[350 GH/s] "Eligius" (experimental) pool: almost feeless PPS, hoppers welcome

[Luke-Jr]

So far how many blocks generated?

As of now it looks like 4!  Seems we're a bit on the lucky side right now.

I count 5.

I'm about to push out an update that makes it a lot more accurate with payouts. It will also recalculate the entire history of payouts. As a result, you may have extra rewards in the next block (as soon as there are fees to cover paying them out), or you might have your payout "docked" a little because it overpaid you. In any case, the margin of error from the old code was small, under 0.02 BTC total.

Another change is that the pool will no longer make payouts for amounts under 1 BTC. It will manage a virtual balance for your address until you have that much and make a single 1 BTC payout as soon as possible. On the other hand, if your address doesn't earn anything for a whole week, it will assume you've stopped mining on the pool and payout whatever is owed.

As always, I am open to constructive criticism and suggestions. I still don't have code to display these balances anywhere (they're basically calculated during block creation every time, to avoid any problems from orphaned blocks), but I hope to soon.

[Luke-Jr]

a few minutes ago v1.3 miner reported upstream RPC error and failed to reconnect to pool, I had to kill app and start it again

Sorry about that, I restarted bitcoind in preparation for the new pool script. It shouldn't happen again, when I do the real upgrade.

[pc]

What's the reasoning for not paying out under 1 BTC? If it's part of the generation transaction, then I wouldn't expect it would add much overhead to pay out less. Maybe you could have the password be the minimum amount you want paid?

What's the reasoning for the pool keeping all transaction fees? I'm certainly fine with a pool that takes a cut, since running a pool takes quite a bit of effort, but it feels weird to me to mine on a pool that requires transactions to have fees, but then not get any of them.

Just curious. I don't really do mining now that CPU mining is pretty much useless, but I fired up minerd at this for a bit until it submitted a few shares to test it.

[Luke-Jr]

What's the reasoning for not paying out under 1 BTC? If it's part of the generation transaction, then I wouldn't expect it would add much overhead to pay out less.

I'm assuming most people don't want to get bunches of tiny coins. It's fine for the pool, but you'll have to pay a hefty transaction fee when you want to spend them, simply due to the data size of the transaction.

Maybe you could have the password be the minimum amount you want paid?

I could, but then anyone random could hijack your address and change it easily. Better to find a happy medium, IMO.

What's the reasoning for the pool keeping all transaction fees? I'm certainly fine with a pool that takes a cut, since running a pool takes quite a bit of effort, but it feels weird to me to mine on a pool that requires transactions to have fees, but then not get any of them.

Originally, it was because the code had no way to know how much the fees added up to. With version 2 that changes, but the transactions are more or less work done by the pool, not the miners, so it makes more sense (to me) to have the pool simply keep those fees rather than taking a sizable percent out of the miners' fair work.

Just curious. I don't really do mining now that CPU mining is pretty much useless, but I fired up minerd at this for a bit until it submitted a few shares to test it.

Thanks. I'll try to get some kind of "what is my balance" online soon after I do the upgrade (which is mainly waiting on reactions and comments before I do it).

[LightRider]

Interesting idea, trying it out.

[danf]

ufasoft 0.7 seems to idle at 0mhash/s and doing nothing.

ufasoft 0.8 isn't working for me, either.

[Luke-Jr]

Could someone having trouble with ufasoft come on #bitcoin-dev so we can troubleshoot it?

[Luke-Jr]

Version 2 is now live and ready for testing. Anyone care to check http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/pool/balances.json?

[Grinder]

It ends with ,"":null}, but otherwise it seems fine.

[Luke-Jr]

It ends with ,"":null}, but otherwise it seems fine.

Yeah, stupid JSON won't let me just leave a trailing comma at the end of an object, and I'd rather throw that in than slow it down even a little with a stupid check every address...

[LightRider]

Should each miner have its own address? Does it confuse the code at all if they don't?

[grndzero]

Version 2 is now live and ready for testing. Anyone care to check http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/pool/balances.json?

I'm lost. How do I read the 3 fields?

[bolapara]

I'm lost. How do I read the 3 fields?

The last two fields are timestamps (number of seconds since epoch) but I'm not sure how to interpret the first field.

[Luke-Jr]

Should each miner have its own address? Does it confuse the code at all if they don't?

I can't think of any reason it would be a problem, but I'm not overly familiar with that part, and make no guarantees.

Version 2 is now live and ready for testing. Anyone care to check http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/pool/balances.json?

I'm lost. How do I read the 3 fields?

Balance is how much the pool considers owed to you if a block is found "now" (that is, it includes the payout of the currently-in-progress block); it is (as all data should be) denominated in raw bitcoin units aka Satoshis: divide by 100,000,000 to get the BTC equivalent.
Oldest is the time your balance went positive originally. In case there are more due for payout than the generation has to distribute, those waiting the longest get paid first.
Newest is the most recent time your balance was increased. If this gets to be over a week old, you will be paid your balance regardless of its value.

[Grinder]

If you're on Linux this script will display info about one address:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use JSON;
use LWP::Simple;

my $acc = shift;
my $data = decode_json(get('http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/pool/balances.json'))->{$acc};

printf "oldest: %4d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d\n",
    sub { $_[5]+1900, $_[4]+1, @_[3,2,1] }->(localtime($data->{oldest}));
printf "newest: %4d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d\n",
    sub { $_[5]+1900, $_[4]+1, @_[3,2,1] }->(localtime($data->{newest}));

printf("balance: %f\n", ( ($data->{balance}) / 100000000 ));

Save it, run chmod +x <filename> and then ./filename address

[Luke-Jr]

If you're on Linux this script will display info about one address:

alias poolinfo='curl -s http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/pool/balances.json|python -c "import json,sys,time;d=json.load(sys.stdin)[sys.argv[1]];print \"Oldest: %s\nNewest: %s\nBalance: %s\" % (time.ctime(d[\"oldest\"]),time.ctime(d[\"newest\"]),d[\"balance\"]/1e8)"'
poolinfo YourAddress

[grndzero]

Let the scripting wars begin!

Seriously, I suck at scripting.

[bitlotto]

You made it in the bitcoinwatch pie chart:

 

[aahzmundus]

That chart needs labels in GH/s... always bothered me..

[LightRider]

I've been mining for the last few hours and your site tells me I have no shares. Anyone else having this issue?

Switching away until issue resolved. Lost eight hours (at least) already.