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

[Inous]

Quick question. When you get a stale/invalid do you still get paid for that, and what is an invalid/stale anyway?

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[Luke-Jr]

Quick question. When you get a stale/invalid do you still get paid for that, and what is an invalid/stale anyway?

A stale block occurs when two miners find the same block at basically the same time. Due to the design of Bitcoin, only one of them can be the "real" block. Until the next block is found, they continue to compete by the miners who are looking for the next block; when the next block is found, the one it chose to be based on becomes the real block, and the other one becomes an orphan. At that time, it basically ceases to exist retroactively.

When Eligius has a stale block, it works the same way: it ceases to exist. Payouts in that block (usually rewards for the same block) cease to exist. Your shares are counted toward the next block, just as if the stale one was never found, so they will be paid when the pool finds its next block.

Stale blocks should not be confused with stale shares, which is what your mining program might report. A stale share occurs when the pool has already moved on to the next block, yet your miner is still submitting shares against the last block. Eligius supports long polling, so it can tell miners immediately when it moves on to a new block. Therefore, if your miner continues to submit stale shares, they are rejected as invalid and not counted toward your earnings.

[Bitcoineruk]

Luke while your replying, you might want to change the front page for the correct servers? in case people are trying to join but cant

[Inous]

Luke thanks so much! So basically I don't get paid till I find a block correct? A block is worth how much? Like 1 BTC? I know this probably isn't the place to be asking this, but I just looked into getting rid of my GTX 285 and upgrading to a Radeon 5870. Looks like this item is basically not being produced anymore? Is that correct? So my best chances are finding it used? I really wanna get a good rig started to start saving for a new rig! I cant wait to hit the Ghash/s range!!

[Bitcoineruk]

Also, for any noobs to Bitcoin like me, just realised, I can set my miners to two different servers one with a lower aggression level so when one server goes down, it just picks up on the other.

At the moment I have my cards pointed at the eu server with aggression 13 - but also another 2 instances of Pheonix miner running pointing to the US server with aggression 4 - works too

Wish id known that before!

[cschmitz]

Also, for any noobs to Bitcoin like me, just realised, I can set my miners to two different servers one with a lower aggression level so when one server goes down, it just picks up on the other.

At the moment I have my cards pointed at the eu server with aggression 13 - but also another 2 instances of Pheonix miner running pointing to the US server with aggression 4 - works too

Wish id known that before!

you should run 1 main instance and one to a "backup pool", preferably not the same pool.

i use my main mining now at eu eligius and the failover are btcmine. if this goes down btcmine takes over, if btcmine is down i get an email :p

[Luke-Jr]

you should run 1 main instance and one to a "backup pool", preferably not the same pool.

Right, preferably your local Eligius is the main instance, and the other Eligius can be your backup pool

[cschmitz]

you should run 1 main instance and one to a "backup pool", preferably not the same pool.

Right, preferably your local Eligius is the main instance, and the other Eligius can be your backup pool

The only issue there is that if you have multiple machines in multiple locations with multiple gpu's, all oc'ed to a stable max, i really like to get an email if something happens, i.e. some connction issue or if i need to nudge the clock down a bit on a card since a driver crashed. email gives me that with workers set up for each gpu.
I really like your system and generated coin transactions but i need that backup warning system. Such complexity is totally against the logic of your pool hence i use btcmine as backup "email warning" pool. Dont get me wrong, its all good the way its simple and how u now have that nice statspage, its just that beyond a number of gpu some sort of monitoring is required.
If i ran 3 gpu i would also do the eu main us failover setup

[cschmitz]

EU pool is working fine, it almost feels a bit like solo mining though

[tiberiandusk]

US pool is rocking it today. Come on big money!

[Luke-Jr]

In case anyone hasn't noticed yet, we have a growing community at #Eligius (FreeNode) and http://eligius.st (email me for your own webspace)

Some various change-ideas are being discussed on IRC, and I would appreciate participation from everyone/anyone that uses the pool and wishes to have a say on what changes get made.

[andrew.skretvedt]

@Luke-Jr

Hi! I just wanted to extend a note of gratitude for the efforts of yourself and your collaborators on the Eligius pool. You've done well bootstrapping this thing and it appears to be polishing up and gaining support nicely.

I'm still relatively new to the pooled mining scene, having just a few weeks ago stopped generating on my own.

I scoured this forum and other resources learning about the pooled mining scene and evaluating the pools to decide which I should join. Bitcoinpool had really looked the most interesting to me, and I was just about to set up there when they experienced their April security breach, leading to a number of accounts being compromised and having their payment streams redirected.

I think they are doing their best at bitcoinpool, but after watching them for a few weeks now, I still have reservations that they may they have architected the accounts system in a way that leaves it fatally vulnerable.

My guess here, some posts to their forum suggest they (had been, and if true maybe are still) are storing actual account passwords in their database, rather than salted hashes. One post suggested the attacker got hold of the accounts database, and was using the raw passwords stored therein to begin redirecting the payment streams; something that the best practice of using salted hashes would have prevented, if that was in fact what transpired. The website itself, where accounts are created and managed, has no security, and they appear to me (disturbingly) to eschew the basic value of securing account/registration sessions with SSL. Little niggles of this sort suggest they may have an incomplete understanding of robust security practices.

So then I see this very forum topic!

What a concept! Forget the account. Just point your miner at our server, mine away, and just tell us the bitcoin address where you want the credit sent. This is so brilliant it seems like one of those obvious things you wonder how no one thought about it sooner?

In the aftermath of their breach, I mentioned the Eligius approach on the bitcoinpool forum as an idea about shortcutting the inherent need to start carefully considering security once accounts come into play. The responses were skeptical; along the line that this would make it hard to trust the pool operator, because it would be difficult to verify that your work was being properly credited.

I admit to being ignorant about the mechanics of the various pooled mining credit systems, but at least I have been able to observe the diligent efforts you've put forth making Eligius completely up-front and transparent. You've proven that even without accounts, self-auditing and tracking is possible.

With the polish starting to shine on this pool, it's feeling less experimental now. But the novel feature of an accountless architecture has made ME feel safer testing and now fully adopting it for my use, than the other more well established pools available. So, thanks! I'm sure I cannot be the only one who feels like this.

[molecular]

Also, for any noobs to Bitcoin like me, just realised, I can set my miners to two different servers one with a lower aggression level so when one server goes down, it just picks up on the other.

At the moment I have my cards pointed at the eu server with aggression 13 - but also another 2 instances of Pheonix miner running pointing to the US server with aggression 4 - works too

Wish id known that before!

uh, how cool is that! Thanks for the hint. No more fiddling around with the "flexible pool proxy"

[Luke-Jr]

I have shutdown the Europe pool temporarily and redirected its DNS to USA due to discovering a major bug (which accidentally never made it to the USA pool). I could use some help debugging it in #Eligius if anyone wants to volunteer some brainpower.

Edit: False alarm. Europe is and has been working properly. Pool brought back online.

[Luke-Jr]

Hi! I just wanted to extend a note of gratitude for the efforts of yourself and your collaborators on the Eligius pool. You've done well bootstrapping this thing and it appears to be polishing up and gaining support nicely.

Thanks. I also appreciate donations, as the pool's fee structure doesn't really cover expenses (it mainly exists to create numbers for testing).

[Luke-Jr]

FYI, after a week of testing on Europe, I have calculated that a patch I wrote decreases duplicate work by 0.7%. Given the current pool size of 60 GH/s, that means we now (once I apply it to the USA pool) accomplish a whole 420 MH/s extra than an unpatched bitcoind, or almost 1 BTC per day at the current difficulty. Even half of that, 0.50 BTC per day, would take only until the end of the current difficulty to cover the expense of the time I spent writing the patch.

In my mind, this would justify adding a long-term 0.7% "fee" to the pools, but I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to just publish the information and ask everyone to keep this fact in mind when considering donating to the pool.

If anyone would like to double-check my math, let me know and I'll setup an account for MySQL access. I started calculation from UNIX timestamp 1306000000 (about a week ago), but it should be safe to start as early as May 11th. During this time, Europe had the patches, but USA did not.

[molecular]

In my mind, this would justify adding a long-term 0.7% "fee" to the pools, but I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to just publish the information and ask everyone to keep this fact in mind when considering donating to the pool.

A fee would be well-justified.

However, I think it's one of eligius' unique selling points to have no fee.

Therefore let me propose a way to encourage users to donate: We could put something like this

http://bitpoll.dyndns.org?poll=4 EDIT: according to luke-jr this is not needed, just normal donations. see http://eligius.st/~artefact2/ or http://bitpoll.dyndns.org?poll=2 for addresses.

on the stats page (at the top or in the middle). (note I used some of eligius' donation addresses here, namely the ones for "stats page" and "pool")

People *love* progress bars, they are really motivational.

So I'm offering my help in putting something like that on the stats-page (using javascript, iframe to my site, server-side or whatever is best)

how 'bout it, luke, wanna try this first, before you put a fee?

also: if you like the idea, even if you dont want this on your page(s)), can you please give me some addresses for the months (we could use 1RNUbHZwo2PmrEQiuX5ascLEXmtcFpooL for April)

[Luke-Jr]

how 'bout it, luke, wanna try this first, before you put a fee?

Like I said, I'm not putting a fee. And there's no easy way to figure out the overall pool costs. Hence, it's ok if people just donate what they consider a fair amount every once in a while.

[cschmitz]

Come on people, this is the only pool where you can independently verify that you are getting the real payout via blockexplorer, join up!

[phelix]

how 'bout it, luke, wanna try this first, before you put a fee?

Like I said, I'm not putting a fee. And there's no easy way to figure out the overall pool costs. Hence, it's ok if people just donate what they consider a fair amount every once in a while.

you really should go for a small fee like you said. that would still be much better than the competition.

the problem with donations is that only the good guys pay. and because of that I do not want to donate any more and thus become a bad guy myself >=)