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

[loshia]

Whatever DOC made if he made something at all he deserves it. Not mentioning the fact that probably some of the pools have some "bugs" not showing the orphans like Ozcoin according to DOC post. I do not know if they are paying the orphans or not though. I have not mined there and i am not bashing at ozcoin at all. Some of the pools "officially" do not support merged mining. And as we all know it is not a rocket science to merge mine especially when you are pool operator. And to take 2.5% (All NMC income) on top of their 4% donation right?

Doc please do your math and tell us what shall be minimal donation in order for pool to stay alive. You are the last one who shall pay for it

[DrHaribo]

While I think reducing block size would help a bit and I had a couple other ideas for reducing orphans, I believe Sturle's idea in combination with propagating blocks outside the bitcoin peer-to-peer network could make orphans nearly extinct. So I think that is the best way forward, for all pools.

I'll see what I can do. Stratum testing will hopefully begin soon. After that I have a few pressing matters of which the orphan problem is one. Priorities, priorities ..

Thanks for the support, guys, and thanks for running the numbers, philipma1957.

[organofcorti]

While I think reducing block size would help a bit and I had a couple other ideas for reducing orphans

I checked back in June - block size to that point had no significant influence on whether a block was orphaned or not. Maybe it does now.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88302.msg984376#msg984376

[juhakall]

I'm trying out BitMinter's GBT server for the first time, and got strange rejects on cgminer 2.9.5 almost immediately:

 [2012-11-28 00:50:30] Rejected 33f2f1eb Diff 4/4 GPU 2 pool 0 (unknown-work)
 [2012-11-28 00:50:38] Accepted 3b537d2f Diff 4/4 GPU 0 pool 0
 [2012-11-28 00:50:47] Accepted 387a7e01 Diff 4/4 GPU 2 pool 0
 [2012-11-28 00:50:57] Accepted 34475128 Diff 4/4 GPU 2 pool 0
 [2012-11-28 00:51:03] Accepted 378ea469 Diff 4/4 GPU 0 pool 0
 [2012-11-28 00:51:46] Accepted 1c1a6472 Diff 9/4 GPU 1 pool 0
 [2012-11-28 00:51:47] GBT LONGPOLL from pool 0 requested work restart
 [2012-11-28 00:51:49] GBT LONGPOLL from pool 0 requested work restart
 [2012-11-28 00:51:57] GBT LONGPOLL from pool 0 detected new block

As you can see, it comes seemingly in the middle of a block. I can't get a clear understanding of what's wrong with those, since a similar problem was supposed to be fixed in 2.9.4.

[DrHaribo]

I'm trying out BitMinter's GBT server for the first time, and got strange rejects on cgminer 2.9.5 almost immediately:

I am also running 2.9.5 testing GBT.  Not many rejects: A:54005  R:46. And I haven't seen any rejects that didn't happen at a block change.

Seems like we need a bit more testing. Anyone else seeing something like that?

[juhakall]

I am also running 2.9.5 testing GBT.  Not many rejects: A:54005  R:46. And I haven't seen any rejects that didn't happen at a block change.

Seems like we need a bit more testing. Anyone else seeing something like that?

I stopped having those rejects after changing all my rigs to BitMinter GBT. Could be just bad luck, but is it possible that having difficulty change dynamically may cause that kind of rejects? I don't have a good understanding of how dynamic difficulty works. At first the difficulty hovered around 1-2, but after pointing all the rigs at BitMinter GBT it's been stable at 4.

EDIT: Now my share difficulty went up to 8, and dropped back to 4 soon afterwards. If my hashrate is just about at the threshold between 4 and 8, at least I'm testing the dynamic difficulty thoroughly.

Yup, it's been changing between 4 and 8 for some time now.

[DrHaribo]

As I write this there are only 7 blocks left with 50 new coins in them. After that it's down to 25. Let's get block 209999! Fire up some extra miners.

I had my donations set at 2% BTC and  2.6% NMC . After the crunch of numbers I have decided to up my btc to 2.5% and my nmc to 4%.

Thank you, sir, much appreciated!

I stopped having those rejects after changing all my rigs to BitMinter GBT. Could be just bad luck, but is it possible that having difficulty change dynamically may cause that kind of rejects? I don't have a good understanding of how dynamic difficulty works. At first the difficulty hovered around 1-2, but after pointing all the rigs at BitMinter GBT it's been stable at 4.

With Stratum there has been some changes to how difficulty works. Earlier it could create a few rejects, but in the future hopefully it won't anymore.

GBT, however, should not. So you should not be seeing any rejects at all apart from at the block change (long poll) times.

Did you happen to catch the message about why the work was rejected?

[louisBSAS]

I haven't seen the difficulty go down yet as we just minted 210001 - hmmm...

[LazyOtto]

post reward reduction:

The "Expected per block" is wrong.

The amount actually awarded is correct.

-- edit --

Sorry, you said "difficulty". No, the difficulty won't change.
Not until GPU folks drop out and it goes down.
Or until ASIC folks begin and it goes up.

On the next regular ~2k block interval.

[conspirosphere.tk]

Just a question: does Bitminter includes TX fees in the miners payments?
Now after the halvening this is more important.

[Krak]

Just a question: does Bitminter includes TX fees in the miners payments?
Now after the halvening this is more important.

Read the title of the thread.

[WhitePhantom]

Doc, are we accidentally still being paid based on a 50 BTC block reward?

[DrHaribo]

Just a question: does Bitminter includes TX fees in the miners payments?
Now after the halvening this is more important.

Yep. If you click on the height numbers at bitminter.com/blocks you will see how much income there is from each block, and how much is paid out to miners (same number twice).

And you are right, this is now more important. Have a look at my answer to this question: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5515/how-much-is-a-mining-pool-share-worth-on-average
I ran some numbers there, and transaction fees and namecoins are now starting to matter. Put together they give about 3.4% extra income. So if you mine at a pool with 3% fees which doesn't pay transaction fees and namecoins, that's more like a 6.4% fee, which seems a bit steep.

Doc, are we accidentally still being paid based on a 50 BTC block reward?

No, BitMinter looks at the exact income from a block and shares that out to the miners, so it will never be wrong.

But...

post reward reduction:

The "Expected per block" is wrong.

The amount actually awarded is correct.

Yeah, sorry, I forgot this expected income per block shown on the account details page on the website, that number is based on each block giving 50 BTC. Will fix in a moment.

[DrHaribo]

"Expected per block" on website corrected to take the reward halving into account.

I also added MPoolMonitor under "tools" -> "third party apps" on the website.

[jamesg]

"Expected per block" on website corrected to take the reward halving into account.

I also added MPoolMonitor under "tools" -> "third party apps" on the website.

Hi Doc,

When can we expect vardiff and stratum support on the main pool?

Thanks,
gigavps

[DrHaribo]

When can we expect vardiff and stratum support on the main pool?

I have some little things still to do on Stratum support. I hope to enable Stratum on the testport within a couple days.

If everything runs perfectly I could perhaps enable Stratum and GBT with var diff on the main pool before the weekend is over. But perhaps delay var diff on getwork a bit longer until hashpower.com supports it.

Also I think ztexminer doesn't support var diff. And perhaps never will?

[jamesg]

If everything runs perfectly I could perhaps enable Stratum and GBT with var diff on the main pool before the weekend is over. But perhaps delay var diff on getwork a bit longer until hashpower.com supports it.

My only other concern with vardiff is that when you enabled it on the main pool, it was done per worker.

Does vardiff now work by used the x-mining-hashrate header if available?

[Luke-Jr]

If everything runs perfectly I could perhaps enable Stratum and GBT with var diff on the main pool before the weekend is over. But perhaps delay var diff on getwork a bit longer until hashpower.com supports it.

My only other concern with vardiff is that when you enabled it on the main pool, it was done per worker.

Does vardiff now work by used the x-mining-hashrate header if available?

GBT replaced X-Mining-Hashrate with the "target" request option (BIP 23 Basic Pool Extensions). Stratum has no equivalent (and no HTTP for headers) yet.

[DrHaribo]

My only other concern with vardiff is that when you enabled it on the main pool, it was done per worker.

Does vardiff now work by used the x-mining-hashrate header if available?

It uses x-mining-hashrate only for the initial difficulty. After it has measured the worker's hashrate it uses that as a basis for difficulty. Using only x-mining-hashrate basically means letting the user select the difficulty - I'm not sure that's a good idea.

I have a pool-wide setting for max difficulty though. I can set this to what is appropriate for 1 minirig now, and later adjust up to what is appropriate for 1 SC minirig. So 10 minirigs running on the same worker account will get the same difficulty as 1 minirig.

Is that then still an issue?

GBT replaced X-Mining-Hashrate with the "target" request option (BIP 23 Basic Pool Extensions). Stratum has no equivalent (and no HTTP for headers) yet.

I didn't implement the target request option yet. I don't know if I would use it for anything but the first minute either. Letting a user with 10+ TH/s set the difficulty makes me a bit uneasy.

[jamesg]

Is that then still an issue?

A max diff of around 20 would be nice.