CEX.io is not a mining pool, it's a mining rental service with huge maintenance fees. I have yet to see a PPLNS pool with maintenance fees.

It looks like your issue is with cloud mining, not PPLNS.

There's 60-70 TH/s running on it currently. Only a few people reported on it, but it appears to reduce the ratio of rejected work for European users. When I have some time I'll have a look at Asian hosting options.


Thanks for staying with the pool all this time! Those were the real early days. We actually only found 2 blocks before you joined. First block took 14 days. I believe we only had one or two GH/s in the pool. GPU mining. I remember I found a cheap refurbished 5970, which mined quite well. Ah, the good old days. Or at least the old days.

Thank you

As a user I find OpenID very quick and convenient.

As someone running a website, OpenID for the most part works fine. I don't need to store password hashes. I also don't have to deal with lost password issues, but on the other hand of course there are people who got banned from Google or otherwise lost access to their OpenID account who need help.

Over the 3.5 years there have been some negative experiences:

Some people write me angry notes saying I am trying to force them to register at Google and Yahoo to help the NSA and big corporations spy on them.

myopenid.net shut down with 6 months notice. Most people switched in time and it wasn't so bad. Only about 5 people didn't, and needed help to recover access to their Bitminter account.

A korean OpenID identity provider whose name I forget suddenly shut down (without notice as far as I know). Their entire website was replaced by a single page with text in korean saying something like "thanks for the good times. we shut down now. goodbye." If I recall correctly the text was an image too, so it was more difficult to get it translated with Google translate.

Blogger/blogspot has always been very unreliable. Their OpenID server is down half the time. There is no customer support available in any fashion. I didn't want to remove them from the login page because some users are using them and it will make it more difficult for them to log in without the blogspot button. Instead I put a warning not to use blogger/blogspot.

A few sites use OpenID implementations that apparently don't work well with the one I use, so you can't log in using those sites.

Yahoo OpenID was unstable for a while, maybe an hour of downtime per week. Then they crashed hard and their OpenID server was down for 3-4 days. I believe Yahoo mail was down at the same time. This came as a surprise as I had not expected Yahoo to be this unstable and take that long to fix their broken servers. Probably close to 1000 active Bitminter users were locked out of their accounts because of this. Too many to do manual account recovery for them all. I started working on an automated process, but then Yahoo finally got their act together and fixed the problem. Some users blamed me and left the pool. While it is not my fault that Yahoo is unreliable, it is my fault that I chose to rely on external services.

The latest problem now is that Google will not just be implementing the new OpenID Connect. They will also shut down the old OpenID 2.0 servers. So now all websites have to change their software if they want to keep Google logins. OpenID Connect is the new version of OpenID.

mcdougle, I'm not stepping out of the shadows from being in the lab since 1999. I'm actually active on bitcointalk almost every day and have been for three and a half years. So I don't know where that is coming from.

Am I taking "a pugnacious swing at the closest passer by"? I wanted to say two things:

1. PPLNS pools do not take 40% of the mining income. Obviously a zero-fee pool that also pays out transaction fees will be paying out 100% of the mining income, so it cannot be keeping 40%.

2. It's ok to ask questions if something strange and unusual is going on. If people tell you to shut up or only give you nonsense answers that intend to confuse you, that's a good reason to become more skeptical than you already were.

People post things that make bitcointalk a bad and unfriendly environment, and full of lies that confuse people who are new to mining and new to bitcoin.

Maybe people are allowed to act like assholes. But I am also allowed to take pugnacious swings at assholes. Any time I feel like it.

That bad, huh 

Does Antminer S4 still require you to set minimum difficulty 2048, or is there a new firmware that fixes this?

Definitely Bitminter.

I haven't found the bug with the NMC sound. Haven't had much time to look though.

And yeah, unfortunately NMC is 25 new coins per block now. Much less income from merged mining now.

You see the rejects under "my account" -> "workers" in the website menu? And accepted says zero?

Make sure you use stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:443 in this case. Don't use port 80. You can use getblocktemplate on port 80, but you're probably on stratum.

Ah, I thought you were referring to something else in this thread.

When someone says that 1% out of 25 bitcoins is 40%, what would you call it? A math professor?

Luckily everyone can see through a lie like that. It's worse with the things that are believable to newbies and confuse the hell out of them. It's a good thing I don't run Bitcointalk. I would wear out the ban hammer. 

We had awesome payouts lately. Take a look at the rewards graph at https://bitminter.com/stats/rewards

If you have lots of good luck followed by a little bad luck that means you were lucky and made a big profit, not that you took massive losses.

Try to look at the big picture (we're winning big the last couple weeks) and not focus on every isolated moment of bad luck (we had some hours of bad luck too). Otherwise you will always feel like you are losing, and mining will not be much fun.

That's awesome Thanks for mining with Bitminter!

Good thing the difficulty increases are taking a break though.

I had forgotten about this. It looks very interesting and much more secure than other 2FA solutions. But are there mobile apps implementing this? Are any sites using it? Are people willing to scan a QR code every time they need to log in?

The problem with many other 2FA solutions:

Most 2FA solutions give you a one-time password on a separate device that you then type into your computer. There is a belief by a lot of users that this makes hacking impossible.

Let's review this. In many cases if you get hacked it's because someone (through a trojan or other malware) took over control of your computer. They are now looking at you through your camera, listening to you through your microphone, taking screenshots of your desktop to see what you are doing.. and they are recording every keystroke you make. When you type your one-time passwords into a compromised computer like this, you are essentially giving them to the hacker.

I wish more people would accept that..

• A one-time password/code typed into a compromised computer won't save you
• A compromised computer can become yours again, but you need to reformat your drive and reinstall the operating system from a clean source

Although if the hacker installed malware on the firmware of your laptop battery then you may wish to just burn the computer.

Not sure what this means. Does the error message actually say it's not receiving work? Or is it the general "something went wrong" error that most miners show, which basically says nothing. You are sure both pool URL and user/worker name is correct?

Could you try us2.bitminter.com:3333 and eu1.bitminter.com:3333 to see if you get the same result?

Hint for mining client authors: your software knows what is wrong. Don't be a jerk, tell the user what it is.

Yeah, Google has added OpenID Connect 1.0 (new protocol) logins and they are phasing out OpenID 2.0 logins (older protocol).

I set up a poll about mining pool logins. Please take part in the poll if you have an opinion on the matter. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=885190.0

How would you prefer to log in at your mining pool's website?

Please take part in the poll above.

A European server eu1.bitminter.com:3333 is now available.

Europeans are advised to set eu1.bitminter.com:3333 as primary server and mint.bitminter.com:3333 as secondary for failover.

I'd be interested in feedback on whether your stale/reject ratio goes down using this server (if you are European).

Odd. When I logged into Yo now I started over with a clean slate by the looks of it. Had to add/yo BITMINTED again.