Mining is now done with specialized mining hardware (ASICs). You can't mine with just a PC.

AaronS, thanks for mining with us for such a long time.

It is indeed a shame that mining has become so centralized.

I hope you'll still be part of the bitcoin world, even though you won't be mining.

Awesome move. Thank you!

Thanks for the opinions on the shift length.


Personally I agree. It seems pointless to gamble with a small jackpot and with the odds stacked against you (as they always are at casinos and when renting overpriced hashes). On the other hand, people do play the penny slots at casinos for hours. There must be some attraction to it.

How high a stale ratio do you get?

I would expect US east versus west would be a difference in stales of about 0.01% and 0.02%

In other words, it's not really going to help.

The problem with renting is that the rented hashes are going through the rental service, creating a lot more latency.

I'm not sure how specific rental services are set up, but imagine the worst case: a miner in Europe is rented out, but connected to a rental service server in the US, and you ask the rental service to deliver the hashes to the Bitminter server in Europe. Any communication between the miner and the Bitminter server is going to cross the Atlantic twice. This is bad.

Yeah, when renting a lot of hashpower for a short time there's a good chance you either double your money or lose it all.

I could double the size of each shift and we can see how that works out. I get the impression that most people renting hashes for Bitminter would prefer that. And those mining 24/7 with the same hashpower aren't affected much.

Are there anyone who would be unhappy with doubling the shift size? It would make unpaid shifts much more rare.


Yeah. Over time it certainly evens out for the big miners. But we have done these "mint races" where the one to find the "best block" (lowest hash) is the winner. And tiny miners have won those. On the other hand many small miners never find a block. Mining really is a lottery.

You are correct. If you have 1% of the pool hashrate then you get 1% of the coins that are paid out. It's that simple if you mine 24/7, and you don't have to worry about shifts.

For part time miners if I increase the shifts then the variance goes down. That includes people renting hashes for a limited time. If you rent someone's hashing for a few hours then if we have long shifts you are more likely to have an average payout. If we have short shifts then you are more likely to have a very high or very low payout. Longer shifts even out the payouts more for those who don't mine 24/7.

But most importantly longer shifts would help with the negative psychological effect of seeing a shift with zero pay. Because of negativity bias (known deficiency of the human brain) people will over-focus on the unpaid shift even if it was a lucky day with high payouts overall. It makes people feel like they are losing when they are winning. This has caused people to leave the pool or send in angry complaints even at times when we have great luck and higher payouts than any other pool.


Payouts happen after just a few seconds if you have the pre-pay perk enabled at the time when the block is found. Otherwise it happens when the confirmations have counted down.

All custom made.


Why don't you like merged mining?

Pro: free namecoins.
Con: the time I spend to keep our namecoin nodes running could be better spent on something else. The namecoin software has been very unstable in the past. One pool controls a large majority of the hashrate in the namecoin world. That pool modified their nodes to hardfork at an earlier time than everyone else, causing problems for all the other pools (many orphaned namecoin blocks).

If you are concerned that you will get rejected (stale) bitcoin work when there is a namecoin block change, you don't at this pool. Old bitcoin work is still valid at Bitminter unless there was a bitcoin block change.

If you still don't want the server to tell your client to flush old work when there is a namecoin block change, then you can turn this off in your worker settings. Uncheck the "Merged mining stale flush".

Changes I have been considering:

• Make "Merged mining stale flush" opt-in rather than opt-out.
• Make namecoins opt-in. If you don't opt in your work is still used to create namecoin blocks, but you do not get namecoins and you do not have a namecoin balance shown on the website at all. Of course there would be no namecoin work flushing for your workers. This would remove the annoyance of namecoins for those who don't like them ("why am I getting namecoins" is one of the most common complaints). It could also be a small extra income for the pool.

Some miners used to put on red underwear...

Same miner as 10 days ago. But we had two other blocks inbetween.

If your average time to find one block is 100 years, then solo mining is rather risky. Sure you could find a block in 1 hour with exceptional luck. But it could also take 10 000 years if you have bad luck. Most likely your hardware wears out and dies before finding anything.

Many miners these days never find a block.

Awesome!

Now let's get back on the lucky blocks

My estimate of 0.05% turned out to be pretty good

You can choose whether to use auto cash out or "send coins".

Auto cash out is free, but has a 0.01 BTC minimum.

"Send coins" has a small fee, but you can send tiny amounts.

Good stuff! Now let's find another block

I meant that namecoin work flushes do not cause stale work at Bitminter. I was talking about the work flush (restart), not the disconnects.

About the disconnects, let me know if us2 or eu1 works better.


That checkbox makes the server not flush work when there is a new namecoin block. It will still flush work when there is a new bitcoin block and in some other (very rare) cases. Using this feature will cause much more stale namecoin work, but namecoin income isn't that high at the moment anyway.


That is indeed odd. Does it go up and down a lot, or is it 4-5 GH/s all the time?

You mine sha-256 at Bitminter and scrypt at another pool at the same time? And then what happens? I'm not familiar with the term zombie hashes.

At Bitminter only a new bitcoin block makes old work get rejected.

But yeah, have a look at the worker options and disable "Merged mining stale flush". That should reduce the frequency of those.

There are still some special cases where the server will ask the client to immediately switch to new work. For instance if the server gets a transaction with an extremely high fee.


And when accepted, all 64 are accepted. Higher diff just means higher variance, both for accepted and rejected work. Remember that you are equally likely to be lucky as you are to be unlucky. Meaning the extra variance could cause a higher accepted count than usual, and lower than usual rejected.

Over time both will even out though.


I don't understand what you mean. The pool started as proportional in late june 2011. After a couple months we switched to PPLNS with shifts.

Bitminter was the first pool to use PPLNS with shifts. A couple other pools had done PPLNS (without shifts) before that. I don't think any of them are still around now. That was in the early days when many different reward systems were being tried out.

mint is currently an alias for us1. You can try us2 also, but I don't expect there will be a big difference in reject ratio.


Yep. Should help a little bit. Note that this is no big deal. But yeah, you'd probably earn about 0.05% more.

Connecting to the closest server will decrease your rejected (stale) work by a tiny bit. If it takes you from 0.11% to 0.06% rejected work then you will be earning 0.05% more bitcoins.

Currently both US servers are in the eastern US.

I'd be interested in hearing some stats from people who have tried the different servers for a day or two each and compared reject ratios.

Regarding mining with old USB sticks: the minimum difficulty is currently 64. You can't get below that. But mining will work fine. It will not make your USB sticks fail and need to reset. It will not cause lower actual hashrates. If those things happen then it's for other reasons. What it WILL do is make the website's estimated hashrates very inaccurate. The website will often show you at zero hashrate. Mining still works and your hashrate in the shifts should be closer to reality: https://bitminter.com/shifts (make sure you are logged in to be able to see your hashrate in shifts)


New work from the server is normal. But how often do you get disconnected? Did you try us2.bitminter.com:3333 and eu1.bitminter.com:3333 and do you get a more stable connection there?