BITMAIN announces Antpool

[Solemn]

Day 3.  

Still have the same problem.

Automatic withdrawal did not execute.  

I am unable to see the BTC address I originally entered when setting up the account.  

I am unable to change or add an address for BTC. withdrawal.

I have emailed the bitmain email address twice and got a single response stating the payout schedule.  Not helpful.

I tried the ticket system multiple times with multiple failures as already documented by others. The last time I tried it worked and the ticket is in "waiting" status.

I have posted on here and got a response from "dogie" which was unhelpful as it offered no resolution or path to resolution.  I responded to his thoughts with further clarification and have not yet heard back from him.

And now the settings pages doesn't even show the BTC address that I set up.

That would be why, how can they pay you if there isn't an address on your account. Did you verify the address via the link sent by email?

I got a response from xlc1985 stating

Hi, we will solve the problem as soon as possible, we now is the day UTC 00:00 - 01:00 pay, manual to mention the function being developed and tested, will soon provide use immediately

It's currently 17:16 in Bejing on the third day of this problem.  


An aside

...you know...my very first miner was a S1.  They are tough little guys that I have pushed since day one and never had a problem. I even chopped the heatsinks down turned them 90 degrees screwed them back on and stuffed 4 full units in a 2U Dell 2950 server case with the 2 stock 750w psu's driving them overclocked!  When the S3 came out I bought a bunch of those because the S1's where bulletproof and I could buy a couple at a time. (helping the smaller home miner like me was a great attraction to Bitmain) Which lead to buying a bunch of S3's and subsequently S3+'s. While a bit disappointed about the specs they, too have been great little machines and I have been a happy loyal bitmain customer.  So much so, that when they announced the HASHNEST project I dipped my toe in and tried it - because I liked what bitmain stood for and the products they produced. Although not a spectacular success, I have recovered my investment and chalked HASHNEST down to "just doesn't work for me".  Then the C1 arrives and so I buy a couple to test the water (pun intended).  So far they've been great and I believe they'll be just as bulletproof as all the other Ants I have.

So up until now I have had nothing but positive experiences with Bitmain and while reading about the issues that other were having with various products, I never needed to make use of the support capabilities. I feel like I've been growing along with Bitmain as "we've" expanded and tired new things - most successful, some not so much.  

But this episode is very seriously eroding my faith in the firm.  Maybe they've grown too much and simply don't have the infrastructure in place to support the new endeavors?  Maybe they simply don't care about the "little guy" anymore?  I understand that "dogie" is a paid "facilitator" for them and I'm sure he's helped a lot of people.  In fact, I used his guides extensively when I first started looking at BTC hardware.  BUT there is a difference between solving problems  - and offering advice or thoughts on a subject.

I'm concerned and a little let down, perhaps irrationally so, with Bitmain.  I fully understand that problems are going to occur.  It's a fact of life that things simply don't work all the time, and that doesn't really bother me.  What does bother me is how this firm is dealing with its problems.  We shall see...

Fortunately I, too, have grown and after cutting my teeth with Bitmain, a couple of Spondoolies products are in the rack and I have a feeling that they'll be joined by more soon.  

I just wish my fondness for Bitmain could remain intact a bit longer....

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[murraypaul]

0% fees and PPLNS earnings. (The tx fee is not paid out to miners for maintaining cost and the bonus for our engineers.)

This is not possible on the existing p2pool share chain. Every p2pool node would have to upgrade(?) to bitmains version.

It would be possible for the 'p2p' pool as described by Bitmain, for their share of the tx fees.
Miners mining on this pool are not p2pool miners, and do not have to run bitcoind or p2pool itself.
They connect to a pool just like any other, except that in this case the pool is a p2pool node.
The pool is the node, and would recieve the coinbase payout.
It would then pay the miners the portion of the 25BTC payout that Bitmain received, according to PPLNS, and keep the tx fees portion of the payout itself.

[loshia]

0% fees and PPLNS earnings. (The tx fee is not paid out to miners for maintaining cost and the bonus for our engineers.)

This is not possible on the existing p2pool share chain. Every p2pool node would have to upgrade(?) to bitmains version.

It would be possible for the 'p2p' pool as described by Bitmain, for their share of the tx fees.
Miners mining on this pool are not p2pool miners, and do not have to run bitcoind or p2pool itself.
They connect to a pool just like any other, except that in this case the pool is a p2pool node.
The pool is the node, and would recieve the coinbase payout.
It would then pay the miners the portion of the 25BTC payout that Bitmain received, according to PPLNS, and keep the tk fees portion of the payout itself.

And then the mentioned tx fees will not be enough to cover server electricity costs alone...
I am wandering whre the rest of the money will come from to cover the pool expenses and what happened to so called decentralization propaganda ?
Where will go merged mining profits also?
And how the hell small miners will benefit from that
Once again as I see things the goal of it is to collect between 5-10 % of all bitmain devices all over the world
Us folks be aware of that as long as you posses most of them.
Nice strategy for a wise businessman though
And as always bitmain will steal p2pol code and probably ckpool also like he did with other open source code and make money on top
How noble he is.
So guys please join whatever pool you like but not this one!
At the end for the those joining antpol it will bring you nothing else but loss!!!!!!

[BITMAIN]

We have double checked your case carefully, here are replies:

I am unable to see the BTC address I originally entered when setting up the account. 

Because you pressed 'Lock' before inputing your BTC address, so BTC address is empty, and you can not add/change any address any more in your side. This problem can be fixed via sending your registered email address to us (PM is also available).

I am unable to change or add an address for BTC. withdrawal.

Ditto.

Please also PM us your BTC address to get earnings earned before you are able to set a BTC address by yourself.

[windpath]

0% fees and PPLNS earnings. (The tx fee is not paid out to miners for maintaining cost and the bonus for our engineers.)

This is not possible on the existing p2pool share chain. Every p2pool node would have to upgrade(?) to bitmains version.

It would be possible for the 'p2p' pool as described by Bitmain, for their share of the tx fees.
Miners mining on this pool are not p2pool miners, and do not have to run bitcoind or p2pool itself.
They connect to a pool just like any other, except that in this case the pool is a p2pool node.
The pool is the node, and would recieve the coinbase payout.
It would then pay the miners the portion of the 25BTC payout that Bitmain received, according to PPLNS, and keep the tx fees portion of the payout itself.

Again, This is not how p2pool works.

The generation tx does NOT go to a node, it goes directly to the miners with active shares (ALL the miners), this is what makes p2pool trust-less and is not something I would see as negotiable with other p2pool miners...

Here is a p2pool coinbase transaction, take a look for yourself...

https://blockchain.info/block-index/497193/0000000000000000010cb1da262778419a4eac1ba3947fea7dc14bef19399956

As you can see each of the 347 miners with an active share in the p2pool share chain received a portion of the payout directly from the coinbase.

[dogie]

0% fees and PPLNS earnings. (The tx fee is not paid out to miners for maintaining cost and the bonus for our engineers.)

This is not possible on the existing p2pool share chain. Every p2pool node would have to upgrade(?) to bitmains version.

PPLNS block transaction fees help pay for the pool, INCLUDING the p2pool side. It doesn't mean p2pool side is providing transaction fees.

Sigh - you really need to learn about something before posting.
They've explained it above already, but I'll try it in detail.

Everyone else running p2pool will not allow Bitmain to siphon off the tx fees to an address - since it will break the rules required of the generation transaction in their version, no matter how Bitmain try to do it.

Thus what would happen if Bitmain started mining on the real p2pool, is that their > 51% would be a true > 51% attack and fork the share chain and then be a separate share chain unrelated to the standard p2pool share chain.

I'm not sure of the full ramifications of that, but I suspect it would mean 2 separate p2pools, one running the true p2pool code by forrestv and another running the forked code.

There is of course something worse than that if Bitmain didn't fork the chain and used a valid generation transaction:
p2pool would sudenly overnight be about 10 times bigger so everyone mining would find 1/10 of the shares they are currently finding ... thus it would be pretty much common for most p2pool miners (using the official forrestv code) to rarely if ever get any payouts.

Its you who isn't understanding, mainly because we're all saying similar things.

There are two sides of Antpool:
1) a normal standard, run of the mill pool acting independently (like btcguild, ghash.io)
2) an exotic p2pool 'pool' which is attached to the p2pool share chain.

Pool 1 retains transaction fees. Pool 2 doesn't. Pool 1's transaction fees help pay for SOME of the costs of hosting both pool 1 and pool 2. [next person to quote please cut it down, its too big]

[murraypaul]

0% fees and PPLNS earnings. (The tx fee is not paid out to miners for maintaining cost and the bonus for our engineers.)

This is not possible on the existing p2pool share chain. Every p2pool node would have to upgrade(?) to bitmains version.

It would be possible for the 'p2p' pool as described by Bitmain, for their share of the tx fees.
Miners mining on this pool are not p2pool miners, and do not have to run bitcoind or p2pool itself.
They connect to a pool just like any other, except that in this case the pool is a p2pool node.
The pool is the node, and would recieve the coinbase payout.
It would then pay the miners the portion of the 25BTC payout that Bitmain received, according to PPLNS, and keep the tx fees portion of the payout itself.

Again, This is not how p2pool works.

The generation tx does NOT go to a node, it goes directly to the miners with active shares (ALL the miners), this is what makes p2pool trust-less and is not something I would see as negotiable with other p2pool miners...

The generation tx goes to all the nodes with an active share.
The assumption behind this portion of the thread is that one of those nodes would be the Bitmain 'p2p' pool, rather than the indivdual miners being nodes and generating their own shares.

Here is a p2pool coinbase transaction, take a look for yourself...

https://blockchain.info/block-index/497193/0000000000000000010cb1da262778419a4eac1ba3947fea7dc14bef19399956

As you can see each of the 347 miners with an active share in the p2pool share chain received a portion of the payout directly from the coinbase.

Yes. And in this assumed setup, the Bitmain 'p2p' pool would be one of those miners. It would receive its portion of the 25+tx fees payout, not the users mining on the pool.
It could then split the payout to the actual users however it wanted to.
Users of the 'p2p' pool would not be p2pool miners, and would not have their own shares in the sharechain.
(We don't know if this is actually what is planned, as they have provided no information about how their p2pool would work, the discussion is about whether it would be feasible.)

[kano]

Dogie,

no Bitmain isn't using the p2pool share chain.

Right now:
Pool rate: 3.88PH/s (7.0% DOA+orphan) Share difficulty: 16500000

murraypaul:

if they were using the p2pool sharechain, they can't divide their payment up into 2 addresses in the coinbase payout.
They can pay it to themselves, as the p2pool does, and then later distribute it based on some fee/nofee calculation of course - but that of course won't be all the tx fees, just their payout % of them.
But as I said at the start of this post, they aren't using the p2pool share chain anyway.

[mdude77]

Dogie,

no Bitmain isn't using the p2pool share chain.

Right now:
Pool rate: 3.88PH/s (7.0% DOA+orphan) Share difficulty: 16500000

murraypaul:

if they were using the p2pool sharechain, they can't divide their payment up into 2 addresses in the coinbase payout.
They can pay it to themselves, as the p2pool does, and then later distribute it based on some fee/nofee calculation of course - but that of course won't be all the tx fees, just their payout % of them.
But as I said at the start of this post, they aren't using the p2pool share chain anyway.

And as you said earlier .. if they try to force some different protocol into the chain, they will fork it.  Which means, still, they aren't using it.

M

[murraypaul]

They can pay it to themselves, as the p2pool does, and then later distribute it based on some fee/nofee calculation of course - but that of course won't be all the tx fees, just their payout % of them.

Yes, as I said:

It would be possible for the 'p2p' pool as described by Bitmain, for their share of the tx fees.

[jonnybravo0311]

Well, we can start to see the changes they're making.  Bitmain's github p2pool repository has been updated with AntPool stuff.  Check it out here: https://github.com/bitmaintech/p2pool.git

I haven't gone through their contributions yet, nor will I have time to prior to next weekend.  Who wants to do a comparison between forrest's and this fork?  For example, the very first thing I noticed was a new directory called dbservice, which contains an __init__.py and sql.py.  It looks to me like they're doing exactly what I speculated they were - throwing a traditional type pool on top of the p2pool backbone.

This certainly allows them to control payouts, including the non-payment of transaction fees to workers.  Let's take an example.  Somebody puts this pool into play and there are a bunch of workers attached to it, totaling 100TH/s.  For the sake of argument, let's say that this 100TH/s earns 1.1BTC per block.  I'm making up numbers, and I do realize that it would not be static as I have described, but for this example, look past that .

The pool's hot wallet now has 1.1BTC.  Let's say that the 0.1 is set aside as transaction fees.  Now, there's 1BTC available to payout the workers.  Your typical PPLNS payment algorithms come into play, and the miners are all assigned some portion of the 1BTC.  This is very similar to a traditional pool.  There's a database involved storing workers, their hash rate, the number of shares, etc.

Yes, I realize I have left out a ton of details, but I think you can get the gist of it.  What I'm really interested in, and unfortunately don't have the time to investigate, is how Bitmain's changes to the p2pool code will play out.  Will they be enough to force a fork?  Does this become a competitor to the original p2pool, or a complement to it?

The advantage I've thought of with this setup is that pool operators now don't need to get enough hashing power together to be able to solve a block on their own, but rather can use the p2pool backbone and contribute there.  In this way, I can see decreased variance to the smaller miners, and if I squint my eyes and hold my breath while looking at it upside down, I can see the decentralization, too .

[dogie]

Dogie,

no Bitmain isn't using the p2pool share chain.

Right now:
Pool rate: 3.88PH/s (7.0% DOA+orphan) Share difficulty: 16500000

Third time, you're not listening. Please, actually read what I'm posting this time.

Bitmain's hashing power is on their main NON P2POOL pool for now, there is very little on the p2pool pool as to not upset p2pool.

[kano]

Dogie,

no Bitmain isn't using the p2pool share chain.

Right now:
Pool rate: 3.88PH/s (7.0% DOA+orphan) Share difficulty: 16500000

Third time, you're not listening. Please, actually read what I'm posting this time.

Bitmain's hashing power is on their main NON P2POOL pool for now, there is very little on the p2pool pool as to not upset p2pool.

Yep, which means it's not a decentralised p2pool, it's the same as any other centralised pool, just like mine
https://kano.is/index.php?k=pblocks

[BITMAIN]

BITMAIN Promotion plan for S3+, S4 and C1

$50 coupon for S3+, $400 coupon for S4 and $50 coupon for C1 are issued to customers who ever bought miners from BITMAIN or our official distributors

[dogie]

Dogie,

no Bitmain isn't using the p2pool share chain.

Right now:
Pool rate: 3.88PH/s (7.0% DOA+orphan) Share difficulty: 16500000

Third time, you're not listening. Please, actually read what I'm posting this time.

Bitmain's hashing power is on their main NON P2POOL pool for now, there is very little on the p2pool pool as to not upset p2pool.

Yep, which means it's not a decentralised p2pool, it's the same as any other centralised pool, just like mine

Until more P2Pool pools based on the open sourced code come up, then the hashing power can be put on the p2pool half without breaking p2pool.

[MrGreenHat]

BITMAIN Promotion plan for S3+, S4 and C1

$50 coupon for S3+, $400 coupon for S4 and $50 coupon for C1 are issued to customers who ever bought miners from BITMAIN or our official distributors

THANK YOU, BITMAIN!!!! YOU ROCK!!!!!

[cathoderay]

BITMAIN Promotion plan for S3+, S4 and C1

$50 coupon for S3+, $400 coupon for S4 and $50 coupon for C1 are issued to customers who ever bought miners from BITMAIN or our official distributors

THANK YOU, BITMAIN!!!! YOU ROCK!!!!!

Not really, too little too late. I bought elsewhere......

The best thing about no longer being a Bitmain customer is that I won't have to read any more dogie posts.......Yaaaaay!!

[Solemn]

Day 5

Still no joy!  I have responded via PM and email with the information requested.  Zero response, zero resolution...come on guys...you're better than this.

We have double checked your case carefully, here are replies:

I am unable to see the BTC address I originally entered when setting up the account. 

Because you pressed 'Lock' before inputing your BTC address, so BTC address is empty, and you can not add/change any address any more in your side. This problem can be fixed via sending your registered email address to us (PM is also available).

I am unable to change or add an address for BTC. withdrawal.

Ditto.

Please also PM us your BTC address to get earnings earned before you are able to set a BTC address by yourself.

[PatMan]

@ Bitmain: Has there been any communication between your engineers & forrestv at all?

@ Bitmain, ktzhan or xlc1985: Any news on this?

Thanks.

[dogie]

Still no joy!  I have responded via PM and email with the information requested.  Zero response, zero resolution...come on guys...you're better than this.

Its being worked on, there isn't much more to say. You're free to move your miners to another pool in the interim. Meanwhile, your balance is safe and isn't going anywhere.