Hello, I'm the Founder of the New Canadian Bitcoin Mining Pool - BTC Canada!

[BTCCanada]

https://btccan.com/images/btccanadabanner.png

With my first post, I'd like to introduce myself and announce my brand new Bitcoin mining pool - BTC Canada!

As our pool is very new (official launch was yesterday), we are currently looking for early adopters to help us build or processing power and userbase. Our first users will also have early access beta features as we add them!

Some examples of features in the pipeline:

• Merged mining (Namecoin)
• Custom BTC Canada miner/miner configs
• Instant BTC crediting
• Extended notifications

Pool info:

• Canada/US based hosting - very low latency for North American miners
• User accounts protected by secure connection (SSL/HTTPS)
• User passwords/pins are all hashed and salted before being sent over HTTPS to the database
• Service fee of 1.5% for Bitcoins, 0% for Namecoins (when implemented)
• Users can choose between automatic or manual payouts
• Pool support multiple miners (workers) per account
• Pool supports long polling requests and simple JSON API for retrieving current balance and other stats
• Pool uses the PPLNS reward structure - benefitting those who are unable to mine consistently, while discouraging pool hoppers

How can you join us?
     1. Register here: https://btccan.com/register.php
     2. Create worker(s)
     3. Configure your mining application to point to our server - examples: https://btccan.com/gettingstarted.php
     4. Start mining!

Thanks a lot for your support! With your help, we can grow BTC Canada into Canada's premiere Bitcoin mining pool.

[Portnoy]

I tried some links at your site, using firefox, and got the This Connection is Untrusted warning.
technical details:
www.btccan.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is only valid for the following names:
  pool.btccan.com , btccan.com 

(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

---

You might want to do something about to keep from putting people off.


Also I don't see any mention of fees.  How do you compare to other pools in that regard?

[BTCCanada]

I tried some links at your site, using firefox, and got the This Connection is Untrusted warning.
technical details:
www.btccan.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is only valid for the following names:
  pool.btccan.com , btccan.com  

(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

---

You might want to do something about to keep from putting people off.


Also I don't see any mention of fees.  How do you compare to other pools in that regard?

Hello Portnoy, I think you may have visited the site during an update (yes, I'm using my production site for development... my profs would have killed me!). My SSL certificate is for "btccan.com" and "pool.btccan.com" only, not "www.btccan.com". This should all be fixed now, as I updated the site to redirect "www.btccan.com" to "btccan.com".

As for fees, there is a 3.5% service fee. This is to cover the cost of server hosting, SSL registration, and ramen noodles. There is a donation option as well, though this is optional. Once merged mining is enabled, there will be no fee for Namecoins.

Thanks for the feedback!

[AndrewBUD]

I'll stick to a no fee + 1% but GREAT idea

[BTCCanada]

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

[Portnoy]

I tried some links at your site, using firefox, and got the This Connection is Untrusted warning.
technical details:
www.btccan.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is only valid for the following names:
  pool.btccan.com , btccan.com  

(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

---

You might want to do something about to keep from putting people off.


Also I don't see any mention of fees.  How do you compare to other pools in that regard?

Hello Portnoy, I think you may have visited the site during an update (yes, I'm using my production site for development... my profs would have killed me!). My SSL certificate is for "btccan.com" and "pool.btccan.com" only, not "www.btccan.com". This should all be fixed now, as I updated the site to redirect "www.btccan.com" to "btccan.com".

As for fees, there is a 3.5% service fee. This is to cover the cost of server hosting, SSL registration, and ramen noodles. There is a donation option as well, though this is optional. Once merged mining is enabled, there will be no fee for Namecoins.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hey Logan,

All the links I tried seem to work without that warning now. It still appears with "ww.btccan.com" though... maybe it is just a matter of time for the changes to propagate through the web.

Thanks for the info about the 3.5% fee.  You might want to put information like that on your site somewhere if you haven't already.  That and your street address ( Toronto, right? ) etc. to help show visitors and potential users that you are a reputable business. 

Good luck with your venture, I will be watching. 

[Portnoy]

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

Myself I don't mine 24/7 but usually shut down at night so I might be interested in a system that would be best for that way of mining, if I was going to use your pool.
Is the proportional reward system best for that? 

[BTCCanada]

I tried some links at your site, using firefox, and got the This Connection is Untrusted warning.
technical details:
www.btccan.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is only valid for the following names:
  pool.btccan.com , btccan.com  

(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

---

You might want to do something about to keep from putting people off.


Also I don't see any mention of fees.  How do you compare to other pools in that regard?

Hello Portnoy, I think you may have visited the site during an update (yes, I'm using my production site for development... my profs would have killed me!). My SSL certificate is for "btccan.com" and "pool.btccan.com" only, not "www.btccan.com". This should all be fixed now, as I updated the site to redirect "www.btccan.com" to "btccan.com".

As for fees, there is a 3.5% service fee. This is to cover the cost of server hosting, SSL registration, and ramen noodles. There is a donation option as well, though this is optional. Once merged mining is enabled, there will be no fee for Namecoins.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hey Logan,

All the links I tried seem to work without that warning now. It still appears with "ww.btccan.com" though... maybe it is just a matter of time for the changes to propagate through the web.

Thanks for the info about the 3.5% fee.  You might want to put information like that on your site somewhere if you haven't already.  That and your street address ( Toronto, right? ) etc. to help show visitors and potential users that you are a reputable business. 

Good luck with your venture, I will be watching. 

Glad to hear it's working - I think you're likely right about the changes, your browser may have cached the site's URL as "www". The information regarding the fee is on the homepage, but I've updated the original post in this thread to reflect it.

Thanks!

[dree12]

(yes, I'm using my production site for development... my profs would have killed me!).

Your customers would share the same opinion when something goes wrong because of this.

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

If you want to keep a proportional reward system, you should get used to feeling like you are robbing your legitimate miners (while rewarding the thieves that mine for thievery). See this article for mathematical details.

[BTCCanada]

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

Myself I don't mine 24/7 but usually shut down at night so I might be interested in a system that would be best for that way of mining, if I was going to use your pool.
Is the proportional reward system best for that? 

Yes, proportional would work best in that regard. Proportional gives you a cut of the mined block based on how many shares you contributed to a particular round. For example, if it took 200000 shares to mine a block and you contributed 5000, you would get 5000/200000 * 50BTC, or 1.25 BTC. With PPLNS, if you haven't submitted any shares in a while you may not get anything when a round ends.

[dree12]

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

Myself I don't mine 24/7 but usually shut down at night so I might be interested in a system that would be best for that way of mining, if I was going to use your pool.
Is the proportional reward system best for that? 

Yes, proportional would work best in that regard. Proportional gives you a cut of the mined block based on how many shares you contributed to a particular round. For example, if it took 200000 shares to mine a block and you contributed 5000, you would get 5000/200000 * 50BTC, or 1.25 BTC. With PPLNS, if you haven't submitted any shares in a while you may not get anything when a round ends.

This isn't how it works. PPLNS usually has n equivalent to two times the difficulty, which means that even if a round is very long, the payouts are perfectly fair to any non-24/7 miner, and long rounds only increase the variance. Proportional pools, on the other hand, will pay out less to honest on/off miners during long rounds. The balance is given away to people deliberately trying to game the system.

[BTCCanada]

(yes, I'm using my production site for development... my profs would have killed me!).

Your customers would share the same opinion when something goes wrong because of this.

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

If you want to keep a proportional reward system, you should get used to feeling like you are robbing your legitimate miners (while rewarding the thieves that mine for thievery). See this article for mathematical details.

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

Myself I don't mine 24/7 but usually shut down at night so I might be interested in a system that would be best for that way of mining, if I was going to use your pool.
Is the proportional reward system best for that? 

Yes, proportional would work best in that regard. Proportional gives you a cut of the mined block based on how many shares you contributed to a particular round. For example, if it took 200000 shares to mine a block and you contributed 5000, you would get 5000/200000 * 50BTC, or 1.25 BTC. With PPLNS, if you haven't submitted any shares in a while you may not get anything when a round ends.

This isn't how it works. PPLNS usually has n equivalent to two times the difficulty, which means that even if a round is very long, the payouts are perfectly fair to any non-24/7 miner, and long rounds only increase the variance. Proportional pools, on the other hand, will pay out less to honest on/off miners during long rounds. The balance is given away to people deliberately trying to game the system.

As for development, this is a side project for me, so I've been keeping things quick and dirty while active users are minimal. My full time job is as CEO of a tech startup (Oikoi) in Waterloo, Ontario - check out our website if you're interested! Once I build up a userbase I'll be creating staging/dev environments and running everything through a continuous integration server.

Most of my development has been with proportional rewarding in mind, so I haven't looked that much into PPLNS - it seems I may have had some incorrect assumptions. My backend can support it, so I would absolutely be willing to switch to PPLNS if the community would prefer it.

[dree12]

(yes, I'm using my production site for development... my profs would have killed me!).

Your customers would share the same opinion when something goes wrong because of this.

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

If you want to keep a proportional reward system, you should get used to feeling like you are robbing your legitimate miners (while rewarding the thieves that mine for thievery). See this article for mathematical details.

A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?

Myself I don't mine 24/7 but usually shut down at night so I might be interested in a system that would be best for that way of mining, if I was going to use your pool.
Is the proportional reward system best for that? 

Yes, proportional would work best in that regard. Proportional gives you a cut of the mined block based on how many shares you contributed to a particular round. For example, if it took 200000 shares to mine a block and you contributed 5000, you would get 5000/200000 * 50BTC, or 1.25 BTC. With PPLNS, if you haven't submitted any shares in a while you may not get anything when a round ends.

This isn't how it works. PPLNS usually has n equivalent to two times the difficulty, which means that even if a round is very long, the payouts are perfectly fair to any non-24/7 miner, and long rounds only increase the variance. Proportional pools, on the other hand, will pay out less to honest on/off miners during long rounds. The balance is given away to people deliberately trying to game the system.

As for development, this is a side project for me, so I've been keeping things quick and dirty while active users are minimal. My full time job is as CEO of a tech startup (Oikoi) in Waterloo, Ontario - check out our website if you're interested! Once I build up a userbase I'll be creating staging/dev environments and running everything through a continuous integration server.

Most of my development has been with proportional rewarding in mind, so I haven't looked that much into PPLNS - it seems I may have had some incorrect assumptions. My backend can support it, so I would absolutely be willing to switch to PPLNS if the community would prefer it.

Good to see you're experienced.

Waterloo, Ontario is where I live, by the way.

[AndrewBUD]

COol.. I am in Sarnia...

[teflone]

Can we whitelist this guy please Mods !

[John (John K.)]

Can we whitelist this guy please Mods !

You posted this at the wrong place. Whitelisted.

[Graet]

onya for starting a pool
shame you didn't research into the Bitcoin payout methods and which are exploitable and which are fair (even for part time miners)before developing for proportional.

proportional appears to be fair but has a long history of being exploited, most miners these days will not join prop pools, hoppers excepted of course

check out https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf

good luck in your venture

[BTCCanada]

Small world - lot's of folks in the Southwest Ontario area!

Thanks for the analysis Graet, I've taken a look and agree that PPLNS would better protect miners using my service. Effective immediately, I've switched BTC Canada over to a PPLNS reward structure.

[BTCCanada]

I apologize for the double post, but I wanted to announce that we're now up to 2 GHash/s with 12 registered users! Just a few more active users and we'll get the time to block discovery below a week .

[AndrewBUD]

I have 3.4 ghash