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

[DrHaribo]

Amazing.  Switched over from Deepbit.  This pays more and is overall much better.  I love the client too!

Thank you for such an amazing pool.

Thank you, sir, and welcome aboard

In other news.. I'm thinking of arranging a Mint Race. Probably over a weekend. With bitcoin prizes for the top 3 winners. Now question is, what should miners get points for? Only proofs of work, making it a pure hash rate race? Or work, plus X points for making a bitcoin block, and Y points for making a namecoin block? Points for other things?

Any thoughts on length (48 hours?) and how big the prizes should be for it to be fun? (10 btc for 1st place?)

[Fefox]

Start it on a friday @ 00:01 GMT - End it Monday 23:59

Have a few categories: Open Class / Bitminter Client only class / FPGA Only / GPU / CPU

1 2 3 place most shares in each..

some kind of 50/50 donation draw. all donations of every .0005 or some set amount is a ticket to the draw, 50% stays with the pool, the other 50 goes to 3 winners 1st 25% / 2nd 15% / 3rd 10%

I really like the idea of, "Best Proof of Work"


what else guys?" I really like this idea.
 

[jake262144]

Stickied? Well done, let's hope the hash rate skyrockets to 3xx where it belongs.
Thanks for all your hard work Doc.

[P4man]

If you are going to make it simply a MH race, it will attract only GPUmax buyers, and those wont stick around. If you are going to make a competition of sorts, Id make sure everyone has at least a chance of winning, so you can attract any kind of miner and they might stick around.

Id make a mining raffle, where every submitted share is a ticket giving a chance to win. YOu might even allow people to buy additional tickets, although I assume the price wont make it worth it.

As for the prizes; well, the higher the better . Adjust the chance of winning to make it worth your while. Maybe you can throw in some feebies, like allowing the winner to chose some text to embed in the block header for posterity?

[DrHaribo]

Stickied? Well done, let's hope the hash rate skyrockets to 3xx where it belongs.
Thanks for all your hard work Doc.

Yay! Congrats everyone, we made it This should help with recruitment of new miners.

Have a few categories: Open Class / Bitminter Client only class / FPGA Only / GPU / CPU

Detecting which miner software people are using is already done, but whether they mine on FPGA/GPU/CPU is more difficult. I could make BitMinter client report it (make it an option maybe), but other miners won't.

some kind of 50/50 donation draw. all donations of every .0005 or some set amount is a ticket to the draw, 50% stays with the pool, the other 50 goes to 3 winners 1st 25% / 2nd 15% / 3rd 10%

I like this idea. That would give an extra incentive to donate during the race, which could hopefully cover some of the expense of prizes.

I really like the idea of, "Best Proof of Work"

Yes, I think that might work better than the number of proofs of work. Best proof of work = the proof of work with the lowest hash. I like how this is verifiable. If your miner reports when it creates a block (bitminter client does) then you can verify that blocks you created are credited to you. You can double check the hash on blockexplorer if you want. Lowest hash wins. Maybe call it "finest quality minting".

Anyone can get lucky and create the "best" block. But more hashes means a better chance to win.

Only downside is, if someone creates a block with an extremely low hash, others may give up as they see it as impossible to beat. So the race might effectively end near the beginning.

If you are going to make it simply a MH race, it will attract only GPUmax buyers, and those wont stick around. If you are going to make a competition of sorts, Id make sure everyone has at least a chance of winning, so you can attract any kind of miner and they might stick around.

You are right. What do you think of "best proof of work"? It may strike a good balance between hash power and luck. It's the same thing as with creating blocks. The race stats could even show "difficulty to beat" for the 3 best blocks.

Id make a mining raffle, where every submitted share is a ticket giving a chance to win. YOu might even allow people to buy additional tickets, although I assume the price wont make it worth it.

The 50/50 donation draw suggested by Fefox could work as a kind of raffle.

As for the prizes; well, the higher the better . Adjust the chance of winning to make it worth your while. Maybe you can throw in some feebies, like allowing the winner to chose some text to embed in the block header for posterity?

Hmm, yeah. That is a cool prize. blockchain.info shows the generation coinbase interpreted as text. The winner could get to include a message in a block we create after the race is over. Maybe put some restrictions on it so offensive messages are not allowed.

[molecular]

cross-post from old bitminter thread:

still getting •OpenID Failure: 0x704: I/O transport error:  here

+1

any solutions for this?

EDIT: the problems is surely with openid. The site itself (myname.openid.com) is sluggish/slow/broken. Still, maybe someone here knows what to do?

[DrHaribo]

EDIT: the problems is surely with openid. The site itself (myname.openid.com) is sluggish/slow/broken. Still, maybe someone here knows what to do?

It has happened once before. Seems exactly the same this time. myopenid.com is so slow that logins don't work. I hope it won't be long before they fix their site.

One time Verisign OpenID services were (completely) down for a while too.

Safest thing (once myopenid.com is working again) may be to register an extra OpenID from a different provider. You can do this at the BitMinter website by going to "my account" -> "logins" in the menus. If you have only registered one OpenID and the provider is down or even permanently down (going out of business for instance) then it becomes difficult to log in.

OpenID has many advantages, but unstable ID providers isn't one of them.

[Isokivi]

Good timing with the promotion a 15% difficulty increase means it's grow or die tie for small and mid-sized pools.

[DrHaribo]

Good timing with the promotion a 15% difficulty increase means it's grow or die tie for small and mid-sized pools.

Yeah, that's tough. Take a look at the oldest page of the block history. That was BitMinter in its early days. Difficulty even higher than now, and tiny hash power. We still managed to grow (slowly) but many other pools shut down.

[Turbor]

We still managed to grow (slowly) but many other pools shut down.

Sometimes it's better to grow slowly. BitMinter will survive.

[SgtMoth]

i like the 50/50 draw

[WhitePhantom]

Is this the first time the pool's had an orphaned block?  I don't recall seeing one before.

[DrHaribo]

Is this the first time the pool's had an orphaned block?  I don't recall seeing one before.

There's one more orphaned block in the block history. But that was really a stale. There was a bug that caused it to still pay out to users. Also there has been a couple namecoin orphans I think.

18 BTC paid out to users who have the prepay perk on, 32 BTC lost for those who didn't. And 18 BTC lost for me. Please don't make any more orphans.

[whiskers75]

Awesome site! Very easy to use, got mining in no time!
Thanks!

[SgtMoth]

whats a used 5970 worth, unmined one?

[DrHaribo]

Awesome site! Very easy to use, got mining in no time!
Thanks!

Thank you - welcome to the team!

[Isokivi]

whats a used 5970 worth, unmined one?

I recentley paid 250€ for one, with fairly little usage reported and condition that suggested nothing othervise, this is in Finland where 23% of the price is made up of taxes, so an untaxed usd price for comparison at todays exchage rates would be about 262$. I considered the price I got good and bought two units.

[SgtMoth]

i managed to get it for $190 canadian.  i like the fan design better then the 6990's, runs alot cooler too.  i blew up a psu lately and have two miners down, psu wont be here till later this week.

[Isokivi]

i managed to get it for $190 canadian.  i like the fan design better then the 6990's, runs alot cooler too.  i blew up a psu lately and have two miners down, psu wont be here till later this week.

I have one 6990 also, I'd advice to stay away from those, they are loud hot and hungry (energywise). I most definetley will not buy another one.

[molecular]

i managed to get it for $190 canadian.  i like the fan design better then the 6990's, runs alot cooler too.  i blew up a psu lately and have two miners down, psu wont be here till later this week.

I have one 6990 also, I'd advice to stay away from those, they are loud hot and hungry (energywise). I most definetley will not buy another one.

I can confirm that. Been comparing 5970 to 6990 (of a friend) last year. 5970 to be preferred (less power consumption, slightly better cooling solution)