Yikes, hope he's okay.

Just to add another data point, I requested a refund on the 8th, and the credit showed up on my card today.

Looks good--thanks!

Just FYI, my PPS balance still seems to be off as well.  Nick on the site is cobracommander.  (Reposting this from the ozcoin forum since I wasn't sure if anyone saw it there--sorry for the duplication.)



I recently switched to PPS, and I'm showing (numbers as of yesterday, so will be a bit off):

82,862 valid shares @ difficulty 2036671, which should be worth 1.93234184 bitcoins
255,884 valid shares @ difficulty 2190866, which should be worth 5.54756512 bitcoins

However, my unpaid balance is showing only 1.84042680 bitcoins (with no payouts, since my threshold hasn't been hit).

Personally, I think this is the way to go, unless you want to run the pool as an outright charity.  The problem with a donation-based system is that, even if you get enough donations to cover costs, it's essentially a decency tax on those who step up and donate.

I'm seeing some odd behavior if I use load-balance for the pool strategy under 2.4.1.

I'm mining on EMC and Ozcoin.  If I use the default failover pool management strategy, I get a rejection rate of 0.4% or lower with either EMC or Ozcoin as the primary.  If I use load-balance, my rejection rate goes up to around 4 or 5%.  I can see in the logs that, when a longpoll indicates a new block, cgminer will submit 1 or 2 rejected/stale shares for pool 0, and then subsequent pool 0 shares are accepted.  For pool 1, however, cgminer continues to submit stale shares for a couple minutes.  I'm not sure if this is new behavior or not, as I haven't tried to use load-balance prior to 2.4.1.

All of the blocks in that table are solved blocks.  The "Validity" column shows how many times our solved block has been validated (i.e. how many blocks have been added to the chain on top of ours).

If you just started mining, you should see non-zero values there on the next block the pool solves.

[EDIT: Heh, somehow missed that someone already answered this.  Oh well... ]

That makes sense--thanks for the info!

Something seems odd in the Block History for block #680 (170290), though it's probably just something I'm misunderstanding.

It says block #680 finished at 2:52:10, and corresponds to block 170290.  Block #681 finished 4 seconds later at 2:52:14, and corresponds to block 170305.  Were there really 15 blocks found on the network in that time period?  Blockchain.info shows 170305 as found by EclipseMC (as expected), but 170290 is showing as found by Bitclockers.  Any idea what's going on?

I've run into something odd--not sure if it's related to the recent changes.  Either yesterday or today, my total blocks found went from 8 to 9 (both on the "My Account" screen and the "Hall of Fame" screen), but there is no new block found for me listed in the "Block Stats" page.  If I go to the "My Found Blocks" page, it only shows 8 blocks (7 valid + 1 invalid).  I took a look at a few of the other account's links on the "Hall of Fame" page, and those added up correctly.

My EMC user name is cobracommander.

[EDIT: Just saw another discrepancy while looking through the "Hall of Fame" page.  ocminer is listed as having found 16 blocks there, but clicking the link shows 17 blocks for that account.]

They don't disallow Tor explicitly; it's just that spammers often hide behind Tor, so sometimes a Tor exit point's IP will be banned.  To get around it, just have Tor use a new identity until you get one that isn't banned.

I've only tried a handful of pools, but I liked the following about Eclipse:

• Low stale rate and low rate of cgminer waiting on work
• Nice UI
• No mandatory fee
• Hopping-proof payout method (though most pools seem to have that nowadays)
• Active and enthusiastic administrator

Hi!  I started mining with EMC a couple of weeks ago, and love it.  It's definitely the best pool I've tried in terms of performance, stability, and administrator enthusiasm  -- great job!

Speaking of donations, do you have an idea of what sort of donation level you'd need to cover at least the "hard" costs of the pool (i.e. easily quantifiable things such as hosting costs, versus time spend on the pool)?  Was wondering from the perspective of making sure I set up a reasonable donation level.

Semi-random story as part of my feeble journey to escape the bonds of newbie-dom:

This weekend, I was talking about bitcoin with my mother.  At one point, she asks my how much money I made from mining.  I said "around $20 a day at the current exchange rates", to which she exclaimed "You make over $1,000 a week for doing nothing?!".  Mental math is not one of my mom's strong points.   

I first read about bitcoin on arstechnica a while back, started mining on my gaming box when i wasn't using it, and then put together a few additional miner boxes a couple weeks later.

I'm Jeff from the US.  I've been mining for a few months (first with Ars, now with Eclipse).  I'm generally not one to post much, so newbiedom will likely be an eternal purgatory for me.