Ozcoin: BTC Site OFFLINE

[gmaxwell]

As some are aware after some financial problems and a hacking incident ozcoin's BTC service is apparently not in service.  According to the prior update on the their IRC channel all continued BTC mining is being taken as donations.

I thought some people might appreciate this being made more visible.

(And perhaps— take the moment to remind people that Solo mining and P2Pool don't carry systemic risks of central pool operators getting hacked; and that pools that do coinbase payments generally have less theft exposure then other kinds of centralized pools)

[DrG]

I assume the LTC mining on OzCoin is unaffected as you specifically mentioned BTC, or is it both OzCoin pools (BTC and LTC)?

[gmaxwell]

I believe only BTC, but I suggest asking in IRC for more details.

[Graet]

An update due to confusion over IRC topic change while I was asleep

All shares are being cached on mining nodes and can be counted and paid
miners will be given the option to be paid or help the pool by donating some (or all) back

Miners with ANY concerns should use another pool in the interim

we are doing our best to get the server back online asap, talk to authorities and others re stolen coins and generally get the pool back on track

I will post another update when I have news
Thank you
Graeme

LTC mining is not affected by the Bitcoin pool issues at all

[organofcorti]

As some are aware after some financial problems and a hacking incident ozcoin's BTC service is apparently not in service.  According to the latest update on the their IRC channel all continued BTC mining is being taken as donations.

I thought some people might appreciate this being made more visible.

(And perhaps— take the moment to remind people that Solo mining and P2Pool don't carry systemic risks of central pool operators getting hacked; and that pools that do coinbase payments generally have less theft exposure then other kinds of centralized pools)

Just to explain a bit more for new miners, solomining has another completely different risk - much greater variance - which may also see you not get paid if you have a low hashrate and the network continues it's current rate of expansion. p2Pool may not be an option for some miners - I know with my network there's no way I'd have a low enough latency.

Coinbase payments though, that does seem like a good idea regardless of the 100 block wait time - are there any pools besides proportional (Slush) and PPS var (Eligius) that do this?

[BitcoinOxygen]

As some are aware after some financial problems and a hacking incident ozcoin's BTC service is apparently not in service.  According to the latest update on the their IRC channel all continued BTC mining is being taken as donations.

I thought some people might appreciate this being made more visible.

(And perhaps— take the moment to remind people that Solo mining and P2Pool don't carry systemic risks of central pool operators getting hacked; and that pools that do coinbase payments generally have less theft exposure then other kinds of centralized pools)

Just to explain a bit more for new miners, solomining has another completely different risk - much greater variance - which may also see you not get paid if you have a low hashrate and the network continues it's current rate of expansion. p2Pool may not be an option for some miners - I know with my network there's no way I'd have a low enough latency.

Coinbase payments though, that does seem like a good idea regardless of the 100 block wait time - are there any pools besides proportional (Slush) and PPS var (Eligius) that do this?

IIRC, Slush does not do coinbase payments.

Also pools with coinbase payments are having some problems with Avalon.

[-ck]

Coinbase payments pollute the block chain with small miners.

[gmaxwell]

Graet has clicked the report to mods button and asked that the misleading subject line been changed and complaining that this was sticked.  The subject is actually just copied verbatim from the ozcoin IRC channel topic.  I wouldn't have needed to post this if Ozcoin sent out a broadcast message to miners at the time they updated their IRC topic to say mining was a donation (and I did subsequently ask Graet to send out such a message, but was told that he was unable).

In any case, I don't know what to change the subject line to since Graet didn't offer an alternative in his post above.

[gmaxwell]

Also pools with coinbase payments are having some problems with Avalon.

Eligius appeared to trigger some cgminer/Avalon bug once two days ago, it was work-around within 20 minutes of it happening. You sure seem to be prompt with repeating old information about issues everyone else has had.

Coinbase payments pollute the block chain with small miners.

Making coinbase payments has ~nothing to do with a pool's payout granularity policy. Ironically, the best known coinbase paying pool (eligius) produces a far smaller amount of small payments than many large pools which will happily make daily payments of 0.01 btc.  You can still keep the overall bulk of the coins in coinbase payments while still batching small payouts— the result is that pool only ends up carrying the sum of yet-unpaid small miners instead of a big wallet.

[twobits]

Graet has clicked the report to mods button and asked that the misleading subject line been changed and complaining that this was sticked.  The subject is actually just copied verbatim from the ozcoin IRC channel topic.  I wouldn't have needed to post this if Ozcoin sent out a broadcast message to miners at the time they updated their IRC topic to say mining was a donation (and I did subsequently ask Graet to send out such a message, but was told that he was unable).

In any case, I don't know what to change the subject line to since Graet didn't offer an alternative in his post above.

Looks like some Jezzz changed the subject line on irc. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=14085.msg1898413#msg1898413 )

In https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=14085.msg1899768#msg1899768 Graet seems to basically say that this is not true. 

Guess IRC subject lines are no more official then any random irc chatter?

[-ck]

Making coinbase payments has ~nothing to do with a pool's payout granularity policy. Ironically, the best known coinbase paying pool (eligius) produces a far smaller amount of small payments than many large pools which will happily make daily payments of 0.01 btc.  You can still keep the overall bulk of the coins in coinbase payments while still batching small payouts— the result is that pool only ends up carrying the sum of yet-unpaid small miners instead of a big wallet.

Ah that's nice, sorry I was under the impression it would always pay out per block solve like p2pool seems to.

[zvs]

As some are aware after some financial problems and a hacking incident ozcoin's BTC service is apparently not in service.  According to the latest update on the their IRC channel all continued BTC mining is being taken as donations.

I thought some people might appreciate this being made more visible.

(And perhaps— take the moment to remind people that Solo mining and P2Pool don't carry systemic risks of central pool operators getting hacked; and that pools that do coinbase payments generally have less theft exposure then other kinds of centralized pools)

Just to explain a bit more for new miners, solomining has another completely different risk - much greater variance - which may also see you not get paid if you have a low hashrate and the network continues it's current rate of expansion. p2Pool may not be an option for some miners - I know with my network there's no way I'd have a low enough latency.

Coinbase payments though, that does seem like a good idea regardless of the 100 block wait time - are there any pools besides proportional (Slush) and PPS var (Eligius) that do this?

is it a satellite connection?

i get 200+ms latency to my server.. sure, there's a lot of dead shares, but efficiency still 110%+ usually from lack of orphans