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

[Bigsky]

Holey guacamole batman

All hail Indss

Miner of what I believe is the fatest block ever
in all bitcoin history 13.4btc in transaction fees

Thanks again Dr Haribo for all your work keeping
this pool running.

Hopefully this will bring some more hash power to
the pool, but I am more than comfortable mining
in this lotto pool either way, big or small

cheers

[DrHaribo]

Yeah, nicely done Indss. 25.9 BTC from one block - that's quite good.

Bitcoin has some bad scaling issues.

[Last of the V8s]

Yeah, nicely done Indss. 25.9 BTC from one block - that's quite good.

Bitcoin has some bad scaling issues.

and many enemies 

many congrats and thanks

[blockbotstakeshots]

Hi all, trying to understand shift work as I dip my toe in the water. When I first looked at mining at the start of the ASIC revolution, it was more profitable to simply buy bitcoin than try to start mining with ASICs. Is that still the case?

If I buy a used S7 on ebay for $750 and turn it on using the correct power supply and high voltage, it should run at 4.7TH/s, or 4700 GH/s.

Shift payouts at https://bitminter.com/shifts say that pay per shift is somewhere between 0.00001-0.00002 BTC if you mined at 1 TH/s for 1 hour (with one shift being 10x that recently)? Do I have that right?

So let's do a simple case of 0.00001 BTC per 1 hour mining at 4.7 TH/s with the S7 being plugged in 24/7 and that shift taking ~72 hours:

0.00001 BTC * 72 hours * 4.7 TH/s = 0.03384 BTC per completed shift, which happens about once every three days? If BTC/USD stays anywhere near its current level, that's 0.03384 BTC/shift * 10 shifts/mo * $6500/BTC = $2200/mo? Then as difficulty goes up and 4.7TH/s becomes less impressive, it pays less over time?

Where am I going wrong? Seems too good to be true.

[TheQuin]

Where am I going wrong? Seems too good to be true.

If it seems too good to be true.....

Rather than explain where you went wrong it is a lot easier just to show you how to do it correctly. Here is a link to a mining profitability calculator. The major cost in mining is electricity and for the example I've used 12 cents per kilowatt hour as that's an average sort of price.

https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingPower=4.7&HashingUnit=TH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=1293&CostPerkWh=0.12

It gives a profit of $66.39 a month which is $807.81 a year.

You do correctly identify the problem with these calculations in that difficulty goes up and the profit is reduced over time. It would be unlikely to recover the $750 in less than a year.

[DrHaribo]

0.00001 BTC * 72 hours * 4.7 TH/s = 0.03384 BTC per completed shift

No, it's 0.003384 - you're missing a zero in there.

Perhaps a simpler way to estimate earnings, use a bitcoin mining calculator. Here is a simple one: https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator

The results will be much too low now though, as it doesn't include income from transaction fees which have become very large. Our last block had more income from transaction fees than from newly generated coins.

Does anyone know of a calculator that includes tx fees?

I'm not sure if there are any easily available stats on tx fees per block, but this one shows transaction fees per day: https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees
If we assume 144 blocks per day (difficulty not changing), then it is yesterday 4.27 BTC per block, 5.43 BTC per block the day before. If we get back to a more normal level where bitcoin is not completely overloaded then perhaps 1.39 BTC per block.

That's 34%, 43% and 11% extra earnings respectively, on top of the 12.5 new coins per block.

In the medium term I think I'd add 11% to what mining calculators say. It may look nice to earn 30-40% from tx fees on top of the 12.5 BTC per block. But I really hope this is not going to last. We have 100 000 backlogged transactions, transaction fees have skyrocketed and bitcoin has been almost unusable the last couple days.

[TheQuin]

Does anyone know of a calculator that includes tx fees?

I don't know of a calculator that does but https://fork.lol/reward/blocks show the $ total reward per block and https://fork.lol/reward/fees shows $ fees per block so I suppose it would be possible to do your own calculation from that.

[DrHaribo]

Increased transaction fee for "send coins"

The fee to withdraw coins using "send coins" has been changed to 0.0013 BTC (was 0.0009)

This is necessary as bitcoin transaction fees have skyrocketed lately. For a while the pool was paying 0.0036 BTC for a small transaction. There is still 77000 backlogged transactions in the bitcoin system, but the fees are on the way down. If this continues we can hopefully reduce the fee for "send coins" on our website again soon.

The pool still pays the transaction fee for you if you use auto cash out instead. This requires a minimum balance of 0.01 BTC.

[blockbotstakeshots]

Thanks for the help everyone! I'll continue to simply buy BTC.

[DrHaribo]

The fee to withdraw bitcoins with "send coins" has been reduced from 0.0013 BTC to 0.0005 BTC.

As always, if you have 0.01 BTC or more then you can withdraw for free using auto cash out instead.

[Twitchie]

With BitMinter, if my rig discovers a new block, do I receive half of it like Slushpool, or just a proportion of my work for the discovery? TIA!

[-ck]

With BitMinter, if my rig discovers a new block, do I receive half of it like Slushpool, or just a proportion of my work for the discovery? TIA!

That doesn't happen on slushpool either.

[Twitchie]

With BitMinter, if my rig discovers a new block, do I receive half of it like Slushpool, or just a proportion of my work for the discovery? TIA!

That doesn't happen on slushpool either.

Hmmm, I was thinking that one did that - it's been a couple years since I mined a lot. For some reason, I was thinking you got 12.5 BTC if you discovered a block.

[Biffa]

With BitMinter, if my rig discovers a new block, do I receive half of it like Slushpool, or just a proportion of my work for the discovery? TIA!

That doesn't happen on slushpool either.

Hmmm, I was thinking that one did that - it's been a couple years since I mined a lot. For some reason, I was thinking you got 12.5 BTC if you discovered a block.

Thats solo mining, not regular pool mining. So you either mine on your own, against your own bitcoind or there are a couple of solo pools that have setup all the infrastructure for you to mine against, they may charge a small fee but you get nearly all of the 12.5BTC if you find the block.

They are promoted in this very forum.

[DrHaribo]

No, we don't have solo mining.

12.5 BTC is not half a block, it's 100% of the new coins in the block currently. In addition to this there is also income from transaction fees.

Yes, it used to be 25 new coins per block, and 50 before that. This is halved approximately every 4 years. Watch the countdown on bitcoinclock.com

It would be possible to have a pool where you paid over 50% in mining fees and you got half the income from the block when you found one. But I don't think there's a market for it.

You can instead put 50% of your hashpower on Bitminter and use the other 50% for solo mining.

[Twitchie]

With BitMinter, if my rig discovers a new block, do I receive half of it like Slushpool, or just a proportion of my work for the discovery? TIA!

That doesn't happen on slushpool either.

Hmmm, I was thinking that one did that - it's been a couple years since I mined a lot. For some reason, I was thinking you got 12.5 BTC if you discovered a block.

Thats solo mining, not regular pool mining. So you either mine on your own, against your own bitcoind or there are a couple of solo pools that have setup all the infrastructure for you to mine against, they may charge a small fee but you get nearly all of the 12.5BTC if you find the block.

They are promoted in this very forum.

Awesome. Thanks you very much for the input!

[Twitchie]

No, we don't have solo mining.

12.5 BTC is not half a block, it's 100% of the new coins in the block currently. In addition to this there is also income from transaction fees.

Yes, it used to be 25 new coins per block, and 50 before that. This is halved approximately every 4 years. Watch the countdown on bitcoinclock.com

It would be possible to have a pool where you paid over 50% in mining fees and you got half the income from the block when you found one. But I don't think there's a market for it.

You can instead put 50% of your hashpower on Bitminter and use the other 50% for solo mining.

Awesome. Thanks you very much for the input!

[DrHaribo]

Fee to use "send coins" on our website now adjusted to 0.0011 BTC.
There has been a flood of transactions on the bitcoin network and there is now a big backlog. We'll adjust the fee again once bitcoin is back to normal.

If you have stuck transactions, many are in the same boat. Thankfully the backlog seems to be shrinking - things may be back to normal within a few days.

Remember, if you have 0.01 BTC then you can cash out for free using auto cash out. That's under "my account" -> "overview" in the website menu.

[Mikestang]

With they skyrocket in BTC value has there been any discussion about reducing the minimum payout value from 0.01 to maybe 0.001, or something?

[DrHaribo]

With they skyrocket in BTC value has there been any discussion about reducing the minimum payout value from 0.01 to maybe 0.001, or something?

For smaller amounts please use "my account" -> "send coins" in the website menu.

There probably won't be a smaller amount than 0.01 where Bitminter will pay the transaction fee for you when you cash out.

An improvement might be the option of setting a lower auto cash out threshold but that in this case a fee would be deducted from your account when the auto cash out happens. On the other hand, many would probably be unhappy with this as it would sometimes trigger when there is extreme transaction spam, several hundred thousand backlogged transactions in the bitcoin network, and very high fees.

These days in bitcoin the transaction fees are either big or humongous. Automating paying fees at random times can be quite risky. Yes, Bitminter is doing this itself and when auto cash out happens during the worst transaction spam times it does get expensive for the pool.

If not for the fees there would of course be free auto cash out for amounts below 0.01.