Do you have another computer you could try it on?

If you found a block it should be listed, even if it was stale. What's your user name and do you know at what time or day it happened?

If you are using BitMinter client, the Bitcoin symbol at the status bar at the bottom of the window shows a 1?

That's the spirit Sorry about the connection problems though - that should work.


Connecting a few hundred very slow miners directly to the pool may get you banned, yes, especially if using the getwork protocol. Connecting them all through a single connection using stratum proxy would be possible though. But on the other hand, is it really worth the effort setting up so many incredibly slow machines to mine? I don't think you'll get 3 TH/s - you'd be lucky to get 1 GH/s.

Is COM3 where the block erupter stick is? If you go "devices" -> "probe all ports" in the menu without the block erupter plugged in, there is no message about COM3 ?

Is it plugged directly into the computer? Or do you have a USB hub, perhaps with several block erupters connected?

I get the impression that most often the problem is that the block erupter doesn't get enough power. Often because powered USB hubs ship with weak power supplies.

That's odd. If one can keep mining then the others should work too.


This works fine for me, with other connections already established.

Here the port number is wrong. getblocktemplate and getwork is on port 8332, not 9332. Alternatively Stratum is also on port 5050 and gbt/getwork on port 80.

What happens when you try with 3 workers?

Did you report the bugs in the stratum proxy?

Currently there are DDoS attacks a couple times per day trying to break through. Normally Black Lotus is able to filter them quite effectively. Sometimes they slip through for a few minutes and lag down the server. The attackers seem to have given up pounding the server with large amounts of UDP packets and are now trying to impersonate normal miners instead. Black Lotus seems to be adapting well so far, but I'm working on my own filtering too, just in case.

If you get filtered you won't be able to make a connection to the mining server at all, you'll just see timeouts. But unless there is a big ongoing attack at the moment, you should be able to connect again in a minute or two. Timeouts have also happened for a short time when the attackers got through. In that case you would be able to connect but the request would not be serviced in time and you'd get a timeout. I'm not sure if you can see the difference in most mining clients. I have seen normal users being filtered after a service restart when everyone are reconnecting at the same time - Black Lotus has since improved their filtering heuristics to prevent this problem.

One problem is that most mining clients are badly programmed and very abusive. Retrying once per second is common, even when authentication fails. If you have 3 computers at your IP address reconnecting or retrying to same wrong name+password 3 times per second, you can imagine how that looks to a server.

No, it won't give you any edge. As long as you are changing the nonce or merkle root and not hashing the same data as anyone else, any block variation is as likely as any other to meet the current target when you hash it. And don't believe people who say you have to try the entire nonce range before changing the merkle root, otherwise you'll "miss something". It's all superstition and misunderstandings.

BFGminer should run the BFL single just fine. And you can use the stratum protocol with BFGminer. You could run it something like this:



When a block is found the payments are set up immediately. In the case that you use the prepay perk the payment takes place then. If you don't then the payment takes place if and when the block is confirmed. But the amount you get is always decided when the block is found, and depends on how much of the work in the last 10 shifts is yours (at the time the block is found).

In general it doesn't matter when you choose to do maintenance on your mining equipment. When you put in a proof of work the amount you will get paid for it is impossible to determine in advance. This is why BitMinter is safe from pool hopping. If things didn't work this way then you would see the hashrate going up when the pay is known to be high, or to be completely unknown, and you'd see the hashrate go back down when the pay is known to be low. Seeing the hashrate bounce up and down like this was very common in pools using the proportional reward system, because it was possible to tell in advance when the pay would be low, so "pool hoppers" would avoid the pool at those times. Luckily most pools have stopped using the proportional reward model, which resulted in 24/7 miners getting reduced pay. I think Deepbit is the only proportional pool left, although Slush's pool and BTCmine (score based reward system) can also be abused by pool hoppers.

Some additional info on BitMinter payouts was posted here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22432.msg2818113#msg2818113

If you pay for electricity, no. If you don't, then yes. But the profit will be so tiny that it won't be worth your time setting up and managing 100 extremely slow miners.

Nvidia cards are very slow for mining, much much slower than AMD cards. Also, mobile versions of the chips run much slower than desktop versions. Anyway, even AMD cards are very slow for mining these days as ASIC-based mining devices are taking over. I don't think any graphics card can make a profit mining right now unless you have free electricity.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ASIC

Compare those ASIC products to the graphics cards on the same page.

The usual bad luck. We actually got block 255245 in the middle of the attack, but it worked out fine.

The mining server is struggling as another DDoS attack is coming in. Working on it.

Situation normal again for the last 33 minutes.

Looks like the DDoS attackers have given up using brute force DDoS against Black Lotus. Now they are trying to look like miners, to slip under the radar, rather than just blindly spamming network data. Someone is quite desperate to take BitMinter down. It's nice to see them putting in some work hours though, instead of just pressing the "usual ddos attack" button.

Instability on the mining server in the last 10-15 minutes. I'm looking into it.

No, you have to use the built-in mining software. I don't have a blade myself, but tried to write some instructions here, based on info from blade users:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg3046129#msg3046129

Maybe in the future BitMinter client can work as a stratum proxy, but not yet.

The ASICminer cubes and blades have their own mining client built in. But it is rather primitive and only supports the old getwork protocol. The recommended way to mine with them is through a stratum proxy. You can set up Slush's stratum proxy on your computer, pointing it at BitMinter, and set up the blades to point to your computer running the proxy.

You can get the proxy from: https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy
And run it something like so: mining_proxy.exe -o mint.bitminter.com -sp 3333 -gp 8332
(if you already have something running on port 8332 you may have to change the port number)

In the cube/blade configuration for user name use something like: username_worker:x,username_worker:x
So if my user name is DrHaribo, my worker is Blade1 and its password is abc123, then I put DrHaribo_Blade1:x,DrHaribo_Blade1:x
This data must be entered twice. As password we just put x since any password will be accepted.
For host/IP put the IP of your computer running the stratum proxy. That IP must also be entered twice with a comma between. So if I am running the proxy on a computer with IP address 1.2.3.4 then I put 1.2.3.4,1.2.3.4

Now you are set for efficient mining. The Stratum proxy will receive block templates from the BitMinter server and use it to generate work for the blade(s). With the cube/blade and computer on the same network the blade will be able to fetch new work very quickly.

I believe you can enter data for another pool as backup as the data after the comma, instead of the exact same thing twice. You'll probably need to set up two stratum proxies on different ports to make this work. Maybe someone can confirm whether this is failover or 50/50 mining.

Some more detailed instructions, starting with how to plug it in, are available here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=205369.0

The auto rescan isn't finding them I guess because they don't work properly for a while after they come back. It sees a new COM port, probes it, determines there is no mining device. After that it doesn't try again, but the single starts working again a couple minutes later. At least that is what this sounds like.

I think I'll need to put in a new option for the auto rescan to keep retrying all ports not just new ones. It will produce a lot of errors on computers with COM ports that are not for mining. But it seems useful in this case.

Doesn't sound like something that would make a difference. Oh well, as long as it works I guess.

Hey, congrats on getting it stable. Did it show a high temperature before? What about now?

We reached 100 000 registered users. Not too shabby


I am working on things to grow the pool further.