[ANN] profit switching auto-exchanging pool - www.middlecoin.com

[h2odysee]

I've been on this pool for a few days and experienced no problems and received good payouts. I haven't decided whether to make this my permanent home or not because of two issues:

* As mentioned by many other posters, 512 difficulty is way too high to expect reasonable variance for small GPU mining, especially on low difficulty coins.

* No accountability. I am happy with my payouts and have no reason to suspect the operator is anything but honest, but am accustomed to being able to audit a pool more than I can here. Any pool operator can cheat the system regardless of the accountability they provide, and ultimately it boils down to whether the payouts seem accurate (which they do here best I can tell), but more details about which coins were mined, when/where they were exchanged will provide more piece of mind. This information doesn't need to be in real time if the pool operator wants to protect his algorithms (although it's trivial to determine which coin we are mining based on the difficulty).


I love what I've seen so far and hope you consider these suggestions.

It's only trivial to determine the coin we're mining if it's on coinchoose. Which, honestly, most of them have been for the past couple of days. That's not always the case though.

Thanks for your input. Even if it's been said before, it's important to know how many people want certain things.

[1714198127]

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[1714198127]

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[1714198127]

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[rtgornik]

h2odysee,

Exposing which coins you are going to sell next is likely to hurt the performance. It is too easy to manipulate the market in front of your dumping.

===

If your value proposition is to keep it simple (miners give you scrypt hash power and you simply give BTC back), then I do not see the point to get all the internal stats.

Someone who "need" all the internal stats is likely someone with the mindset to control all the steps. Good for them, but they will unlikely be satisfied with anyone else fully automated solution (which will sometimes do unprofitable moves) or the management fee. Why bother.

This is similar to choose to trust (or not) a Mutual or Hedge Fund. You give up control to the managers, and what really matter is how much money end up in my pocket.

Personally, I don't need the micro-management details to evaluate if your pool is good compare to my other approaches (and the time I have to spend on these). I just need to monitor the BTC/Hash rate at the user level. It is that simple.

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Furthermore, public scrutiny into your automated strategies will slow you down from adapting your design. You will have to constantly explain your changes rather than being creative (and more profitable?).

===

Good idea. Keep up the good work.

Well stated. I agree.

[vingaard]

I can't understand a lot of people here...

I think the mental process we have to follow is the next one:

1.- I put my hash rate in a pool (in this case middlecoin)

2.- I check my earnings and compare my benefits with other pools

3.- If I earn more in this pool than in other with the same hashrate I'm happy 

4.- END

So... thank you h2odysee because you make me HAPPY  ... end of history

PS: What I want to say is I don't mind what are you doing with alt-coins or how are you trade with them, the only thing I know is when I did the same as you I got lower profit so I don't mind if you are dealing with devil or you are doing somekind of tribal dance te get those BTC... I don't mind but you MUST continue

Good work 

I'm sorry for my english

[MrJay]

The idea behind this pool is a great one and I love not having to deal with trading coins myself, but you really do need to look at the diff as it does affect earnings.  If I was one of the following users, I would consider moving away due to the following:

Username                     Accepted MH/s (Last Hour)   Rejected MH/s (Last Hour)   
1PqM7xBPA6Q2DohamzncBGY48U17jC9tVA   32.8927                  8.1463                  
1GC1XB9p4AJuZBti94LB3UkY5js7MhTigr           22.5467                  6.0491                  
1AV24hjDkkSSFdcioPEB9ooUPMLi64GMi           15.5189                  2.3581                  
1EbTFodU6SBEj8xR38842LyEoc27k5uiXK           14.4470                  9.8240      

As of posting this we have been mining a fast block coin with a high diff which means more rejected and stale shares.  The top 4 users on this pool as of that time have a combined rejected hash rate of 26.3775MH...that's the same size of some smaller farms.  One of those users is only seeing just over a 50% accepted rate. Having a constant high diff does affect profits with these faster coins, lots of wasted hash power.

I know the quicker coin blocks do create more rejected and stales, but not to the tune of 50%.  CGWatcher is telling me that my rigs are running at around 27-30% efficiency, which is pretty poor and one of those rigs has 3x 7950's in it.

Please consider enabling VARDIFF or getting the server to set a lower diff when mining faster coins, I'm sure it will make everyone more money, including yourself h2odysee.

[kirk46]

Please consider enabling VARDIFF or getting the server to set a lower diff when mining faster coins, I'm sure it will make everyone more money, including yourself h2odysee.

i will say it again....

ive been saying this since the pool started......

[Kuroth]

Please consider enabling VARDIFF or getting the server to set a lower diff when mining faster coins, I'm sure it will make everyone more money, including yourself h2odysee.

i will say it again....

ive been saying this since the pool started......

H20 if this is the case, then why not?  Is it just a matter of you need to wait until you can upgrade your servers?

I am ALL for more money   

   Thanks!

[h2odysee]

Please consider enabling VARDIFF or getting the server to set a lower diff when mining faster coins, I'm sure it will make everyone more money, including yourself h2odysee.

There are more important things to work on. I will at some point do a better low diff test. But some things need to come first.

If you want me to make that a priority, then you can explain logically why having a lower diff would increase profits. So far, most explanations seem to fail by misunderstanding what a share exactly is.

Also, there is a coin that has a 42% rejection rate, but it's still sometimes the most profitable, even with that included. So it's ok when you see that high of a rejection rate.


It's not just a matter of upgrading servers. It would take a significant amount of time for me to rework the code to include diffs other than 512. And, I would need to do some more database optimizations, because that's where the slowdown will occur.

[Damnsammit]

Just curious, what made you settle on 512 difficulty in the first place?

I know nothing about pool administration, so i am just wondering.

[h2odysee]

Just curious, what made you settle on 512 difficulty in the first place?

I know nothing about pool administration, so i am just wondering.

It takes about a 40 seconds to find a share on my rig, and I felt that wasn't too long. And it's a base-2 number, so the math is easy.

[Damnsammit]

That's cool, but aren't some of the complaints valid?

If it takes 40 seconds to find a share, but with some lower difficulty coins, with the pool hashing speed, can't a block be found in less than 40 seconds?  If so, then doesn't that mean some rigs might never find a valid share on those coins?

[h2odysee]

That's cool, but aren't some of the complaints valid?

If it takes 40 seconds to find a share, but with some lower difficulty coins, with the pool hashing speed, can't a block be found in less than 40 seconds?  If so, then doesn't that mean some rigs might never find a valid share on those coins?

No. Share difficulty isn't really how long it takes to find a share. It's the probability.

[Damnsammit]

I know you know way more about it than I do, so that works for me. 

You got a great thing going here... very cool pool!  I'll likely be switching back over soon, but right now I'm addicted to Bottlecaps

[mueslo]

No. Share difficulty isn't really how long it takes to find a share. It's the probability.

So what exactly results in rejected shares due to 'Job not found'? And what does in fact constitute a higher difficulty share?

(Sorry for all the questions, I can't seem to find any good source to read more about this online. Do you know any particular place?)

[h2odysee]

So what exactly results in rejected shares due to 'Job not found'?

(Sorry for all the questions, I can't seem to find any good source to read more about this online)

When you try to submit a share, but someone has found a new block since then, invalidating any block you might have found.

"Job not found" is just the standard error for when that happens. There might be other rejected share error messages, but they are very few, and I haven't bothered to see what they are.

[kirk46]

so when the pool switches to a low diff coin and the pools hash rate drops by like 100Mh and that 100Mh appears on the rejected Mh.....

how is that not hurting profits?

as of tomorrow im switching back to LTC as the diff is dropping and it will net me more profit

[mueslo]

Okay, that's what I thought. And what exactly is a higher difficulty share, let's say N? A miner looking for blocks that have log_2 N more zeros in front than actually needed for the current network difficulty? That wouldn't make much sense to me though, because that'd essentially 1/N your usable hashrate.

If so, then yeah, vardiff won't help in any way except to reduce variance.

[Tigggger]

so when the pool switches to a low diff coin and the pools hash rate drops by like 100Mh and that 100Mh appears on the rejected Mh.....

how is that not hurting profits?

What the OP is saying is that the reject rate is taken in to account before deciding which coin to swap to.

So if Coin A is 200% and 0% rejects, Coin B is 300% and 30% rejects coin B is still more profitable despite the higher rejects. (*see below)

as of tomorrow im switching back to LTC as the diff is dropping and it will net me more profit

I'd be amazed if LTC isn't amongst the coin rotation.

*
The question is if lowering the difficulty would achieve less rejects and more profits for all.

It would definately reduce the reject %, which my gut says should increase the profit, but I don't have the knowledge to know for sure.

[h2odysee]

Okay, that's what I thought. And what exactly is a higher difficulty share, let's say N? A miner looking for blocks that have log_2 N more zeros in front than actually needed for the current network difficulty?

Not exactly.

If N is half of the network difficulty, then you need one less zero (in base 2) to find a share. If it's a quarter, you need two less zeros.

My difficulty is actually 512 * 65536. They generally divide by 65536 because it's easier to read I guess.

If N is zero, every hash you compute is a share. If it's 512*65536, you need 25 (log2 512*65536) zeros in front. And one in every 512*65536 hashes is a share. So if you have a 1 MH/s rig mining in my pool, it will take on average 512 * 65536 / 1000000 = 33.6 seconds to find a share.

[h2odysee]

It would definately reduce the reject %

I believe it wouldn't reduce the reject %.

[mueslo]

Not exactly.

If N is half of the network difficulty, then you need one less zero (in base 2) to find a share. If it's a quarter, you need two less zeros.

My difficulty is actually 512 * 65536. They generally divide by 65536 because it's easier to read I guess.

If N is zero, every hash you compute is a share. If it's 512*65536, you need 25 (log2 512*65536) zeros in front. And one in every 512*65536 hashes is a share. So if you have a 1 MH/s rig mining in my pool, it will take on average 512 * 65536 / 1000000 = 33.6 seconds to find a share.

Ah, thank you. That makes a lot more sense.