[0Th]Ozcoin Pooled Mining |DGM 1%|Stratum+VarDiff port 80|NEW CN mining|

[Graet]

Is the US server working ok?  I just had to switch to the EU server.
Sam

a couple of ppl reported comms errors
currently running at 372Ghash, which is normal these days
my home net is being flaky atm, making it hard to actually see, all my miners have been bouncing round with the disconnect/reconnects lol

* Graet checks ISPs website

[1714006308]

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[Graet]

Had some connection issues
stats are currently stuck, working to fix that now
good news is there is a block hiding in the uncounted shares

[Graet]

Fixed those issues, back to normal except current round time is incorrect

[LazyOtto]

It doesn't matter, but why I'm gone (and why I expect to be back some day).

Back when BTC was $5 USD the statement was that the necessary break-even contribution was 1.5%.
(My contribution was set at 0.75%. Yes, too low, but the same as I was paying at my 'second-favorite' pool to enable auto-payouts.)

When BTC had been fairly stable at $10 for a while, the mandatory fee was set at 3%.

Four times the 'money' of what break-even was defined as.

Four times break-even stuck in my craw.
(For those non-USA idiomatic speakers - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/craw)

After the first week in December I expect to be back. Because I consider sharing transaction fees to be 'the right thing to do' and, so far as I know, Ozcoin is the only pool doing that.

--

Graet, I think you're doing a great job. Would have been less effort, obviously, to just switch pools and say nothing. I'm sending you this feedback out of respect.

[Graet]

yep and if back when I wrote that thread people had donated at 1.5% total across all miners, fees may not have been needed. A  lot of people donated at 5% but still the total never got much over 0.65%, less than half of what I had hoped miners would contribute back to a pool they obviously liked. A lot of people are donating 2% over the 3% fee and are getting VIP features still.

Also since that thread we have an extra 3 servers running and just after I announced fees I got a warning my traffic bill for AU server is going up $250 this months bill.
I supported the pool on my income protection insurance payments for 14 months, I now have no income and am looking for work. To put it bluntly I can no longer afford to subsidise miners mining on Ozcoin. I realise this has offended some people and I apologise to them.
My choices were as I stated before
1: fees that made pool viable and sustainable over time
2: close pool
3: follow ars and other pools, let irl intervene, just stop caring and let pool fall over and die - that approach has never worked out well for miners.

Also if servers were my only costs this might be valid, but the business that I run also needs accountants, probably another visit to a lawyer soon and other costs often not thought of by miners.
e.g: $230 bill just to keep my company registered for the next 12months.
Also with the upcoming changes to mining we need to do some heavy development - the guys that do the work to support miners could do with some thanks sometimes. In the past that also has come from my pocket (and has been pretty rare).

I actually believe businesses that are properly registered and comply with regulations are good for Bitcoin -it wont be a good look for the Bitcoin economy when Bitcoin businesses operating outside the law start getting done for avoiding tax or breaking laws - we already have enough shady stuff going on that puts off potential Bitcoiners and Bitcoin users.

When I compare 3% to the fees of other pools it is a mid range fee, I think 5-10% is too high, some miners pay that happily and have for a long time with no payouts of txn fees or merged mining. I don't see miners on those pools clamouring for fee decreases now $ value of Bitcoins has gone up - no pool has dynamic fees. I didn't actually look at todays price and go "woohoo I can make $x per day" when I introduced fees, I looked at long term costs, price over time (it is just as likely BTC will hit $5 again next month as it is $20), the probability that pool hashrate would drop significantly (which it did) etc etc, unlike miners I cant just turn my hardware on and off depending on the $/BTC value, wouldn't be much of a service for starters and it would still cost the same (minus maybe some traffic costs)

We intend to keep value adding, recently Ozcoin started paying out TXN fees again - which currently is paying more than the Namecoin side of merged mining.

Ozcoin is a fee for service pool now and as always miners will come and go as they choose based on their thoughts/needs/understandings - most go without feedback. Thanks for yours  LazyOtto

I'm sure I could have played it differently, pretended I was going to shut down, wait for miners to suggest introducing fees etc etc, seen it all before on pools closing, run with "miners ideas" and all would be good. Just close the pool and open a "new" 3% fee pool the next day under different branding, much I could have done in hindsight to trick miners into accepting fees.

Ozcoin didn't just get to be in a battle for 2nd/3rd biggest pool because it had no fees, there are plenty of 0fee pools that never made 100Ghash.
Those miners that see the value in Ozcoin continue to mine here, new miners are still joining. Those that think it is too expensive will move along.

I'm going to post this now, was going to edit it more - need to go out for dinner with family
made a small edit.

Hope thats a help
Graet

[crazyates]

Some of the higher priotity development jobs include:
- Paying mined transaction fees to miners - something we did as a proportional pool and essential before block reward halving
- Higher difficulty shares to support faster mining hardware
- Pay valid block -> valid block for all miners and a "orphan bonus" to VIP members
Lower priority:
- more graphs and stats

Can you elaborate on any Ozcoin plans to move to higher than diff 1 shares?

And will DGM offset any additional variance introduced by diff > 1 shares for slower miners?

[Graet]

Some of the higher priotity development jobs include:
- Paying mined transaction fees to miners - something we did as a proportional pool and essential before block reward halving
- Higher difficulty shares to support faster mining hardware
- Pay valid block -> valid block for all miners and a "orphan bonus" to VIP members
Lower priority:
- more graphs and stats

Can you elaborate on any Ozcoin plans to move to higher than diff 1 shares?

And will DGM offset any additional variance introduced by diff > 1 shares for slower miners?

Initially we plan to test with separate a mining node on diff 4 or 5

I am unsure yet if we will work with variable difficulty shares or have a range of difficulties miners can choose from. Variable looks best for miners but hardest for pool to implement. So slower miners should not be affected but newer hardware coming will be handled well by the pool. We also need to consider if higher diff shares is the solution or see what is coming from the community on alternative solutions, I know eleuthria has been looking at a different solution.
These are topics the development team are still discussing.
Thanks for the interest, we will update miners as info comes to hand.
Graet

[Krak]

After the first week in December I expect to be back. Because I consider sharing transaction fees to be 'the right thing to do' and, so far as I know, Ozcoin is the only pool doing that.

BitMinter and Mt. Red also pay out transaction fees.

[Graet]

After the first week in December I expect to be back. Because I consider sharing transaction fees to be 'the right thing to do' and, so far as I know, Ozcoin is the only pool doing that.

BitMinter and Mt. Red also pay out transaction fees.

yep there is even a thread on it
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98682.0

[crazyates]

Some of the higher priotity development jobs include:
- Paying mined transaction fees to miners - something we did as a proportional pool and essential before block reward halving
- Higher difficulty shares to support faster mining hardware
- Pay valid block -> valid block for all miners and a "orphan bonus" to VIP members
Lower priority:
- more graphs and stats

Can you elaborate on any Ozcoin plans to move to higher than diff 1 shares?

And will DGM offset any additional variance introduced by diff > 1 shares for slower miners?

Initially we plan to test with separate a mining node on diff 4 or 5

I am unsure yet if we will work with variable difficulty shares or have a range of difficulties miners can choose from. Variable looks best for miners but hardest for pool to implement. So slower miners should not be affected but newer hardware coming will be handled well by the pool. We also need to consider if higher diff shares is the solution or see what is coming from the community on alternative solutions, I know eleuthria has been looking at a different solution.
These are topics the development team are still discussing.
Thanks for the interest, we will update miners as info comes to hand.
Graet

Thanks! By variable do you mean if I have 10GH/s, my diff is 1, but someone else who has 80GH/s has a diff of 8?

[Graet]

Some of the higher priotity development jobs include:
- Paying mined transaction fees to miners - something we did as a proportional pool and essential before block reward halving
- Higher difficulty shares to support faster mining hardware
- Pay valid block -> valid block for all miners and a "orphan bonus" to VIP members
Lower priority:
- more graphs and stats

Can you elaborate on any Ozcoin plans to move to higher than diff 1 shares?

And will DGM offset any additional variance introduced by diff > 1 shares for slower miners?

Initially we plan to test with separate a mining node on diff 4 or 5

I am unsure yet if we will work with variable difficulty shares or have a range of difficulties miners can choose from. Variable looks best for miners but hardest for pool to implement. So slower miners should not be affected but newer hardware coming will be handled well by the pool. We also need to consider if higher diff shares is the solution or see what is coming from the community on alternative solutions, I know eleuthria has been looking at a different solution.
These are topics the development team are still discussing.
Thanks for the interest, we will update miners as info comes to hand.
Graet

Thanks! By variable do you mean if I have 10GH/s, my diff is 1, but someone else who has 80GH/s has a diff of 8?

something along those lines yes
at 10Ghash you might do better on diff 2 and those with minirigs like 5 -10 from what I hear
just as people still mine on cpus once diff gets very high there will be miners that still want to mine on GPU so either variable difficulty or a range 1,2,4,8,16 choosable by miners depending on their hashrate would allow GPU miners to continue if they choose.
but as I say still under discussion

[crazyates]

something along those lines yes
at 10Ghash you might do better on diff 2 and those with minirigs like 5 -10 from what I hear
just as people still mine on cpus once diff gets very high there will be miners that still want to mine on GPU so either variable difficulty or a range 1,2,4,8,16 choosable by miners depending on their hashrate would allow GPU miners to continue if they choose.
but as I say still under discussion

I was just curious. Thanks for updating!

[organofcorti]

My choices were as I stated before
1: fees that made pool viable and sustainable over time
2: close pool
3: follow ars and other pools, let irl intervene, just stop caring and let pool fall over and die - that approach has never worked out well for miners.

If any miners are still confused about the need to charge a fee and are not familiar with Arsbitcoin, the first section here: http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/31-rise-and-fall-of-arsbitcoincom.html has a summary.

A more in depth and recent example of a pool that was once popular but is now failing and costing miners about 30% of what they should earn is here:

http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/61-bitlcnet-pool-hopping-and.html

Bitlc is fee free, pays orphans and Tx but the full time miners there still lose out big.

Or consider MTRED. Fee free PPS - but with much downtime, which I assume is due to the fact the pool op can't make it a fulltime job since he relies on donations.

If you want a pool you can rely on, miners need to accept that everyone needs to contribute, not just the forward thinking donators. Otherwise, you could mine solo I guess.

[gyverlb]

If you want a pool you can rely on, miners need to accept that everyone needs to contribute, not just the forward thinking donators. Otherwise, you could mine solo I guess.

In this case there's p2pool too.
There are some drawbacks : you have to setup your node instead of simply pointing a miner to a known URL, most of BFL's hardware doesn't play well with the high LP frequency, the web interface is not as friendly as what some pools (including ozcoin) provide and the relatively low pool hashrate (~300GH/s these days) comes with high variance. It seems it doesn't play well with GPUMax either (limited testing on my part).
It seems there was a bug that could cost 5-10% to miners months ago but it seems it was finally ironed out (and luck is quite good for some time actually).

[crazyates]

If you want a pool you can rely on, miners need to accept that everyone needs to contribute, not just the forward thinking donators. Otherwise, you could mine solo I guess.

In this case there's p2pool too.
There are some drawbacks : you have to setup your node instead of simply pointing a miner to a known URL, most of BFL's hardware doesn't play well with the high LP frequency, the web interface is not as friendly as what some pools (including ozcoin) provide and the relatively low pool hashrate (~300GH/s these days) comes with high variance. It seems it doesn't play well with GPUMax either (limited testing on my part).
It seems there was a bug that could cost 5-10% to miners months ago but it seems it was finally ironed out (and luck is quite good for some time actually).

Switch to p2pool and lose my gorgeous Ozcoin widget?! NEVAH!

[Epoch]

If you want a pool you can rely on, miners need to accept that everyone needs to contribute, not just the forward thinking donators. Otherwise, you could mine solo I guess.

I didn't want to quote your entire response, but it was well-said.

I, like most I suspect, like the idea of 'free'. But being pragmatic I understand that running a pool, especially a large and stable and actively-supported one, comes at a cost to the operators. Hardware costs, maintenance, hosting, power, customer support, time, stress.

The pools give miners a convenient interface for their mining hardware, and useful software tools (web interface) to view statistics and other relevant information. Should miners expect all this to come 'for free'? No, we should not. It would not be fair to the operators.

So I choose to thank Graet and his team for providing a great pool to the community in Ozcoin, instead of choosing to whine about fees. It is only fair.

[kano]

...
If you want a pool you can rely on, miners need to accept that everyone needs to contribute, not just the forward thinking donators. Otherwise, you could mine solo I guess.

You need mining software too .........................................

[organofcorti]

...
If you want a pool you can rely on, miners need to accept that everyone needs to contribute, not just the forward thinking donators. Otherwise, you could mine solo I guess.

You need mining software too .........................................

Yes, I'd hope you and Con and all the team at cgminer receive coins for all your hard work too. If miners using cgminer want continued quick updates and response to changing mining conditions and protocols, they should consider an ongoing donation for the cgminer devs.

However, coders can work  sporadically at coding - in their spare time (what spare time?) if they have to. Graet needs to be on call (or have someone on call) 24/7, which makes a fee unavoidable.

[crazyates]

...
If you want a pool you can rely on, miners need to accept that everyone needs to contribute, not just the forward thinking donators. Otherwise, you could mine solo I guess.

You need mining software too .........................................

Yes, I'd hope you and Con and all the team at cgminer receive coins for all your hard work too. If miners using cgminer want continued quick updates and response to changing mining conditions and protocols, they should consider an ongoing donation for the cgminer devs.

However, coders can work  sporadically at coding - in their spare time (what spare time?) if they have to. Graet needs to be on call (or have someone on call) 24/7, which makes a fee unavoidable.

There used to be a --donation option that would submit like 0.5% or 1% of your shares to the dev's pool, but no one ever used it, so it got taken out. However, anyone who uses any software for a significant amount of time should consider donation.

[os2sam]

...
If you want a pool you can rely on, miners need to accept that everyone needs to contribute, not just the forward thinking donators. Otherwise, you could mine solo I guess.

You need mining software too .........................................

Yes, I'd hope you and Con and all the team at cgminer receive coins for all your hard work too. If miners using cgminer want continued quick updates and response to changing mining conditions and protocols, they should consider an ongoing donation for the cgminer devs.

However, coders can work  sporadically at coding - in their spare time (what spare time?) if they have to. Graet needs to be on call (or have someone on call) 24/7, which makes a fee unavoidable.

There used to be a --donation option that would submit like 0.5% or 1% of your shares to the dev's pool, but no one ever used it, so it got taken out. However, anyone who uses any software for a significant amount of time should consider donation.

I used it.