[BitAffNet] How we're the #1 Bitcoin Mining Pool In The World (or so we thought)

[aurel57]

FWIW: Mining is simply a hobby for me so not getting paid for a few days hasn't been an issue.  (I have always received full payment eventually.)  As long as the pool continues to pay above what I can find elsewhere, I see no reason to pull my miners.  I've been mining here since last August and despite a few hiccups, delayed payments and such, I'm still way ahead of what I would have received elsewhere.  (IMHO)

All true as I have mined at the pool about the same time I think since July? maybe but the payments are getting longer and longer between at times. Without a plan to fix it it will only get worse I am afraid.

[1714761053]

1714761053

[1714761053]

1714761053

[1714761053]

1714761053

[1714761053]

1714761053

[1714761053]

1714761053

[ATCkit]

FWIW: Mining is simply a hobby for me so not getting paid for a few days hasn't been an issue.  (I have always received full payment eventually.)  As long as the pool continues to pay above what I can find elsewhere, I see no reason to pull my miners.  I've been mining here since last August and despite a few hiccups, delayed payments and such, I'm still way ahead of what I would have received elsewhere.  (IMHO)

All true as I have mined at the pool about the same time I think since July? maybe but the payments are getting longer and longer between at times. Without a plan to fix it it will only get worse I am afraid.

True. It's a great pool with a very nice front end too. Currently, not many people make much of a donation to fees. So, I think sobr will be forced to set a min fee and drop the bonus eventually...or the pool won't survive. I'm gonna step up my donation to 2%.

[Biffa]

FWIW: Mining is simply a hobby for me so not getting paid for a few days hasn't been an issue.  (I have always received full payment eventually.)  As long as the pool continues to pay above what I can find elsewhere, I see no reason to pull my miners.  I've been mining here since last August and despite a few hiccups, delayed payments and such, I'm still way ahead of what I would have received elsewhere.  (IMHO)

All true as I have mined at the pool about the same time I think since July? maybe but the payments are getting longer and longer between at times. Without a plan to fix it it will only get worse I am afraid.

True. It's a great pool with a very nice front end too. Currently, not many people make much of a donation to fees. So, I think sobr will be forced to set a min fee and drop the bonus eventually...or the pool won't survive. I'm gonna step up my donation to 2%.

The donation doesn't actually work anyway, so no fee is being donated.

[jammers]

FWIW: Mining is simply a hobby for me so not getting paid for a few days hasn't been an issue.  (I have always received full payment eventually.)  As long as the pool continues to pay above what I can find elsewhere, I see no reason to pull my miners.  I've been mining here since last August and despite a few hiccups, delayed payments and such, I'm still way ahead of what I would have received elsewhere.  (IMHO)

+1. I'm not day trading on mining and I've tried now 14 plus pools and think BAN still has the best interface. s0br does talk to people directly on irc, and i'm sure if he posted here again, certain people will jump on it. I've flagged a couple of times to him about the donation not working. His response as always is he's been building out the data, and responding to things reported here, even if he's not posting. He said the pool is being bipolar which made me laugh too!

But for Kano's stuff, every pool will have the same issue if it has a relatively fixed hashing rate (ie eligius and btcguild were always around the same) compared to a fluctuating world hash rate, and you can't use luck in the past to compare to the future. The only pools that will be able to swim against the current by maintaining their relative luck is either by getting more people mining week on week, piling on hardware (chinese pools/knc) or riding out the rough patches. This pool can hit five blocks a day if it wants to and luck is in favour, but I'd nearly give a 100% donation for a week to help go towards clearing the backlog - if it worked! I don't have much at the end of the day, but the pool's been my replacement to BTC Guild which I mined for most of 2014.

[lobogil]

..I'd nearly give a 100% donation for a week to help go towards clearing the backlog.

What a crock of shit. Are you s0br in disguise?

So, you went from mining at one of the most reliable, trustworthy & well maintained pools for over a year to mining at BAN because .......why? Let me guess, were you coaxed here by the:

Lure of a 10% bonus on earnings as stated on the thread page? No. Because it's a fabrication of course.

Maybe you prefer the constantly late payments?

Or maybe you like the complete lack of support/info/posts here by the OP?

Or was it that you didn't like the honesty of Eleuthria & much prefer a pool that is run by a proven scammer?

I see you have a Bitcoin Marketing Team in your sig - is this yours? Remind me not to hire you for any advice on BTC 

[jammers]

nope, i was reviewing half a dozen pools, and came across it then looking through blocktrail, posted a review, and had a bunch of people jump on me and troll the hell out of me. if you actually looked at my profile you can see exactly who i am unlike a lot of anonymous people here.

And nope, I didn't like the fact that I had to wait ages for payouts waiting to hit a minimum transaction fee, and that most of my shares got eaten up by zero block shifts. I ran a spreadsheet for all the pools, side by side, and this one gave me regular earnings, nice interface, and is the only pool that is actually constantly updating it's UI and interface. Every other pool is sitting on it's fee having done work two or three years ago, and Slush is the only other pool that's actually stepped up in response to the kind of data BAN is giving, to improve their own offerings. BTC Guild was my favourite look and feel wise before, but I'd left before they dropped their payout threshold to 0.001 and it wasn't enough to attract me back. I can choose where I point my own hardware, like everyone else.

From what I can see Eleuthria has always been fine and very open with his pool members in his own way, but PPLSN wasn't for me with a small amount of hashing power I have. I didn't want to mine on Discus Fish because of their %, and their interface is terrible. gHash is badly integrated with CEX, Antpool is ok, but again big. I've just spent the last month mining across MMPool, Triplemining, Bitminter, Kano and a load of others too, and none of them have as good an interface as BAN.

And the pool owner is contactable on the pool irc channel at least two or three times a day should i have a question, he sends newsletters occasionally with updates (ie the recent one about the DDOS extortion attempt), and if i can't reach him there i can submit a ticket and get a response in a day or two. Most pool owners I email don't even reply.

[.....Really?]

..I'd nearly give a 100% donation for a week to help go towards clearing the backlog.

What a crock of shit. Are you s0br in disguise?

So, you went from mining at one of the most reliable, trustworthy & well maintained pools for over a year to mining at BAN because .......why? Let me guess, were you coaxed here by the:

Lure of a 10% bonus on earnings as stated on the thread page? No. Because it's a fabrication of course.

Maybe you prefer the constantly late payments?

Or maybe you like the complete lack of support/info/posts here by the OP?

Or was it that you didn't like the honesty of Eleuthria & much prefer a pool that is run by a proven scammer?

I see you have a Bitcoin Marketing Team in your sig - is this yours? Remind me not to hire you for any advice on BTC 

Yes, he's one of s0br's many aliases I think.

You forgot to mention the "pretty" interface in your list of reasons for joining.......bitcoin marketing teams love pretty things

[padrino]

Yes, he's one of s0br's many aliases I think.

You forgot to mention the "pretty" interface in your list of reasons for joining.......bitcoin marketing teams love pretty things

In looking at your post history I am absolutely floored by the amount of time you spend posting in this thread.. Meanwhile my payouts keep coming....

[jammers]

Well strangely mining on a pool for 6 months will give you reason to post on a thread! Some people are so paranoid in this forum

[no141]

Diff Change! It went lower.

Share payout changed.
Was 0.0000000005271197
Now 0.0000000005351308

Expect unusual payments as payments are separate for different difficulties, if nothing changed since the last.


My payouts have been pretty regular at somewhere around 24 hours at a 12 hour setting.

[bbeesley]

Lure of a 10% bonus on earnings as stated on the thread page? No. Because it's a fabrication of course.

Many of us got the 10% bonus for several months.  It was great while it lasted, especially since we all knew it couldn't last forever.

Maybe you prefer the constantly late payments?

Late payouts can occur when this pool is catching up from an unlucky block.  This has been made pretty clear and we all understand the risks but so far, s0br has made good - sometimes with extra for inconvenience so we stick it out because the pool pays better than any other and waiting a few hours every once in awhile to get that is something that may of us are willing to risk

if you don't want to take that risk, it is understandable.  Mining is risk anyway.

 

Or maybe you like the complete lack of support/info/posts here by the OP?

I wasn't aware that providing support in this forum was a requirement for starting a pool.  Frankly, given that weakly substantiated attacks can continue by accounts clearly created for no other purpose than to defame the pool owner, I am not surprised that s0br doesn't come here to provide support.  What would be the point?  It would just devolve into an accusatory troll war and would be useless to those seeking help.  s0br provides direct support in IRC, email, and via the site tickets.  He and his folks are responsive, helpful and have always made it right...at least from my perspective and from others with whom I have spoken.

I am not generally one to jump onto things that appear to be too good to be true - which is pretty much how this pool has been characterized in this thread by a few who probably aren't even mining there - but the honest answer is that for those of us who have actually been mining there for the better part of 10 months now is that the pool does pay out and does so much better than the majority of other pools.

[bbeesley]

Meanwhile my payouts keep coming....

yeah, that is the thing I find confounding.   this whole idea of a scam originated from the claims of a single individual who created an account to grouse and moan that he didn't win a free miner in a contest.

that the pool has continued to pay out and those who are actually mining have gotten excellent support from the owner and his designates for months now doesn't appear to be enough to clear the specious claims of one clearly fake account.

[aurel57]

Late payouts can occur when this pool is catching up from an unlucky block. This has been made pretty clear and we all understand the risks but so far, s0br has made good - sometimes with extra for inconvenience so we stick it out because the pool pays better than any other and waiting a few hours every once in awhile to get that is something that may of us are willing to risk

  This has been made pretty clear

When and where has s0br made this clear?


waiting a few hours every once in awhile

It's been days waiting at times and I would say it's more than "once in awhile"

This thread would be better off if everyone would just keep it real and truthful

[no141]

Late payouts can occur when this pool is catching up from an unlucky block. This has been made pretty clear and we all understand the risks but so far, s0br has made good - sometimes with extra for inconvenience so we stick it out because the pool pays better than any other and waiting a few hours every once in awhile to get that is something that may of us are willing to risk

  This has been made pretty clear

When and where has s0br made this clear?

Everyone on the IRC is very helpful and s0br has explained it many times there. s0br is someone you can directly talk to and it's great.

waiting a few hours every once in awhile

It's been days waiting at times and I would say it's more than "once in awhile"

This thread would be better off if everyone would just keep it real and truthful

Whereas other pools have the btc to float through rough patches, there are two things that make it hard on bitaffnet to stay current. First the pool gets up to 6PH at times. Growing too fast means there's more payouts than blocks. Second, there has been security issues, that now should be dealt with, but that lead to losing all the float money though theft. So, futures blocks pay for past work, it's just what's happening to get the highest payouts possible. No idea if it can ever recover, but it seems there will be 70-100 btc in queued payouts, waiting for blocks.

I can deal with getting paid once everyday or three days, I can see the unlucky times with blocks. I don't have that much adding up, but some of the people that do are on IRC and they have no issues with how things are going. I hope things continue, but life is a gamble, and I'll still be here to earn the most.

[kano]

Expected block find rate is directly related to the pool hash rate.
As the speed goes up and down so does the expected block finding.

[aurel57]

Late payouts can occur when this pool is catching up from an unlucky block. This has been made pretty clear and we all understand the risks but so far, s0br has made good - sometimes with extra for inconvenience so we stick it out because the pool pays better than any other and waiting a few hours every once in awhile to get that is something that may of us are willing to risk

  This has been made pretty clear

When and where has s0br made this clear?

Everyone on the IRC is very helpful and s0br has explained it many times there. s0br is someone you can directly talk to and it's great.

waiting a few hours every once in awhile

It's been days waiting at times and I would say it's more than "once in awhile"

This thread would be better off if everyone would just keep it real and truthful

Whereas other pools have the btc to float through rough patches, there are two things that make it hard on bitaffnet to stay current. First the pool gets up to 6PH at times. Growing too fast means there's more payouts than blocks. Second, there has been security issues, that now should be dealt with, but that lead to losing all the float money though theft. So, futures blocks pay for past work, it's just what's happening to get the highest payouts possible. No idea if it can ever recover, but it seems there will be 70-100 btc in queued payouts, waiting for blocks.

I can deal with getting paid once everyday or three days, I can see the unlucky times with blocks. I don't have that much adding up, but some of the people that do are on IRC and they have no issues with how things are going. I hope things continue, but life is a gamble, and I'll still be here to earn the most.

You are not telling me anything that I don't already know about s0br and it seems you have missed my points. Also your pointing out why I hate IRC chat as the only way to get pool information. If the pools payout system has changed then this should be posted so existing and new miners know this.

The hash rate should have nothing to do with how late the coins are paid out, and as Kano pointed out as pool hash rate goes up so should the expected blocks, unless it's a flawed system and the shortage just continues to get larger as the hash rate goes up. If that's the case then payments will get later and later. Also what is going to happen when next year the blocks half and there are 200+ coins in queued? If the pool never recovers and gets currant then someone will be left holding the bag which is fine as long as the pool lets miners know this and if people still want to mine there so be it. Hell I still have half my miners there at this time.

On another personal observation, the large pool hash rate swings have always worried me as I often wondered if it was s0br renting miners or someone hitting the pool and withholding blocks somehow? I just have not seen on other pools the hash rate fluctuate like it does here and have worried about it for sometime now.  

[aurel57]

We are in a patch of bad luck now, but I'm sure things will turn around and everyone will be paid asap. I like everyone else, was paid last on the 17th, 5 hours before my local midnight. The pool has paid nothing out in the last 24 hours, but did pay out 69.02355119BTC in the last 3 days. There is one block that will confirm in 35 blocks.

I don't understand why someone else running a pool, is so negative towards this one. I really don't want to be associated with someone like that. You aren't protecting us from anything. Show us we can earn more with you, in your own thread, not here.

I was simply pointing out that your statement was based on a failure to comprehend PPS.

My comments about PPS are simply fact but also don't include the more drastic issue of long term luck risk that Meni has explained in one of his posts about the statistics of pool payment methods.

Another thing that people don't seem to understand is:
Just because luck is bad does not mean it will correct that imbalance.
Completely flawed statement: "I was unlucky yesterday, so I will be lucky today"
Have a look at Eligius - years average of under 100% luck

This pool keeps repeatedly doing what I (and others) said would happen - but when I stated those facts, the main response I got here were people (including the pool OP) making false statements about PPLNS and telling me I was wrong - which, of course, wasn't the case - as has happened

I haven't anywhere claimed that s0br is running a scam.
My first post was (if you bother to read it) pointing out how the original thread title was wrong since at the time he listed a bunch of pools whose luck was worse that his payout rate, but ignored my pool that was better than his payout rate at the time - for a number of months

Kano I did always notice that and that has been my biggest bitch with others to prove their scam claims. I also can see how the pool was maybe intended to not turn a profit as s0br stated in his first thread but used to promote another business venture. As time goes by I question now if this other business is still planned and if not then I don't see how this pool will last the way its structured.

I agree that there's no reason to think it is a scam - if it were it would be a pretty bad scam. The problem is the payout method is unsustainable. The pool will (due to orphans and the 1% bonus) get further and further in debt to miners to the point where unrealistic "good luck" or implementation of a fee will be necessary to pay off miners.

I've mined here in the past because the pool is transparent about how it operates. But I (quite selfishly I suppose) only mine when the pool has had a run of "good luck" and isn't in debt to miners.

The bottom line is that the way the pool is run, by itself, is unsustainable. If I saw proof of reserves from other business ventures that may be helped by having a large number of miners in the pool that would ensure regular payouts, I'd jump back to this pool in a heartbeat. 101% PPS that is paid out regularly is hard (impossible?) to beat.

All good points and I think there is a lot of miners that feel the same as you do.

[deleterase]

I just have not seen on other pools the hash rate fluctuate like it does here and have worried about it for sometime now. 

Maybe this is the cause of the fluctuation:

The stolen merchandise is with Bitcoin Affiliate Network in Las Vegas, Nevada. They are aware that the merchandise is stolen yet they ignore communications with us. We are in discussion with the Police.
Fedex tracking number: 806214740987 https://www.fedex.com/apps/fedextrack/?tracknumbers=806214740987&language=en&cntry_code=us
Total shipment weight: 8, 487.8 lbs / 3, 850 kgs

S0br promised to post an announcement here many weeks ago:

I will publish a statement soon addressing some issues and concerns here. It's just a simple matter of providing more information.

....but still nothing.......why

[aurel57]

I just have not seen on other pools the hash rate fluctuate like it does here and have worried about it for sometime now.  

Maybe this is the cause of the fluctuation:

The stolen merchandise is with Bitcoin Affiliate Network in Las Vegas, Nevada. They are aware that the merchandise is stolen yet they ignore communications with us. We are in discussion with the Police.
Fedex tracking number: 806214740987 https://www.fedex.com/apps/fedextrack/?tracknumbers=806214740987&language=en&cntry_code=us
Total shipment weight: 8, 487.8 lbs / 3, 850 kgs

S0br promised to post an announcement here many weeks ago:

I will publish a statement soon addressing some issues and concerns here. It's just a simple matter of providing more information.

....but still nothing.......why

LoL Ya Black Arrow I trust that bunch   and if it was true then they can and should be going thru proper channels to recover their merchandise. I still say that's BS until someone proves it, as that tracking number means nothing!

Yes more or better information from the pool would be helpful. It the pool dynamics/ structure have changed then this threads first post needs to reflect that change.

[deleterase]

I just have not seen on other pools the hash rate fluctuate like it does here and have worried about it for sometime now. 

Maybe this is the cause of the fluctuation:

The stolen merchandise is with Bitcoin Affiliate Network in Las Vegas, Nevada. They are aware that the merchandise is stolen yet they ignore communications with us. We are in discussion with the Police.
Fedex tracking number: 806214740987 https://www.fedex.com/apps/fedextrack/?tracknumbers=806214740987&language=en&cntry_code=us
Total shipment weight: 8, 487.8 lbs / 3, 850 kgs

S0br promised to post an announcement here many weeks ago:

I will publish a statement soon addressing some issues and concerns here. It's just a simple matter of providing more information.

....but still nothing.......why

Following up on this, I have sent the following PM to a forum moderator in the hope that he will clear the matter up:

Hello gmaxwell,

I am writing to you in the hope that you can rectify some inconsistencies in BAN thread header page, in particular, this:

Payment System: PPS + 10% Bonus.

BAN stopped paying a 10% bonus a long time ago, but s0br has refused to change the pool description despite users pointing this falsehood to him on various occasions. I believe this is deliberate false advertising in an attempt to lure new miners to his pool under the impression that they will receive 10% extra payment - which clearly they will not.

I would also like to ask you if anything can be done about this statement from s0br:

We're transparent.

There is absolutely no support for miners on the pool thread whatsoever. Many miners have asked s0br to comment on his own thread about a number of pool issues, but s0br refuses to post anything, despite logging on frequently. I feel that instead of the above statement, a warning should be placed stating clearly that there is no support via the bitcointalk thread.
S0br has made his disdain for bitcointalk & it's moderators very clear previously, yet is quite happy to use bitcointalk as a platform to promote his pool with wholly inaccurate & misleading statements while contributing nothing to his thread & the forum in general. I think this is an injustice on bitcointalk & it's many members.
At the very least, correcting his inaccurate statements would help clean up his pool thread of posts regarding late/low/missing payments.

Thank you.