[ANN] NiceHash.com - sell & buy hash rate cloud mining service / multipool

[greatwolf]

For the Bitcoin Armory website:

Sending less than 0.01 BTC to any recipient — The network considers these small outputs to be “dust,” and discourages them by requiring a fee. If it was not discouraged, someone could take 1.0 BTC, and create 1,000,000 transactions of 0.000001 BTC each, for free, which would clog the network. So, that's one definition of dust.

If you have received lots of "dust" and try to spend it, you will end up paying ridiculously high tx fees, which can even be over 75% of the amount of bitcoin sent!


TL;DR:  We all really want to avoid receiving lots of dust, because *we* will pay huge fees when trying to use (spend) those bitcoins afterwards.

One man's "dust" is another man's micropayment.

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[TransAtlantic]

TL;DR:  We all really want to avoid receiving lots of dust, because *we* will pay huge fees when trying to use (spend) those bitcoins afterwards.

I'm not sure I understand your concern. One input contributes 148 bytes to the transaction size. You can have up to six inputs and still fit within 1KB and pay only the default transaction fee. FAQ states "Payments are issued four times a day if your unpaid balance is greater than 0.002", which doesn't add up even to a 1% transaction fee in the worst case scenario.

What do you want to purchase for 0.012 BTC? (That's 6 times 0.002 BTC.)  And what if you want to spend 0.1 BTC, or even 1 BTC?  Or even transfer your coins to an exchange, for whatever reason.  That's when the huge fees come in.

Try sending, let's say, 500 of these recent small amounts you received (you can select them using Coin Control) to one of your own address - you will see the important fee you will have.     (You don't need to complete the transaction, your client will ask you to confirm it when displaying the fee.)

You won't run bankrupt by paying 0.010 BTC or even 0.030 BTC in fees - but I would rather prefer to keep those BTC for myself (especially as it will represent a few days' worth of mining).

Anything which is smaller than, let's say, 0.01 BTC, and in big quantities, is dust.  And lots of dust = lots of fees.

If the payments would be once per day, the size of each transaction would be 4 times bigger, there would be 4 times less individual transactions, and it would give you 4 times less fees (much less than that, actually).

Anyhow, I do not see the point of being paid every 6 hours.  Is it really that people do not trust the pool owner and think he will run away with coins if they are not distributed straight away, and they would fear too much if he would only distribute once per day? 

I guess I should ask my employer to pay me every 2 hours, and not every 2 weeks... 

[suchmoon]

What do you want to purchase for 0.012 BTC? (That's 6 times 0.002 BTC.)  And what if you want to spend 0.1 BTC, or even 1 BTC?  Or even transfer your coins to an exchange, for whatever reason.  That's when the huge fees come in.

Try sending, let's say, 500 of these recent small amounts you received (you can select them using Coin Control) to one of your own address - you will see the important fee you will have.     (You don't need to complete the transaction, your client will ask you to confirm it when displaying the fee.)

You won't run bankrupt by paying 0.010 BTC or even 0.030 BTC in fees - but I would rather prefer to keep those BTC for myself (especially as it will represent a few days' worth of mining).

Anything which is smaller than, let's say, 0.01 BTC, and in big quantities, is dust.  And lots of dust = lots of fees.

If the payments would be once per day, the size of each transaction would be 4 times bigger, there would be 4 times less individual transactions, and it would give you 4 times less fees (much less than that, actually).

Anyhow, I do not see the point of being paid every 6 hours.  Is it really that people do not trust the pool owner and think he will run away with coins if they are not distributed straight away, and they would fear too much if he would only distribute once per day? 

I guess I should ask my employer to pay me every 2 hours, and not every 2 weeks... 

You seem to be jumping all over the place with this. You mentioned up to 75% in fees. The fact is NiceHash payouts can't add up to more than 1% in fees in the worst case scenario, no matter if you collect 0.01, 0.1, or 1.0 BTC.

If you collect 1 BTC in 500 payouts, that's 125 days of mining (again, worst case assuming you hit exactly 0.002 four times a day). Your fees will be very low because input age is a factor too. Have you actually read the webpage you linked to?

http://bitcoinfees.com/

[phzi]

TL;DR:  We all really want to avoid receiving lots of dust, because *we* will pay huge fees when trying to use (spend) those bitcoins afterwards.

I'm not sure I understand your concern. One input contributes 148 bytes to the transaction size. You can have up to six inputs and still fit within 1KB and pay only the default transaction fee. FAQ states "Payments are issued four times a day if your unpaid balance is greater than 0.002", which doesn't add up even to a 1% transaction fee in the worst case scenario.

What do you want to purchase for 0.012 BTC? (That's 6 times 0.002 BTC.)  And what if you want to spend 0.1 BTC, or even 1 BTC?  Or even transfer your coins to an exchange, for whatever reason.  That's when the huge fees come in.

Try sending, let's say, 500 of these recent small amounts you received (you can select them using Coin Control) to one of your own address - you will see the important fee you will have.     (You don't need to complete the transaction, your client will ask you to confirm it when displaying the fee.)

If you know how to use Coin Control, I don't know why you need this explained to you... But, you can use Coin Control to combine your dust for free, as long as it has aged sufficiently.  You simply make many transactions that are just below the notx fee size limit, and re-spend your dust to yourself.  Rinse and repeat until you have one block sum and no dust.  It takes a few minutes to do manually with lots of small dust, but you should never have to pay fees on it.

[TransAtlantic]

What do you want to purchase for 0.012 BTC? (That's 6 times 0.002 BTC.)  And what if you want to spend 0.1 BTC, or even 1 BTC?  Or even transfer your coins to an exchange, for whatever reason.  That's when the huge fees come in.

Try sending, let's say, 500 of these recent small amounts you received (you can select them using Coin Control) to one of your own address - you will see the important fee you will have.     (You don't need to complete the transaction, your client will ask you to confirm it when displaying the fee.)

You won't run bankrupt by paying 0.010 BTC or even 0.030 BTC in fees - but I would rather prefer to keep those BTC for myself (especially as it will represent a few days' worth of mining).

Anything which is smaller than, let's say, 0.01 BTC, and in big quantities, is dust.  And lots of dust = lots of fees.

If the payments would be once per day, the size of each transaction would be 4 times bigger, there would be 4 times less individual transactions, and it would give you 4 times less fees (much less than that, actually).

Anyhow, I do not see the point of being paid every 6 hours.  Is it really that people do not trust the pool owner and think he will run away with coins if they are not distributed straight away, and they would fear too much if he would only distribute once per day? 

I guess I should ask my employer to pay me every 2 hours, and not every 2 weeks... 

You seem to be jumping all over the place with this. You mentioned up to 75% in fees. The fact is NiceHash payouts can't add up to more than 1% in fees in the worst case scenario, no matter if you collect 0.01, 0.1, or 1.0 BTC.

If you collect 1 BTC in 500 payouts, that's 125 days of mining (again, worst case assuming you hit exactly 0.002 four times a day). Your fees will be very low because input age is a factor too. Have you actually read the webpage you linked to?

http://bitcoinfees.com/

I am sorry to contradict you, but you would still have a huge fee for that transaction.  Input age is a factor, but divided by the size (in bytes) of the transaction - so your transaction would still have a quite low priority, and would therefore incur fees.  That wouldn't change much over time, unless you *only* take older transactions and not take the newest ones.

Furthermore, at 148 bytes per input, 500 inputs would give you 74000 bytes (74 KB !! ), which is quite a large transaction!  It might take a while before miners accept to process that transaction, as bitcoin miners are know to choose smaller transactions, therefore faster to incorporate into blocks, as a few milliseconds of delay can mean that another competing miner finds a block before them - and a 25 BTC reward is much more important than a miner's fee of 0.0xx BTC.
(it should eventually go through after a few days, up to a week, though - but don't expect such a large transaction to go through immediately, that's for sure!)

I am certain that the fees coming out from nicehash payments will be will be much higher than 1%.  I've had fees of around 3-4% with lots of "small" transactions which actually were 10-20 times bigger than those small transactions here.

You are right, though, that you won't get 75% in fees with payments of 0.002 BTC - it would need to be smaller dust than that.  But ridiculously high fees with dust (even up to 90% of the amount that was intended to be spent) have been seen.  Here is an example:  http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1f4t2e/90_transaction_fee_how_can_this_be_avoided/

Amounts of 0.002 BTC _are_ very small amounts.  ($0.85 USD at the current rate of $425/BTC.)  I cannot understand the usefulness of receiving such small payments - especially when we all know it will increase the fees and will cause us some slight annoyances when spending it.  That is way "un-optimal".
If I was to spend another 2-3% in fees, I would rather prefer to give it to the pool operator, for all his good work, instead of spending it on tx fees (which goes to other miners, and do not profit people around here).

[TransAtlantic]

If you know how to use Coin Control, I don't know why you need this explained to you... But, you can use Coin Control to combine your dust for free, as long as it has aged sufficiently.  You simply make many transactions that are just below the notx fee size limit, and re-spend your dust to yourself.  Rinse and repeat until you have one block sum and no dust.  It takes a few minutes to do manually with lots of small dust, but you should never have to pay fees on it.

I agree with you.
However, if you are able to wait for your coins to age before spending them, then you should also be able to wait 1 day (instead of only 6 hours) before receiving your mining payment from nicehash - and that would save you from doing this manual exercise of combining dust to send it to yourself.  


That is, basically, my whole point.  What is the usefulness of receiving payments every 6 hours instead of once per day?  I can only see disadvantages (even though it seems that some do not agree with the exact figures).

[suchmoon]

I am certain that the fees coming out from nicehash payments will be will be much higher than 1%.

Can you provide a specific calculation how you came up with that conclusion? Forget aging, let's leave that as a homework. Just using plain number of inputs and transaction size, how does that come to more than 1%?

[suchmoon]

Both Scrypt and Scrypt-N ports seem to be down for me, although stats show other miners mining. Am I banned? 

[mrflibblehat]

Both Scrypt and Scrypt-N ports seem to be down for me, although stats show other miners mining. Am I banned? 

Takes me about 15 minutes to connect. otherwise it just says pool is down, persevere with it, you will get mining.

[suchmoon]

Both Scrypt and Scrypt-N ports seem to be down for me, although stats show other miners mining. Am I banned? 

Takes me about 15 minutes to connect. otherwise it just says pool is down, persevere with it, you will get mining.

What do you mean? Cudaminer is trying every 15 seconds and failing, what can I possibly do to force it to connect?

[kenshirothefist]

What do you mean? Cudaminer is trying every 15 seconds and failing, what can I possibly do to force it to connect?

We've forced some DDoS rules that might ban some of the legit users, unfortunately. We're being hit by smart DDoS with fake miners and we have to fine tune our filter to not ban the legit miners. Please, send me you IP to PM, we'll investigate why your IP is banned. Thanks!

[ahmedjadoon]

Scrypt rate is dropped significantly.I think no more profitable coin to mine.

[phzi]

Scrypt rate is dropped significantly.I think no more profitable coin to mine.

No pump of the day right now, so all the scrypt mining profitability is close to or below LTC (king of scrypt).

[mrflibblehat]

Both Scrypt and Scrypt-N ports seem to be down for me, although stats show other miners mining. Am I banned? 

Takes me about 15 minutes to connect. otherwise it just says pool is down, persevere with it, you will get mining.

What do you mean? Cudaminer is trying every 15 seconds and failing, what can I possibly do to force it to connect?

SGMiner actually, But yeah, I just imagined the stratum was overloaded.

[suchmoon]

What do you mean? Cudaminer is trying every 15 seconds and failing, what can I possibly do to force it to connect?

We've forced some DDoS rules that might ban some of the legit users, unfortunately. We're being hit by smart DDoS with fake miners and we have to fine tune our filter to not ban the legit miners. Please, send me you IP to PM, we'll investigate why your IP is banned. Thanks!

Wow, that's just totally fucked up. Why don't you look up legitimate users in your database, you know - ones that were SUCCESSFULLY SUBMITTING WORK FOR WEEKS, and unban them?

BTW what happened to Scrypt-N doesn't seem like "some of the legit users", more like 100% were banned:

[uberua]

I'm mining at another pool and using nicehash as reserve pool, it's in settings of my main pool web page. Before everything worked fine and when my rig had no job at my main pool it was switching to nicehash. Now this option stopped working today and their web page shows warning:
 "This pool (meaning nicepool) issued a client.reconnect which is incompatible with our service. In order to keep our system from getting banned by the remote pool (nicehash) we've temporarily disabled this connection"
I've got a question to support or developers how can I make it work like it was working all time before today (I'm using sgminer 4.1.153 from the start of nicehash).
Thank you.

Update to NiceHash sgminer and reconnects will not happen.

Well I did updated to NiceHash sgminer today and have the same issue again.
Any more suggestions?

[kenshirothefist]

GridSeed users:

We've already patched David Bartle's fork: https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355

See commits from May 07, 2014: https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355/commits/master

If you're familiar with the build process I welcome you to  compile your own builds from this GIT repo (https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355.git) and then test if your ASIC miners are working properly with NiceHash (you should get almost no rejects from US East or EU). We'll also provide windows and linux binaries for https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355 in the near future.

[kenshirothefist]

I would rather prefer if payments (for providers) be made only once per day.  With the current rates, having payments 4 times per day only produces dust (or near-dust) for 98% of the miners (that is, everyone apart from the top 15 miners with huge hashrates), and so we will all end up paying huge tx fees for using those btc in the future.

kenshirothefist, would changing that be something you could consider?

Thanks for all the rest of the good work! 

This has already been explained in the past. Payments are sent in a single transaction for all miners, thus the transaction fee is negligible. Furthermore, transaction fees for outgoing payments are covered by NiceHash and are included in the NiceHash 2% service fee (all costs are covered in the 2% service fee). We want the providers to be paid fast, that's why we want to keep multiple payments per day. Anyway, isn't that the whole point of Bitcoin - to make a quick and seamless currency flow?

[jjj0923]

GridSeed users:

We've already patched David Bartle's fork: https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355

See commits from May 07, 2014: https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355/commits/master

If you're familiar with the build process I welcome you to  compile your own builds from this GIT repo (https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355.git) and then test if your ASIC miners are working properly with NiceHash (you should get almost no rejects from US East or EU). We'll also provide windows and linux binaries for https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355 in the near future.

what was the nature and reason for the patch - I've been using cgminer and love it because it's got a monitoring api - any reason to switch to cpuminer for my seeds and blades?

thanks

[jimlite]

TO NICEHASH STAFF:

YOU NEED TO ANSWER YOUR EMAILS