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

[slush]

The duration seems to be measuring time from 2 blocks back rather than 1. I wonder if slush had to split something into multiple threads and that is what is causing the problem.

You are right, there was one problem with concurency. This does not affect anything than stats, it is fixed now (next blocks should have correct durations). Also notice that block id #1062 will be skipped because of the fix.

[demonofelru]

The duration seems to be measuring time from 2 blocks back rather than 1. I wonder if slush had to split something into multiple threads and that is what is causing the problem.

You are right, there was one problem with concurency. This does not affect anything than stats, it is fixed now (next blocks should have correct durations). Also notice that block id #1062 will be skipped because of the fix.

Do you know why my balance went down by 2 coins then 5 minutes later went back up?  Also am I correct in assuming that the reason it goes down every now and then for like 30 seconds is due to large traffic?

[slush]

Hello,

I just come back from holiday, back from lagging wifi somewhere in Cafe to my working station. I know that my recent step with forced donations was quite controversial and didn't helped to PR of my pool :-). Firstly, many thanks to all of you who understood my situation and supported me here when I was away.

I just want to explain whole story and the reason why I setup fees (I know it isn't "donation" any more, I just re-used existing infrastructure for hot fix).

When I started the pool, there were only few pool members, mainly well known from the Bitcoin community. They sent me some donations for the beginning, later I set up voluntary donations and everything worked well. As pool hashrate went up, many users joined the effort, but they didn't feel they are part of pool community; they just used service which was paid by few first members. Pool was still financial self-sufficient, but I become little unsure if my business model will be still working with many and many newcomers. This is great example of disaster of the common; First users known that donations are needed to run the server and pay me for service support (yes, I'm not Mother Teresa and like to earning bitcoins). But new users just saw that there is cool free service and those already connected players surely pay enough to run the service also for them. So day by day, my earnings from pool dropped, but server resources and also my _time_ for running the service went up significantly, to many hours daily. I'm big Bitcoin fan, but running service for 5 dollars (on current prices) for covering server costs and few hours per day of my time for support and development, become on the edge of worthless.

The big break happen few days ago, when Bitcoin was mentioned in some Internet media. The "disaster of the common" effect become much more significant. The hashrate and server resources (and emails from users!) doubled in ONE DAY and the traffic still increased, but the daily donations dropped. Nobody (except two, three users?) from hundreds from new users set up even 2% donations! I tried to find the source of newcomers, find what was behind the huge step in traffic and found, for example, few Russian warez forums, where Bitcoin and the pool was mentioned as "easy money". This is definitely not what I like, but it fully corresponds with donation numbers which I see in on pool. I definitely don't think it is fair that few Bitcoin fans should support tens or hundreds of users which simply misuse the free service.

So because I was only on poor connection and had only few possibilities, I decided to set up those "minimal donations", fees, to cut down income of those 'unfair' users, to get some extra cash for scalability improvements and more server resources (I will set up second pool server this week, for example). Well, I cannot call the users with 0% donations as 'unfair', because I offer them the possibility of free pool, but the equilibrium of free/paid users changed dramatically in last days. Those problems pushed me to think about business model. Unfortunately, I see that donation model does not work well.

I considered solutions as running pool only for closed group of trusted users, basically the same mode as pool started in December. But I still want to bring the service for the wide consortium of users, because that was my big idea when I started my work on the service. I'm really enjoying people that wrote me they are happy with cents per day using their CPUs and see that they are supporting me with 6%. I definitely don't want to cut them from the pool, just because some of them are not such honest and don't want to pay even 0.001 from their 0.025 daily reward.

So I decided to keep fees on the pool up, just lower them from current 2% to 1%. I'm sure that cut of 1% (0.5 BTC from every 50BTC block) is far under anything which can be really recognized on user's daily reward. This is enough to run pool for all users without judging their motivation and without asking. I also remove 'voluntary donations' option, which effectively make pool cheaper for users which voluntarily supported service until now. I would like to say big THANK YOU for all of you which set up donations in times when it was really voluntary and I hope that users like the service enough to don't care about the minimal fees.

I will make this change in this week. But before this, I'll finish mass mailing of users to communicate this change better, few days in advance, than last change in fees. Once again, I'm sorry for the way how I did the communication few days before.

[slush]

Do you know why my balance went down by 2 coins then 5 minutes later went back up?  Also am I correct in assuming that the reason it goes down every now and then for like 30 seconds is due to large traffic?

What's your nickname, please? Send me PM. This looks weird, I'll trace it in logs.

No, the traffic is OK. Before few minutes I had issue with free disk space, it was solved in one or two minutes. The right reason behind 'server error 500' few times per day is that application is forcing locks on database when block is found, to calculate rewards and clean up everything for new round. Then the timeouts of few requests in thread queues expires and the server return this weird message. The problem became more often as number of workers is rising (currently around 500 workers in every round). I know how to fix this, but in fact it is not real problem, just few requests experienced this everytime block is found. I just want to finally finish my anti cheating project and open server stats again. Then I'll work on this.

[gusti]

Slush, I would like you get enough resources to run the pool as a business.
If you ask me, feel free to set up the fees accordingly, be that 1%, 5% or whatever.
Also pls consider having colo server and technical support backups.

[AmnesicWeasel]

So I decided to keep fees on the pool up, just lower them from current 2% to 1%.

What is that at current rates, 500-600/month at the most? I fear that when the difficulty shoots up shortly, you'll once again not even be able to cover your hosting costs.

Are you expecting the improved communication efficiency work to compensate enough for the difficulty jump?

Regardless, thanks for your work!

[AmnesicWeasel]

Also pls consider having colo server and technical support backups.

I don't know slush's exact arrangements, but I can see from the IP address that he's hosted in Linode's London facility, so I wouldn't be worried on that front, Linode's infrastructure is good. I think this has been almost entirely a matter of raw resources.

[slush]

Also pls consider having colo server and technical support backups.

Thanks gusti for your support. Yes, I'm thinking about technical support, to have somebody who can repair service from trouble when I'll be offline. Now, there is already one guy with access to the server, for the situation I will be in troubles for longer time. In the meantime, I'm monitoring service pretty often, to be honest, it's only few times per week when I'm not online .

Colo server is quite difficult question. In fact, they are really needed only with current "getwork" stuff, which is bad for big pools at all. It is very network ineffective and roundtrips might play some role here. Once "pushwork" will be done (and I believe that it will be really soon), the colocations don't be necessary, as there will be only one request per minute for worker and the latency will be only the half of roundtrip. So I don't want to spend much time on building colocations, because there are some issues to solve. Building scalable pool in one location is another task and I did the pool with scalability in mind, so adding more servers to pool will be very easy when it become be necesary.

[demonofelru]

Do you know why my balance went down by 2 coins then 5 minutes later went back up?  Also am I correct in assuming that the reason it goes down every now and then for like 30 seconds is due to large traffic?

What's your nickname, please? Send me PM. This looks weird, I'll trace it in logs.

No, the traffic is OK. Before few minutes I had issue with free disk space, it was solved in one or two minutes. The right reason behind 'server error 500' few times per day is that application is forcing locks on database when block is found, to calculate rewards and clean up everything for new round. Then the timeouts of few requests in thread queues expires and the server return this weird message. The problem became more often as number of workers is rising (currently around 500 workers in every round). I know how to fix this, but in fact it is not real problem, just few requests experienced this everytime block is found. I just want to finally finish my anti cheating project and open server stats again. Then I'll work on this.

Hello sent you a PM sorry if I sent twice the first time it didn't show up in my outbox but maybe I just forgot to click the box saying to save a copy.

[dadittox]

I believe that having a bigger pool makes block computation faster and therefore increases everybody's chances in the pool to receive a reward. So having a free accounts may be beneficial to the service.

Yet now there are no public competiting pools, so 1% fee is not a problem. Personally I think that 1%-2% fee is very much acceptable, except the probable PR impact it may rise. So it may make sense to add some marketing actions like free trial for a few days or a completely free accounts for the people that can greatly increase the pool computation power.

And what about the server to handle pool requests, I would recommend looking for a 100mbit unmetered dedicated quad xeon at netdirekt.de for 169,80 Euro /month (VAT included). I have a server there that generates more than 10TB of traffic per month. This should be sufficient for quite a while.

[slush]

I believe that having a bigger pool makes block computation faster and therefore increases everybody's chances in the pool to receive a reward. So having a free accounts may be beneficial to the service.

Hm, not really. Increasing hashrate does not bring much advantage for common users, except those with big % of current hashing power. Once the pool find few blocks per day, the payout are quite steady. Increasing hashrate leads to many blocks, but less block reward for every user.

And what about the server to handle pool requests, I would recommend looking for a 100mbit unmetered dedicated quad xeon at netdirekt.de for 169,80 Euro /month (VAT included). I have a server there that generates more than 10TB of traffic per month. This should be sufficient for quite a while.

I don't think that adding more and more bandwidth is solution, really. Current protocol cost not only server bandwidth, but also client's bandwidth, roundtrips and so on. It's the reason why I don't want to migrate to another server, because traffic is _still_ doable even on Linode and for final solution the Linode VPS is perfect service.

[slush]

What is that at current rates, 500-600/month at the most? I fear that when the difficulty shoots up shortly, you'll once again not even be able to cover your hosting costs.

I think you are quite right, but there are many unknowns inside, so I really don't know how much I can expect. This also depends on market price, 1% in December with slower pool hashrate was really under expenses, now with parity it looks better. If market prices, higher difficulty or whatever really need to set higher fees to make pool running, I'll probably do it, because I prefer higher fees for few satistfied users before closing the pool.

[dadittox]

I believe that having a bigger pool makes block computation faster and therefore increases everybody's chances in the pool to receive a reward. So having a free accounts may be beneficial to the service.

Hm, not really. Increasing hashrate does not bring much advantage for common users, except those with big % of current hashing power. Once the pool find few blocks per day, the payout are quite steady. Increasing hashrate leads to many blocks, but less block reward for every user.

Please correct me if I am wrong, I am new to bitcoin. As far as I understood the principle is that creating of a new block depends on a hash of a previous block. So if someone generates a new block faster than the pool a whole calculation becomes stale and the pool will have to start creating a new block based on a new hash. So generating blocks faster increases the chance of a successful block generation. Am I missing something in this assumption?

[Dude65535]

Since even a solo cpu miner can perform millions of hash calculations per second losing a single calculation is insignificant.

[gusti]

So I decided to keep fees on the pool up, just lower them from current 2% to 1%.

What is that at current rates, 500-600/month at the most? I fear that when the difficulty shoots up shortly, you'll once again not even be able to cover your hosting costs.

Are you expecting the improved communication efficiency work to compensate enough for the difficulty jump?

Regardless, thanks for your work!

I expect BTC value will increase also with difficulty increases.

[nka1024]

what's the meaning of error message "verification failed, check hardware!"?
i get it generating on my amd gpu using  m0mchil's windows miner

[WarWolf]

Using mining screensavers with good results 

[FairUser]

It seems like you took the option to change passwords away too. 
How do I delete my account, or change my password?
Why not show the Hall of Fame anymore?  How can that screw anyone?
Seriously, what's your deal dude? 
Why are you taking away all the features/information people want? 
Every week something else is going away...
Next week we won't even have graphs or a stats page at this rate.

[t3h]

2 of my computers have found a block according to my stats page. Total payout so far has been 33 bitcoins plus another 5 unconfirmed.

If I was mining for myself I'd have 100BTC right now.

Am I just unlucky, or is something screwy going on here?

[BitterTea]

Am I just unlucky, or is something screwy going on here?

You're almost certainly a victim of chance.

It seems like you took the option to change passwords away too. 
How do I delete my account, or change my password?
Why not show the Hall of Fame anymore?  How can that screw anyone?
Seriously, what's your deal dude? 
Why are you taking away all the features/information people want? 
Every week something else is going away...
Next week we won't even have graphs or a stats page at this rate.

If you don't like it, take your processing power somewhere else. Slush isn't a state, if he doesn't meet his customers needs, they will leave or he will make adjustments.