[ANN] CoinLab Protected Pool

[dentldir]

We're this weeks payouts processed yesterday?  I haven't seen any transactions yet.

Thanks.

[CoinLab]

Once again I will point to EclipseMC as a great example of good statistical features, good security features and good tracking of pool activity.

Cool.  I'll spend some time this week looking into their features.  

Is it possible to sign up now, build up Loyalty Points with FPGA bitcoin-mining and redeem the points later with a GPU rig?

For now, yes.  However, a few weeks after we release our HPC client, we will stop accepting shares that weren't submitted by it.  You can earn Loyalty Points with FPGAs for now, but we will probably only accept shares from them for the next 2 months or so.

How do I get a cool coinlab thing under my name ?

Yep, looks great phillips. We think it's pretty cool too.  I'm getting our designer to build custom per-user graphics that will include your hashrate.

To everyone who wan't their own hashrate image: would you prefer a black background (like phillips has), or something closer to our website's color scheme?
http://coinlab.com/

[CoinLab]

We're this weeks payouts processed yesterday?  I haven't seen any transactions yet.

Thanks.

Yesterday was a national holiday in America.   Payouts will be sent out in the next couple hours.  

[CoinLab]

Thanks con.

Another question: I guess most of the HPC work will require Nvidia GPUs (except for cryptographic stuff). The first post says "We may perform other types of computation with your GPU besides Bitcoin mining.  We will calculate your earnings based on the equivalent number of credits your card would have produced for the same amount of work.". Problem is, Nvidia GPUs are very bad when it comes to bitcoin mining. So using a 580 GTX, which barely reaches 150 MH/s, will put me in bad position (compare it to a 7970 that reaches 550 MH/s with stock clocks). When doing HPC tasks I would say a 580 GTX should earn no less than a 7970, otherwise there would be no reason to deploy Nvidia GPUs in my rigs.

Edit: In other words: Currently payouts are based on the performance in bitcoin mining. I think the performance of GPUs should be "normalized" in some way - because AMD is great for some applications (cryptography) where NVidia is bad and the other way round.

Or am I missing something?

CoinLab hopes to eventually offer a public-facing mining pool where anyone can perform HPC jobs to earn Bitcoin.  This is going to take a little while: we have to build a general HPC compute client, a pool, and sell HPC compute work.  Once we have this built, we plan to let miners to earn the higher HPC compute work rates and be paid in Bitcoin.

Our current protected pool offering is most advantageous for AMD cards (though all are welcome).  We realize that a small bonus on an NVIDIA card doesn't add up to much, which is why we will be starting an NVIDIA-only pool with larger bonuses.  Our client will soon be able to verify whether your card is NVIDIA or not, and then we'll be able to offer these cards higher rates.

[philips]

How do I get a cool coinlab thing under my name ?

Yep, looks great phillips. We think it's pretty cool too.  I'm getting our designer to build custom per-user graphics that will include your hashrate.

To everyone who wan't their own hashrate image: would you prefer a black background (like phillips has), or something closer to our website's color scheme?
http://coinlab.com/

Glad you like it. Until decided I made some other variants, everyone feel free to use them if you like.
Do not crop them, you are gonna loose the the shadows.

[CoinLab]

If I missed it, please forgive me.  Once a user runs out of Loyalty credits, where do things fall?  Especially when factoring in the other work that doesn't happen to be bitcoin?

It depends on how much HPC work we have sold by the time you run out of loyalty points, as well as the relative to the size of our cluster:

- If we have lots of HPC work and not enough workers, we'll launch a publicly available pool that will let miners earn higher HPC compute rates (we hope this happens )

- If we have enough workers with Loyalty Points to finish our HPC orders, we'll use them to do our HPC work, and send you (with no Loyalty Points) normal Bitcoin mining work units.

- If we need just a little bit more power to fill our orders, first we'll use all of our Loyalty Point users' power, then we'll give users who have been mining with us longest priority for getting higher value HPC work, and the rest will Bitcoin mine.

[CoinLab]

If I missed it, please forgive me.  Once a user runs out of Loyalty credits, where do things fall?  Especially when factoring in the other work that doesn't happen to be bitcoin?

I guess my question would also be about the 'new work'.

Will there be a market for it. bids and offers?.  or will coinlab just set a btc/'share'  price?  

a share of course being something similar to the current getwork/solution.

At CoinLab, we really love markets.  So we are looking at various ways of marketizing our service. The "market" side will probably be facing the HPC customers: we think miners will want to maximize earnings, and that is the primary (sole?) factor in deciding which work to do.  HPC customers will be able to bid higher to get their jobs done more quickly, or put in low limit orders to skim the cheapest compute possible.  However, we don't have the volume to justify building the market yet... we hope soon

I imagine that next year (these are rough ideas), our service will have a list of several dozen HPC compute tasks you can perform.  You will be able to select the jobs you are willing to do ("I only want to fold proteins", or "I never want to mine for ___ Company").  Each job will have a per-'share' value and we'll select the highest value job for you to run (of the subset of jobs you've selected), and you will be paid out in Bitcoin.  We'll periodically test different job types on your machine to see which jobs your computer can do most efficiently to ensure we're getting the most out of your rig.

We're pretty excited about these ideas, but a year is a long time in the Bitcoin world, so its always possible that our model will change.  

[regular]

are you still taking on new miners?  I only have 3 GH/s but would love to be a part of your pool.

[meebs]

This sounds like an interesting and innovative idea. It almost sounds like hedging, if the price drops in the future, you are covered, if it goes up, then the 'loyalty points' might be worthless.

Question: Is there any guarantee that the 'other' work assigned in the future is legit and won't be illegal? (not cracking passwords for hacking etc)

[CoinLab]

are you still taking on new miners?  I only have 3 GH/s but would love to be a part of your pool.

Yep!  Sorry for the slow response, I had to process the large backlog of signups from this holiday weekend.  Looking forward to having you on our pool!

[CoinLab]

This sounds like an interesting and innovative idea. It almost sounds like hedging, if the price drops in the future, you are covered, if it goes up, then the 'loyalty points' might be worthless.

Question: Is there any guarantee that the 'other' work assigned in the future is legit and won't be illegal? (not cracking passwords for hacking etc)

Well, we are a real, legitimate company with investors (who invest with dollars, not Bitcoins) - and we have a responsibility to them to create a lasting profitable business that doesn't break the law. We have to comply with the law because we aren't hiding and are responsible for the actions of the company.  If you are ever in Seattle, drop us a PM and we'd love to have lunch with you and talk about the future of Bitcoin. 

CoinLab is in it for the long haul.  We won't trade short term gains for tarnishing our brand, and we'll never engage in illegal activity.

[ShadesOfMarble]

One thing I already love... 0 Rejects

[philips]

Not so lucky as you, in 3 days I had 5 rejected shares.

Code:

0.005% farm wide reject ratio

Awful!

[Chaplin]

I'm very pleased with the protected pool's reliability so far. In cgminer I set up a failover to my old pool just in case your servers went down, and in the past couple weeks I've only seen a couple hundred shares submitted to the failover.

If one of your staff has the time, would you consider putting together a guide or FAQ for miners who want to plan for the transition to HPC work? Basically I'm looking for recommendations of (Nvidia) cards that will be suitable for the types of jobs you plan to offer. As well, any estimates of the availability of jobs that run fastest on ATI cards. Long-term I'm interested in switching over to HPC entirely, either with a hybrid or full Nvidia rig as is appropriate.

[jjshabadoo]

I second Chaplin's remarks in regard to nvidia machines. From my contact with Chris at Coinlab, they will have more info for us shortly.

I am also focused on creating a GPU farm for HPC work exclusively and believe we can all benefit from some initial guidance. Once we get started I think we can all come together to improve our efficiency.

This is a relatively unlimited field and at this time it behooves all of us to co-operate in optimizing our machines.

Considering the help I received when first building my bitcoin mining rigs on this forum, I am optimistic we can all help each other to build highly efficient HPC clusters.

I am very excited about Coinlab's vision and future and will be supporting them in any way I can moving forward. I have about 10 GH+ pointed here and hopefully will have another 6 GH or so in the next two weeks.

[stick_theman]

Is Coinlab for GPU mining only?  Or Does coinlab accept ASIC as well?

[CoinLab]

Is Coinlab for GPU mining only?  Or Does coinlab accept ASIC as well?

Right now, we accept shares from any device.  We will be transitioning to GPU-only in a couple months.

[TheHarbinger]

Is Coinlab for GPU mining only?  Or Does coinlab accept ASIC as well?

Do you have an ASIC that you are currently mining on another pool with?   

[CoinLab]

I'm very pleased with the protected pool's reliability so far. In cgminer I set up a failover to my old pool just in case your servers went down, and in the past couple weeks I've only seen a couple hundred shares submitted to the failover.

If one of your staff has the time, would you consider putting together a guide or FAQ for miners who want to plan for the transition to HPC work? Basically I'm looking for recommendations of (Nvidia) cards that will be suitable for the types of jobs you plan to offer. As well, any estimates of the availability of jobs that run fastest on ATI cards. Long-term I'm interested in switching over to HPC entirely, either with a hybrid or full Nvidia rig as is appropriate.

That's great to hear! 

Once we have a better idea of which HPC work units will go online first, we'll let you know more about how you can optimize a mining rig for them.  However, its still too early to make any specific card recommendations, because we are talking to such a variety of compute consumers.

Once we've finalized which units will come online first, we plan to host a private forum for us all to discuss how to build rigs that perform best for different kinds of work units (thanks to Jjshabadoo for this idea ). 

We'll keep you posted!

[stick_theman]

Is Coinlab for GPU mining only?  Or Does coinlab accept ASIC as well?

Right now, we accept shares from any device.  We will be transitioning to GPU-only in a couple months.

Why transitioning to GPU ONLY if you could have ASIC that's much faster?  Maybe that's something on the business side or hardware side I don't understand. 

I don't have an ASIC machine at the moment.  We are just talking on a theoretical level right now.

I just want to find out what is the incentive for Coinlabs to have GPU only miners when they can get a much better hashing power in the future.