[ANN] CoinLab Protected Pool

[CoinLab]

If you send me an email, I can process a special payout for you within 1 business day.  We're going to build an automated payout system within the next month.  What kind of flexibility would you like?  We'd love to hear your input so we can design the best payout system to serve you.

Thanks for the info.

The most useful withdrawals for me are:
1) Basic: One time manual withdrawal to a manually entered address (usually above a minimum threshold like 0.01 BTC).  This lets you pay anyone, including yourself one time.
2) List Based: One time withdrawal from an editable list of addresses (for commonly used addresses, exchanges, etc).  The list also lets you set a default address so you can have a one click payout button.
3) Time Based: Recurring withdrawals to an address in the list. Multiple times a day / once every day at 4:30pm EST / once every 7 days / once every 30 days.  This one is used for paying out multiple times a day or to pay recurring bills.

Minimum thresholds usually apply on most pools so you don't get outbound coin spamming. 

At 1.5GH now.  I suppose I'll start digging up my Nvidia cards as well.

Cheers.

Awesome feedback!  Thanks, sharing your thoughts with the team.

#1 may not be possible - Our lawyer advised us to make our terms state that all payouts have to go directly to you, for fear of us becoming classified as a money transfer business.  I'll check with him and see if there is anything we can do to make this more flexible.  I have an idea about how we may be able to get around this with client side transaction signing.  I'll have to get back to you on this one. #2 and #3 both look doable.

Another concern we've had about security:
If you can easily change payout addresses, any hacker who gets your password can take all unpaid funds sitting in your account.  Where do you think CoinLab should draw the line with this? 
- Should "locking in" a payout address be optional?  (security is an individual responsibility)
- Should we take the "protectionist" approach of defaulting to a higher level of security? (because the least secure people wont think to check the optional 'lock in payout address' box)

What does everyone think? We'd love to hear the community's thoughts on this!

[CoinLab]

Understood.
 
I wanna add though that we could use a shorter time scale with more immediate relevance, something like an hour or even better, an adjustable period of time.

Thank you

Yep, we're hearing that a lot.  I'm going to try to get a 1-hour or 10 minute average live by end of day tomorrow.

Adjustable time period is a cool idea.  I'll share it with the team.

[koin]

Well if your using Nvidia then mem clocks are not important. However CPU cycles may be.

how would you even know what a loyalty point earned today based on ghash/s will equate to later when units of work are based on some completely different metric?

if these points do have value though, there are a ton of used nvidia cards that can be drop in replacements for a 5970 or whatever that gets sold that are still of use to someone mining an alt-chain.

[CoinLab]

Well if your using Nvidia then mem clocks are not important. However CPU cycles may be.

how would you even know what a loyalty point earned today based on ghash/s will equate to later when units of work are based on some completely different metric?

if these points do have value though, there are a ton of used nvidia cards that can be drop in replacements for a 5970 or whatever that gets sold that are still of use to someone mining an alt-chain.

We have a few ideas, but we don't know exactly which method we'll use to equate the different work units.  For example, we could credit you based on the hashrate you would have earned during the same time, which we'll be able to estimate based on your recent Bitcoin mining history with us. Once protein folding jobs are being tested internally, we'll have a much better idea of what the most accurate method of equating compute work is.

PS: We love NVIDIAs.  They're better for protein folding!  

[GenTarkin]

just wanted to comment, Ive noticed the last 2 evenings (20:30hrs PST) the protected pool lags badly for like half hour to an hour then goes back to normal....any reason?

[CoinLab]

just wanted to comment, Ive noticed the last 2 evenings (20:30hrs PST) the protected pool lags badly for like half hour to an hour then goes back to normal....any reason?

This is our CTOs top priority today.  We have a few different things we'll be trying to balance peak server load, including launching a new front end.  I'll keep you all posted here about our progress. 

Sorry!  We'll be overpaying this week to compensate for any shares lost from lag, so don't worry, you'll get paid out like normal.

[GenTarkin]

Just a comment: I really love the avenue you guys are pursuing! To hope that my GPU's could remain useful / profitable into the ASIC era is exciting. So, I hope your business venture thrives!

[CoinLab]

Update:
- We've made some server side optimizations that decreased response time by approximately 10x.   The lag you saw last night should be much less or gone entirely.

- The Web Interface now has an "Estimated Hash Rate" field which is more accurate than the weekly average.  It's not perfect, and fluctuates on every refresh for miners with high hash rate.  We have some ideas for making our estimate more accurate, so this estimate will continue improving. You can check it out here:
http://pool.coinlab.com/partners/protected

- We ran out of time today, so our second frontend will go up tomorrow.

Let us know if you see improvements (or dont) tonight.  Thanks!

[GenTarkin]

seems more stable and I like the estimated hashrate =) comin along well...

[Chaplin]

Hey, have you guys been checking e-mail/PMs? I haven't been able to connect to the protected pool since I was given my account info a couple weeks ago. Which miner doesn't seem to make a difference, but for example, Diablo gives me this:

Code:

[8/26/12 10:23:30 AM] ERROR: Cannot connect to pool.coinlab.com: Bitcoin disconnected during response: 200 OK

I sent a PM with my miner parameters etc., hope you guys can get back to me on this soon.

P.S. The new website looks purdy. 

[GenTarkin]

Announcements

8/13/12 - Loyalty points now expire 2 years after the price drop, extended from 6 months.

8/20/12 - Users who contribute an average hashrate of 10GH/s over the week (submit a total of at least 150,000 shares) will now earn 97% PPS

8/20/12 - Web Interface for checking your mining performance is now live at http://pool.coinlab.com/partners/protected/

Kinda confused... 150k shares is way below 10GH in the timeframe of a week....
So, what is it? 10GH or 150k share minimum / week?

[organofcorti]

Announcements

8/13/12 - Loyalty points now expire 2 years after the price drop, extended from 6 months.

8/20/12 - Users who contribute an average hashrate of 10GH/s over the week (submit a total of at least 150,000 shares) will now earn 97% PPS

8/20/12 - Web Interface for checking your mining performance is now live at http://pool.coinlab.com/partners/protected/

Kinda confused... 150k shares is way below 10GH in the timeframe of a week....
So, what is it? 10GH or 150k share minimum / week?

There's a decimal place out I'd say. 150000 shares = 1.06 Ghps, and 10Ghps = 1408160 shares. Either 1 Ghps is required, or 1.4 mill shares are required.

edit: or pool difficulty is actually 10

[midnight]

I think this is a great idea! I am very interested in the HPC part of it, I have been researching the same ever since ASIC announcement, with no luck. Also the loyalty points program sounds good too, IF difficulty ever gets to that point  , all our computing power has to be good for something.

[GenTarkin]

When are payouts?

[CoinLab]

I'm just about to start payouts now.  We're going to be overpaying to show our appreciation for toughing out the (now fixed) lag problems we had this week.

Everyone in the 95% PPS pay tier will be getting 100%PPS.

Everyone in the 97% PPS pay tier will be getting 102%PPS.

Furthermore, GenTarkin and organofcorti are correct: we accidentally dropped a zero.  As such, for this week only, anyone who submitted over 150K shares this week will be bumped up to the 97% PPS tier. From next week forward, the cutoff will be at 1.125 million shares.

The expected output of 10GH/s is 1,408,138 shares per week.  With 80% uptime at 10GH/s, you'll be able to earn a bit more than 1.125 million shares.  Alternatively, if you have perfect uptime with 8GH/s, you'll be able earn enough shares as well.

I'll be processing payouts for everyone who has earned at least 0.1BTC today, so you can all get this weeks 5% bonus. 

Cheers!

Chris

[GenTarkin]

Awesome!, too bad I didnt submit required 150k shares...oh well =/ LOL

[philips]

Good news, great way to start a week 

But please, do something with the estimated hashrate, use a greater number of shares or a bigger time span to work with.

Thank you.

[CoinLab]

Awesome!, too bad I didnt submit required 150k shares...oh well =/ LOL

Actually, you did break 150k shares.  Just sent out the bonus payments for people who are earning the bonus for this week only.

Thanks for reminding me.  Manually processing payouts is very mind-numbing 

[GenTarkin]

Awesome!, too bad I didnt submit required 150k shares...oh well =/ LOL

Actually, you did break 150k shares.  Just sent out the bonus payments for people who are earning the bonus for this week only.

Thanks for reminding me.  Manually processing payouts is very mind-numbing 

Ah, thought I didnt cuz the week stat showed me short by 20k shares. The week thing is kinda misleading then =P

[-ck]

Slightly offtopic: Kept trying to figure out why I never got any notifications from this forum thread and finally found just this thread being binned as spam by google mail. Something about the topic makes it unhappy, probably the word earnings. Carry on.