[OLD] Eligius: ASIC, no registration, no fee CPPSRB BTC + 105% PPS NMC, 877 #

[Luke-Jr]

I think wizkid057 should reduce the default minimum payout to 40 TBC (0.04194304 BTC) instead of the current 100 TBC.
When I ran Eligius, I was targeting about $20, so this fits with that original goal, at the current price.
Yay/nay?

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[wizkid057]

I think wizkid057 should reduce the default minimum payout to 40 TBC (0.04194304 BTC) instead of the current 100 TBC.
When I ran Eligius, I was targeting about $20, so this fits with that original goal, at the current price.
Yay/nay?

Probably a good idea.

[un_ordinateur]

First of all, I must say I really like this pool. I've been mining with you for a few months, and I have had absolutely no problem. A+.
(I felt I needed to say that because of the lot of rants I'm reading on these forum pages)

About the minimum payout: Something I would really like would be able to make auto-payout at a given frequency instead of a given amount. I've chosen my auto-payout amount such as I get payout every two weeks, but I keep adjusting the amount because of the constant increase of difficulty. So I'd be really happy if I could indicate I wish to be paid every two weeks, whatever my balance is at that point.

In any case, if you're to lower the default auto-payout amount from 100 TBC to 40 TBC, then by the same logic, maybe you should reduce the minimum payout amount from 10 TBC to 4 TBC?

One again, thank you for all the hard work!

Thank you!

[Luke-Jr]

About the minimum payout: Something I would really like would be able to make auto-payout at a given frequency instead of a given amount. I've chosen my auto-payout amount such as I get payout every two weeks, but I keep adjusting the amount because of the constant increase of difficulty. So I'd be really happy if I could indicate I wish to be paid every two weeks, whatever my balance is at that point.

I don't think basing your minimum payout on difficulty is a good idea.
You want to have the same size coins coming in, as going out.
So if you spent $1 amounts all the time, it makes sense to have payouts around $1 worth of bitcoins.
On the other hand, if you buy more products at $500 value, you'd want a minimum payout close to that.
$20 value seems like a reasonable expected-spending price, hence the default.

Side note: Contrary to popular myth, difficulty increases do not influence price. Price does influence difficulty to a degree, but difficulty is so far behind price right now that it's not a good feedback loop.

[spooderman]

errr Ghash.io getting a bit big?

[wizkid057]

First, I'll just second Luke-Jr's reply above.

In any case, if you're to lower the default auto-payout amount from 100 TBC to 40 TBC, then by the same logic, maybe you should reduce the minimum payout amount from 10 TBC to 4 TBC?

About this, the 10 TBC minimum is for coinbase payouts.  Because some miners do not function properly with large coinbase transactions (with hundreds of outputs) it was decided to put an absolute minimum on coinbase payouts of 10 TBC.  Due to another unrelated issue with a particularly annoying botnet, an absolute will-never-pay-out-ever minimum was set at 2 TBC.  Those that fall between 2 and 10 TBC just wont get generated payouts and I instead pay them manually periodically.  The 10 TBC lower bound for the custom minimum is so that people can still automatically enter the payout queue with their custom minimums.

Technically balances that timeout that are under 2 TBC get donated to the pool, as per rules setup a while back..... however, like the % donations in the control panel, I haven't actually coded that yet due to finite coding time being better spent on other improvements.

-wk

[RchGrav]

I have been mining exclusively on Eligius for a long time now, and recently helped my friend get his asic miner up and running.  He has had a few payouts so far, and his most recent entry into the payout queue was about 6 hours ago.  He was asking about the last 2 blocks which were cracked and subsequently transferred to the eligius offline wallet (18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B).   I pointed out to him that this is explained in the FAQ section of the website, to which he responded that it says that happens when the queue is empty surplus gets sent to the offline wallet for manual payout when the pool cannot keep up with generating blocks.  I was at a loss to explain this to him why this took place on the last 2 blocks.  Can anyone help me with some insight here?

http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/blockinfo.php/0000000000000003717cb89e66259447fc57ec114c3d4e219020c978f7b28fd9
http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/blockinfo.php/000000000000000452884b897e93eac8ee0ae8fc232ef71f70d51b3f75c96cb2

https://blockchain.info/address/18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B

[cverity]

Hi wizkid,

I am new to this pool and like the reward system. If I'm understanding correctly, it attempts to pay 100% PPS as luck allows, and when luck doesn't allow, it caches up shares so that they might be paid someday.  I've been mining for a week or so and love the stats etc.

What I don't understand is how you get paid / cover your costs.  Unless the pool was lucky for a long period, there doesn't seem to be anything in it for you.  Even if the pool was lucky for a long period, how would you know that you could take profit vs storing it for the inevitable bad luck in the future.

Finally, is there anyway of me seeing how many shares I have in the backlog?  Right now I am comparing the "maximum reward" to the "unpaid+everpaid+est" shown in the Balance Graph, but I wanted to see if that's the best way.

Thanks!

[wizkid057]

I have been mining exclusively on Eligius for a long time now, and recently helped my friend get his asic miner up and running.  He has had a few payouts so far, and his most recent entry into the payout queue was about 6 hours ago.  He was asking about the last 2 blocks which were cracked and subsequently transferred to the eligius offline wallet (18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B).   I pointed out to him that this is explained in the FAQ section of the website, to which he responded that it says that happens when the queue is empty surplus gets sent to the offline wallet for manual payout when the pool cannot keep up with generating blocks.  I was at a loss to explain this to him why this took place on the last 2 blocks.  Can anyone help me with some insight here?

http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/blockinfo.php/0000000000000003717cb89e66259447fc57ec114c3d4e219020c978f7b28fd9
http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/blockinfo.php/000000000000000452884b897e93eac8ee0ae8fc232ef71f70d51b3f75c96cb2

https://blockchain.info/address/18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B

There are reasons why this happens normally, generally when a block is found quickly after a new network block is known.

However......

*facepalm* ... This time it was my fault.  I have to disable automatic payouts for a few minutes in order to do a manual payout (to make sure that the automated payout system doesn't double up on payouts in case we find a block while I'm getting it together).... and I did a manual payout last night and somehow didn't re-enable auto-payouts (coinbaser) on all servers.

I had a thousand things going on yesterday so I must have just missed it. As you can see from the stats, the payout queue just grows with these blocks that pay the cold wallet and wait for me to distribute them.

Sorry about that folks, I'll do another manual to catch up as soon as I get home from work today. (~10 hours)



--------------

Hi wizkid,

I am new to this pool and like the reward system. If I'm understanding correctly, it attempts to pay 100% PPS as luck allows, and when luck doesn't allow, it caches up shares so that they might be paid someday.  I've been mining for a week or so and love the stats etc.

What I don't understand is how you get paid / cover your costs.  Unless the pool was lucky for a long period, there doesn't seem to be anything in it for you.  Even if the pool was lucky for a long period, how would you know that you could take profit vs storing it for the inevitable bad luck in the future.

Finally, is there anyway of me seeing how many shares I have in the backlog?  Right now I am comparing the "maximum reward" to the "unpaid+everpaid+est" shown in the Balance Graph, but I wanted to see if that's the best way.

Thanks!

Eligius is donation/volunteer run.  There is nothing ever taken from the block reward.  Everything mined by the pool goes to miners.  Even if the pool is lucky for a long period, after all of the existing backlog is paid, then it just gets buffered and paid to miners eventually.

The % shares rewarded is the best way to know what you have in the backlog.  100% means everything you've submitted is paid.  We've tried other methods, but, displaying the tally of shelved shares as a number of coins just seemed to confuse people too much.

-wk

[lightfoot]

Just a data point on shelved shares:

Back in early Sept I tried Eligus for a few days during apparently the "worst luck on the Earth". Not understanding I was upset that I only "got" 50% of my work so I switched. In October I figured out the concept and tried mining again. Through October I got every bit of bitcoin that was shelved back, and am running at 99%+ now.

So I will say that Eligus works, and that every shelved share seems to have been paid at the rate at which it was mined.

Thank you Wiz: You run a very. fair. pool.

C

[un_ordinateur]

Hi Luke and wizkid,

I don't think basing your minimum payout on difficulty is a good idea.
You want to have the same size coins coming in, as going out.
So if you spent $1 amounts all the time, it makes sense to have payouts around $1 worth of bitcoins.
On the other hand, if you buy more products at $500 value, you'd want a minimum payout close to that.
$20 value seems like a reasonable expected-spending price, hence the default.

Duly noted.

About this, the 10 TBC minimum is for coinbase payouts.  Because some miners do not function properly with large coinbase transactions (with hundreds of outputs) it was decided to put an absolute minimum on coinbase payouts of 10 TBC.  Due to another unrelated issue with a particularly annoying botnet, an absolute will-never-pay-out-ever minimum was set at 2 TBC.  Those that fall between 2 and 10 TBC just wont get generated payouts and I instead pay them manually periodically.  The 10 TBC lower bound for the custom minimum is so that people can still automatically enter the payout queue with their custom minimums.

Okay, I see that there is lot of stuff going on in the backscene we are not necessary aware. I have seen a lot of posts in this forum of people being confused by the timeout. Maybe you could add a "request payout" button, that would pay everything that is unpaid (if the unpaid balance is over 2 TBC, to avoid the botnet annoyance), but could only be invoqued once per week/month?

I'll do another manual to catch up as soon as I get home from work today.

Is there anyway to know what amount is currently in the "reserve" fund? I know that the address 18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B gets the "surplus" money from every block found, but it seems there is a LOT more money than just that at that adress!

The % shares rewarded is the best way to know what you have in the backlog.  100% means everything you've submitted is paid.  We've tried other methods, but, displaying the tally of shelved shares as a number of coins just seemed to confuse people too much.

Two ways I -think- could be used to "efficiently" represent this data is eiter:
a) A line chart of "Total BTC you would get" as a function of "Total BTC the pool catches up". So it would be an constantly increasing line.
b) A histogram of "Shelved shares you have" binned in groups of (say) 10 billion shelved shares, in reversed chronological order. Makes easy to see where in the share log is hidden the bulk of your shelved shares.

In fact, b) is approximately the derivative of a), both are interesting in some way/highlight some data.

---------------

A while back, you told about the "?timemachine=1" trick to get our full history, but it is "hidden" because you said that web crawlers overloaded your servers with the requests to these pages while indexing your server. Have you tried using a robot.txt file to request that the stats pages not be crawled? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard)

[wizkid057]

Okay, I see that there is lot of stuff going on in the backscene we are not necessary aware. I have seen a lot of posts in this forum of people being confused by the timeout. Maybe you could add a "request payout" button, that would pay everything that is unpaid (if the unpaid balance is over 2 TBC, to avoid the botnet annoyance), but could only be invoqued once per week/month?

I've considered this.  This would need to be done with signmessage, also, to prevent lamers from requesting that everyone be paid out.  Also, it would not be instant and would just be a way to tell me, "Hey, this person wants a payout," since there is no hot wallet for Eligius for security purposes.  I have considered keeping a remote (not on Eligius servers) hot wallet with a very small amount of coins (less than 5 BTC at all times or so) for actual near-instant payout requests via signmessage... but this probably won't happen any time soon.

Is there anyway to know what amount is currently in the "reserve" fund? I know that the address 18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B gets the "surplus" money from every block found, but it seems there is a LOT more money than just that at that adress!

The 18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B offline wallet is one address in a shared offline wallet.  Some of the coins are Eligius's, some of the coins aren't.  There is no "reserve" fund, per se, as there are still shelved shares to be paid.  However, the pool cold wallet always does have the funds to cover every satoshi of every unpaid miner balance (not including estimates, obviously).  If you really want to know the exact amount the pool has on hand, you can determine this amount by summing the "balance" field in the balances.json then subtract 25 BTC for estimates for the current round (the "balance" field includes estimates).

Two ways I -think- could be used to "efficiently" represent this data is eiter:
a) A line chart of "Total BTC you would get" as a function of "Total BTC the pool catches up". So it would be an constantly increasing line.
b) A histogram of "Shelved shares you have" binned in groups of (say) 10 billion shelved shares, in reversed chronological order. Makes easy to see where in the share log is hidden the bulk of your shelved shares.

Actually, I've been working on a per-user share log visualization for quite a while now.  Making it make sense, though, is the hard part, since most of my attempts simply look like noise for most miners.  I'm still working on it though and I plan to have a histogram type visualization working in the next major stats/CPPSRB revision.

A while back, you told about the "?timemachine=1" trick to get our full history, but it is "hidden" because you said that web crawlers overloaded your servers with the requests to these pages while indexing your server. Have you tried using a robot.txt file to request that the stats pages not be crawled? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard)

I have, actually, and it turns out most crawlers don't actually care about robots.txt.  Only the major ones (like Google, Yahoo, etc) seem to actually obey it.  The longer term goal is to simply make the data accessible more efficiently.  The stats have hash rate and balances data for every user since the beginning of Eligius-Ra.  I want to make that data accessible.  I want people to be able to plot 1 year of their personal hash rate if they so desired, without having to precompute everything all the time.


----

Side notes:  I do plan to drop the default minimum payout soon, probably to 40 TBC, which makes sense.  I haven't considered this a huge priority, since people can simply set their own minimums already.  But, it probably is time.

Thank you Wiz: You run a very. fair. pool.

Thanks!

[madmax_ger]

anyone got a double payout recently, too?

https://blockchain.info/tx/89fb732aa1eb3f59a6b72ec2b21b2068bcfa76de87339af534d832c22d7f2def
https://blockchain.info/tx/8598ce3fedca8f2cd06e9289856dcd0c111dd9c8cdf690da3075098cbdfeb737

one is confirmed, the other one is not.

I got two mails from blockchain, one for each transaction. both mails include the note "1 confirmation",
so I have to think both transactions should have been balanced with my account.

But they were not - only one transaction was booked.

Any ideas?

Without even following your links, it probably has something to do with the orphaned block mentioned on the previous page...  (You were delivered the Eligius block that had your payment in it that was then orphaned by another pool, so your payment was resent in the next Eligius block, which will actually confirm)

Perfect, thanks  

Essentially this is correct, however the payment in the orphaned block in the eyes if the reward system retroactively never happened,  so it may or may not have contained the exact same payouts depending on the shares to be paid at the time of the new block.

The coinbase transaction in the orphaned block can never confirm.

-wk

Thank you for your feedback, too

The second payment was a little bit higher, so I guess there was more to pay then 

And, by the way, thanks for your support and for running this pool.
I like it very much - it's easy to use and it just: works.

[robix]

My unpaid balance got stuck since 3 blocks or so. Is this issue common?

[EnJoyThis]

My unpaid balance got stuck since 3 blocks or so. Is this issue common?

Not common but it happens every now and than when the pool finds some fast blocks and can't keep up with calcualtions.

[AbiTxGroup]

My unpaid balance got stuck since 3 blocks or so. Is this issue common?

This is why I came to the forums tonight.  My total "Unpaid Balance" and the "Estimated Change" have not changed/updated in the past 5 hours or so.

The "Estimated Change" should have gone up as earlier a had a usb hub fail that had two Jalapeno's connected to it, so I dropped 14GH/s from my hashrate and since then the hashrate has gone back up but "Unpaid Balance" totals have not changed at all.

The miners are still hashing and shares are being accepted, just not showing on the stats page.

[wizkid057]

Should be good in a few minutes.

Payout system was paused pending my review of an orphaned block

-wk

[Mapuo]

Should be good in a few minutes.

Payout system was paused pending my review of an orphaned block

-wk

Its not good, no changes from hours

[FarSky7]

Ya, blew thru 5 blocks in like 6 minutes. YAY!

[wizkid057]

Should be good in a few minutes.

Payout system was paused pending my review of an orphaned block

-wk

Its not good, no changes from hours

Everything looks fine now.  Stats and reward system are caught up, although I'll have to do yet another manual payout later today to catch up the payout queue.