Topic: [204 GH/s] yourbtc.net closing it's doors on 2011-12-08 - page 8. (Read 19910 times)

In the future, PPS pools won't be literally "specified payment per share", but rather "specified fraction of share's value per share". That is, pB(1-f) given immediately per share where f is known and fixed, p changes every two weeks and B is variable.

If the thermal cycle cost is higher than the electricity cost, and there are really no other profitable things to do, they will probably keep mining 24/7 after all.

Ah good.

So, in the long run (assuming Bitcoin bitcoin becomes large and transaction fees become the primary incentive to mine) then the profitability of mining will fluctuate significantly on a minute by minute basis.  Miners could then start hopping the PPS pools (provided they are still alive) and true 24-7 mining will disappear.  I wonder what miners will then do to limit the wear on their equiptment, particularly considering that the hardware may be Bitcoin mining specific.

Of course, this is hardly significant at this stage but it's nice to get the mathematics right.

I find it odd that with the current version one can't get the block reward. As a temporary measure until the new version I'd do one of the following:
1. If "Transaction fees are paid" is not important for the pitch, I'd just keep them.
2. If it is, base all score calculation on B=50. When a block is found, in addition to the payment specified by the method, pay the transaction fees for the block to participants in proportion to their score.

Yes, except that only the Merkle root of the transaction list is in the header, not the entire list.

Yes, if transaction fees are rapidly changing, the pool (and, in a proper scoring method, the miners) are incentivized to work on an up-to-date header with higher fees. This should be balanced with the resource cost of frequently pushing work.

Also, I'm a little confused about how block generation works so I'll lay down my current understanding.  Feel free to correct me.

Each new job is basically a header containing, among other things, a list of transactions to be verified.  This means that the "block reward + transaction fees" as far as a miner of this pool sees them will only change when new work is pushed.  Consequently, the pool would only need to find the total transaction fees for each of the jobs it sends out and not the transaction fees currently up for grabs on the network when a share is submitted.

A competing pool could react to new transactions by compiling and sending out new jobs more frequently (perhaps whenever it can increase the block reward + transaction fee by 0.1 BTC).  The shares at a pool would consequently be more valuable on average and so they could offer higher income for their miners.

I don't have any good suggestions.  What I would do is to include the transaction fee rewards with the blocks for now and begin to scale the share values appropriately once bitcoind 0.5 comes out.  This means that the pool will be less than perfect on the pool hopping front for now but instinct tells me that it's a big improvement over the loyalty bonus approach.

Perhaps Meni has some better ideas.

Not sure yet, if you have any suggestions let me know.

Yep, I read this and appreciate the problem.  I just wondered what do you plan to do with the transaction fee rewards between now and when bitcoind 0.5 comes out?

Great Chris! I just adjusted my donation rate in order to appreciate your efforts.

Yes of course:


Did some homework after Meni's feedback, in order to determine B (block reward + transaction fees) correctly when a share was submitted:

bitcoind version 0.5 will get a "getmemorypool" call, which is capable to get the btc amount of transaction fees, if the current network block would be solved at that moment.

So the distribution of transaction fees will be included into DGM on yourbtc.net as soon as it's technically possible.

Awesome!

What's the current plan for the transaction fee rewards?

Not to mention that stales are lower than ever!!! I am running under .1% since I repointed the farm earlier today.

In order to support Merged Mining and get a fair reward of namecoin blocks we did major updates on the pool:

- Loyality Payout has been done and the feature is now removed
- Therefore all upcomming NMC earnings are distributed on Double Geometric Method just like BTC
- NMC earnings are automatically converted into BTC on current exchange rates and put into the payout queue
- All stats are independent for each chain (BTC & NMC) in the frontend
- According charts will be updated soon

It seems like bitcoind got stuck in middle about 9 hours ago. Fixed it with server restart. If it happens again, i will take a more detailed look into it.

Currently finishing DGM on NMC blockchain, if all goes fine, it will go live today.

Does anyone know what happened at the pool recently?  The pool's hashrate and estimated payout graphs both flatlined for a few hours.

The problem with higher stale rates and cgminer is hotfixed for now.

We are now accepting stale shares from NMC chain as a valid share until we have a more advanced solution.

You find a more detailed and technical discussion here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.597031

A slightly higher amount of stale shares is still a side effect of MM and frequent long polls. Stale rate will stilll decreasing a little bit in future with namecoin difficulty increasing.

I'm glad you've managed this.  It would have been a shame if your monsterous hashing power was taking a 4-5% hit.  I've been working pretty hard on my stales and my average for this round is 1.67% (only 8000 shares though) so until there's a change to the server software I doubt either of us will be able to do much better.


Excellent.  I hope this is not interfering too much with the plan to start using DGM for the Namecoin block rewards at the start of November.

Thanks for your results.

I'am currently in contact with shadders (poolserverj dev) and gathering log files atm.

Keep you informed if got an update.

I am now running on this pool with under 2% stales. See sig.

Just some data on the current stales situation.  Excerpts from the output of phoenix on a 350 MH/s miner (times in UTC + 1).

My miner is now alerted to Namecoin block changes with an impressive 6 new jobs!
{
[28/10/2011 10:36:08] Result: 527688f6 accepted               
[28/10/2011 10:36:19] Result: a2265f38 accepted               
[28/10/2011 10:36:35] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:36:40] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:36:40] Currently on block: 24955               
[28/10/2011 10:36:41] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:36:42] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:36:43] Result: e6a20530 accepted               
[28/10/2011 10:36:43] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:36:44] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:36:55] Result: c7755a8a accepted               
[28/10/2011 10:37:01] Result: fe495922 accepted               
}
As you can see here, there can still be a significant window of rejects.
{
[28/10/2011 10:57:57] Result: 6fb45837 accepted               
[28/10/2011 10:58:09] Result: 9b264748 accepted               
[28/10/2011 10:58:18] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:58:22] Result: 32fc2451 rejected               
[28/10/2011 10:58:23] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:58:23] Currently on block: 24962               
[28/10/2011 10:58:24] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:58:25] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:58:26] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:58:27] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:58:29] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:58:33] Result: 14bcb49c accepted               
[28/10/2011 10:58:35] Result: 309e5bcc accepted               
}

The window of rejects when the Bitcoin block changes still exists.
{
[28/10/2011 10:43:39] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:43:43] Result: 13845b18 rejected               
[28/10/2011 10:43:43] Result: 0e7d80ea rejected               
[28/10/2011 10:43:47] Result: 8ee66e58 rejected               
[28/10/2011 10:43:57] Result: c552249c accepted                           
}
{
[28/10/2011 10:55:49] LP: New work pushed                     
[28/10/2011 10:55:52] Result: 96c68812 rejected               
[28/10/2011 10:55:56] Currently on block: 150893             
}