Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB

[KNK]

... it's a little higher than 2% recently, but not much

Exactly my point 2% is not much:
 

• There is a new block each 600 seconds (by design)
• Once the block changes, the pool needs CPU power (and time) to prepare a new list of transactions and send it to miners
• If the pool waits for that list before sending work to miners it will waste their resources - mining on old block and producing staled shares just to be rejected later
• Long pooling was introduced exactly for that - to reduce the staled shares by providing new block to work on, immediately when the old is solved from someone
• But the pool server needs time for that, except if it is empty block which is much faster and can be partially pre-calculated

OK, so we need to send such empty block and replace it later with a normal one ... now from the miner's perspective:
 

• New empty block is received - miner start working on it not wasting power on rejects
• New full block arrives (2-5 sec later, depending on pool power and miner connection speed) - the miner discards the work on empty block, BUT only those that are waiting for processing, because if the processing was started (i.e. sent to the ASIC chip) it may produce a valid block
• The jobs that were sent to the ASIC chip may take from 1 to 3 sec (depending on miner processing power and connection speed) to be returned as valid solution to the pool

OK, so an empty block may be returned for up to 10 sec - lets see how it compares to 600 sec - 1.66666%
How much is 2% - 12 sec and 2.5% is 15 sec

Q. What if the pool does not send an empty block to work on?
A. The miner works for 2-5 sec on stale block or about 1% stale and useless shares

Q. Which is better 2% empty blocks or 1% wasted work
A. ?
Hint: Note that solving an empty block strengthens the block chain and does not interfere with solving another one full of transactions few seconds later

[jonnybravo0311]

Since it's kind of relevant to the discussion... I rebuilt the file, and identified as many pools as I could.  For any empty block I could not identify the pool, I put the payout address.  You can find that file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tisp9mj6a369dds/empty_blocks.csv?dl=0

By the way, as of block 360520, Eligius has 231 empty blocks.  The very first empty block mined by Eligius was July 7, 2011 at 15:02:12 UTC.  The last empty block mined by Eligius was 353712 on April 25, 2015 at 22:16:14 UTC.

[Biomech]

Ok, I concede I stepped in that one. I still don't see it as a big deal, but I guess I see the relevance.

[KNK]

By the way, as of block 360520, Eligius has 231 empty blocks.  The very first empty block mined by Eligius was July 7, 2011 at 15:02:12 UTC.  The last empty block mined by Eligius was 353712 on April 25, 2015 at 22:16:14 UTC.

Let's take a look only for blocks between 350k and 360k = 10k blocks, as for that period the pools percentage from the network was almost constant and for ease of calculations:
 

• AntPool - 91 blocks with 19% of the network or ~4.8 empty blocks per percent of hasrate
• Discus - 66 with 20% or 3.3 per %
• Eligius - 3 with 3% or 1 per %
• KnC - 21 with 6% or 3.5 per %

     ...
 Total - 214 or 2.14%

As you can see Eligius has the lowest number of empty blocks per percent - 3 times lower than others

[Mikestang]

By the way, as of block 360520, Eligius has 231 empty blocks.  The very first empty block mined by Eligius was July 7, 2011 at 15:02:12 UTC.  The last empty block mined by Eligius was 353712 on April 25, 2015 at 22:16:14 UTC.

Let's take a look only for blocks between 350k and 360k = 10k blocks, as for that period the pools percentage from the network was almost constant and for ease of calculations:
 

• AntPool - 91 blocks with 19% of the network or ~4.8 empty blocks per percent of hasrate
• Discus - 66 with 20% or 3.3 per %
• Eligius - 3 with 3% or 1 per %
• KnC - 21 with 6% or 3.5 per %

     ...
 Total - 214 or 2.14%

As you can see Eligius has the lowest number of empty blocks per percent - 3 times lower than others

Did the other 52% of the network have 0 empty blocks in that time?

[KNK]

...
 Total - 214 or 2.14%
...

Did the other 52% of the network have 0 empty blocks in that time?

The other 52% have the rest of those 214

[Mikestang]

...
 Total - 214 or 2.14%
...

Did the other 52% of the network have 0 empty blocks in that time?

The other 52% have the rest of those 214

Doh, I didn't add up the 0 blocks; I should have mathed harder.

[thedreamer]

It's doing it again. 

I have been looking at my earnings all day.

It was showing estimated earnings of 0.16xxx BTC.
I checked now and it's down to 0.094BTC.

Why is this happening??

[toptek]

WoW the difficulty just went up anyone see that coming i kept seeing it was going down. I guess i need to watch other sites to now .

NM I should ask whats the best site to watch for difficulty ?.






 

[Biomech]

WoW the difficulty just went up anyone see that coming i kept seeing it was going down. I guess i need to watch other sites to now .

NM I should ask whats the best site to watch for difficulty ?.






 

bitcoind

[thedreamer]

It's doing it again. 

I have been looking at my earnings all day.

It was showing estimated earnings of 0.16xxx BTC.
I checked now and it's down to 0.094BTC.

Why is this happening??

Anyone? After the last block my actual earnings were 0.02btc.. WTF?? Should have been 0.19 after the hashes I sent here.

[wizkid057]

Estimated earnings only go down if you stop mining during an unlucky round.  Meaning you stop adding shares to the top of the share log and your older shares get buried under those from people who are contributing.  Lots of posts and information on this around already.  If you think there is a real problem, please open a ticket.  (There has never been a real problem along these lines.)

---

Greetings Eligius miners,

So, I just wanted to give an update on the pool and some other things.

First, my apologies for my apparent lack of attentiveness to the pool.  While publicly it may not seem like a lot is going on, I have  several improvements and updates in the works.  One major change is that I will be migrating the physical hardware for the pool over to new hardware in a new data center soon.  For miners this will be pretty seamless, with the exception of some quick connection drops/reconnects (I'll post around to announce when this is to occur) as miners end up on the new servers.  In the end the pool's capacity will be upgraded and the functionality of the front end stats will be able to be expanded.  The new web server machines will be able to handle much more intense stats usage and I'll finally be able to enable some long awaited features such as full address hash rate and balance histories.

Next, as some of you may already know, I've had quite a bit going on outside of the pool in real life.  Not much negative, fortunately, but quite a lot of things happening.  I recently moved, changed job positions (same company), and married my girlfriend/fiance of many years.  My new job position requires substantially less travel than my former one, which is a plus, but the workload has been leaking into my personal time more often than I would have liked.  This, at least, should be remedied pretty soon, though.  So between getting settled into my new place (which has brought about many projects of its own), traveling for our wedding planning/wedding/honeymoon (most of our families are not where we moved to, so had the wedding near them), and overall just having a full plate lately I haven't been able to devote as much time as I would have liked to improving Eligius.

Finally things are winding down and I can get back to putting more effort into more than just maintenance for Eligius.

Some changes coming very soon:  The bitcoin network is moving towards mining only v3 blocks (more information on this available elsewhere), and Eligius is now a minority in still mining v2 blocks.  v2 blocks haven't started being rejected yet, since 95% of the last 1000 blocks haven't ever been v3 blocks yet, triggering this to happen (adoption seems to have leveled off just below ~80% as of now).  I've been watching this very closely and rest assured that Eligius will be mining the correct block version when it is needed.  I've been testing some updates to make this change and some other pool server improvements before making them live, and everything seems fine so far.  If need be I can switch everything over to this code base on a moment's notice, but I'd prefer to get more testing in before that happens.  I'd prefer to just have Eligius contributing to the switch to v3 rather than reacting to it.

This change basically doesn't have any effect on miners unless you're mining using GBT and a version of bfgminer prior to 5.1.0.  If you are one of these miners, please upgrade bfgminer to the latest version ASAP as this change will occur very soon.

Aside from that, keep an eye here and on the stats home page for the latest updates.  Honestly, the main website hasn't been well maintained and will be replaced with something new once the changeover to the new data center is complete.

Eligius is a great pool, and I believe the only zero fee pool still.  I have no plans to shutdown the pool while there are still miners mining and making use of the service.  Even with just a small portion of the network hash rate Eligius is a very viable pool choice.

If anyone has any suggestions for improvements or has anything to volunteer/contribute to the pool, please don't hesitate to drop me a line.  (PM here, freenode IRC, or my nick at google's-free-email-service-domain.com)

Thanks everyone!

-wk

P.S. - Full disclosure:  I personally do not really mine anymore since my move.  I stopped buying mining hardware when it became apparent that the price vs return was pretty unattractive and the hardware I have uses more in electricity costs that it would produce in BTC/USD.  Even if electricity were free the hardware I have (only about 4 Th worth) wouldn't produce much these days anyway to make it worth maintaining (mainly dealing with the heat).  I still use my miners for testing purposes, however, and I keep one small miner running on Eligius as a continuous monitoring effort on top of other monitoring efforts.

That said, if the economics of mining work for you, by all means continue to do so.  I no longer mine full time myself, but I still fully support everyone who uses Eligius and will continue to do so.

[thedreamer]

Estimated earnings only go down if you stop mining during an unlucky round.  Meaning you stop adding shares to the top of the share log and your older shares get buried under those from people who are contributing.  Lots of posts and information on this around already.  If you think there is a real problem, please open a ticket.  (There has never been a real problem along these lines.)

Ahh.. I thought that all shares contributed will get shelved and eventually paid for when a block is found. I thought that was the whole point of Eligius' setup.

[wizkid057]

Estimated earnings only go down if you stop mining during an unlucky round.  Meaning you stop adding shares to the top of the share log and your older shares get buried under those from people who are contributing.  Lots of posts and information on this around already.  If you think there is a real problem, please open a ticket.  (There has never been a real problem along these lines.)

Ahh.. I thought that all shares contributed will get shelved and eventually paid for when a block is found. I thought that was the whole point of Eligius' setup.

It is unlikely, in the long term, for all shares to be paid.  Many will remain shelved indefinitely due to variance that mainly is caused by orphaned blocks.  The variance long term for Eligius comes out to ~98% shares paid.  Keep in mind this isn't a fee, this is variance, which you will also experience on any other pool.  Except with other pools it will be the 98% shares paid minus a fee, so still less earnings than Eligius even if both pools found blocks in the same amount of shares.

Shares are paid in a LIFO (last in, first out) fashion.  As in, the newest shares submitted when a block is found will be paid first.  If your shares were shelved under other miners' shares since you stopped mining then everyone else who continued to mine will be paid before you.  If the pool is lucky enough to dig back to the point in the share log where your shares are, they will be paid, sure.  But your overall percentage of shares rewarded is more likely to remain reasonable if you mine continuously.  If you stop mining during a very unlucky round it could be days, weeks, or more before the pool gets to your shelved shares.

[chalkboard17]

Eligius is a great pool, and I believe the only zero fee pool still.  I have no plans to shutdown the pool while there are still miners mining and making use of the service.  Even with just a small portion of the network hash rate Eligius is a very viable pool choice.

It sure is. Thank you!

[toptek]

Sense I started using this pool back in Sept or Oct of last year i was impressed then but didn't go hard core here till Jan of this year and so far this year I have mined close to 5.95684118 BTC according to my stats but some of that was from last year maybe a half a coin. I all most gave up mining about the time the S5 came out now i can't i have pretty much made all i Put into my S5s back, i can honestly say  , a friend asked me that the other day, it got me thinking and  i can say with all honestly i have at this pool a lone and I all most gave up on this site a week or so a ago then it magically started working right or seemed to.

I think i would be lost without it being here now that I use this pool as my main mining BTC pool.


I think i finally figure out just how the payout works or it seems this way. in simple terms the -  Estimated Change: we all ways get at the beginning of the next new block and the + a mount we get at the end of said block for what we did in that block . that's the simple way i see it and it seems to work that way . and the negative or - a mount is because of bad pool luck .


 I love this pool no fees, how the pay system works, is awesome.

[abbeytim]

love this pool wish we could get more hashrate on here to compete with cloud mining and other huge centralzed pools

[toptek]

I DO hope this happens in about 7 days 


Next difficulty retarget occurs at block 362879 (eta 7,8 days): 45731601773.4 / -7,97 % [est.]

[noobtrader]

congratulations on your weeding wedding  

[Biomech]

congratulations on your weeding 

yeah, and the wedding too