So, how many people are switching away from deepbit?

[DareC]

With all this noise about deepbit controlling 50% or more of total mining power, I've seen a handful of people say that they've moved to other pools. I'd like to get a firm idea of how many people have done so.

So, have you moved? If so, where?

I had been meaning to experiment with deepbit's PPS model (I started on proportional), but with the controversy I decided to move over to eligius. Fees per share are lower there anyway.

[Garrett Burgwardt]

I'm in eligus. Wanted to try it out anyway, and the fact that I'm supporting a pool that allows low fees is nice. And the fact that coins show up directly into my wallet is a big plus.

I represent about 2gh/s

[PwrLeveld]

I might switch when my 5830 comes but I've been using deepbit so far.

[goatpig]

Even beyond the security problem, which is real imo, I don't understand why the miners who bailed out of slush's pool figured they should join the one pool with the highest fee oO"

[grndzero]

The highest I saw was 548. Seeing as it's down to 526, it looks like the answer is not many.

[BitLex]

..the fact that I'm supporting a pool that allows low fees is nice.

it allows low fees for miners, that's true,
but the fact that it doesn't allow ANY free transactions isn't that nice.
it forces every bitcoin-user, may it be a miner or not, to pay transaction-fees.
do you ever send free transactions?
i hope you don't.

[EpicBacon]

I took my 1Gh/s over to Eligius, I like getting the payout in block generation.

[geebus]

We saw a roughly 15 Gh/s increase at BitcoinPool.com in the past 12 hours. So, a few... I can't account for the other pools.

[grndzero]

btcmine.com shot up to 74
"Eligius" more than doubled to 40

[allinvain]

btcmine.com shot up to 74
"Eligius" more than doubled to 40

It's understandable. I for one decided it would be best to evenly split up all my miners on various pool. Until now I had all my miners on slush's pool, then when that went down I moved the all to deepbit, but later I realized that with such a huge hash rate deepbit would not be in my best interest due to the very fast rounds. So my solution for now is to split half of the miners on some other pool and as for the others I'm not sure where to place them (still currently on deepbit).

I think if everyone did this (distributed their hashing power on multiple pools) it would be better for the network. This way when one huge pool goes down for whatever reason it does not cause a huge and sudden drop in total network hash rate as the users scramble to find alternative pools to hop to. Also a mining proxy may be an even smarter solution. This is something I intend to look into this week.

Happy mining everyone!

[gmaxwell]

..the fact that I'm supporting a pool that allows low fees is nice.

it allows low fees for miners, that's true,
but the fact that it doesn't allow ANY free transactions isn't that nice.
it forces every bitcoin-user, may it be a miner or not, to pay transaction-fees.
do you ever send free transactions?
i hope you don't.

With the current limits used by most miners (including the big pools) no more than about 10 free transactions will ever be put into a block (because the software stops adding them when the block hits 4k) and less if there are also paying transactions.  There are only 10 blocks solved an hour (well, more at the moment because the hashrate grew and difficultly will take another day or two to catch up).

Some miners appear to be processing blocks without any transactions at all (except the generated transaction to pay them, of course), even though there are with fee transactions pending. (For example: http://blockexplorer.com/block/0000000000007787385a1a8e076e0a6192a1af786845ab21ad1ab675290c2b24)

So, over the long term as the software is currently setup the network will only confirm 60 free transactions per hour.  The backlog of free transactions went up to over 1000 several times last week.   It only takes a _very_ small fee (0.00004096 BTC) to get included in Eligius blocks. It's pretty reasonable compared to the network's current inability to cope with many free transactions.

I talked to Luke-Jr on IRC about the possibility of setting up a free tx fountain to pay miners to process free transactions, he pointed out that the fountain would need to have some heuristic to distinguish spammy transactions, but sounded basically positive about the idea. So this might be a route to long term sustainability for those who care about free transactions... though with some miners apparently forging with fee transactions, I'm not so sure.

[goatpig]

btcmine.com shot up to 74
"Eligius" more than doubled to 40

It's understandable. I for one decided it would be best to evenly split up all my miners on various pool. Until now I had all my miners on slush's pool, then when that went down I moved the all to deepbit, but later I realized that with such a huge hash rate deepbit would not be in my best interest due to the very fast rounds. So my solution for now is to split half of the miners on some other pool and as for the others I'm not sure where to place them (still currently on deepbit).

I think if everyone did this (distributed their hashing power on multiple pools) it would be better for the network. This way when one huge pool goes down for whatever reason it does not cause a huge and sudden drop in total network hash rate as the users scramble to find alternative pools to hop to. Also a mining proxy may be an even smarter solution. This is something I intend to look into this week.

Happy mining everyone!

You also have to consider variance in the pools themselves. A quick look slush's graphs will show you that even though you'd expect a big pool to give you a steady daily payout, it isn't the case, and you'll good and bad days. Now, if pooling is about reducing variance, then spreading your miners on several pools is definitely the way to go, on top of the fact that it helps secure the network some more, which is the very reason there is a profit to make out of mining.

[allinvain]

You also have to consider variance in the pools themselves. A quick look slush's graphs will show you that even though you'd expect a big pool to give you a steady daily payout, it isn't the case, and you'll good and bad days. Now, if pooling is about reducing variance, then spreading your miners on several pools is definitely the way to go, on top of the fact that it helps secure the network some more, which is the very reason there is a profit to make out of mining.

Yep, good point! Thanks for pointing that out. It is now my new policy to spread out my miners as widely as is reasonable. I wish though there were more pools out there. A few more pools, each with a total capacity around 50 Ghash would be a good thing IMHO.

[Zamicol]

Yep, I moved over to eligus. 

[BitLex]

With the current limits used by most miners (including the big pools) no more than about 10 free transactions will ever be put into a block

i'm well aware of that and i don't think that miners processing blocks without any transactions at all are any better.
it might take just a _very_ small fee, but even a _very_ small fee is a fee
and how small it is highly depends on the amount you send and the balance you might (or might not) have left after your transaction.


i just said that i hope (nah, actually i don't) that all miners using luke's pool don't send ANY free transactions themselves,
because they don't process ANY free transactions themselves, they let other miners do that un-profitable work.

so, advertising luke's pool as the one that has no fees is just wrong,
it has no fees for it's miners, but forces fees to anyone else.

i don't mind if that block-generators prefer fee-containing transactions, that's alright,
i don't mind if they don't include free transactions if the block is filled already with fee-containing transactions, that's alright,
i just can't see any reason to not include any free transactions at all.

[warweed]

im actually in the process of switching all from slush to deepbit about 6 ghash/s just to give it a shot

[allinvain]

im actually in the process of switching all from slush to deepbit about 6 ghash/s just to give it a shot

Interesting. So you're moving from a pool with lower fees to one with higher fees. Why not move that capacity to bitcoinpool or btcmine as both have no fees at the moment.

[Nythain]

Switched my piddly 78Mh/s miner from deepbit to eligius earlier today. Not even for size reasons... just wanted a change.

[ZEB-DEMON]

im in deepbit and choosing a newone.

[error]

I left deepbit some time back when it became clear from [Tycho]'s own words that he doesn't really care.