[0 GH/s 0% fee SMPPS] ArsBitcoin mining pool!

[Jack of Diamonds]

Any chance of SMPPS? To fence off 4+ day blocks such as the last one.

Beside that, nice pool if you're looking to diversify miners to various sites. I'll keep a few GPUs here.

[1714106727]

1714106727

[1714106727]

1714106727

[BurningToad]

Sorry, I didn't get time to finish smpps today, but it is definately coming soon! Meanwhile, we'll just keep finding lucky blocks just got one!

[FreeJAC]

Yeah it sure is nice to wake up in the morning and see the round shares in the tens of thousands. 

[loglow]

Hi, this pool is looking really appealing! For the time being I'm moving over my ~630Mh/s from BTCGuild. Mostly I like the speed of the site, the responsiveness of the dev, and the automatic payout option. I have a couple suggestions though. First, it'd be nice to be able to remove workers from the site (unless I'm missing something, it can't be done). Also, it'd be nice to adjust the formatting on the stats pages so that they don't scroll horizontally. Overall, I'm hoping this turns out to be the smaller-sized yet reliable/responsive pool I've been looking around for.

[geek-trader]

Hi, this pool is looking really appealing! For the time being I'm moving over my ~630Mh/s from BTCGuild. Mostly I like the speed of the site, the responsiveness of the dev, and the automatic payout option. I have a couple suggestions though. First, it'd be nice to be able to remove workers from the site (unless I'm missing something, it can't be done). Also, it'd be nice to adjust the formatting on the stats pages so that they don't scroll horizontally. Overall, I'm hoping this turns out to be the smaller-sized yet reliable/responsive pool I've been looking around for.

Welcome!

I made the switch from BTCGuild also.  Mostly because I've been an Ars reader since 2000, but also because BTC's website is SO SLOW.  The Ars mining site is fast and reliable.

[BurningToad]

Hello, randyfolds just pointed a bug out to me.  The account history table that stores historical block information had an incorrect schema set.  For the donation percentage per-block, it was only using integer values to store your donation history.  This means that 2.5% would have rounded up to 3% on the blocks.php page.  However, this is just a display issue, as this information is stored after the actual donation.  I have corrected this table so that decimals can be stored for future history, but the old values will stay rounded because that information is now lost.  (Well, I could probably pull it from logs, but not worth it.)

[BurningToad]

The server was having some issues today.  Pushpool decided to consume 100% cpu for some reason.  I think it wasn't happy that I didn't restart it for ~5 days   So i've given everything a clean start, and things seem to be fine again.

[BurningToad]

One more hiccup, but I caught it as it happened.  This time the actual cause was addressed, i had not properly allowed the user running the server processes to use more sockets and it was running out.  That has been fixed.

[sethmo]

Today was a good day!

[btcminer]

This is a very good pool. I've tried several pools including eligius, btcmine, deepbit, btcguild, and so far this one is the quickest and most reliable.

Highly recommended.

[gade202]

Woah, what luck this morning!

[miscreanity]

It depends on the GPU.  I'm a  Mac guy, so I don't know what GPU's come in Windows laptops these days.  There's a hardware list / comparison at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison

CPU mining, or mining on non-ATI cards is a nice way to use what you have to see how the whole thing works, but you're never going to get any money that way.  My MacBook Pro (2009) was getting 2.1 Mh/s on it's Nvidia 9400M.  My file server running linux and an AMD cpu from 2006 was getting 1.2 Mh/s. I threw a ATI 5830 in that file server and now I get 277 Mh/s.

277 Mh/s gets you .2 BTC a day.  So you can imagine how long it would take to get 1 BTC with CPU or Nvidia mining.

Yeah I've been looking at a 2-4x 6950 setup, but have been hesitant to set up a dedicated machine for mining over a system that I can at least accumulate BTCs with. Now that the exchange rate steadily dropping, Mt. Gox either needs to get its sh*t together or holders need to stop selling before I make the plunge. Time will tell if this is a retest of the $10/BTC range or a deeper sell off.

Of course, I'm not as concerned about using BTCs to pay for the hardware as I am with simply getting out of the USD. As (not if) the dollar continues it's accelerating decline, Bitcoin could behave in a similar manner to gold by going up rapidly (just wait for the QE3 announcement...). This will be even more pronounced as the US locks down on financial transactions across borders and more people realize their dollars are becoming relatively worthless.

On that note, using WalletPaperbackup you can print several hundred Kb of scannable data in hard copy for subsequent recovery. No need to move coins out of the country or risk confiscation of flash drives and other electronic media. Just slip a piece of paper into a book or magazine and endure the cavity search.

Bitcoin may be having a rocky start, but I think the above will build demand to a point where it may be one of the only routes for wealth to escape from the American kleptocracy, so simply having Bitcoins is better than not.

[GimEEE]

Don't ban the botnets or they'll DDOS you :-/

[BurningToad]

Hello everyone,

EDIT, testing complete!  Test server down
SMPPS is currently in testing at http://ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com/  If you had a worker account set up on the real pool before Friday, you can just change the hostname to ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com to help me test here  This is mining on testnet, so you won't earn any real BTC.  However, if you could point a miner to ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com for just 10 minutes or so, it would be helpful to test the system out!

I'm hoping to be able to move the live pool to SMPPS before the next difficutly change.  This means that I would disable stats for a bit, do the conversion, convert all current round shares to the current PPS value, then re-enable everything under SMPPS.  This seems to be the best way to do it if I can get it done before the difficulty change, as all shares would have the same value.

Here is the psuedo-code for the new payout method: http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Shared_Maximum_PPS  This payout method will even out payments and provide a constant expected value per share.  This means that pool hopping is worthless on this pool, as round length essentially doesn't matter.  The 'cost' of this method, is that your expected payout can be delayed if the pool has long rounds.  This is the only way to do PPS without charging a fee (otherwise the pool can easily go in the hole.)  If the pool is lucky (like it has been!) it saves the BTC to pay out on the long rounds.  All said, you can expect to earn much more BTC here than Deepbit with a 10% PPS fee, for example.

To summarize:

1) All submitted shares earn you an exact amount of BTC.  This BTC will keep adding up as "Total PPS Work".  This is (1 / difficulty) * 50 BTC per share.  This is the expected value of each share submitted.
2) When the pool solves a block and gets 120 confirmations (releasing the 50BTC), the pool then tries to do a payout as follows.  If the "Total PPS Work" for everyone is LESS than 50 BTC (it was a short round), everyone gets paid their full "Total PPS Work".  If the work is GREATER than 50 BTC (long round) the pool pays as much as it can, evenly distributed (If 5 people each have Total PPS work of 2 BTC, but the pool only has 5 BTC to pay, each person gets 1 BTC now, and the pool will pay the rest when it gets more BTC.)  It does not prioritize "older" shares, as that felt a bit like a pyramid scheme.
3) Everytime the pool gets more BTC, it tries to pay as much as it can to everyone who's Paid PPS Work is less than their Total PPS work. You will continue to get paid anything you are due, even if you stop mining.


There is a new chart that shows you daily totals for "Total PPS Work" and "Paid PPS Work", and I will continue to improve this chart. It is based on Icey's and Lego's chart code, so I'll be sending them a donation soon.

There has been some criticism of Eligius for delayed payouts.  Though we will also be using SMPPS, we should not have the same issues.  We aren't switching to completely different pool servers, and we aren't doing payouts with generations (which means the pool can only pay 50BTC per payout.)  I think the delayed rewards on Eligius are perhaps because of that.  Even if we have lots of long rounds, you will still get paid at a minimum, your proportional rewards each block, which is the same as you would get paid now for a long block, except now you will also have credit for future payments.

[The_JMiner]

EDIT: I think it was a problem on my end and I fixed it. Keep up the good work!

[BurningToad]

This lucky streak doesn't stop giving!

[rearwheels]

Cool, thanks rearwheels!

I recently added this, which contains hash rate and historical block info.

http://arsbitcoin.com/blockApi.php

Thanks! And Done!

Now user stats and pool stats will show up on www.btc-poolwatch.com

[btcminer]

what is SMPPS?

[BurningToad]

what is SMPPS?

Read the wall of text about 5 posts up

Along with the reason for switching: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24966.0

[BurningToad]

SMPPS will go live in about 1 hour, to beat the difficulty change.  It will not require any pool downtime.  Stats are likely to be down for about 10 minutes during the update.

All shares in the current round will be transitioned to SMPPS, so no shares will be lost.