Multipool - the pool mining pool (with source code)

[TeaRex]

I've tried your pool with part of my computing power for about 24 hours now. Question: do you have an idea how long it takes before you start collecting anything? Cause I'm still at 0.000 collected right now. Thank you!

[1714913535]

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[BombaUcigasa]

What happens if you put your pool in the list of pools for your pool to pool in?

[Sukrim]

He would create a loop... but why should he do that in the first place?!

[Multipool]

First payouts are out!

Question: do you have an idea how long it takes before you start collecting anything?

Multipool has to wait until it collects the rewards from the pools. Since there are many pools with work split approximately evenly between them, it takes that much more time to cross the pools' automatic payout threshold. Although now, with more people, collections should speed up.

This would mean you donate 2.5% to BTCguild - why are shares then not immediately confirmed?

I'm making sure that screen scrapping is working adequately. Once I'm satisfied, I will include the confirmation-pending rounds as well. You do get paid for invalid rounds, as long as they've reached the head of the confirmed queue.

I'm getting many of these after a while.

The server handles requests fine, but some of the pools are running pretty slow sometimes, and the work queue wasn't getting replenished fast enough, even with multiple request threads. Been tweaking this a bit, and have more ideas for improvements for later.

Also, by contributing to this pool, you are ruining the network's security, as massive pool hopping inevitably leads to everyone hopping to the same pool at the same time, creating one giant überpool that is waay over the 50% "safe limit".

Actually, the equilibrium situation where all miners are perfectly rational (and the pools continue to use shares method) is quite different. It makes sense to jump at 43% point into a round only if everyone else continues to mine at the same rate. If you know everyone would jump at 43% point, you will have to jump earlier to maintain >100% efficiency, but then everyone else would jump earlier as well! In the 100% rational limit, no one would ever join a shares-based pool. Pool mining will become impossible and everyone will go back to solo mining again! In the real world, where only 5% of people are rational, I adjust accordingly.

There could be ways around this, such as requesting just a few getworks from different IPs, a small helper program that constantly asks for a few getworks and sends them to the metapool... should be easy to set up and not too hard to find a few "mirrors/nodes" for that. I would happily contribute until all pools finally agree that pool hopping is not a crime but something that is THEIR OWN FAULT!

Also if this pool really gets banned and fought big time instead of solving the issue of pool hopping instead, I hope Multipool just releases the code, so anyone can run it locally in private. (Edit: Just like any other pool hopper currently does!)

All great ideas! If ip banning does get out of control, I can release a small proxy script for the miners to use to relay Multipool traffic. And if I do grow tired of being a pool tycoon and the mining pools still haven't implemented fair algorithms, I will release the source code, so that anyone can run their own metapool.

even without the pool hopping algo the would provide excellent failover. Maybe it will still be around to provide that when pool hopping is dead.

It looks like it's a nice fail-over, yeah, but in reality it's just another additional point of failure. You're way better running two miners on two different pools locally (with different priorities, of course).

A pretty valid concern. If a person is in search of better uptime, they select the pool with the highest reliability. Multipool would at best only be as good as its own uptime. I would've just released the code outright, but there are already pool mining proxy programs available, and this is just too much fun.

[organofcorti]

If a person is in search of better uptime, they select the pool with the highest reliability. Multipool would at best only be as good as its own uptime

True, but in order to be a ddos target you have to be big. Because you're mining big pools, but don't need to be big yourself, you aren't a ddos target. Well, not for that reason anyway.

You retain the low variability advantage of the big pools, without the ddos disadvantage of being a big target. If you weren't pool hopping at all, you might not ever face being a target - unless your subscriber base got too big.

Regardless, until people start taking pool hopping seriously and start to target you, I'd expect you to have better uptime than any of the large pools.

BTW I gave the pool a spin, and got efficiency of 1.4 - so it works, all you doubters! And *sigh* yes, it works, all you who knew it would and fear the worst.

Multipool, a quick fyi - I notice that the results from btcmine were changing from 'pending' to being zeroed out, and then only 10 - 30 mins later showing the actual results. This was also affecting the page top stats for a while too. Screen scraping issue? Otherwise it was all simple and easy.

OK, funs over, back to eclipsemc (free plug for inaba's mine, you gotta try out the best mine with distributed servers that pool across AU, EU, and US - not separately!)

and this is just too much fun

Evil bastidge, aintcha? 

[M4v3R]

From what I see, in my account as well as on your demo account, slush pool and BTC Mine have very low efficiencies. Maybe this is due that they are using score based calculations? Either way, if it keeps up, I'd remove them for better eff. Other than that it works as advertised .

[Sukrim]

Multipool, a quick fyi - I notice that the results from btcmine were changing from 'pending' to being zeroed out, and then only 10 - 30 mins later showing the actual results. This was also affecting the page top stats for a while too. Screen scraping issue? Otherwise it was all simple and easy.

Here as well, I got 2 rounds at btcmine that are rewarded with 0 out of 5 rounds that are not pending any more - and interestingly they are in between rounds with payouts:
131504   Fri Jun 17 22:35:06 2011   145   179.681   0.00000000   0.000   0.00000000
131499   Fri Jun 17 22:01:12 2011   622   626.707   0.01991538   0.562   0.00000000
131469   Fri Jun 17 19:02:33 2011   93   108.445   0.00000000   0.000   0.00000000
Hope this helps in squashing bugs!

[luffy]

why not connect only to 0% fee pools? they are a lot of them

[Sukrim]

Because most of them are tiny and might rather get DOSed from a massive hopping pool like this I guess.

Also reducing variance is one of the reasons here, and this is best accomplished by having as many pools as possible. The pool hopping still gives you better results than average.

[Multipool]

I notice that the results from btcmine were changing from 'pending' to being zeroed out, and then only 10 - 30 mins later showing the actual results. This was also affecting the page top stats for a while too. Screen scraping issue?

Here as well, I got 2 rounds at btcmine that are rewarded with 0 out of 5 rounds that are not pending any more - and interestingly they are in between rounds with payouts:
131504   Fri Jun 17 22:35:06 2011   145   179.681   0.00000000   0.000   0.00000000
131499   Fri Jun 17 22:01:12 2011   622   626.707   0.01991538   0.562   0.00000000
131469   Fri Jun 17 19:02:33 2011   93   108.445   0.00000000   0.000   0.00000000
Hope this helps in squashing bugs!

You are right - btcmine was the most difficult of the pools to scrape, because it does not indicate actual rewards on a per-round basis. The rounds are "earned" some time after they are "confirmed"! I've cleaned up the stats a bit (a couple of the rounds were mis-attributed), see if these are any better. However, there will always be rounds with very low or even zero rewards in score-based pools, because they have very high variability. Imagine: due to the exponential decay, all the shares that are worth 1.0 BTC now, will be worth only 0.00000615 BTC one hour from now - 12 decay periods later. And rounds can last for many hours...

From what I see, in my account as well as on your demo account, slush pool and BTC Mine have very low efficiencies. Maybe this is due that they are using score based calculations? Either way, if it keeps up, I'd remove them for better eff. Other than that it works as advertised .

Again, the score-based rewards result in higher variability. The expected utility is still above 100% for most rounds. However, since the expected utility of score-based pools levels out at about 90% during long rounds, they are usually the fallback option when all the other pools are also having long rounds (and shares-based expected utility keeps dropping to zero). If this happens too often, I might even have to add a solo pool option and generate my own getworks for the miners during dry periods! Being the go-to fallback option, score-based pools are usually not as profitable overall (but still more profitable than their operators would like you to think). It will take more time though to see whether the actual average rewards will match my utility predictions.

why not connect only to 0% fee pools? they are a lot of them

It is integral to maximize the number of pools in rotation. At many timepoints, even those with fees have higher expected utility than any other pool. If pools implement fair algorithms that make the expected utility constant throughout time, then fees will indeed play a greater role.

[irishmick]

I may have missed this, I apologize in advance if I did.

How are you computing the efficiency of improvement?

[irishmick]

And one more.

Why limit payouts after a week of inactivity to .10 min.

If I quit your service and have only given .09 btc of service I've inadvertently gifted you 1.50+(more ATM) ....... WTF?

and I'm really not WTF'ing but if I was in that position, I'd be WTF'ing and more.......

EDIT:
changed .10 max to .10 min

[Mike 71]

There where connection issues the last 9 minutes. You just working on your pool?

BTW thank you for your pool. I really like it.

[wachtwoord]

I don't really understand the statistics

Shares   1455
Shares (pending)   3841
Utility   1927.513
Earned   0.08262282
Efficiency   0.996
Collected   0.00719988
Paid   0.00000000
Date   Sun Jun 19 14:07:13 2011

I submitted 1455 (confirmed) shares with a utility of 1927.513. Shouldn't my efficiency then be: 1927.513/1455 = 1.324 instead of 0.996?

[Sukrim]

Utility seems to me more like an internal scoring method which pool is good to jump into than some "useful" value to caluculate with for people who don't know the inner algorithm.

[organofcorti]

Hey Multipool

Just thought you might like to know that http://multipool.hpc.tw (including the user stats sub-d) is blocked by "Websense" at my work. None of the other bitcoin sites are. How the hell did you manage to piss them off? 

[wachtwoord]

1. The pool is down (went down 5 minutes ago)
2. If efficiency actuallty means efficiency it is not doing too well    0.864 over    3137 shares.

[Multipool]

Aye, the pool was down . With all these users, the pool decided that the getwork response rates for the pool it was requesting work from wasn't fast enough, temporarily banned it, and switched to another pool. But the rates still weren't good enough, so it banned all the pools in succession. I've reset the ban counter and will figure out how to get work faster.

Just thought you might like to know that http://multipool.hpc.tw (including the user stats sub-d) is blocked by "Websense" at my work. None of the other bitcoin sites are. How the hell did you manage to piss them off? 

It is a third-level domain registrar, so some of the other subdomains might have been blacklisted.

I don't really understand the statistics

Utility seems to me more like an internal scoring method which pool is good to jump into than some "useful" value to caluculate with for people who don't know the inner algorithm.

That's right: the utility is my prediction for the expected utility of each share submitted. A single solo share has utility of 1, but utility of pool shares fluctuates widely. For the stats pages, utility is summed for each round, pool, and user. If your utility is greater than the number of shares, you are predicted to be doing better than solo mining. Efficiency is the ratio of the actual rewards allotted by the pools to the expected rewards of solo mining. In the long term, the ratio of the total utility to total shares should equal the total efficiency, assuming the prediction formulas are accurate.

How are you computing the efficiency of improvement?

There are slightly different formulas for different pools. Some you can figure out on your own, others are more clever.

Why limit payouts after a week of inactivity to .10 min.
If I quit your service and have only given .09 btc of service I've inadvertently gifted you 1.50+(more ATM) ....... WTF?
EDIT:
changed .10 max to .10 min

That's .10 min, not .10 max. If you have 1.50 left, you get 1.50 out. The limit is there because there is no registration for the pool. You don't want someone making up a hundred thousand bitcoin accounts, submitting a hundred thousand shares (each worth 0.00005702 BTC), and costing the pool 50 BTC in fees to pay out 5.702 BTC in rewards.

[irishmick]

That's .10 min, not .10 max. If you have 1.50 left, you get 1.50 out. The limit is there because there is no registration for the pool. You don't want someone making up a hundred thousand bitcoin accounts, submitting a hundred thousand shares (each worth 0.00005702 BTC), and costing the pool 50 BTC in fees to pay out 5.702 BTC in rewards.

I nor anyone else would want the pool to incur those fees. Wouldn't it work to have minimum payout be .01 BTC after say 3 days inactivity and if the balance due is < .25 then the receiver pays the transaction fee out of their BTC due balance?

How are you computing the efficiency of improvement?

There are slightly different formulas for different pools. Some you can figure out on your own, others are more clever.

Seeing as the 5% fees are directly tied to your efficiency algorithms doesn't it make sense to disclose what those fees are based upon?

I realize you have a right to make some bitcoins off of your time and hardware. I am not disputing that. I'm just trying to understand when and how those 5% instances are determined.

[organofcorti]

It is a third-level domain registrar, so some of the other subdomains might have been blacklisted.

Any chance of a mirror? Doing data analysis but need more data than I can email myself from my nexus one. Or a JSON API? Little things, don't worry about it if you're flat chat.

Cheers.