[204 GH/s] yourbtc.net closing it's doors on 2011-12-08

[jamesg]

Wow!!! We just knocked down two blocks in 30 minutes! 

Let's keep'em coming.

[teukon]

Wow!!! We just knocked down two blocks in 30 minutes! 

Let's keep'em coming.

Very kind of you to use the word "We" there.

[jamesg]

Very kind of you to use the word "We" there.

Every share helps.

[teukon]

Very kind of you to use the word "We" there.

Every share helps.

We may end up getting a few more shares in the near future.  RFCPool.com has just closed and this small pool was PPLNS.  I doubt all of these miners are going to suddenly change to PPS+fee or Proportional.  However, I expect many will be looking specifically for PPLNS and so will go to mineco.in or simplecoin.us rather than here.

Ah well, there's always hope.

[urstroyer]

Registration still open until the pool reaches 100 Ghash/s.

Thats the point were i have to figure out if current donations are enough to compensate the risk i'am taking to keep paying rewards if pool runs unlucky.

[teukon]

Registration still open until the pool reaches 100 Ghash/s.

Thats the point were i have to figure out if current donations are enough to compensate the risk i'am taking to keep paying rewards if pool runs unlucky.

If you are running into problems with pool risk at large hashrates then perhaps you can tweak the parameters of DGM (making it more PPLNS like) so that you have less risk.

I would imagine that a fee should be brought in at some point and it should be done purely to pay for server costs and for your time.  At the moment you (and arguably gigavps) are providing a free service and you're simply not going to be able to sustain this on donations alone.

[freshzive]

Can someone explain why the risk is greater for urstroyer at higher hashrates? Just because there are more members and if the pool gets unlucky then a percentage of the payout comes from his pocket (which could be a large amount if we are going through lots of blocks)?

Sorry, I'm still catching up on the mathematics of all of this  

[freshzive]

Also, at the current rate, are you breaking even with a 2% donation from miners or would that need to be increased?

[Meni Rosenfeld]

and it should be done purely to pay for server costs and for your time.

I disagree. A fee should also be taken for the risk. It doesn't have to be a high fee if planned properly.

Can someone explain why the risk is greater for urstroyer at higher hashrates? Just because there are more members and if the pool gets unlucky then a percentage of the payout comes from his pocket (which could be a large amount if we are going through lots of blocks)?

Yes, that's basically it. With more miners there's more money passed around and more to lose if the pool gets unlucky. More formally, the variance of the number of blocks found is proportional to the hashrate. But the relative variance is inversely proportional to the hashrate, so with proper planning more hashrate is a good thing.

[teukon]

Also, at the current rate, are you breaking even with a 2% donation from miners or would that need to be increased?

If you check out http://yourbtc.net/content/overview-bitcoin you'll see that the actual donation is much less than 2%.

and it should be done purely to pay for server costs and for your time.

I disagree. A fee should also be taken for the risk. It doesn't have to be a high fee if planned properly.

I don't doubt that, for DGM, the best approach in the long term would be to change a fee to offset the intrinsic pool operator risk.  In the reasonably short term (order months - sorry I wasn't clear) I think it will be tough for a small pool that needs income to survive.  In this context it might make sense to start requiring a fee but I feel such a fee should be used as efficiently as possible.  I'd rather see it all spent on the server and operator's time and have the parameters of DGM tweaked so that the risk is covered by donations.  This will mean higher share variance for a lower fee and I must admit I'm biased towards such models.

That said, if this pool started charging a fee to offset pool operator risk I'd still continue to use it so I'm probably best ignored.

[freshzive]

Also, at the current rate, are you breaking even with a 2% donation from miners or would that need to be increased?

If you check out http://yourbtc.net/content/overview-bitcoin you'll see that the actual donation is much less than 2%.

But isn't that just because some of you have changed your donation to 0%?

[urstroyer]

After a few days, it is safe to say, that merged mining implementation works really well.

Already over 20 nmc blocks where found, distributed on double geometric method and converted to btc for payout. This should be a nice boost for your mining rewards.

We recently added luck graphs for each blockchain, if you are interested:
https://yourbtc.net/content/luck-bitcoin
https://yourbtc.net/content/luck-namecoin

[teukon]

After a few days, it is safe to say, that merged mining implementation works really well.

Already over 20 nmc blocks where found, distributed on double geometric method and converted to btc for payout. This should be a nice boost for your mining rewards.

We recently added luck graphs for each blockchain, if you are interested:
https://yourbtc.net/content/luck-bitcoin
https://yourbtc.net/content/luck-namecoin

I've just seen some of the changes to the site and everything looks good to me.  Well, to be honest, I still think "Estimated Payout" and "Estimated Payout next Block" are incorrect labels but it seems I'm the only one that has a problem with this so I'll just let it go.  Changing all the "Invalid" to "Efficiency" is much appreciated, consistency is good.

The luck graph with 20 entries seem fine to me.  I think the luck graphs are a very useful element of the site and are good for people scouting for new sites to see at a glance that the site is working fine.

The pool seems to be settling down nicely after the upheaval of merged mining.  The only minor problem I see now is that the site is down.  Other than that everything looks good.

[Pontius]

Looks like the pool is down again; website is unreachable and all my workers are on the backup pool.

[freakfantom]

Looks like the pool is down again; website is unreachable and all my worker are on the backup pool.

yep pool is down about 2 hours already... urstroyer, please, investigate stability issues.

[urstroyer]

Looks like the pool is down again; website is unreachable and all my worker are on the backup pool.

yep pool is down about 2 hours already... urstroyer, please, investigate stability issues.

Server is up and running again, sorry for the outage.

I identified the possible source of the problem and will report back soon.

[urstroyer]

Also this week here are some exciting news for you:

- BTC block and converted NMC payments are now combined and send as one payment instead of two.
- E-Mail notifications about BTC payments can be disabled by every pool member (enabled by default).
- Added FAQ content for more information about how payment for both Bitcoin and Namecoin work.
- Lots of other cosmetic improvements and bugfixes on the web frontend.

Promise: I won't get lazy now, still a load of new features incomming over the next weeks!

[teukon]

Some minor points on the charts:

- Credit History charts still have an old "Estimated Payout" label at the bottom.
- The geomap occasionally displays the figures on the colour key to a large number of decimal places.
- Credit History charts need a scale on the x-axis.
- The Namecoin luck chart could do with labels for the scale on the y-axis.

[teukon]

Urstroyer?  Have you considered asking for this pool to be added to the pool comparison table discussed here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12920.0?

I've come across this at several points in the past and it appears to be actively maintained.  I think yourbtc.net would look pretty good on this list and its inclusion may attract a few more miners.

Just a thought.

[urstroyer]

Some minor points on the charts:

- Credit History charts still have an old "Estimated Payout" label at the bottom.
- The geomap occasionally displays the figures on the colour key to a large number of decimal places.
- Credit History charts need a scale on the x-axis.
- The Namecoin luck chart could do with labels for the scale on the y-axis.

All issues fixed.

Can't reproduce the large number of decimal places on our geomap. If it happens again, it would be great if you could take a screenshot for me.