Lots of network issues with several Vertcoin pools [solved] [nope, not solved]

[dp-unique]

Okay, I've been mining to the VTC pool at multipool.sonofatech.com for 45 hours with very few rejected shares (99.8% acceptance) and my earnings are finally approaching the predicted amount. It's still underestimated, but now the difference is between 0.26 reported vs. 0.34 predicted, rather than 0.003 reported vs. 0.17 predicted... I suspect the long time to find a block at SOAT - around 12 to 16 hours - is partially to blame for the under-reported earnings, and if so, then the estimation should improve the longer I mine there. As a result, I am going to give it another day at least, even though I was planning on switching the mighty GTX 1050 Ti over to mining ZEN this morning.

The situation at give-me-coins.com is even worse: the time between blocks is estimated at 105 hours!?! So while I no longer think there are shenanigans going on at GMC, I also don't want to waste time mining there; 12-16 hours between blocks is already trying my patience as it is.

Hey Magic!

Thanks for trying out our Vert pool! We are fairly new with vert so we do have very few miners. The low miner count was also partially due to the halving, as we lost a lot of miners in that process for one reason or another. We were closer to 8-10 gigahash previously.

I will say, in the defense of ALL Vert pools, this coin has definitely been one of the most difficult to manage pool-wise as it requires a lot of attention/babysitting. Please feel free to reach out to us on our discord with anything you might have questions on! https://discord.gg/pcQJ75C

If there's anything we can do, we'd be glad to try.

[MagicSmoker]

Thanks for trying out our Vert pool! We are fairly new with vert so we do have very few miners. The low miner count was also partially due to the halving, as we lost a lot of miners in that process for one reason or another. We were closer to 8-10 gigahash previously.

Thanks for replying here; the comment section on YouTube should be reserved for posting insults, inflammatory rhetoric and proclaiming one is "1st!"...  

You run a new pool; I'm a new miner - probably a recipe for disaster - but I am an electronics engineer for my day job so I should be less prone to stupid f-ups than the average Nicehash miner... Or, at least, my f-ups will be more spectacular... and with big arcs!

As for the block reward halving on Dec-12, I suspected that the difficulty would halve along with it so I didn't stop mining, and that seems to have been the case, more or less (difficulty ranged from 70-90k prior to the halving and it is now in the range of 40-60k; okay, so a bit more than half the difficulty for half the reward...).

I will say, in the defense of ALL Vert pools, this coin has definitely been one of the most difficult to manage pool-wise as it requires a lot of attention/babysitting. Please feel free to reach out to us on our discord with anything you might have questions on! https://discord.gg/pcQJ75C

If there's anything we can do, we'd be glad to try.

Granted, I've only been mining for about 2 weeks now - and I only just bought my first GPU specifically for mining* (so the mighty 1050 Ti has some competition) - but even in this brief time I've noticed that VTC is one messed up coin to mine. The p2p pools seem to be a total disaster, and your comment that running a VTC pool requires more work than average might explain why.

I have just one request for your pool at this point, and it is something which I feel will make your life easier if it can be implemented: report immature earnings assuming a block has been found. What your pool (and many others) currently do is report 0 earnings until a block is found. You can probably guess what that makes most miners think is happening on your pool - they are doing a whole lot of work for someone else's wallet.



* - an RX 570 that was on sale at Best Buy for $230 (so only ~$40 more than MSRP...   )

[MagicSmoker]

In a bizarre twist, Give Me Coins now shows a balance of 0.17 VTC (vs. 0.073 expected) while SOAT seems to have lost a send transaction of around 0.11 VTC somewhere as my electrum wallet says I've received about 0.36 VTC in 3 separate transactions while SOAT says it has paid me 0.47 (with an unpaid balance of 0.099 - because min. payout of 0.1, lol...).

Right now I've switched over to mining Feathercoin on GMC because it takes too long for my puny 1050 Ti to earn the minimum payout in VTC and no pool seems to accurately represent how much I've earned until days - literally days - later. If I had a much more powerful mining setup I'd be pissed at pointing it at a pool that showed 0 earnings for 24+ hours.

[MagicSmoker]

Feathercoin mines quickly so it was easy to confirm that give-me-coins is paying the expected amount, and since difficulty for FTC has risen dramatically since this morning and my missing VTC balance ended up reappearing, I decided to switch back to VTC on GMC. Besides, I need to get the balance there up to 0.5 VTC before I can cash it out.

Oh, and the time to find a VTC block on GMC has dropped down to about 24 hours, so not nearly as bad as the 105 hours when I last checked it.

[MagicSmoker]

Oh, man, I think I am going to give up on VTC after I get to the minimum payout of 0.5 on Give-Me-Coins; I mined it for *80* hours at 14.8 MH/s average and my balance went from 0.24 to 0.31; I should've received 0.6 VTC. I suspect it has something to do with the pool only finding 1 block in that time so most of my shares - despite being valid/accepted - went towards solving a block that some other pool found first. I'm not too sure on how things work in that particular situation.

Anyway, I switched over to mining FTC on the same pool and have accumulated close to the expected number of coins vs. time (a much harder target to hit as the difficulty for FTC varies a lot more wildly) so it's not the pool short-changing me, per se, there just seems to be something dodgy about this coin.