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

[DrHaribo]

Beware of fake Bitminter representatives

Someone is pretending to be Bitminter head of marketing, showing a photoshopped “international Bitminter ID card” and pretending to sell hash rate, accepting payments through western union and to a bank account.

This is a scammer. Don’t give away your money to scammers. If you already did then you’ll want to get in touch with the police. If you wired money then maybe your bank can cancel or reverse the payment. When Western Union asks you if you know the person that you are sending money to, don’t lie, they are trying to help you avoid scams.

If you want to contact Bitminter; send an email to support@bitminter.com or use the contact form on the webpage https://bitminter.com

[jlrx81]

Yep, supporting BIP91.

Hello, with the announcement that BIP148 is going forward, even with BIP91/141 becoming active, what does that mean for Bitminter, and where will our mining prowess go? If this hard fork does indeed occur, and we end up with two wallets, where will our coins go?

Thanks.

[DrHaribo]

BIP91 activated. All pools are forced to activate segwit now.

But there will still be a split. After a split was avoided through BIP91 some miners decided to fork bitcoin anyway and create a new coin called BitcoinCash.

Best option, if you want to have BitcoinCash coins, is to cash out your coins to a wallet where you control the private keys.

[DrHaribo]

A group of miners are planning to make a fork of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash (BCC) on august 1.

Bitminter currently has no immediate plans for BCC support. If you want a BCC for each of your bitcoins, your best option right now is to cash out your coins before august 1. Cash out to a wallet or service that is going to support BCC or at least where you control the private keys.

[gb1971]

nice to see Fefox back on top

[Odetas]

Doc- it is fascinating how long it has been since a block has been found. What is the motivation to stay in?  As each shift passes that gets disqualified for pay, I think that the payout model would have to adjust, don't you think?

[DrHaribo]

Doc- it is fascinating how long it has been since a block has been found. What is the motivation to stay in?  As each shift passes that gets disqualified for pay, I think that the payout model would have to adjust, don't you think?

With PPLNS you never know what the pay is for work you are doing right now. There is no motivation to come or go due to good or bad luck in PPLNS. You can never predict the pay for work until after it is done.

How do you think the reward model should adjust?

[Odetas]

I don't claim to have the answers, however, as each shift/day passes where a block is not found by the pool, the value of the reward goes down significantly because nothing says that when a block is finally found, that another will be found soon thereafter like the history has shown.  And with difficulty going up as much as it is, this problem seems like it will only get worse.  Even if the rewards were given to every shift since the last block, as time passes without a block, the value of the reward goes down. There are transaction fees being accumulated, right?  So those that fall outside of the last 10 shifts will never see those TX fees either, correct?  What happens if you're 90 days out from finding a block?  Wouldn't miners just start dropping off because the reward over time becomes so diluted vs a large pool that is frequently finding blocks?

[DrHaribo]

I don't claim to have the answers, however, as each shift/day passes where a block is not found by the pool, the value of the reward goes down significantly because nothing says that when a block is finally found, that another will be found soon thereafter like the history has shown.  And with difficulty going up as much as it is, this problem seems like it will only get worse.  Even if the rewards were given to every shift since the last block, as time passes without a block, the value of the reward goes down. There are transaction fees being accumulated, right?  So those that fall outside of the last 10 shifts will never see those TX fees either, correct?  What happens if you're 90 days out from finding a block?  Wouldn't miners just start dropping off because the reward over time becomes so diluted vs a large pool that is frequently finding blocks?

Transaction fees are not accumulated between blocks. With each block we get the newly generated coins from that block plus the transaction fees from the transactions we put in that block. So we only earn anything at all when we find a block.

Yes, when there is bad luck the payouts are low and when there is good luck the payouts are high.

With a small pool the variance is higher. If the variance is too high then you can reduce it by splitting your hashrate over multiple pools.

No, people should not leave a pool after there has been bad luck. At least not if it uses PPLNS. The bad luck is in the past. You have no way of knowing what the future luck will be like. And it is the future luck that determines the pay for the work you do right now. That is a very important part of PPLNS. You should never be able to tell anything about future payouts. Whether you get a high or low payout for the work you do right now should be completely random and not something you should be able to estimate. That was the design goal of PPLNS. That is the reason PPLNS exists at all.

In the olden days many pools used the "proportional" reward method. Instead of only paying the N most recent amount of work when a block is found, it paid all the work back to when the previous block was found. Now with that reward system you CAN say something about what future payouts are going to be. This makes the proportional reward system vulnerable to pool hopping. People would switch pool at the right time and get paid more than the 24/7 miners.

I don't think any pools use prop rewards anymore, except maybe some altcoin pools. So after pool hopping became impossible it was kind of forgotten. Today many miners think pool hopping simply means switching from one pool to another.

You can read about pool hopping here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping

[Odetas]

Doc, you should thank me.  Right about the time I open my mouth and complain about something is when it fixes itself!

[cenicsoft]

A group of miners are planning to make a fork of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash (BCC) on august 1.

Bitminter currently has no immediate plans for BCC support. If you want a BCC for each of your bitcoins, your best option right now is to cash out your coins before august 1. Cash out to a wallet or service that is going to support BCC or at least where you control the private keys.

Do you foresee a significant amount of the Bitcoin hash rate getting moved over to Bitcoin Cash now that the price is going up again? It would be nice to see a pool as great as Bitminter offering Bitcoin cash mining.

[DrHaribo]

Hard to say what will happen with bitcoin cash. We'll find out.

[StelioKontos]

Trying to revive the minter on my pc just out of curiosity even for bradcrumbs of bitcoins

Is it normal that after ~1 hour of minting I don't even see stats of ghps on the worker? I've put my username and workername under Settings>Account and it's minting at an incredible speed of 0.39 Ghps

edit: nevermind, they just showed up.

[ilovetotalklots]

Hay Doc, any advise on the 2 pending Bitcoin forks that are due to happen ?.

BitCoin Gold and segwit2x ?. I assume the pool is not going with Bitcoin gold or segwit2x ?.  Ive been reading that the Bitcoin gold fork will prob end up like the Bitcoin cash fork. However the segwit2x fork may be different. (is there any chance the segwit2x fork will end up taking the Bitcoin name ?.)

In both instances they are suggesting to keep your Bitcoin in a local wallet during these periods and not in an exchange. (so that you can control what happens with your coins).

Is there anything we should be doing to prepare for the 2 forks happening soon ?.

[DrHaribo]

UPCOMING FORKS

It's becoming popular to make new coins that share a history with bitcoin. If you have X bitcoins at the time of the fork, then you will have X amount of new coins as well, assuming you control the private keys to your coins.

At block 491407: BTG (bgold / "bitcoin gold"). Although the fork happens at this time, the new chain won't be public right away. First the people behind it are going to keep it to themselves so they can mine lots of free BTG. After that BTG will go public. This type of "pre-mine" usually indicates that the coin is just a pump-and-dump scam.

At block 494784: B2X (segwit2x). Their intention is for all bitcoin users to follow this fork to support 2 MB blocks. Many say they will stay on the old chain though, so it looks like we will end up with two coins.

BEFORE A FORK

Move your coins to a wallet where you control the private keys. Find a wallet: https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

AFTER A FORK

If the new coin has replay protection you should be good to go.

If the new coin does not have replay protection, you'll need to split the coins while still within your own wallet(s) before sending coins to anyone else. Otherwise that other party could copy the transaction over to the other blockchain and receive the same number of both coins. They "replay" a transaction from one chain on another chain. For example, 1 BTG turns out to be worth $1 and you send 1 BTG to someone - they take 1 BTC too, worth $6000. That's not good.

Both BTG and B2X may add replay protection. Let's hope so - it would make this much less messy.

WHAT IS BITCOIN

If everyone and their dog switch to B2X (segwit2x) then that will become bitcoin. This does not appear to be what's about to happen.

It looks like we'll soon have 4 bitcoins. BTC/XBT (bitcoin), BCH (bcash), BTG (bgold), B2X (segwit2x).

WHAT DO WE MINE

We are mining bitcoin. We may add support for other coins in the future.

[Nemo1024]

Thank you for the summary!
What is the best way to "split the coins"? Would it be to send mined coins to the BTC wallet, then wait for 20-30 confirmations before sending BTC out of the wallet? As far as I understand, that way the BTC inputs in a transaction would differ from the inputs on the B2X chain, correct?

[DrHaribo]

I took 5 minutes to write this suggestion on how to split coins. It may be safe or maybe you lose all your coins. Proceed at your own peril.

Splitting coins is a way to avoid transaction replays when a fork has no replay protection. See https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/61212/what-is-transaction-replay-and-replay-protection

Situation: Let's say a new coin, NOOB, forks off of the BTC chain without any replay protection. Before the fork you have moved all your BTCs to a wallet where you control the private keys.
What to do: To split your coins after a fork, move all the BTCs and move all the NOOBs to addresses where you control the private keys. Make sure all coins are moved.
Why: This way none of your coins will share an unspent transaction output (UTXO) on both blockchains, so transaction replay becomes impossible. Any transaction you make in the future will refer to outputs that do not exist on the other chain. The transaction is invalid on the other chain and cannot be abused there.

In detail, here is how you can split the coins. AFTER the fork happened:

• Make a new BTC wallet where you control the private keys
• Send all your BTCs from the old to the new wallet. Wait for 6 confirmations on the transaction. Your old wallet now contains 0 BTC.
• Make a new NOOB wallet where you control the private keys
• Import the private keys from your OLD BTC wallet into your NOOB wallet. Wait for blockchain sync.
• You should see the correct NOOB balance; the same as your original BTC balance. You may see a zero balance after syncing if there was a transaction replay attack. You can confirm this using a NOOB block explorer. Look up the BTC transaction ID or BTC address from point #2. If NOOBs moved to the BTC address there was an attack; go to point #7.
• Send all your NOOBs to new address(es). Wait for 6 confirmations.
• If your NOOBs didn't go where you wanted them, but instead moved to where you sent your BTC then you are victim of a transaction replay attack. You only lost the transaction fee though. Go back to point #1 and start over. Make a third BTC wallet. "old" now means the second wallet and "new" is the third. You don't need a new NOOB wallet though, just import the keys from your second BTC wallet after it is empty.
• All coins moved separately on the two chains? You made it. Celebrate with your favorite beverage.

Why do I need a new bitcoin wallet?

With the "bitcoin gold" fork there were fake wallets asking you to give them your bitcoins keys/seed to get your bitcoin gold. As soon as you did that they stole all your bitcoins. This scam can be expected to repeat every time a new coin forks off of the bitcoin chain.

Never give an altcoin wallet any bitcoin keys that still control bitcoins. Always move the bitcoins first and wait for 6 confirmations so that the keys no longer control any bitcoins.

I used a scam wallet and my coins are gone!

Be careful that you pick a safe wallet and not some malware. Malware can do other bad things besides the specific scam above. They can steal your NOOBs. They can attempt to steal a bitcoin wallet on the same PC. They can install a keylogger and other nasty things.

You may want to install new altcoin wallets in a virtual machine or an old garbage PC you have lying around. This way you can make it very hard for them to do any harm beyond stealing your NOOBs.

I have a better idea!

Post your comments below.

[-ck]

I have a better idea!

Post your comments below.

With lack of replay protection with the b2x fork you have to check after your step 2 that the coins haven't moved on the fork as well. If that happens when you make your b2x wallet there will be zero balance in that too.

[DrHaribo]

With lack of replay protection with the b2x fork you have to check after your step 2 that the coins haven't moved on the fork as well. If that happens when you make your b2x wallet there will be zero balance in that too.

Good point. The replay attack could happen before you even try to send the new coins. I edited the post above and added another replay attack check, so the check is now in two places.

Thanks.

[DrHaribo]

The Segwit2x hard fork has been cancelled.

It was announced here: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-November/000685.html

Those worrying about replay attacks and how to split coins can rest easy.