Automatic Payouts are now working.

Fairly lacklustre response so far, is there anything in particular you guys would consider a crucial feature before considering this or any pool?

hum, we do have one user currently mining through port 80 so it is working. I'll be on IRC all day today, pop in after you get back from work and we'll see what's up

Edit:
Made a few tweaks, also please ensure that you're using pool.rfcpool.com if you're trying to use port 80, NOT rfcpool.com or www.rfcpool.com in your miner config. Port 80 will only work on pool.rfcpool.com

10GH/s bump.

Done some tuning and tweaking on reducing stales too, try us out and see how low your stale ratio can get

Third block found! Jump in near the start of our 4th block now

We've just passed the 20 GH/s mark.  Nice job guys.  Onward and upward.

7% PPS seems fair given your only pure PPS competitor in the BTC market (deepbit) charges 10% of all earnings.

Variance swings are massive at this difficulty level and only 29ghash/s though.
Do you have a stable enough buffer to guarantee PPS payments in the short term?

95th percentile rounds are nearing 10 million shares soon.

Nice site guys. Any chance of a pool api that includes total shares?

Cheers!

sorry, i only get:


but not round shares - is that at a different url/feed?

great, cheers!

Done, requests to /api will no longer force SSL on you.

Couple of updates to first post; API is maturing and getting useful now, we have per-worker stats, user balances and estimated reward, and pool stats APIs all up and live.

Also enabled switching between prop & pps for any user with no shares in the current round so new members can start on PPS right away.

Current long round is long

I came across your pool today, seems like the only other good PPS (I don't really like deepbit that much) so I'm pointing my measly 112 mhash your way now.

API updated. /api/user/account now contains total_earnings, total_donation and sum of previous payouts.

Also updated it to full precision display (20 decimal places as stored in our database) which you can't get on the website.

Was the last block orphaned?

Blockexplorer link shows nothing and it seems only a couple of PPS users got rewarded.

Awww unlucky, sucks to be those 200k+ share holders

Oh, didnt know you pay out donators on invalids, should mention this somewhere

I have a question to ask.

How comes the value of a share changed midround on PPS?? It was at .0000275 and has now changed to .0000246!! Thats a bit naughty when we have already started on a block!!

We cant go between pps and proportional mid round so how can the price change??

Any feedback please?

Actually you both have a point here. PPS users rewards are currently calculated and paid on block find, which is wrong. I'm updating this now so they're paid in realtime into confirmed rewards without waiting on blocks, as Clipse says.

As compensation for doing it wrongly so far, the price per share has been put back up to the value before the difficulty change today and will be honoured until we find this block.

Now done - PPS are completely decoupled from blocks as they should be. You get confirmed rewards updated every 5 minutes for the shares you did in the past 5 minutes.

Edit: in addition to this, rfcpool will be discontinuing proportional payouts entirely at some point. The date is undecided but there will be plenty of notice on the website.

Block #8 found, and PPS  payouts remained at the previous level as promised.

They've now gone down to what they should be for this difficulty (0.00002461897887581132).

They were mostly hoppers I'm afraid We see an influx of about 130GH/s after a block at the moment.

We do offer PPS though so if you don't want your payments to be affected by them, there's the option.

Not at all. There's 3 people behind rfcpool and all of us are systems administrators and coders, so we know a thing or two about running a service.

I shan't name any names but it's rather concerning seeing the quality of some of the pools popping up recently, with admins who use a prebuilt frontend having no idea how it works, and asking for help on how to build/run pushpool. Seriously, if you're going to run a pool, you should be able to figure this stuff out on your own. You'll run into far greater problems with pushpool once you grow than how to chuffin' compile it.

So yeah, Jack, you're right to be concerned, every new pool recently including ours has to prove themselves. I however, will let the pool speak for itself and don't feel the need to try and force it to grow by offering rewards and bonuses, or pimping its 100Mb superduper fibre-optic line (lol?) like it's something special that nobody else has.

Rant over I think. :p

I think since launch near the end of June we've had under an hour of downtime in total. That's actually a pretty bad record for me but I'll put it down to growing pains.
We're still on a single server (the pool size doesn't warrant anything more) but there's decent redundancy within it, I can restart one of our multiple pushpools for instance and you wouldn't even notice.
Hardware failure would be our big achilles heel right now but I'll invest in duplicate servers once the pool earns itself some money (currently we're 30BTC down thanks to an invalid).

Pure PPS is supposed to 'hemorrhage' BTC every now and then (negative balance) with a small buffer. It's bound to happen.
With 7-10% fee you ensure long term profitability just like a casino that runs house-edge games.
 
There is only one winner and that is the operator.
smpps pools like eligius go down by even ~400BTC in one weekend then make it all back in a few days.

But I wish you luck, that's your decision

.

Block #9 is already in your confirmed balance - block #10, ironically found 4 minutes after I reset the round to remove PPS, should be in your unconfirmed.

Also sigh, I think everyone got paid twice for block 9, enjoy your windfall

Why not at least put back up the sign-in page and the account management page so that we can view/update/set our wallet address?

Thankfully a number of users have come over to ozcoin rather than move to a big pool - much appreciated guys

heya,

any date when you'll pay us? and will you pay for your last 4min block - i did donate so i think i should get this money even if it was an invalid.

btw. i really loved your pool. as a developer i was impressed how your pool did handle the load-changes from pool hoppers

i hope you'll continue your work (maybe with smpps or something?) as i do love your design and your stability.
if you want to open up again and need some help with a few nice graphs - just pm me

i use eligius for that
and yes - its official (but eligius seems to hiding that fact a little).

atm i am using this:

http://17AJs6hqdJaDEiHb42GULKy6zwjVbaSQYk:x@mining.eligius.st:80 which worked flawlessly the last month

Very sad this pool closed. It had _the_ best bitcoin pool website which was clean, easy to use, and had nice statistics.

I'm formally placing my vote that the pool should re-open.  If you agree, please do the same.

Vote +1  (3 GH/s)

+1 as long as the same crew do it. I'd give a solid 5% for a pool that doesn't treat part time miners as criminals.

voting for re-opening!

+1 (2GH/s)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=35214.0

check that tool, it could help

Yep, I got mine.. Thanks.

Sad to see this pool go

Wtf? These guys have been some of the most honest and hands on pool operators I have come across.

Huh. Wizards can be trolls, too.

me too, cheers

Yep, lessons learnt, new reward system, backend scripts being tidied up, etc.

Main issue at the moment is what to set the 'N' in PPLNS to. It's 0.5 but subject to change, considering PPLNH with a 48 hour H actually. Maybe I should do a poll for this?

Welcome back rfcpool! 

Good to see you guys back.

For clarity:

rfcpool just found a block after 688718 shares (excluding stales, which are obviously worthless).

N was set to diff*0.5 (902850) so obviously if you do the maths you'll see that our total payout for that block would have been under 50 BTC (clearly we weren't going to include blocks 10 and below in the calculations, they were rewarded under Prop/PPS separately)

For this reason, N was set to 688718 as a one-off, meaning that the full 50 BTC was paid out. If you were watching your estimated reward in our stats, you'll see a big jump in the final rewards table for this block now: https://www.rfcpool.com/stats/block/11

These rewards will be added to your balances shortly, I'm just checking scripts over first.

N has been set back to diff*0.5 now. If you check your estimate reward in My Account, you can see that the next payout, at the moment, will include shares from block 11 and the new ongoing one.

Hope this answers any pending questions.

Hey Caes,

First off,  nice to see you back!

Its maybe none of my business but Graet from OZcoin publically announced you were joining their team a few days back... can you comment on how this ties in with rfcpool being back up and what exactly you are doing with ozcoin?

Im just curious (as a fellow pool op) whats going on in general with the other pool ops

Cheers,
Anni

To be very honest i am dissapointed to say the least, but i have spoken to Caesium and I understand what has happened.

In the past Caeseum and Ycros (from Ozcoin ) have collaborated to overcome issues both pools have faced, with a "pre-established" working relationship  it was easy to ask Caesium to join the team.

Best of luck to RFCPool and their relaunch

Thats prety much it. Better go put something in ozcoin  forum too

First block has been confirmed and first payments for it sent out - we're officially back in business

Still looking for opinions on what to set N to. We now have diff*0.5 shares since relaunch so old shares are rolling out of the payment window. Current view is to set it to diff*2 once we reach that figure, then probably leave it for the time being. If you would hate this, shout here.

PPLNS is simple. At the moment N=902850 (half of the current difficulty), so when we find a block, the latest 902850 submitted shares get paid (50 BTC / 902850) = 0.00005538015932406342 BTC per share. If the round is shorter than 902850 shares, then latest shares from the previous round(s) get paid again until we reach 902850 shares into the past. If the round is longer, then the oldest shares from the start of the round will not get paid.

This means that:

• if you mine constantly, your earnings will average the same as on PPS (but in the short term, luck is a factor)
• pool-hoppers don't earn anything extra
• if you stop mining for a while, your payout from future blocks starts shrinking (because the "payment window" keeps moving forward, and less and less of your shares are in it), but you may still get paid from multiple future blocks if the rounds are short
• when you start mining, your rewards from future blocks ramp up similarly as they ramp down when you stop
• there is no unfair penalty for intermittent mining on average, but the pool's luck does affect how much you get

The difference PPLNH makes is that instead of the last "N" shares, every share from the last "N" hours gets paid (not a fixed sum, but so that we spread the 50 BTC evenly to all shares submitted in the last 48 hours for example). Otherwise it's the same: old shares can get paid multiple times if short rounds follow, or not get paid if long rounds follow.

The exact choice of "N" shares or hours doesn't matter on average, but the larger it is, the less pool luck affects the payouts, but it also takes longer for the payouts to start or stop coming.

Fantastic.

Thanks Rennex thats just what I was after, it seems like a very fair way to pay.

Hiya.

What happened to my reward overnight??? It went from 3.9 btc to 2.4btc. How come?? I didnt stop mining at all? All of a sudden it seems that people who were below me in the eligible shares list have had a lot added to there balance, why is this? I dosnt even look as though they have turned there miners back onto Rfcpool!

Thanks