[1050 TH] BitMinter.com [1% PPLNS,Pays TxFees +MergedMining,Stratum,GBT,vardiff]

[Xephan]

The reason I chose OpenID was for the convenience it gives users. A lot of people already have a Google or Yahoo account, and they don't want even more passwords to remember.

I agree that OpenId is good for that, which is why it came about anyway. Just that keeping in mind one of the key attributes of bitcoin, makes that sort of a irrelevant consideration if you know what I mean. It's a little like providing condoms dispensers in the toilet for convenience... except the toilet's in a monastery.

If you want anonymity you could create a new account anywhere that offers OpenID accounts, instead of using the same Google account you use everywhere else.

Of course that's what I do... this nick and associated email is basically only used for my non-serious for fun geeky activities, and shared with a few friends just to obfuscate the trail further.

But if enough users want it, maybe I'll add regular username+password login too. My TODO list is getting rather long, though.

What I already have planned for logins is:
1. Being able to associate multiple OpenID identities with your BitMinter account. So if you lose one OpenID you can still log in with another one, provided you registered it with BitMinter first.
2. Logging in with a Facebook account

I like what you've done with the miner Doc, but a (Disregard-My-Privacy)-Facebook-Connect button is one of those things that make me want to click close on a site

Why not do it the way eligius does it? No login, just use the receiving address. Nothing for anybody to steal unless they want to send BTC to some stranger

And you don't even need to worry about user logins, password security and whatever not.

[DrHaribo]

Yeah, I hear what you are saying, guys, and I see how the way Eligius does things makes it very anonymous.

I could perhaps make a separate type of "anonymous account". I think I'll have to take a look at how this works on Eligius. I mean, you can't log in and change the payout threshold if there is no login. I guess it would have to be a special type of account with a different feature-set.

[Xephan]

Yeah, I hear what you are saying, guys, and I see how the way Eligius does things makes it very anonymous.

I could perhaps make a separate type of "anonymous account". I think I'll have to take a look at how this works on Eligius. I mean, you can't log in and change the payout threshold if there is no login. I guess it would have to be a special type of account with a different feature-set.

That's pretty much an expected and acceptable give and take. If I don't use a login, I don't get access to more fancy features and live with defaults like eligius' threshold of about 1/3 BTC. No problems unless your defaults are so unreasonable that it's obvious you're just trying to force us to give up our privacy

[DrHaribo]

I added some new stats to make mining less boring.  Click "live stats" at the top of a BitMinter webpage. You can choose between pool speed, your own speed or speed of the top 10 fastest miners. Updates every 5 minutes.

I know the Mhps measurements fluctuate a lot. I'll have a look at making it measure for longer periods than 5 minutes later.

Maybe I'll make it update more frequently than every 5 minutes in the future. Will see how things go with server load.

[farfiman]

Am I missing something or do i see that there is know way to see what the pool is working on.. how many shares etc...?

[iopq]

Yeah, I hear what you are saying, guys, and I see how the way Eligius does things makes it very anonymous.

I could perhaps make a separate type of "anonymous account". I think I'll have to take a look at how this works on Eligius. I mean, you can't log in and change the payout threshold if there is no login. I guess it would have to be a special type of account with a different feature-set.

doesn't matter, eligius just does generated transactions to pay members of the pool, so the payouts can be small and no fees are paid on them
so when you stop mining for a certain time (say a week) you can pay out in full, even if there's like 0.01 in that person's account

[Soak]

Why not do it the way eligius does it? No login, just use the receiving address.

I think it's not good because DrHaribo wants to create a dedicated forum for the pool. So, the idea is to link account of the website with forums (and the usernames). What will happen if a member use your username on the forums, especially with the future donation system (whick give you a special rank on the forum for example)?

In this case, we need to destroy the actually system accounts, and how members can have special benefits for donators? It's not possible, except if DrHaribo implement double account system (regular and anonymous). I think that will make confusions and it's a lot of work, for almost nothing. And that means for example in the top 10 miners: 1- Username 2- Bitcoin Address 3- Username 4- Username 5- Bitcoin Address etc. You find that good?

In other words, the goal of BitMinter is to make a community around the pool, with the future forums, and the current IRC channel. I think anonymous isn't a good idea.

[Xephan]

Why not do it the way eligius does it? No login, just use the receiving address.

I think it's not good because DrHaribo wants to create a dedicated forum for the pool. So, the idea is to link account of the website with forums (and the usernames). What will happen if a member use your username on the forums, especially with the future donation system (whick give you a special rank on the forum for example)?

In this case, we need to destroy the actually system accounts, and how members can have special benefits for donators? It's not possible, except if DrHaribo implement double account system (regular and anonymous). I think that will make confusions and it's a lot of work, for almost nothing. And that means for example in the top 10 miners: 1- Username 2- Bitcoin Address 3- Username 4- Username 5- Bitcoin Address etc. You find that good?

In other words, the goal of BitMinter is to make a community around the pool, with the future forums, and the current IRC channel. I think anonymous isn't a good idea.

Doesn't need a second system.

You could just link the forum account to wallet addresses for those who opt to be named. Those of us who value our anonymity and privacy are used to having lesser privileges and I doubt those of us who value anonymity cares if somebody else use our username on a forum. I personally make one up for each subgroup of activities.

For ranking, a good example would be Slush, there's an option to display or not display username in stats. So in our case, the ranking can simply be "Top Miner: <wallet address blah blah blah> / Soak".

If really desired, each address can also have a corresponding receiving address so DrHaribo knows which address's owner is the donor. Then for certain benefits, like being able to get paid out before threshold/confirmation could still be implemented.

[DrHaribo]

Am I missing something or do i see that there is know way to see what the pool is working on.. how many shares etc...?

True, this is not shown at the moment. I intend to add statistics with such information when a new reward system is in place, one that is unaffected by pool hopping. Most likely PPLNS or a variation of that system. This will open up the possibility of many cool new statistics.

Can you add emails for miners that go down?

Yes, that's on the TODO list.

Adopted your sig DrH.  Let me know if you want me to take it down.

Soak made it for anyone to use. I'm quite happy to see more people use it. He also made a different one that some may like better, but I think this one is cool.

I understand you're trying to promote your own pool with the application, but I think you should add the ability to use different pools on your Bitminter application to gain even more of an audience (in turn getting you more miners on your pool).

I already prefer this beta app over GUIminer, the interface and ease-of-use are awesome.

Thanks

Yes, the miner might get more users if it worked with any pool. But I don't think it would work as well for supporting the BitMinter pool as it does today. I will consider adding support for other pools, though. At least as backup pools.

[Xephan]

Yes, the miner might get more users if it worked with any pool. But I don't think it would work as well for supporting the BitMinter pool as it does today. I will consider adding support for other pools, though. At least as backup pools.

Since you put in the work to tweak the client, I think it's fair if you wish to keep it exclusive to BitMinter in order to promote the pool. In which case, I don't think you should support backup pools... simply because offhand, I think I probably can use that function to use your client to mine at any other pool, not as a backup

[DrHaribo]

Since you put in the work to tweak the client, I think it's fair if you wish to keep it exclusive to BitMinter in order to promote the pool. In which case, I don't think you should support backup pools... simply because offhand, I think I probably can use that function to use your client to mine at any other pool, not as a backup

Hehe, yes, it could be used that way. But at the same time, backup pools is a nice feature to have. So far the server has been stable, but you never know.. Well, I have some other things to implement first anyway, so there is time to think about how this could be done.

[marks1976]

I love the software.  Really nice look to it.  Simple to use.  It makes showing my computer challenged friends easy to show how to mine.  I just set my friend up remotely from my house it was so simple.  If he can do it I think there is hope for bitcoin to make it mainstream. I will be jumping in soon I have to stay in mineco so I don't lose my shares until the block finishes.

[DrHaribo]

Issues with server. Working on it.

[DrHaribo]

Server is back up and everything seems to be running smoothly again.

Looks like it went down at 08:15 UTC and I got things running properly again at 10:15 UTC.

I'm very sorry it was down as long as 2 hours. I'm still in Las Vegas. I took a taxi to my hotel and tried to get things running again as fast as possible. Of course hotel wi-fi started to fail in the middle of things and I had to switch to internet over a cellphone.

Thanks to Soak for sending me a message that the pool was down.

The pool went down because the load had suddenly increased something awful. Not sure what did that. But after starting things back up, there was no problem. Will look into this later. It's 4 in the night here, so I must get some sleep.

[DrHaribo]

I love the software.  Really nice look to it.  Simple to use.  It makes showing my computer challenged friends easy to show how to mine.  I just set my friend up remotely from my house it was so simple.  If he can do it I think there is hope for bitcoin to make it mainstream. I will be jumping in soon I have to stay in mineco so I don't lose my shares until the block finishes.

Cool - this is exactly what I wanted to achieve with BitMinter.

[DrHaribo]

Already in the top ten! Should have a couple of GH/s for you all when I've finished - got three custom frame rigs to build

Nice! Feel free to post pics of the rigs if you want. My machines run pretty hot - I guess custom frames is what is needed.

ETA - sorry, just liked the name, I'm not even using the software because I've already built a Linux install based on phoenix - it installs on all my machines, regardless of number of GPUs, and builds a central webpage table that shows salient details of each machine, GPU miner instance, temp, speed, etc. for monitoring. My Apple Macs serve the webpage. It was just an excuse to mess about with Ruby again

Nice setup! Don't worry about not using the BitMinter client - it is of course purely optional.

[DrHaribo]

Yes, it's our first unlucky block. I hope we finish it soon.

Many pools struggling with long blocks lately, and some pools seem to get abandoned. I appreciate you guys sticking it out.

[joulesbeef]

couldnt sign up with chrome.. none of the open ids would work for me but aol and when it switched me to aol it put my username as joulesbeefhttp://aol ....w/e

ok so switched to IE.. got signed up.. when it asked for a wallet.. i copied and pasted one of my wallet addies that I have used many times before. it said all wallet addies must be 34 numbers, mine was 33.. and I have more than one that is 33.. so i picked one that had 34.

it was quite an adventure just to sign up.

and do you have json? or block stats

[DrHaribo]

And here I was thinking I can soon take off the "beta" stamp.

couldnt sign up with chrome.. none of the open ids would work for me but aol and when it switched me to aol it put my username as joulesbeefhttp://aol ....w/e

The website appears to work fine with chrome. I'll do some testing with chrome and the sign up though.

The AOL thing is a problem with logging in?

Could you tell me (PM if you want) which OpenID providers that wouldn't work? That way I can track down bugs.

ok so switched to IE.. got signed up.. when it asked for a wallet.. i copied and pasted one of my wallet addies that I have used many times before. it said all wallet addies must be 34 numbers, mine was 33.. and I have more than one that is 33.. so i picked one that had 34.

Oops! Thanks for catching this one. I have changed the validity check for bitcoin addresses. Just a (now correct) length check. Next I should let bitcoind validate addresses instead. Anyway, you should be able to set any valid bitcoin address now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

and do you have json? or block stats

There is some JSON data available:
http://bitminter.com/api/pool/stats
http://bitminter.com/api/pool/topten

Unfortunately no stats on current round yet. I would like to implement a new reward system before making those data available.

[ManOfKnight]

Man, hopefully we finish a block soon...the waiting is killing me.

Love the miner...actually have three people from work FINALLY getting into mining, as even at $7-8 it is still profitable for the casual miner.

The two I know of that are going to sign up have a 5870 and the other has a 4870.  That should add roughly another 540Mh/s to the pool.  If I can get the other two 5870's at work to join that would add another 900 Mh/s to the pool.