Continuum Mining Pool: No fees; Client uptime monitoring via twitter and email

[Dobrodav]

Start from http://www.continuumpool.com/

[brocktice]

I have tweaked the RPC scripts and they are orders of magnitude faster. This required some URL changes and I have edited the top post to reflect. To summarize though, the URI is now http://rpc.continuumpool.com/rpc and everything else is the same. The old url will redirect but the new is much snappier.

Hm, I am unable to connect to rpc.continuumpool.com. The old URL is still working.

[Dusty]

Start from http://www.continuumpool.com/

Done (of course), but I only get the average hash rate of my account, nothing regarding the balance.

[brocktice]

I have tweaked the RPC scripts and they are orders of magnitude faster. This required some URL changes and I have edited the top post to reflect. To summarize though, the URI is now http://rpc.continuumpool.com/rpc and everything else is the same. The old url will redirect but the new is much snappier.

Hm, I am unable to connect to rpc.continuumpool.com. The old URL is still working.

Ah I missed the port change. Now I get 403 forbidden.

[Dobrodav]

Ummm....
Do you have Python installed  ?

[brocktice]

Ummm....
Do you have Python installed  ?

What does python have to do with it? Of course I have python installed, I'm mining with poclbm.

[brocktice]

Bought these today: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9855

Once they arrive I will be bringing them online to this pool for another 700 or so Mhash/s.

[martok]

RPC should be fixed. Sorry folks.

[brocktice]

RPC should be fixed. Sorry folks.

New RPC confirmed working for me.

[Luke-Jr]

I am using the scoring algorithm described here:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4787.0
It was designed to prevent pool-hopping attacks.

My understanding of reading this algorithm is that it only works if the pool takes fees... yet you claim no fees. How does that work?

Seems like a clone of Luke's (Eligius) pool, but it doesn't really matter. The more pools the better.

Eligius is an Excellent pool. I wanted to do more with notifications of downed miners though. IE when a miner is down, I want an SMS etc. Luke definitely has the payment system right though.

Eligius is a community pool, with (read-only) access to basically anyone. You're welcome to setup SMS etc notifications on the server if you want (contact me for an account), though I'm not sure you'd care to since you have your own pool now.

[martok]

I am using the scoring algorithm described here:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4787.0
It was designed to prevent pool-hopping attacks.

My understanding of reading this algorithm is that it only works if the pool takes fees... yet you claim no fees. How does that work?

The algorithm does work using fees but it works such that I can set my expected comission to 0. This is done by setting a positive variable fee and a negative fixed fee. In other words, in some rounds, the operator fee will be positive and in others it will be negative with an expected overall payout of 0. Last round for example, my fee was negative.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

I am using the scoring algorithm described here:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4787.0
It was designed to prevent pool-hopping attacks.

My understanding of reading this algorithm is that it only works if the pool takes fees... yet you claim no fees. How does that work?

The algorithm does work using fees but it works such that I can set my expected comission to 0. This is done by setting a positive variable fee and a negative fixed fee. In other words, in some rounds, the operator fee will be positive and in others it will be negative with an expected overall payout of 0. Last round for example, my fee was negative.

And this was of course mentioned in my description of the method, and earlier in this thread.

[brocktice]

Looks like another 2-3 Ghash/s just hopped on board last night (CDT).

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Looks like another 2-3 Ghash/s just hopped on board last night (CDT).

I added ~1.5 Ghash/s 5 hours ago. I put my mining where my math is (hey, that's a really nice-sounding paraphrase!)

Detail: I added my 370MH/s personal computer immediately when I found this. But my mining rigs are harder to access and I was busy so I postponed it. Then my personal MB died and this miner was down until I got a replacement. Then the PSU for one of my mining rigs died, so I did some switching hardware around which left my PC unsuitable for mining. But at the same time I switched my mining rigs from slush, which total about 1.9GH/s.

Edit: Hm, I've just checked at http://www.continuumpool.com/ and it reports my mining rate is ~15% lower than what is reported by poclbm. Any idea why this is? (Sorry if this was discussed before and I didn't notice)

[brocktice]

Looks like another 2-3 Ghash/s just hopped on board last night (CDT).

Edit: Hm, I've just checked at http://www.continuumpool.com/ and it reports my mining rate is ~15% lower than what is reported by poclbm. Any idea why this is? (Sorry if this was discussed before and I didn't notice)

Mine's been fluctuating both higher and lower than poclbm, I think it's just the variability?

[martok]

Edit: Hm, I've just checked at http://www.continuumpool.com/ and it reports my mining rate is ~15% lower than what is reported by poclbm. Any idea why this is? (Sorry if this was discussed before and I didn't notice)

15% seems like a lot. Though I get some variance on this as well. Here is the function I use. To summarize, it just takes the shares over the last 5 minutes and calculates the expected hashrate from there. If you see anything glaring, let me know.

sub hashrate : Public(worker:str)
{
my ($self, $params) = @_;
my ($shares);
my $dbh = $self->{dbh};
my $worker = $params->{worker};
my $sec = 300;
my $y = Math::BigInt->new("26959535291011309493156476344723991336010898738574164086137773096960");
$shares = $dbh->selectrow_arrayref(qq{
select count(*) from share
where worker=? and time >= now() - interval '$sec seconds'
and our_result='t'},
undef, ($worker));
my $x = Math::BigInt->new(2);
$x->bpow(256);
$x->bmul($shares->

• );

$y->bmul($sec);
$x->bdiv($y);
return $x->numify();
}

[DareC]

You guys are my new standard backup pool. Throwing my ~785 Mhash/s at you while my main pool is down.

Any chance of setting up an IRC channel?

Also, are payments made only when balance hits 1 BTC? Manual payouts would be a nice option too.

[martok]

Any chance of setting up an IRC channel?

I'm not usually around IRC but if you need immediate help, feel free to post here or mension @continuumpool on Twitter.

Also, are payments made only when balance hits 1 BTC? Manual payouts would be a nice option too.

Unfortunately, I don't see an easy way to do this. The problem isn't that we can't, it's that since workers are effectively unauthenticated, there is no secure way you could tell the pool, send balance of address x out immediately. You have no way of proving you own address x and since TX fees will likely apply, well....

I am however working on combining payouts to multiple workers. If I have workers a, b, c and d mining, it may not make sense to have four seperate payments generated. So, I should be able to tell the pool to combine those payments and send to address e. We even have an unused message field for that, the client password. Again, due to the proof of ownership problem, the feature will only apply to those shares submitted with the payment address as password and not previous shares but it should work.

[brocktice]

I uh, invited some friends. How's the server holding up?

[martok]

I uh, invited some friends. How's the server holding up?

Indeed, and they found a block.

Server load is pretty much where it was when we started. Sitting at 0.3 with most of that being consumed by bitcoind itself.