[4+ EH] Slush Pool (slushpool.com); Overt AsicBoost; World First Mining Pool

[VentMine]

When changing the difficulty for one of my miners on Slushpool, how long will it take to come into effect? I have an S9 and am trying to decrease the bandwidth consumption. I understand if I increase the difficulty I should use less bandwidth because I will be submitting my shares and requesting work less frequently (am I right about this?).

Also, does anyone have any suggestions on how I can reduce my total bandwidth / traffic use if I have multiple (20+) S9's running on the same network? I will be using a cellular data plan, so it is important to minimize my data usage.

Thanks

Hi VentMine, you can set the minimum difficulty to 28 000 which should decrease the bandwidth consumption by half. Let us know if it helps.

Hi SlushPool, yes I've got it figured out now. At first I made a small change to the difficulty so I didn't notice a significant variance / bandwidth change. I've since moved it from difficulty 25,000 to 250,000 and it didn't take long to verify that it did indeed work wonders at reducing bandwidth. I'm now at diff 500,000 for my S9 (max difficulty) just to see how low a bandwidth I can get (without running my own proxy as CK mentioned above).

So my variance, as expected, has increased dramatically. Should I be worried about increased stale shares or anything that will reduce my average hashrate, considering I am working at a ridiculously high difficulty of 500,000? I'm imagining my S9 working on a difficult share for a while before it finally realizes the pool has a new block to work on (just want confirmation from a smart person).

Thanks

[hurricandave]

 [/quote]

 I'm imagining my S9 working on a difficult share for a while before it finally realizes the pool has a new block to work on (just want confirmation from a smart person).

Thanks
[/quote]

It doesn't work quite like that. The discards are reported mostly from your machine throwing away current work because it's received the signal from the pool that the block has changed and it has accepted the new work parameters.

[allinvain]

Question is how much can we trust the pool own autodiff mechanism and do certain miners fail to work properly with this? When I check some S7s of mine they do seem to report appropriate difficulty - same for S9s.

[VentMine]

 I'm imagining my S9 working on a difficult share for a while before it finally realizes the pool has a new block to work on (just want confirmation from a smart person).

Thanks
[/quote]

It doesn't work quite like that. The discards are reported mostly from your machine throwing away current work because it's received the signal from the pool that the block has changed and it has accepted the new work parameters.
[/quote]

OK gotcha, so difficulty will have 0 effect on long term average. Thanks

[hurricandave]

 I'm imagining my S9 working on a difficult share for a while before it finally realizes the pool has a new block to work on (just want confirmation from a smart person).

Thanks

It doesn't work quite like that. The discards are reported mostly from your machine throwing away current work because it's received the signal from the pool that the block has changed and it has accepted the new work parameters.
[/quote]

OK gotcha, so difficulty will have 0 effect on long term average. Thanks
[/quote]

If you set the difficulty excessively high for the asic, you will decrease your bandwidth usage, but, there is a tipping point wherein you begin to see something known as VARIENCE, your hashrate may look lower than you expected then awhile later it will look really high, like an exaggerated roller coaster.

[HashSpike]

SlushPool,

Hypothetically speaking here, what is to stop your pool from artificially creating workers and the hash rate associated with them.  For instance, the pool has stayed at around 17,000-17,300+/- workers while the combined pool hashing power has gone up 10-20PH?  Would it be possible for a pool to artificially increase their ghost workers hashing rates up by 10-20PH?  Are ghost workers or artificial hash rates plausible? 

I do not know anything about the backend operations of a mining pool, just generally curious?  Is this something that could be done on other mining pools?  I love your pool, just a little worried about the huge increase in hashing power and not an increase in workers that I would assume would come with that big of a jump.

How can I be sure a pool is not doing some shady stuff or do I just have to believe the stats from the pool? 

Again, this is all hypothetical and I am just curious.  Some backend pool experts school me to some knowledge please.

Thank you Gentlemen!

[VentMine]

SlushPool,

Hypothetically speaking here, what is to stop your pool from artificially creating workers and the hash rate associated with them.  For instance, the pool has stayed at around 17,000-17,300+/- workers while the combined pool hashing power has gone up 10-20PH?  Would it be possible for a pool to artificially increase their ghost workers hashing rates up by 10-20PH?  Are ghost workers or artificial hash rates plausible? 

I do not know anything about the backend operations of a mining pool, just generally curious?  Is this something that could be done on other mining pools?  I love your pool, just a little worried about the huge increase in hashing power and not an increase in workers that I would assume would come with that big of a jump.

How can I be sure a pool is not doing some shady stuff or do I just have to believe the stats from the pool? 

Again, this is all hypothetical and I am just curious.  Some backend pool experts school me to some knowledge please.

Thank you Gentlemen!

I can't offer any technical answer to your question but I do believe doing something like this would be a horrendous business decision, Slush has built a great brand and this kind of thing would destroy it forever. I think you could take notes on Hashrate and block frequency + block reward and figure out yourself if anything seemed off. Probably easier ways of doing it too

[KNK]

There is a link in the pool stats https://slushpool.com/stats/hashrate_proof/

[Cozy]

Is there anywhere on this pool to see who or which miner actually finds the block? Thanks

[Rabinovitch]

Why do you need to know it?.. 

[Cozy]

Why do you need to know it?.. 
And why wouldnt you want to know if one of your miners found one of the blocks? Answer that question?

[joz]

Hi guys.  Bitcoin noob here and am trying to mine with a super-joke hash rate, just as a proof of concept/research.  I've got a whopping 11 Mh/s off an onboard GPU (haha) connected to slush.  It reports accurately and everything.  My question is:

If I use this mining calculator with this hash rate, it says I should earn about 4 sathoshi/week.  I've been mining at this rate on slush for a week, and even though my stats estimated daily reward says 1 satoshi, my confirmed/unconfirmed reward remains 0.  Will I ever get even a satoshi?  Is this because I only get that estimated rate applied to blocks found, and so it would build up far slower than 1/day?  Is 1/day based on if the pool is constantly finding blocks?  Thanks for your help/sorry for the noob question.

[KNK]

Your reward is calculated when a block is found and in your case it is less than 1 satoshi per block, so you will never get anything, because 0 + 0 will always be 0

[adyb]

Has anyone else noticed that they're past their payout threshold (since a fair few hours) and payments haven't been sent out yet?

[traxor]

I crossed my threshold around 4.5 hours ago -- no payout.

[allinvain]

I crossed my threshold around 4.5 hours ago -- no payout.

Same here. I wonder if they're having issues with their payout system.

I've sent them a message via the website's contact form, but I don't know what response time to expect (if any). I would imagine though that they would've done the smart thing and built some watchdog process into their system which alerts them of such problems.

Let's wait and see.

[traxor]

I've sent them a message via the website's contact form

Good idea -- I've sent them a note as well.

[traxor]

And -- I already received a response.

Thank you for contacting us. I'm happy to assist you. Actually the delay in payouts is currently on our side. Let me explain, please. For security reason pool uses two wallets – Hot and Cold.
The funds immediately available for payouts are kept in a Hot wallet. This wallet has quite a low balance for security reasons and when it becomes empty, the pool administrator has to load it from the cold storage – a highly secured offline computer keeping pool's bitcoins. Since this process can not be automated and only very limited number of people has access to the cold wallet, it can introduce a few hours delay in sending bitcoins to user's wallet.

Thanks for your patience. We will make sure your payout will leave the pool today

Martin

[allinvain]

lol I was just about to paste the same reply. Anyways, I'm glad it's nothing serious. So let's just be more patient and all shall be well.

Happy mining everyone!

[Moonrackers]

Thanks for the reply!