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

[Cascaders28]

New guy here -

I just wanted to drop in and say hello and thanks. I'm a pretty technical person but this client is easily the most straightforward one I've found. I'm a small fish and between some old video cards and a few ASIC USB miners I expect to be between 1500 and 2000 MH/s but I'm having fun and appreciate how easy BitMinter makes it. Thanks!

[xTachibana]

ive tried out a few pools in the past week or two, but why is it with 12 hours of mining i only get .0001 from bitminter, when i usually get around .001 from places like slush and btcguild

edit: was it just bad luck with the pools yesterday?

[DrHaribo]

I've been using bitminter for a few months now and have been very happy with the service.

I just wanted to drop in and say hello and thanks. I'm a pretty technical person but this client is easily the most straightforward one I've found. I'm a small fish and between some old video cards and a few ASIC USB miners I expect to be between 1500 and 2000 MH/s but I'm having fun and appreciate how easy BitMinter makes it. Thanks!

Thanks, glad you like it, guys

ive tried out a few pools in the past week or two, but why is it with 12 hours of mining i only get .0001 from bitminter, when i usually get around .001 from places like slush and btcguild

edit: was it just bad luck with the pools yesterday?

Daily income will vary with luck, that's called variance.

In addition to that there is a delay from the time you do some work until that work is fully paid. The work you do is registered in a shift, and then that work is credited with income from new blocks we find until its shift is no longer among the 10 latest shifts. This takes about 15 hours currently. If you turn off the prepay perk then there is an additional delay having to wait for blocks to confirm, which takes about 20 hours.

So, assuming you have prepay on, if you do 24 hours of work and then look at the results, then only 9 of those hours of work have been fully paid. The remaining 15 hours of work are still receiving pay, even if you stop mining, because of how the shifts work.

If you do 12 hours of work and then look at the results, then even the first hour or work is not fully paid yet! Needless to say that is not going to look very profitable.

Also, comparing pools by how much you get paid for 12 hours of mining is pointless. The comparison becomes "which pool has the best luck today?" You can't use that data for anything. The luck a pool has today has no influence on its luck tomorrow.

More interesting: What is the fee? Is income from transaction fees paid out? Do you get namecoins? Is the reward system safe from pool hopping?

[pening]

Was there/is there something troublesome with Bitminter?  I found it very easy to use, got in to it and happy for weeks.  Then i found it was offline in patches (DOS?), and then i noticed some really bad luck on the variance.  I noticed it dropped off the Bitcoin Charts hashrate distribution diagram.  about this time i was getting really poor hash report on the web tool, like 25%-50% best of what client was reporting. 

So i switched to another pool and i don't think its dropped offline in three weeks.  Which is a shame as i really liked the tool set provided.

[DrHaribo]

Was there/is there something troublesome with Bitminter?  I found it very easy to use, got in to it and happy for weeks.  Then i found it was offline in patches (DOS?), and then i noticed some really bad luck on the variance.  I noticed it dropped off the Bitcoin Charts hashrate distribution diagram.  about this time i was getting really poor hash report on the web tool, like 25%-50% best of what client was reporting. 

Yes, we had many DDoS attacks that caused downtime and instability. I think it's 2 weeks now since the last attack that was able to do anything, though.

Bad luck will happen once in a while, just like good luck.

The website hashrates are only estimates. The website tries to guess your hashrate based on how many proofs of work you send in. Sometimes you find many and it thinks your hashrate is higher than it is, and the other way around when you are unlucky and find few proofs of work. Your actual hashrate is what you see in your miner client.

[xTachibana]

ive tried out a few pools in the past week or two, but why is it with 12 hours of mining i only get .0001 from bitminter, when i usually get around .001 from places like slush and btcguild

edit: was it just bad luck with the pools yesterday?

Daily income will vary with luck, that's called variance.

In addition to that there is a delay from the time you do some work until that work is fully paid. The work you do is registered in a shift, and then that work is credited with income from new blocks we find until its shift is no longer among the 10 latest shifts. This takes about 15 hours currently. If you turn off the prepay perk then there is an additional delay having to wait for blocks to confirm, which takes about 20 hours.

So, assuming you have prepay on, if you do 24 hours of work and then look at the results, then only 9 of those hours of work have been fully paid. The remaining 15 hours of work are still receiving pay, even if you stop mining, because of how the shifts work.

If you do 12 hours of work and then look at the results, then even the first hour or work is not fully paid yet! Needless to say that is not going to look very profitable.

Also, comparing pools by how much you get paid for 12 hours of mining is pointless. The comparison becomes "which pool has the best luck today?" You can't use that data for anything. The luck a pool has today has no influence on its luck tomorrow.

More interesting: What is the fee? Is income from transaction fees paid out? Do you get namecoins? Is the reward system safe from pool hopping?

[/quote]

ill just assume its luck and variance and do a few more days to a week of mining here

and yes, you were right about the waiting thing, even with the prepay on, it went from getting .0001 to .0005 ( in addition to the .004 namecoins i got, not that namecoins are worth much :B, something like 2.5 nmc per usd)

[Cascaders28]

...
Bad luck will happen once in a while, just like good luck.
...

I'm just hoping to clarify - is this current block that has been taking all day an example of bad luck?

[DrHaribo]

...
Bad luck will happen once in a while, just like good luck.
...

I'm just hoping to clarify - is this current block that has been taking all day an example of bad luck?

Yes.

If you look at the block list at http://bitminter.com/blocks you can see that it varies a lot how much work it takes to find a block. Right now at the first page of the block list there is one block that took 95 million proofs of work and one that took 222 thousand, and both at the same difficulty. We spent 15 and a half hours on one and only 2 minutes on the other.

Bitcoin mining is similar to a lottery. Sometimes you go through a lot of lottery tickets before you find a winning one.

[pazsion]

please let us remove this "energy wasting slow cpu implementation in use" as it is not needed. and slows down the hashrate.

Or does "performance" mode remove this silly feature?

[DrHaribo]

please let us remove this "energy wasting slow cpu implementation in use" as it is not needed. and slows down the hashrate.

Or does "performance" mode remove this silly feature?

CPU mining will be removed in a future release. Just don't click on the start button for the CPU and it won't start. If you click the button to start all devices it will start all devices except the CPU (unless you had the CPU running earlier).

[mnyonpa]

I am not sure if this (bug?) have been already treated but some time ago if you had “Start all devices” setting at startup, that would also start the CPU…

But the client is great, thanks everyone involved for such a good work!

[Nupsie]

I have a problem with Bitminter. When I mine with two Asic block erupters after about 30 second it says:
ICARUS (COM3) ERROR: ICARUS (COM3) ran out of work. Idling...

Can some one help ?

[DrHaribo]

I am not sure if this (bug?) have been already treated but some time ago if you had “Start all devices” setting at startup, that would also start the CPU…

But the client is great, thanks everyone involved for such a good work!

Ah. That's probably an oversight. Anyway, it won't be an issue once cpu mining is disabled.

I have a problem with Bitminter. When I mine with two Asic block erupters after about 30 second it says:
ICARUS (COM3) ERROR: ICARUS (COM3) ran out of work. Idling...

Can some one help ?

Does it recover and continue mining after that or get stuck? Are there any other errors shown in the log, like network errors?

[HenriH]

- Can I use BitMinter without registering an account (only using bitcoin address as a username)? If not, will this feature be implemented in the future?
- Can I make a webpage with a link/button "Start mining bitcoins for (bitcoin address)" and after clicking that link/button the BitMinter will start without asking further questions or needing to change any settings?

[DrHaribo]

- Can I use BitMinter without registering an account (only using bitcoin address as a username)? If not, will this feature be implemented in the future?

No, and it probably won't be implemented either. Just use some random words/characters as user name if you want to be anonymous.

- Can I make a webpage with a link/button "Start mining bitcoins for (bitcoin address)" and after clicking that link/button the BitMinter will start without asking further questions or needing to change any settings?

This is planned, but not ready yet.

[HenriH]

- Can I use BitMinter without registering an account (only using bitcoin address as a username)? If not, will this feature be implemented in the future?

No, and it probably won't be implemented either. Just use some random words/characters as user name if you want to be anonymous.

I have several bitcoin addresses and I would like to have different workers for them:
- worker_1: bitcoin_address_1
- worker_2: bitcoin_address_2
- worker_3: bitcoin_address_3
and so on.

Is this possible to implement without creating several user accounts?

- Can I make a webpage with a link/button "Start mining bitcoins for (bitcoin address)" and after clicking that link/button the BitMinter will start without asking further questions or needing to change any settings?

This is planned, but not ready yet.

Good to know. Thanks!

[DrHaribo]

I have several bitcoin addresses and I would like to have different workers for them:
- worker_1: bitcoin_address_1
- worker_2: bitcoin_address_2
- worker_3: bitcoin_address_3
and so on.

Is this possible to implement without creating several user accounts?

This is not possible currently. I am thinking about some ideas along those lines though, for the future.

[HenriH]

I have several bitcoin addresses and I would like to have different workers for them:
- worker_1: bitcoin_address_1
- worker_2: bitcoin_address_2
- worker_3: bitcoin_address_3
and so on.

Is this possible to implement without creating several user accounts?

This is not possible currently. I am thinking about some ideas along those lines though, for the future.

Thanks for the info.

Is it possible to attach several computers to one worker at once or should I use a different worker for different computers?

[DrHaribo]

Is it possible to attach several computers to one worker at once or should I use a different worker for different computers?

That's up to you. You can use multiple workers if you want separate statistics for them. If you don't need that, just use the same worker.

[SgtSpike]

Does anyone know of a good iPhone app for tracking mining stats at BitMinter?