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

[strongenough24]

Imagine you do a little mining for a couple hours in the morning. Later you mine a couple hours in the evening. We find a block and both the morning and evening work is paid. Later we find another block and only the evening work is paid, as the morning work is no longer among the 10 latest shifts.

Now that the last 10 shifts can be accomplished in roughly 24 hours, it seems to me likely that a shift not paid could scroll off the list. In other words, the work is never paid. Am I thinking about this incorrectly?

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[ichtus27]

You are working with it so i trust it must be good.

Thanks Fahlcor

[DrHaribo]

make sure that the pool is using minimal/starting pool share difficulty which is compatible with our service

Try setting the minimum difficulty on your worker to 16.

An estimate is not needed to me as I see it.  But when we find a block it would be nice to see how much I made on each one. Otherwise I have to add up the shifts but that could be multiple blocks.

You can see how much you got for each block under "my account" -> "transaction history" in the website menu. There's just no estimate for future blocks anymore - you can still see what you got for the blocks after they are found.

For an estimate of future payouts the best tool is really to google "bitcoin mining calculator".

The amount earned /block is a fixed number is it not?  I guess also assuming that it confirms.

The income from a block is 25 BTC (until next reward halving), plus the transaction fees which vary from block to block. The pool fee of 1% is deducted from this. Then the rest is paid out. Your share is determined by your share of the work effort in the 10 latest shifts.

If the pool hashrate goes up, the pay per block drops, causing some miners to be unhappy when that happens - thinking some big miners come in and take all the profits from them. This is a fairly common misunderstanding. Taking this logic to the next level would be to go look for the smallest pool available, to get better payouts. That does not seem to be common though. How it actually works: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10731/mining-pool-hashrate-effect-on-a-miners-income

[DrHaribo]

Now that the last 10 shifts can be accomplished in roughly 24 hours, it seems to me likely that a shift not paid could scroll off the list. In other words, the work is never paid. Am I thinking about this incorrectly?

Shifts with zero pay happened every once in a while before when 10 shifts were 4x difficulty. Now 10 shifts are 1x difficulty and it will happen more often.

Shifts with zero pay are averaged out by shifts with very high pay. Very high paying shifts also now happen more frequently.

The reduced shift size means no change for 24/7 miners.

The reduced shift size means increased variance for part-time miners.

Also see this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=788753.msg9161208#msg9161208

[Fahlcor]

Anyone looked at these guys?

https://pbmining.com/stats.html?

I'm in Canada so it says I can't mine with them.  But it seems pretty reasonable for someone not wanting to buy hardware to do this.

Seems cheap enough.  I can't find anyhting about power or maint costs.

This would be long term rentals.

Fahlcor

[hayseed]

on west hash.

I deleted the order and recreated and now is working.

us2.bitminter.com is what I used on the second and third attempts and I had tried changing the difficulty.
made a new worker and redid the order now working.

Thanks all

[DrHaribo]

If you have already used a worker on a mining server and then change its settings it can take as much as 20 minutes (worst case) for that mining server to notice the settings have changed.

[DevonMiner]

New server is up, and stats have been updated on the website!

We now have a new server up at us2.bitminter.com:3333 (Stratum only)

Should we all be updating our stratum miner settings to this new server now? The homepage info still says stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333, will the '3333' server be closing at some stage?

[DrHaribo]

Currently there are two servers.

us1.bitminter.com:3333 in Los Angeles
us2.bitminter.com:3333 in Kansas City

mint.bitminter.com:3333 is an alias for us1.

If you set only one server, use mint.bitminter.com:3333

If you want a backup server I recommend you set either us2 as primary and mint as secondary, or mint as primary and us2 as secondary "pool" in your miners.

[DevonMiner]

Currently there are two servers.

us1.bitminter.com:3333 in Los Angeles
us2.bitminter.com:3333 in Kansas City

mint.bitminter.com:3333 is an alias for us1.

If you set only one server, use mint.bitminter.com:3333

If you want a backup server I recommend you set either us2 as primary and mint as secondary, or mint as primary and us2 as secondary "pool" in your miners.

Thanks Doc, understood.

[cenicsoft]

It would be very useful if those who want the "estimated pay per block" number back could explain what they get out of it.

I used it a couple of ways. When it was one of the first things to see when logging in, I could tell if there had been a sudden change in anything - new hash added to the site, a worker offline that I didn't know about, etc.  I don't pool hop and since it was usually consistent or would only vary slightly, having it was used as a trigger that something changed.

The second way I used it was to estimate how long to hit a certain goal. yes, I could use a mining calculator for that. This made it easier since I knew how many blocks would need to be solved in order to earn a certain amount specifically at Bitminer.  Most mining calculators base earnings off hash rate estimates over time, not earnings per block.  This was a nice way of looking at it from a different perspective. Plus, I didn't have to go to a different website to check a calculator!

Maybe you can enable it as a preference with it off by default. Those that were confused by it, would never know. Those that liked it could have it back.

A note on the longer shifts - it was nice for those of us who had been around for some time because when someone brought a bunch of hash suddenly and you got a nice string of blocks solved, your older work suddenly was more lucky.  Newer work suffered, but then with people adding then dropping hash, slower miners got a boost, while the hoppers were discouraged.  If no blocks were solved in a 13 hour shift, then 3 in the second 13 hours, you'd see a huge impact on earnings and your per block earnings would be very high. Now, in 13 hours, that's 4 shifts gone by and the higher hash rate would drop your earnings per block solved significantly.

The opposite would then happen. When those people left, your earnings per block would be down as they continued to get paid for previous shifts. The difference was that when those people left, there would be three or four days between blocks being solved and their work would mostly be gone with your earnings per block back to where they were before anything happened. Bad for high hash rate hoppers, good for everyone else.

I do see the logic in shorter shifts though in the fact that it seems to be attracting an overall higher hash rate to make earnings more consistent. I didn't mind the inconsistency though since you could have some killer days and then other days that would kill you! 

[bitcoinino]

doc or anyone who can help.
Just added a couple of s3 and having a problem.
my balance is  stuck at zero even after a day.
I  am using  US2.bitminter.com and the status on the antminer is alive.

Thanks for the help.

[Grimsley]

I personally don't see the point behind having shifts at all.  We find a coin, we get paid.  I don't see any sort of delay.  The amount I get paid is based on the amount of hash I do over the length of the coin.  If someone jumped on and put 500,000 hash into the pool for a day, all it would mean to me is I'd get paid a little less because of the hash jump and as soon as person left, I'd be back to normal.  Inbound jumpers to me only means we'll get that BTC a little faster then when they were elsewhere.

[Fahlcor]

I personally don't see the point behind having shifts at all.  We find a coin, we get paid.  I don't see any sort of delay.  The amount I get paid is based on the amount of hash I do over the length of the coin.  If someone jumped on and put 500,000 hash into the pool for a day, all it would mean to me is I'd get paid a little less because of the hash jump and as soon as person left, I'd be back to normal.  Inbound jumpers to me only means we'll get that BTC a little faster then when they were elsewhere.

That is an interesting idea.  Doc could you not actually just make the shift length equal to the block? or last 2 blocks or 5 to reduce variance.

Then all work would be paid period.

Just a question.


Fahlcor

[ichtus27]

I don't know why, but the calculator on westhash and nicehash won't do it.

I put in what i needed to put in and not talking about the bitminter part but what i was willing to pay that part. Did not see how long i could mine. To bad, hope to use it in the future.

[DrHaribo]

cenicsoft, thanks a lot for that post. That gives me some food for thought.

The two parts of the website I am most unhappy with are the front page and the account details page which you get right after login.

What should be on the page after login?

Seeing how your own mining is gong makes a lot of sense. Perhaps instead of the pay per block some info on your hashrate could do the job? Maybe a small graph of your hashrate over recent shifts, as well as your current live hashrate? A lot of people like to watch the pool hashrate as well. It's already displayed at the top of every page, but it could be shown in the same graph as well.

Keeping the account balance is probably good too.

How many blocks do we need to find before you get X coins which you want to spend on something? Ok, I can see that this is something many would want. It's difficult to do that without getting all the confusion I was trying to put an end to. Perhaps the optional display you mentioned is a solution. I also have to explain to people several times per day that they get paid when blocks are found, not when shifts are finished. Obviously the website is confusing in this regard. I would like the website to make this fact obvious: "when blocks come in, coins come in". I'm not sure how best to do that, and I want to avoid the focus on how much you get per block and all the confusion that ensues.

To anyone using Bitminter: after you log in what do you most often need? Not necessarily exact numbers or buttons, but what you'd use them for.

[DrHaribo]

my balance is  stuck at zero even after a day.

It's been 1 day 7.5 hours since the last block was found. You get paid when blocks are found. Sometimes we find the next block quickly, other times it takes longer. There's some further details on the payouts here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824

That is an interesting idea.  Doc could you not actually just make the shift length equal to the block? or last 2 blocks or 5 to reduce variance.

That's the proportional reward system. It was very popular in the early days of mining pools until pool hopping was invented. Pool hoppers would abuse this reward system to get more than their fair share - resulting in 24/7 miners getting less than fair pay. You can read more about pool hopping here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping - the top answer is by Meni Rosenfeld who literally wrote the book on pool reward systems.

[marklyon]

What is up with the large swings in average TH/s per shift?   Why does is it swing that much?

NetDomain hashrate move from 150TH to 900TH.

What would the explanation for that be?   One that makes economic sense.   That was more my question.

I don't have an answer that makes economic sense, other than luck chasing, but it seems that last week was quite good for those leasing their mining equipment.  I have my two S3+'s running through LeaseRig (they provide what they call LR3, a proxy that lets me get some reporting for my own mining and then can instantly switch to a renter's pools with no intervention on my end) and last week we had almost every rig rented.  My 900GH kept getting picked up in 1h increments by two different renters (one kept paying in DOGE, the other in LTC) - as soon as it would come off lease, the other would pick it up. Neither stayed at the same pools for too long, I saw the pool settings change several times.

Then suddenly, it stopped and renting went back to normal.  As I look now, 25/45 of the rigs are rented out.

Doc, don't know if it's easy to add, but I like the performance chart they have.  Would be neat to have something similar when mining directly.

https://i.imgur.com/aFwPQ5Ql.png

[HerbPean]

It would be very useful if those who want the "estimated pay per block" number back could explain what they get out of it.

The second way I used it was to estimate how long to hit a certain goal. yes, I could use a mining calculator for that. This made it easier since I knew how many blocks would need to be solved in order to earn a certain amount specifically at Bitminer. 

I was doing the same thing. I would knew how many blocks (plus minus 1) I needed to reach my cash out.

[DrHaribo]

It would be very useful if those who want the "estimated pay per block" number back could explain what they get out of it.

The second way I used it was to estimate how long to hit a certain goal. yes, I could use a mining calculator for that. This made it easier since I knew how many blocks would need to be solved in order to earn a certain amount specifically at Bitminer. 

I was doing the same thing. I would knew how many blocks (plus minus 1) I needed to reach my cash out.

Is the transaction history ok for this? Maybe a link or button on the first page after login would be faster than having to go through the menu at the top?