Bitminter bitcoin mining pool - shutdown mining 2020-07-01 website 2021-06-01

[DrHaribo]

Seems the red underwear tricked worked!  Got to love the tried and true methods.

Nicely done, sir 

[no141]

Must I really wear underwear? Can I just paint the miner red?

Anyways, nice to see a mining superstition.

[HerbPean]

Must I really wear underwear? Can I just paint the miner red?

Anyways, nice to see a mining superstition.

I'm going all red from now !

[no141]

Buy more red underwear and clothes and shoes! All red, all the time, that's the spirit! Die your hair red, we can do it!

[HerbPean]

Dammm i hate those stale blocks !

[Epoch]

Dammm i hate those stale blocks !

This brings up a good point: it may be better if stale blocks either (a) don't show up in the 'latest blocks' list on the livestats page, or (b) were somehow marked as stale (with red text, for example). The current bitminter implementation doesn't differentiate between a 'good' block and a 'stale' block on the livestats page, which can be potentially misleading for those relying on it.

Case in point: kdbaumann's latest block (height 343607) appears in the livestats 'latest blocks' list and many/most people would assume that it was a valid 50.57% CDF block ... but only by clicking the 'statistics/blocks (income)' link does it become apparent that the block was in fact stale.

Of course, this is only my personal observation and opinion. Others may have different views.

[no141]

I don't understand how any block can be stale today. There have been periods of no blocks today from 20-30+ minutes, new to the blockchain. Something has to be wrong or the difficulty is too hard.

[DrHaribo]

I don't understand how any block can be stale today. There have been periods of no blocks today from 20-30+ minutes, new to the blockchain. Something has to be wrong or the difficulty is too hard.

There's always some stale work and blocks. The time since the previous block was found and the difficulty both don't influence stales at all.

This brings up a good point: it may be better if stale blocks either (a) don't show up in the 'latest blocks' list on the livestats page, or (b) were somehow marked as stale (with red text, for example). The current bitminter implementation doesn't differentiate between a 'good' block and a 'stale' block on the livestats page, which can be potentially misleading for those relying on it.

That's a good point. I should probably either show the status for the block, or hide the bad ones from the livestats page.

[Newar]

Do stale blocks also skew CDF calculations? I.e. the full stats show the duration on mining since the stale block. However the stale block took 20 hours to find and we got nothing from it. So shouldn't the current CDF be calculated from: (time it took to find the stale block) + (time mining on the current block)?

[DrHaribo]

Do stale blocks also skew CDF calculations? I.e. the full stats show the duration on mining since the stale block. However the stale block took 20 hours to find and we got nothing from it. So shouldn't the current CDF be calculated from: (time it took to find the stale block) + (time mining on the current block)?

Yes, the following block would have a higher CDF if you didn't count stale blocks. So the CDF tells you how much work it took to find a block solution, not how much work it took to find a block and get it accepted in the block chain.

We could change this so a new round is not started when finding a stale block. But CDF still wouldn't be the amount of work it took to get a paying block. That's because of orphans. We could even get two orphans in a row. We could have a block go orphan and then later be on the longest chain again (no longer orphan). To make CDF only count paying blocks the data would have to be changed when blockchain reorganizations happen. It's doable, but I don't know if it's worth the effort.

[HerbPean]

Do stale blocks also skew CDF calculations? I.e. the full stats show the duration on mining since the stale block. However the stale block took 20 hours to find and we got nothing from it. So shouldn't the current CDF be calculated from: (time it took to find the stale block) + (time mining on the current block)?

We could have a block go orphan and then later be on the longest chain again (no longer orphan).

Interesting, I didn't know that. Did it already happen here ?

[DrHaribo]

Interesting, I didn't know that. Did it already happen here ?

Possibly, but it's a rare event.

[SourceNinja]

I've got a new Spondoolies SP20, I'm fairly new to mining, and I'm using bitminter. I noticed there are custom worker settings. Is this something I would need to set to get the best performance? My current hash rate is 1.45Th/s. I wasn't sure if I should set the minimum difficulty or not.

[HerbPean]

I've got a new Spondoolies SP20, I'm fairly new to mining, and I'm using bitminter. I noticed there are custom worker settings. Is this something I would need to set to get the best performance? My current hash rate is 1.45Th/s. I wasn't sure if I should set the minimum difficulty or not.

The pool will adjust the diff by himself but you can set one in the worker if you want. Doc could give you the exact behaviour but I think the pool start it at 256 (As Doc corrected me it's 16) and will increment it for your hashrate over time (it's quick).

Min diff. for my SP20 are not set. I'm just loosing a bit of speed when the worker stop and start. It's no big deal

I think there is somekind of magic number like 1450 GH / 1.x = min diff to set. I just don't remember what is it. But this only an approximate.

I guess 1000 should be fine.

Doc will tell you exactly what to use I guess ;-)

[DrHaribo]

The difficulty starts at 16 when you connect. But yeah, it goes up quickly, so setting a minimum difficulty isn't really necessary.

Setting a minimum diff is very useful for dragonminers since they violate the stratum specification and ignore the difficulty the server tells them to use. For those miners you should set the minimum diff at Bitminter to the same as the diff in the dragonminer configuration.

[no141]

Are there only the two US servers?

And is anyone mining in China on bitminters?

[DrHaribo]

Are there only the two US servers?

And is anyone mining in China on bitminters?

Yeah, currently 2 in the US and 1 in Europe.

Are you getting a high rate of rejected work? Reducing that a little is really the only difference between close and remote servers.

[no141]

I'm just checking out options if I add capacity in China

[Newar]

I'm just checking out options if I add capacity in China

*troll mode*

+1 I had high hopes for an Asia server for a while, either HK, KR or SG. Don't matter now. There's plenty of pools in China now. Missed opportunity.

[DrHaribo]

+1 I had high hopes for an Asia server for a while

Do you get a high reject ratio with the american servers, or is there another reason for this?