Topic: [ANN] profit switching auto-exchanging pool - www.middlecoin.com - page 500. (Read 829908 times)

I love the idea of this pool, and have been using it with ~17-18MH/s for the last 2 days. I don't have any time to manage my miners these days, so this is a perfect solution.

That being said, the issues listed above are a problem which I've also noticed.

My setup looks something like this:

7970s mining @ 800KH/s
7970s mining @ 740KH/s
7950s mining at 655~680 KH/s

Everything works great for the most part, except when the pool switches to low difficulty and or low block time coins. Right now, the pool is mining what I assume to be Litecoins because of the 54.9M difficulty level. When we're mining high difficulty coins like this, everything is fine and all of my cards are able to submit shares @ 512 difficulty since we're working on those 54.9M difficulty blocks for long enough. In this case, 512 difficulty shares are perfect.

The problems start when we switch to less than 50~100k difficulty or so coins, from what I've noticed. 512 difficulty shares simply take too long to calculate, and new blocks are discovered before 90% of us have a chance to even submit a single share. This means that we are (mostly) all burning electricity and wasting time for absolutely nothing, as only the 10% (in this made up example) of the pools users are managing to submit shares/blocks while the rest of us get nothing due to the 512 difficulty setting.

The solution to this is very simple, thankfully. We need lower difficulty, 128 or max 256 difficulty shares. Unfortunately, this causes problems for the pool operator since it's increasing the work load on his server.

A better, but harder solution which may or may not be possible for the server:

Coin difficulty >500k = 512 share difficulty
Coin difficulty >200k = 256 share difficulty
Coin difficulty >100k = 128 share difficulty
Coin difficulty >50k = 64 share difficulty
Coin difficulty <50k = 32 share difficulty

I think this would optimize profits for everyone, including the pool operator who would end up collecting more fees off of our higher individual profits received from submitting low difficulty shares on super fast coins which are currently escaping us.

Thankfully I've got quick mining cards. I can only imagine how much worse the problem must be for people mining on 6 and 5 series cards.

h20, you've been doing a stand up job managing and tweaking the pool. You deserve more than all the profits you've been making so far from the 3% fee. Lower the share difficulty, and you'll have just that. 

Thanks for running this awesome pool, and I really hope this small problem gets resolved when you have the time so that myself and others can continue mining with you. 

the difficulty is adjusted.

Unfortunately it's much more reality than theory.

Basically "fast coins" have fast blocks enabled by lower difficulty ratios. Lower difficulty means easier and faster to solve. Faster transactions, faster block rewards etc.

This is all good and fine until the blocks start getting solved WAY too fast. Distributed computing is fast, but still has its limits.

I like the faster coins, they are great to mine and transfer WHEN the block rate is at or near specification.

Lets say all coins are limited by this distributed network (internet, p2p etc) to a maximum block generation rate of 1 every 5 seconds.

How many times can the designed average be exceeded on a 2.5 minute coin before reaching the 5 second limit VS a .30 minute coin?

So What happens when the blocks are solved faster than every 5 seconds?

We can be "autoswitching into dud coins" because it is very possible that coins look very nice on paper (theoretically the most profitable) but in practice it could not be the most profitable, even by a long shot. The whole point of this pool is indeed to attempt to switch to the most profitable but perhaps some real-world conditions are coming into play that are not taken into account when calculating the most profitable coin on paper. If this continues for much longer, I may be forced to leave this pool although it is really an excellent idea. I really hope this issue is remedied soon

Well that was odd. I had .03 BTC confirmed a bit ago and now down to .027 when I refreshed again.

JR

The diff adjustment I think would help.  I have yet to see my hash rate report at or above what I have.  It's always about 500kh/s lower.  If I was mining solely on an LTC pool I would get credit for those other 500 kh/s.  Considering I only have 2,400 kh/s -- that's a lot of credit I'm not getting.

I'm right there with you and I have the same hash rate as you!  So yes, it's a problem -- but it's an inherent problem that I don't believe can be fixed without splitting the pool to low diff coins.  The problem with that is -- who gets the profit from the split?  Sometimes the lower diff coins are 800% as profitable as BTC.  With this the diff is usually less than 1.  If you throw 600Mh/s at a low diff coin then you get the results you described.. "new block new block new block reject reject reject accepted" -- obviously some people are getting accepted shares.

But, isn't that happening to everyone on the pool equally? Meaning, everyone is still splitting the profit from the low diff coin -- just with less accepted hash rate.  I'm not sure why the last few days this pool has paid less than just mining LTC -- but I'm almost to my end.  I'll give it another day or two, then I'm with you and on another pool.

I really think we need two things in this pool.
256 difficulty.
2 payments per day.(i thought we agreed this was ok before?)
anyway, since were not constantly mining the same coin, the "512 diff is the same as any other diff" doesnt apply now if we were constantly mining one single coin, that is different. but when we switch to 512k diff coins, and only submit one share in an hour, then it changes to another coin that is 1m diff, then we wasted all that work on nothing.

Interesting Theory.   But How can we be "autoswitching into dud coins"?    it makes no sense..  I thought the whole point of auto switching was to try and always to be mining the most profitable coin?   

The easiest solution I can give is to find your graphics card in  http://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison list <--that list.

Then look for the one with the highest hashrate and try those settings.

--as CGMiner runs, watch the "HW:#" value at the top...that should always be zero, if not then tweak the settings till they stay there(run overnight at least)

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I used to get a Butt Load (126 Gallons) of errors which resulted in a low reported hashrate and a lot of bad shares...

Wanted to provide a bit more information about the problem that I noticed has been going on in this pool lately in the hopes that it can be fixed or explained. 

I actually take my mining stats from the pool and record them every few minutes (all day long) to see what is happening in order to evaluate pool performance. In doing this, I get a fairly detailed understanding of the workings and don't get misled by minor trends. My little program factors in all aspects of the mining output (including immature and unexchanged), not just the balance available at the end of the day to transfer out. I generate trend information data every few minutes, and summarize like data together until the trend is broken. I produce summary statistics during every like trend period. As mentioned before, have 2.4 Mhash pointed at the pool.

It generated about $10 a day 3 and 4 days ago (and I was not mining for about an hour each day). That level I defined as good. Then a couple of days ago I noticed that it appeared to start mining some coin with a very low difficulty (the miner just reports a constant string of "new block" messages). While this coin is being mined, statistics go to pot, almost nothing gets posted to the account in any form until the pool switches to another coin. I have had occurrences where my gross balance (including immature and unexchanged)  actually go backwards while this type of mining is in progress for 30 minutes or more (some immature coins previously mined get killed, and there is nothing productive to replace it). Typically, you can also see the pool's total reject rate skyrocket (mine as well), moving on multiple occasions to 30% of the total shares submitted by everyone in the pool. It appears that everyone is caught working on obsolete shares or something. Once the pool moves back to a "normal" coin, things go back to normal and the coin mining rate trends back to normal rates (was about .005 bitcoins per hour previously, for last 2 days down to .0025 per hour, which are rates of approx $12 and $6 per day. The pool continues to jump into these coins for various periods, and stats go to pot consistently at these times.  At one point, my shares were rejected over 50%. Not sure who is benefiting when these coins are being mined, but it certainly is not me.  This has caused my total production to drop from the $10 per day reported earlier down to less than $6 now. 

I understand that mining is a random payout and there are multitudes of factors affecting the payout.  I have studied this particular effect in enough detail (and it is rather consistent), so I believe that it is not a random effect at this point. I also noticed that the pool had a few hiccups in the last day or so, and I have factored out these time periods.

The premise of this pool is great, and I'm a big fan.  Love the idea, and think that if properly implemented the operator(s) could and should make plenty of $$$. However, unless the operator(s) can tackle this problem of autoswitching into dud coins, I'm going to have to mine elsewhere. I'm posting this in the hopes that the operator(s) are not aware and can look into this problem and make adjustments to protect the viability of the pool. Maybe the low difficulty coins are great for some segment of the miners (huge ones?) but certainly not for the 2.4 Mhash crowd like me.

Please advise if there is something that I am wrong about, as I don't want to move elsewhere but cannot ignore the facts...

Same boat. However I think from reading we were mining some coin a couple days ago that was uber profitable and low difficulty and the party is over on that one.  Think there were a couple hiccups also that may effect things. Just make sure you verify your immature and unexchanged balances as some coins take longer to mature than others.

JR

My Rejected 4,3% so not bad I think, especially when I am connecting from EU. I will give pool a try for a week or so, 24 hours is not long enough to judge.

I have been using this pool for a while, and up until recently I have been making roughly .1 BTC per day with 2.4 Mhash which I consider good. As of recently (last 3 days or so) I have been making more like 0.03 BTC per day or less. I have restarted cgminer several times and mined with other pools to make sure that my miner was still working (and it is). Sometimes when the pool appears to switch coins, my accepted hashrate falls and then my rejected hashrate skyrockets. In addition, after that happens, my accepted and my rejected hash rate added together do not equal my total hashrate, and they should.

Does this happen to anyone else?

more

I am mining with 1,7 Mh/s and got 0.05 BTC after 24 hours, Is it worth? How much would I get mining LTC?

Figured it out but need someone to blame. Could the eradic behavior of the system earlier have caused CG or something to crash?  System stopped responding and had to 10 second hold the power. Always very stable.  Second time it happened but only with this pool. Used to use non switching pools of course.

JR

I tested stratum-proxy (mining_proxy.exe) before on your pool for a whole day. it worked perfectly without any problem.

Yeah it should be fixed now. Are you seeing 0.1 MH/s on just the stats page, or in cgminer too? If just on the stats page, restart cgminer and let me know if that fixed anything.

Is it supposed to be working now as I'm getting 0.1 M/H right now.  Should be getting 1.2 at least.

Thanks.