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

[bspurloc]

I need help recovering my wallet. I re-installed my Windows today and lost one of my wallets in the process because I didn't backup the private key.

However, I have private key backed up for this wallet two weeks ago. But since then I created new receiving address. Now my balance shows zero and if I create a new receiving address it is not the same as what was created before the backup.

Need help! I'm using multibit.

I'm afraid you won't be able to recover your wallet as multibit wallet is non-deterministic (AFAIK).
However you could try scanning your HDD for deleted files using specialized software.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/builds
Recuva is free and will scan the HD for lost files. however if u formatted the drive, it isnt going to find anything.
formatted means formatted not quick format which isnt formatting its just a directory table wiping

[bspurloc]

So, does anyone know the situation with the payouts?

Is all fixed now for future payouts? I have enough confirmed balance to pass my threshold, but it has not yet paid out since this morning.

Just wondering.

A watched pot never boils

[Paul Troon]

I am a recent Slush pool member and former BTC Guild member.  I prefer many things about how BTC Guild reports statistics, but the increased centralization of hashing on any pool seems detrimental to the long term value of my coins. 

I have what is probably a naive question that I think many new miners might share.

In a nut shell, when someone gets a shiny new ASIC, they know the coins it will produce are front loaded - the difficulty is going up, so they want low variance so they get the benefit from the maximum theoretical reward of their device with out the risk that bad luck/reward variance causes them to miss reward when network difficulty is low.

Has anyone quantified the relationship between the pool hashrate and network difficulty for an individual member's hash rate as it relates to the desire to get maximum reward as early as possible?

So far my daily payout seems comparable to BTC Guild.  I assume the higher a member's hash rate then the less they need to join a big pool to receive low variance rewards up front.  I think if this is true (and could be explained well) maybe people would spread their hashing around a bit more and not just flock to the largest pool.

My intuition tells me you can somehow compute the theoretical variance from a large pool vs. smaller pool for a particular hash contribution. 

An example (with bogus numbers) of what I'd like to see a report on might look something like this:

Small pool (Slush):

 - Expected daily reward with for 700 Gh/s member is 0.70 +/- 0.5  BTC/day (SD = 0.1) for pool with 5% of hashing power and network difficulty of 510,929,738.02.

Large pool (BTC Guild):

 - Expected daily reward with for 700 Gh/s member is 0.70 +/- 0.2 BTC/day (SD = 0.01) for pool with 35% of hashing power and network difficulty of 510,929,738.02.

Solo mining:

 - Expected daily reward with for 700 Gh/s member is 0.70 +/- 17 BTC/day (SD = 1.2) and network difficulty of 510,929,738.02.

My statistics fu is not up to the task, so hopefully someone has already figured out the equation 'f' that returns:

  (avg return, std deviation) = f(miner hash rate, pool hash rate, network difficulty)

Even better would be if you could solve to find the minimum pool hash rate that gives a miner with a fixed hash rate a minimum desired standard deviation on BTC return within some time frame (eg. 1 day).

For the smallest miners, the largest pool is best to even out average payouts and take advantage of current (lower) difficulty.  But for larger miners I suspect it is more nuanced and you only need a pool that is over some threshold to get the benefit of being in a pool.  I know pool fees and details are also important, but I am ignoring that for this analysis.

[bspurloc]

luck is luck...
I am surprised u r matching daily payouts between slush and btcguild. r u sure?

Solo mining 700 gh/s... how long will that take to find a block? by saying .7 u r implying less than 2 days. I would doubt that and guess more like a week. but what do I know! well I know the diff is 510+ now

[vesperwillow]

FWIW I've had same payouts on a daily basis between a few different pools before, but without hitting blocks your payouts may get held.

[OmegaNemesis28]

I was stupid.
I was going to try out Bitminter again, which I havent done for a long time - back when they first started, but after 20~ hours of hashing at 200GH/s - I had only 0.05BTC (almost all unconfirmed). Meanwhile here at slush I usually have at least 0.2BTC in that time span. The luck wasn't too bad at all during that time, so it wasn't that.

So I asked them what would cause this. There weren't any terribly long blocks happening on their end. The luck wasn't THAT bad. But my payouts were terribad. When asked, I was greeted by snark criticism rather than helpfulness and now insults to boot. Even after my question had been answered politely by someone nice enough. But never again.

Sticking with slush it seems. I was silly for trying otherwise.

[DrHaribo]

I was going to try out Bitminter again, which I havent done for a long time - back when they first started, but after 20~ hours of hashing at 200GH/s - I had only 0.05BTC (almost all unconfirmed). Meanwhile here at slush I usually have at least 0.2BTC in that time span. The luck wasn't too bad at all during that time, so it wasn't that.

The luck is unfortunately very bad right now, after 96.73% and 74.41% CDF blocks we are now at 98.08% CDF with no block after 8 hours 48 minutes. Only 5 blocks in the last 24 hours. Add to that the fact that it takes about 10 hours from you do some work until that work is fully paid.. this is why the payout so far was low.

So I asked them what would cause this. There weren't any terribly long blocks happening on their end. The luck wasn't THAT bad. But my payouts were terribad. When asked, I was greeted by snark criticism rather than helpfulness and now insults to boot. Even after my question had been answered politely by someone nice enough. But never again.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I tried my best to explain about the variance and the work-to-payout delay, without any criticism. I think some miners got a little annoyed though.

[nottm28]

I think some miners got a little annoyed though.

That's unusual

[mdopro1]

I would definitely take this to an expert unless you are sure that you have done all that is humanly possible to recover those coins.
Experts have special ways of getting data back, but there are obviously limits.

Unfortunately I'm one of those places where people go for light recovery jobs like formatted drives. I have 3 pieces of commercial applications to do recovery and have spent entire night using each of them with no avail. I recovered some of the older wallet files but nothing from the one I was looking for.

I do make several backups but my loss was because of a misunderstanding of the fact that if I create a new receiving address I have to make a new backup - that's exactly what I didn't do and proceed with format believing that I have a good backup

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/builds
Recuva is free and will scan the HD for lost files. however if u formatted the drive, it isnt going to find anything.
formatted means formatted not quick format which isnt formatting its just a directory table wiping

I've used recuva before, it can bring back deleted files but never from a lost partition. Although I still used it as one of my last attempts after using 3 other apps - nope! All gone... today's value they were around 10k

[bspurloc]

I think some miners got a little annoyed though.

That's unusual

Mean!!! If I dont receive my payouts instantly then I can afford to buy my next fix

[Trongersoll]

How often are you getting paid out by Slush? Does it make a difference if you set your threshold higher? I'm always past my threshold and seem to be waiting a day for payout. I've got it set at .1

EDIT: Or I don't have enough to cover the 2% fee yet. I might have to do some math.

you don't cover the fee. that is taken off the top.

[bspurloc]

I would definitely take this to an expert unless you are sure that you have done all that is humanly possible to recover those coins.
Experts have special ways of getting data back, but there are obviously limits.

Unfortunately I'm one of those places where people go for light recovery jobs like formatted drives. I have 3 pieces of commercial applications to do recovery and have spent entire night using each of them with no avail. I recovered some of the older wallet files but nothing from the one I was looking for.

I do make several backups but my loss was because of a misunderstanding of the fact that if I create a new receiving address I have to make a new backup - that's exactly what I didn't do and proceed with format believing that I have a good backup

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/builds
Recuva is free and will scan the HD for lost files. however if u formatted the drive, it isnt going to find anything.
formatted means formatted not quick format which isnt formatting its just a directory table wiping

I've used recuva before, it can bring back deleted files but never from a lost partition. Although I still used it as one of my last attempts after using 3 other apps - nope! All gone... today's value they were around 10k

Yeah Recuva isnt going to search beyond the present partitions. You could create a partition that spans the whole drive then search it.
lifes about learning lessons... sometimes those lessons really hurt.

[mdopro1]

Yeah Recuva isnt going to search beyond the present partitions. You could create a partition that spans the whole drive then search it.
lifes about learning lessons... sometimes those lessons really hurt.

Tough lesson learnt. However I blame my Lenovo Yoga for having such a small drive that my keys got overwritten pretty much instantly when I installed windows. It's just 256GB. Oh well!

Now I backed up my wallet and for practise wiped my laptop again, re-installed multibit and recovered a test wallet with small amount of btc. I had to do this practise because I don't want to lose anything ever again! My backup method works well.

[RoadTrain]

Yeah Recuva isnt going to search beyond the present partitions. You could create a partition that spans the whole drive then search it.
lifes about learning lessons... sometimes those lessons really hurt.

Tough lesson learnt. However I blame my Lenovo Yoga for having such a small drive that my keys got overwritten pretty much instantly when I installed windows. It's just 256GB. Oh well!

Now I backed up my wallet and for practise wiped my laptop again, re-installed multibit and recovered a test wallet with small amount of btc. I had to do this practise because I don't want to lose anything ever again! My backup method works well.

What could help in your  case is using deterministic wallets. So you only need to back up once, then all addresses you create will be deterministic.
I think Electrum supports this, don't know about Multibit.

[Eternity]

Loving very much

[boromir]

Anyone experiencing very low reward for last 2 blocks?

[Searing]

Anyone experiencing very low reward for last 2 blocks?

er nope same as always for me on my Jupiter it ranges from .046 to .055 more or less usually like say .044 or so as an ave I guess I'm showing 530gh on slush

[vesperwillow]

Tough lesson learnt. However I blame my Lenovo Yoga for having such a small drive that my keys got overwritten pretty much instantly when I installed windows. It's just 256GB. Oh well!

You're blaming the digital size of a piece of hardware for your misuse which caused you to lose important data? Windows, on a bad day, takes 10gb. Most of my XP installs are between 600-700mb, and Windows 7 installs are 3-7 depending on how I slipstreamed it.

The size wasn't the issue.. your problem was you started writing data back to a drive instead of performing surgery to recover the data.

[inevertell]

So, does anyone know the situation with the payouts?

Is all fixed now for future payouts? I have enough confirmed balance to pass my threshold, but it has not yet paid out since this morning.

Just wondering.

A watched pot never boils

Good point, was just "worried" because of the recent payout issues. But I got my payout soon after.

Analogy also works here when watching the stats page for too much of the day too..
Seems we have much better luck when I am not staring at a 10hr block with my finger on Cmd+R (mac speak for reload)

[mdopro1]

What could help in your  case is using deterministic wallets. So you only need to back up once, then all addresses you create will be deterministic.
I think Electrum supports this, don't know about Multibit.

I now created twice as many receive addresses than I need and will never create new ones. That's one sure way to know my backup will remain valid. I have also setup MS synctoy to create a backup with one click whenever I need straight to my file server's mapped drive which is running on RAID 5. Will never lose a single coin to my own stupidity.

You're blaming the digital size of a piece of hardware for your misuse which caused you to lose important data? Windows, on a bad day, takes 10gb. Most of my XP installs are between 600-700mb, and Windows 7 installs are 3-7 depending on how I slipstreamed it.

The size wasn't the issue.. your problem was you started writing data back to a drive instead of performing surgery to recover the data.

I'm not blaming the size per se, my problem was I only found out that my backup was bad after installing Windows 8 all over again and a bunch of software that I use daily including multibit. Problem with 256GB drive with Lenovo's oem stuff is that a chunk of it is backup/restore partition and stuff. So 256GB isn't really 256GB. My C Drive is 189GB formatted, Windows 8 takes approximately 30GB and all my software (plus documents etc) installed is typically about 80GB on its own. That's nearly 110GB almost immediately gone out of 189GB that I'm allowed to store on. With those odds, I pretty much overwrote my wallet before I even realized what I had done. So to blame anything is silly, I blame myself for my stupid action. People do stupid things but what makes me feel even worse is that I own an IT company  Luckily my identity is safe or I'd lose business if people find out I did this to myself.

All in all, I'm no longer angry at the situation because I know for a fact that it is all gone and no way to get it back. I'm just moving on but I learnt a very important lesson which will prevent this from happening ever again.