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

[BurningToad]

First payouts under SMPPS have been completed   Everything looks smooth!

This, followed by solving two more blocks, with one at just 61,153 shares!  Things are looking up for us!

[1714038901]

1714038901

[1714038901]

1714038901

[inlikeflynn]

Just noticed ars has a pool and moved 1 of my miners off. Been reading ars since the very beginning, so thanks for setting this up BT!

[Meatball]

We were BS'ing in IRC earlier and bugging BT about pool fees/server costs.  As we all know, the pool does not currently have a required fees, but according to BT the servers are costing a bit under $10/day to run.  While it's not much, I don't think we're covering those costs with our voluntary donations.  With our current hashrate (115 GH), the pool should find on average 1.5 Blocks (75 BTC) per day.  Right now the average donation is about 0.3%, so the pool is only collecting about .225 BTC a day (75 * .003).  

Considering BTC is worth about $14 right now, that's only about $3.50 a day coming in with fees.

I don't know if BT is going to put in a mandatory fee, but it's definitely not fair for him to be paying for all of this out of pocket.  Hopefully as the pool gets bigger, there will be more people/BTC found per day for the same server costs, but in the meantime, why not raise your donation percentage a smidge or send him a donation?

[FreeJAC]

Done updated my donation.

[skottiejay]

Had a quick about this pool.

(Btw love the new system)

In my lifetime work and unpaid work is a different number than my current balance. How does this work? Is the unpaid going to be added to the balance?

[twmz]

Had a quick about this pool.

(Btw love the new system)

In my lifetime work and unpaid work is a different number than my current balance. How does this work? Is the unpaid going to be added to the balance?

* Lifetime Work is the cumulative total BTC you have earned (shares * PPS share price)
* Unpaid Work is the portion of Lifetime Work that you haven't been paid for yet.  This may be because blocks are still unconfirmed, or it may be because the pool has been "net unlucky" and needs to have some lucky blocks to catch back up to "even".
* Paid Work is the amount you have actually been paid.  This happens when blocks get confirmed.  The 50 BTC from each confirmed block gets distributed between everyone with Unpaid work.
* Balance is the portion of Paid Work that you haven't withdrawn yet.

So when blocks confirm, your Paid Work will go up and your Unpaid Work will go down by an equal amount (donations wil make your Paid Work go up a bit less than your Unpaid Work goes down).  At the same time that your Paid Work increases, your balance will increase until you manually request a withdrawal or until auto-payout threshold is met at which time your balance will be transfered to your Bitcoin address and your Balance will be 0 again.

[skottiejay]

Had a quick about this pool.

(Btw love the new system)

In my lifetime work and unpaid work is a different number than my current balance. How does this work? Is the unpaid going to be added to the balance?

* Lifetime Work is the cumulative total BTC you have earned (shares * PPS share price)
* Unpaid Work is the portion of Lifetime Work that you haven't been paid for yet.  This may be because blocks are still unconfirmed, or it may be because the pool has been "net unlucky" and needs to have some lucky blocks to catch back up to "even".
* Paid Work is the amount you have actually been paid.  This happens when blocks get confirmed.  The 50 BTC from each confirmed block gets distributed between everyone with Unpaid work.
* Balance is the portion of Paid Work that you haven't withdrawn yet.

So when blocks confirm, your Paid Work will go up and your Unpaid Work will go down by an equal amount (donations wil make your Paid Work go up a bit less than your Unpaid Work goes down).  At the same time that your Paid Work increases, your balance will increase until you manually request a withdrawal or until auto-payout threshold is met at which time your balance will be transfered to your Bitcoin address and your Balance will be 0 again.

Thank you so much, that was bothering me looking at that haha.

[Internet151]

I've come to take over your stats page leaderboard! ^_^

[coblee]

I have a proposal for a better SMPPS payout system. See: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=27698

[RandyFolds]

I've come to take over your stats page leaderboard! ^_^

Rocking the charts there, fella. Awesome.

[BurningToad]

Hello,

Due to a problem with the pool software under a higher load, I just noticed that we found a block that did not show up in the database/stats/webpage.

This block is: http://blockexplorer.com/block/0000000000000a2b5d284e15919c23eaef7988ebec93ef0af8939c51952fc589
The block currently has 179 confirmations.

I've been very busy lately with work and have only been able to check in just to see if there are any major pool problems, or I would have found this sooner.  I noticed it because the pool balance is 50 BTC higher than it should be.

The problem that surfaced is that the method for checking for new blocks is that every 5 minutes, the pool looks at the last 10 transactions to see if an 'immature' block pops up.  Well, I guess there were 10 payouts in this window and the 'immature' block fell off of this short list.  I have now fixed the code to check the last 500 transactions until I can spend the time to come up with a better method.

This is the only block that this has occurred for, I could not find any other un-accounted blocks (and the pool balance corresponds to just this one missing block.)

I can provide more explanation later, but I wanted to post this as soon as I found out.  Yall can check the SimpleCoin code to see this specific "listtransactions" call and how it was set up if you are curious.

Thankfully, with the SMPPS system in place well before this block was found, there aren't any major consequences for payouts.  I will simply add this 50 BTC to the confirmed BTC total, and our buffer will increase by 50 BTC.  This means that one of our round's statistics basically includes two rounds worth of shares, but as we don't use round shares for payouts anymore, this isn't balance or payout affecting.

I am STILL very busy with work, but when I get I chance I can come back and answer any questions yall might have.

[gentakin]

That's good news. More guaranteed PPS payments!

I've seen a "listgenerated" patch somewhere. It only lists generation transactions. I'm not sure if it works with recent releases of bitcoind, but it might be a solution to your problem.

[FreeJAC]

Thanks for letting us know and being proactive even though you have a high workload ATM. We appreciated your efforts!

[coblee]

Yeah, thanks for being so honest BurningToad. You could have easily just kept the extra 50 BTC and no one would have known. It's nice to find such a good pool and pool operator. And the fact that it's also lucky right now is just icing on the cake.

[Zoomer]

This is probably a good time for people to check their donation settings, or to make sure your wallet still sends ok with BurningToad's address. Not sure if there's a pool link to signup for Tradehill; I'd use that too if available.

[RandyFolds]

This is probably a good time for people to check their donation settings, or to make sure your wallet still sends ok with BurningToad's address. Not sure if there's a pool link to signup for Tradehill; I'd use that too if available.

This...

[BurningToad]

Thanks everyone for helping me to try and get this pool to break even!  In order to help reach this goal, I am making the following change.  This change is now clearly noted in the original post, home page, and registration page.

All new accounts (as in, you haven't registered an account yet) will have their default donation set to 1%.  This value can still be changed in the account details to anything from 0 to 100%.  

I am hoping that this encourages some donations or at least gets people to think about how much they want to donate upon joining, and setting their own value.  I think 1% is fair for what the pool provides.  In the future I will look at adding optional perks for those who donate.

[coblee]

I just upped my donation percent. Thanks for all your hard work!
You should definitely add some optional perks like miner idle emails.

[BurningToad]

You can now hide all those extra workers you created.

[coblee]

You can now hide all those extra workers you created.

What happens when you hide a worker that you are currently mining with? I assume that would screw things up, right? You should probably only show the hide button if the worker is idle (when it's red).

Also, can you please sort the worker list by name? Thanks!