks with BTC work - this is called "merged mining". If you don't want these free coins that don't slow down your BTC mining, then you can set NMC donation to 100% to get rid of them.

Some namecoin info:

We get namecoins with our bitcoin mining with no additional effort. Only got namecoins so far? You will get bitcoins when we create the next bitcoin block. Read more and get a namecoin wallet from http://dot-bit.org Get a namecoin GUI from http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=341 You can sell namecoins at exchanges: [1] https://btc-e.com/ [2] https://vircurex.com/

This driver is used by all mining clients except CGMiner for BFL units:

http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

I don't know if you need to uninstall or disable the winusb stuff for the normal FTDI driver to work. Anyone know?

If you are a member of the Bitcoin Foundation, don't forget to vote in the board elections.

"This election runs until 11:59 pm on September 08, 2013 Pacific Time (US & Canada)."

Note that you must have joined the foundation by Friday, August 23 to be able to vote, so if you aren't already a member you won't get to vote.

Stratum: the server gives the client templates that the client can use to generate its own work. Only the block header and first transaction (generation transaction) are included. Stratum uses the least bandwidth of all the protocols. Stratum also makes it very fast and efficient to switch to new work data when there is a block change, which can help keep down the reject ratio caused by stale work. Unlike the other protocols it is not HTTP, so it won't work over an HTTP proxy. There is no real specification. There is a document that explains the core features and for the rest you have to read the source code for "stratum mining proxy" and/or old posts on bitcointalk.org.

GBT (getblocktemplate): the server gives the client templates that the client can use to generate its own work. The client is given full block data and (if supported by server and client) this allows the client to modify the block. For instance the miner could choose which transactions to include in a block. Because of these features GBT needs to transfer more data than Stratum, so bandwidth usage is higher. These features are not supported anywhere yet, as far as I know. GBT is well documented through detailed specs.

Plain getwork: the way mining was done originally. The server gives the client a block header without any transactions or any way to modify the block except for the nonce value. The client is limited to trying all possible nonce values and will then need to request more work from the server. This causes massive bandwidth usage for modern mining hardware. Like Stratum it doesn't give the miner any control over what is mined. You get the worst of both worlds.

getwork with rollntime extension: allows the client a limited way to generate work by modifying the timestamp on the block header. If you process 10 nonce ranges per second (42.9 Ghps) you'd want to request 10 block headers from the server. As each second passes you update the timestamp on those block headers, allowing you to reuse the same work for the next second. Bandwidth usage goes up with hashrate. 429 Ghps would require 100 small request-response exchanges with the server to get enough work after every block change. Compare with GBT where bandwidth usage goes up with the size of the transactions (one big request-response exchange per block change). Which uses less bandwidth depends on your hashrate (getwork) and the size of the block you are hashing (GBT).

TL;DR: getwork is the old way. The rollntime extension gave it back some life, but it won't scale as mining devices get faster. There are two new protocols to improve mining: Stratum which focuses on low bandwidth usage and GBT which focuses on allowing the miner to control what goes in a block.

The BitMinter mining pool supports all of the above.

Sorry for the delay. It's this block:

https://bitminter.com/block/btc/0000000000000011aed14421280adfac98dceef3fac4c02d9dca540841c58dbb

The block was found in the middle of a DDoS attack and the information about who found it was lost. It shows in the blocks list as coming from "BitMinter". The mining server reporting who made a block is something that is retried only a limited number of times in case of communication errors (while pushing out the actual block and storing how much work each worker did is retried forever). I'll change that to keep retrying forever as well. I'll put on my TODO list for the client to log the hash of the block when one is solved - makes this kind of investigation much easier.

Sometimes someone plays the lottery every week their entire life without winning. And then someone plays just a single time and wins. What actually wouldn't make sense is if everyone would win after playing exactly 50 times.


No, it's not usually that bad. And yes, bad luck happens on all pools.

We did have some really bad luck before and that time Organofcorti did a thorough analysis which you can read here: http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/05/131-bitminter-and-luck.html

MyOpenID will shut down 2014.02.01. If you are using MyOpenID to log in at BitMinter, please add an alternative OpenID login under "my account" -> "logins" in our website menu.

Can you try bfgminer? There is a link at the frontpage of https://bitminter.com to get it and you can run it from the command line like so:


At this point I would think the erupter stick is broken, but there has been 1 user reporting that bfgminer works for him and not BitMinter client.