BitMinter.com * Optional Custom Miner, PPLNS, Merged mining, Newbie-Friendly! *

[Alexstrazsa]

Bitminter is the second client I tried using, and since then I've never looked back. It's a great application that looks nice and is very accessible.

Would you be able to use the information from this thread to improve Bitminter with nVidia GPUs at all? I'm not a programmer by any means, so I have no idea what the feasibility of this suggestion is. Figured I'd throw it out there, though!

[survient]

I've been trying about 7 different mining clients and all of them have heavy fluxations on the MHash rate, is there a way I can stabilize this?

[DrHaribo]

Great job, BitMinter is awesome, so easy to use!  Can we have one to mine for LTC?

Thank you LTC will be considered soon, right now things are a bit hectic.

I need help understanding the payout transaction fees. Are they a fixed percentage of earnings paid out regardless of how often or is it a fixed amount per transaction? Is there any fee at all charged to the recipients or is the fee paid by the pool? I know there are several recipients of each payout but how does that work transaction fee wise?

Currently there is only auto cash out which is free. That means the pool pays the fees. But you should be aware that a threshold of 0.001 will leave you with a "wallet full of pennies" and force you to pay fees to send those pennies later. A threshold of 0.01 or higher is recommended. I may change the minimum to 0.01 in the future.

Hi DrHaribo.
Could you elaborate a bit more on the last point "New users will have a 1.5% default donation (rather than 2%)".

From saturday and onwards there will be a 1% mining fee for everyone. You can donate on top of that to activate perks. The prepay perk will require 1.5% donation. New users will have a default donation of 1.5% (total 2.5% with the fee) and prepay perk enabled. It's just a default setting - anyone can use the same setup with an older account. If you want you can reduce donations to 0% and only pay the 1% fee.

I've been mining with PPS pools for a few months but due to recent downtimes, and more personal dedication to mining, I figured I'd try a PPLNS pool. 

With PPS pools I've always been able to see a steady "24 earnings" metric.   With Bitminter, in my first 24 hours, I'm looking at less than half of the normal bitcoin payout I'd see.  The worker estimates are all over the map whenever I look at the page, varying as much as 50% down from the near-constant value cgminer is reporting, which is stressing me out.   I can't tell if the estimates on the worker page are bad or if it's actually something wrong with work submission.   cgminer has reported a constant rate the whole time, with <0.1% rejects and no HW errors.

What's a reasonable timeframe in a PPLNS scheme to compare to PPS earnings?  I'm a little nervous to continue here if my stats keep trending like this.

A proof of work ("share") takes a while to be fully paid because it is eligible for payouts from blocks as long as it is still in a shift that is one of the last 10 completed shifts. Your payouts will start small in the beginning as you don't have much work in the 10 last shifts. And if you stop mining you'll still get paid for several hours because you still have work in the 10 last shifts.

Coming from PPS you will probably find the graphs at this URL interesting: http://bitminter.com/stats/rewards

The top graph shows how much each proof of work (share) was paid in the last 500 shifts. As you can see the randomness of bitcoin mining makes it vary a lot. The bottom graph shows how the total cumulative pay for the last 500 shifts compares to expected average for Bitcoin mining.

Bitminter is the second client I tried using, and since then I've never looked back. It's a great application that looks nice and is very accessible.

Would you be able to use the information from this thread to improve Bitminter with nVidia GPUs at all? I'm not a programmer by any means, so I have no idea what the feasibility of this suggestion is. Figured I'd throw it out there, though!

Glad to hear you like it I could implement CUDA mining, yes, but currently it's not near the top of the TODO list. We'll see what there is time for, it's all a question of prioritizing with limited time.

I've been trying about 7 different mining clients and all of them have heavy fluxations on the MHash rate, is there a way I can stabilize this?

Not sure why that is. Which GPU model is this, and are you running other things at the same time that use the GPU, like Youtube videos?

[Serjster]

I did not see any increase in performance vs. GuiMiner. I will stick with that since it doesn't lock me into a specific pool.

[Drizzle]

I am running an ATI 6670 and an ATI 4850.  Both are running with a monitor attached to each.  However, unless one of the cards is disabled in device manager in the control panel, none of the bitcoin miners will open.  They just crash.  Again, it instantly works when one card is disabled.

What driver are you using? AMD has moved about a year ago (Catalyst 12.5) to separate drivers for the newer cards and 2x00-4x00 cards. I'm not sure that both cards can be expected to work well with a single driver newer than that.

[Drizzle]

Hi, I'm new here. I appreciate BitMinter having a thread in the newbie section. I recently started mining (again, after a short stint half a year ago in a pool that took my half bitcoin) at Slush's, and when he got a DDoS attack I looked for a backup pool and joined BitMinter.

So far seems cool. It generates for some reason a lot more namecoins than Slush's, which makes it more appealing (not that namecoins are worth much, but still...). I still like Slush's, but might do some more on BitMinter especially if I move to two card mining.

By the way, is 140MH/s on a Radeon 5750 considered good? I'm running at the default clocks.

[survient]

I've been trying about 7 different mining clients and all of them have heavy fluxations on the MHash rate, is there a way I can stabilize this?

Not sure why that is. Which GPU model is this, and are you running other things at the same time that use the GPU, like Youtube videos?

It's an XFX double d radeon HD 7970. After a bit more research and some trial and error I discovered the wonderful world of firmware based gpu throttling. As soon as the temp even hit 80 degrees it slashed the clock speed in half before even touching the fan speed to try and reduce the temp. I poked around with a few tools and am currently using Trixx's fan control on a curve to have it "properly" increase the fan speed as the temp increases and it's steady at the border of 76 and 77 degrees and hasn't been dropping. I need to do a few more tweaks on the clock setting(it's currently overclocked) as it will occasionally lock up when I'm trying to do mining and another task at the same time. Running just mining it's fine at the current clock settings, but this is my main machine so I'll have to sacrifice some speed for stability. Running at factory speeds I can mine and do other minor gpu tasks and have no issues so I should be able to find a sweet spot after some tuning.

I have a couple other linux boxes running various models of ati gpus at maxx'd settings that haven't been having issues so this one's no biggie. Thanks for the pointers though.

[premo]

hi i jus done a lil dummy test where i connected to ur bitminter it seems to log on an connect it is mining atm on my cpu as i got a a lame graphics card ( please over look my ignorance i only got into bitcoins a week ago or more)  when it says no open cl compatible does it mean the graphics card in my laptop needs to be different or that i need to upgrade sum software regarding? i'm only doing this to get a feel for it (usin cpu or gpu if possible atm) i knw asic is the future of minning bt we all know thers so very limited availability of asics. however in the future will your bitminter pool work with asics from butterfly( if they ever come) or even other asics. thanks to all in advance for ur help.

Which graphics card do you have?

The pool server already works great with ASICs. There are users in the pool mining on ASICs already. I am working on adding support for BFL SCs in BitMinter client. I aim to have this finished and stable before BFL customers receive their ASICs.

my laptops got a AMD ATI mobility radeon hd 5470 lol i know ryt super rubbish. also any chance ur pool will mine litecoins in future

[PCMiner]

hi i jus done a lil dummy test where i connected to ur bitminter it seems to log on an connect it is mining atm on my cpu as i got a a lame graphics card ( please over look my ignorance i only got into bitcoins a week ago or more)  when it says no open cl compatible does it mean the graphics card in my laptop needs to be different or that i need to upgrade sum software regarding? i'm only doing this to get a feel for it (usin cpu or gpu if possible atm) i knw asic is the future of minning bt we all know thers so very limited availability of asics. however in the future will your bitminter pool work with asics from butterfly( if they ever come) or even other asics. thanks to all in advance for ur help.

Which graphics card do you have?

The pool server already works great with ASICs. There are users in the pool mining on ASICs already. I am working on adding support for BFL SCs in BitMinter client. I aim to have this finished and stable before BFL customers receive their ASICs.

my laptops got a AMD ATI mobility radeon hd 5470 lol i know ryt super rubbish. also any chance ur pool will mine litecoins in future

He's stated several times in this thread that he is considering LTC support, but his "to do" list for improving the BitMinter client is long and LTC support is not very high on said list.  It'll probably happen someday though, just no time table as to when.

[premo]

sweet thanks for reply

[Tia]

I can't seem to get my cgminer to connect with to my bitminter pool account. In Cgminer I have tried the following for the URL field: stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333 no luck, http://mint.bitminter.com:8332 no luck, and just mint.bitminter.com:8332
I am sure I am typing my Username (or workername) correctly and its password. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

[DrHaribo]

I can't seem to get my cgminer to connect with to my bitminter pool account. In Cgminer I have tried the following for the URL field: stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333 no luck, http://mint.bitminter.com:8332 no luck, and just mint.bitminter.com:8332
I am sure I am typing my Username (or workername) correctly and its password. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

URL is correct. Probably wrong credentials. User name, worker name and password are all case sensitive. If you used capital letters at the website then you must do so in the client as well. If it still won't work, email me at operator@bitminter.com with your user name and I will look into it.

[Aurum]

I have a Bitcoin wallet and a Litecoin wallet but I cannot find a Namecoin wallet. When I read the descriptions I googled I cannot figure out what to do with them. Where do I store them?

[SgtMoth]

i just left mine in my bitminter account.  i had over 700 that i sold the other day, or send them to an exchange account.

[Menissalt]

20 blocks in one day, very nice...

[Aurum]

Java did an upgrade (Version 7 Update 21) and now Bitminter Client will not launch.

[ISAWHIM]

Java did an upgrade and now Bitminter Client will not launch.

Go to javaconsole in your control-panel, and "delete" the temp files.

You can also delete the downloaded files, which may be in temp-net folder, or some other location for java. (Gotta research that for your system.)

Just delete them, go to the bitminter website and click the LAUNCH again, and it will redownload the latest version again.

If you are saying, "Java just did an update"... Then you may have "just installed a virus/trojan"... because Java DIDN'T "just do an update". (It has been nearly half a month since the latest java update, which was a minor security update, not a major code-breaking update.)

[DrHaribo]

Common reasons for BitMinter client failing to launch:

[1] No Java http://java.com
[2] Java cache bad, clear: http://www.java.com/en/download/help/plugin_cache.xml
[3] Antivirus/firewall prevents download, esp. AVG: whitelist javaws.exe + javaw.exe, turn off file transfer inspection
[4] "null" message: use default Windows desktop theme
[5] Browser doesn't know JNLP, commandline: javaws http://bitminter.com/client/bitminter.jnlp
[6] Wrong proxy settings: http://www.java.com/en/download/help/proxy_setup.xml (use direct connection if you don't need proxy)
[7] hs_err_pid file on desktop: graphics drivers crashed, get new drivers
[8] Mac OS X: sometimes OpenCL breaks, reboot to fix
[9] Java cache disabled, fix: http://247support.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10166/~/enable-java-to-cache-files

ISAWHIM is probably right. Especially if you upgraded from Java 6 to Java 7 the cache breaks - point [2] above.

[Aurum]

Java said to uninstall obsolete version 6. I only have 7.021 and now it cannot recognize .jnlp:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/javaws/

[DrHaribo]

Java said to uninstall obsolete version 6. I only have 7.021 and now it cannot recognize .jnlp:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/javaws/

[5] Browser doesn't know JNLP, commandline: javaws http://bitminter.com/client/bitminter.jnlp

Are you able to start it that way?

On Windows you can paste the command into the input field in the start menu.