Topic: Bitminter bitcoin mining pool - shutdown mining 2020-07-01 website 2021-06-01 - page 12. (Read 324945 times)

Hi again,

Thanks Dr. Haribo for clearing up my understanding of how the fees work, it makes a lot more sense to me now. To further display my ignorance, how will it work for fees when we reach the end state of all the coins being found? I assume the idea would be for bitcoin to remain a viable currency at that point? At least that's what the founder must have had in mind. Given that, was the idea that everyone would just provide hashpower for free in order to participate in the community of bitcoin when there were no more coins to be mined? Sorry if that's a stupid question.

facing eternity, mining in a medium or big pool would be exactly the same - even if you try solo mining.
but an human being so far isn't eternal and could be unlucky his life long :-)
except for the horrible one we shouldn't mention an x4 or a x5 block can occur frome time to time, the pool has just to gather enough hashing power to reduce interval without finding block for exemple once a month.
its on a good way, I've just seen 55Ph, can a mathematician draw something about it ?
And many thanks Doc for this pool !

Some miners used to wear lucky underwear. Perhaps what you are doing will work better to improve our luck.

Thanks for the informative response and the honesty.  For some reason hearing about that awful 11x block actually makes me feel better!!?!  I can't say that because I wasn't in the pool for that block.


I have a tendency to personify inanimate objects that are relevant to my life, like cars, computers, television sets... We have nicknamed our Miner "Peggy." 

I find myself almost daily screaming "Peggy, you stupid, lazy &!+¢#, find me some money!!!" 

It is both futile and cathartic.


Regardless, we are still hanging in there! I hope everyone who is reading this (and your stupid, lazy machines) all hang in there with us too!

Cheers!

I haven't mined for a long time but this thread still shows up in my unread replies. It brings back painful memories of what a run of bad luck feels like. I also find it a bit baffling that people can invest in mining without first fully understanding how it works..... and don't get me starting on people not reading just a tiny bit before posting.

This felt salty but funny at the same time. Deserved I guess, not the “lucky” moment for certain statements.

Maybe try reading back the last few pages of the thread? I'm pretty sure if the pool was dead someone would have mentioned it. You might also learn some interesting things about mining.

I noticed no new coins in 2018 altogether. Is this pool still alive?

I honestly never noticed your badge and never really take it into consideration. People learn things all the time whether they are newbies or not. My next response was going to be that the only way to spread the Tx fees to everyone over time would be to take it away from the ones that rightly earned it by mining it. Luckily everyone was quick to jump in and help clear up a misunderstanding and spread some more knowledge. Newb or not, I'm glad you are here, glad you are mining with us, and glad you learned something that will hopefully help you down the road some. I still learn all the time and I have been in it for a bit as well. When I've been in it so long I can't learn anything new, then I probably won't be interested in it anymore!

Excellent post Doc. Merit earned.

In the meantime, I would also like to add that I'm glad to see you are adjusting the servers to help prevent rental issues. I know I for one am not above renting hash and pointing it here since some other pools are not fans of the rentals and actually try to ban them. Not my pool, so they can do what they want. However, any rental hash I get gets pointed right here to Bitminter. Thank you for working on that.

Yes, the only way to get any income with mining is to find/create new blocks. The income from mining a block is the combination of new coins that are created with the block, and the transaction fees of all the transactions in the block.

When you create a new transaction because you want to pay someone, it just floats around on the bitcoin peer-to-peer network. It is not part of the permanent ledger that is the blockchain. To anyone observing the transaction it is merely an intention to pay, which may take place in the future. Another transaction sending the same coins somewhere else might become part of the blockchain instead. This transaction is considered unconfirmed. You might trust it to pay a cup of coffee, but not a car (certainly not a Lambo).

So you offer a transaction fee on your transaction, to incentivize miners to include it in a block. The miners mine a block with your transaction, they get paid and now your transaction is in a block. Your transaction is in the block at the top of the chain. It has 1 confirmation, which is the block it is in. It's somewhat more trustworthy. But what if there is a blockchain fork and the other side of the fork becomes the longest chain? Then this transaction may yet disappear. This becomes less likely as more blocks are added on top of the block with the transaction. Once there are 5 additional blocks the transaction is said to have 6 confirmations. This is often considered to be the point where you can assume it is a permanent part of the blockchain. The recipient can trust that the coins you sent them are now theirs. This is what you paid the miners for.


Currently the difficulty is almost 3.3 trillion (called billion in continental europe). This means it takes a tremendous amount of work to find a block. On average it takes 3.3 trillion (mining pool proofs of) work. If the difficulty goes up the average time to find a block goes up. If our hashpower goes up the average time to find a block goes down.

Compared to 3 months back, the difficulty is now 2.5x what it was. Our hashpower is 3.5x what it was. So our average time to find a block has gone down. Further increasing the hashpower will further reduce the time to find blocks. It makes all rounds (time between blocks) go by faster, but most importantly of course the long and unlucky ones.

Our amount of work since the last block is over 10.6 trillion. That's more than 3x the difficulty and is certainly bad luck. This is fairly rare.

The worst block we've had took an amount of work that was 11x the difficulty. This is the awful block of which we do not speak. Except I just did. Thankfully something like that is extremely rare.

Only variables that affects block finding is luck. Hashrate of the pool and difficulty play a big part in expected luck but not actual luck. In reality of course the ratio between hashrate and difficulty is the main driver of a pools efficacy.

Bottom line difficulty is going through the roof. It's doubled since the beginning of December. A pool needs to have doubled it's hashrate to keep up even with average (100%) luck. It also needs to be large enough to get its expected number of blocks within each difficulty change.

Bad luck will affect smaller pools over short time periods, but all pools no matter what size suffer from it. If a pool can maintain its Hash to difficulty ratio then over the long term given average luck, then Fees will play a part in how much is earned.

I guess I misunderstood too... So you're saying we aren't accumulating transaction fees since December.  The only transaction fees that are paid out are those that are part of the block that is found by us.   Is that right?

Is there some explanation other than a long run of bad luck for why this is taking so long? Has difficulty jumped that much higher? Other variables?

This long round is getting rather annoying and several people have been trying to end it by renting extra hashpower, but had problems getting that to work.

Mining servers have been updated today to make rentals run more smoothly on Bitminter:

• Default worker difficulty is now 4096
• Auto detect Nicehash worker and use minimum difficulty 1 million
• Minor tweaks to difficulty auto adjustment algorithm

Yeah, those transaction fees, we get them when we mine a block. There's noone on the web collecting them. And noone is earning them in between blocks. When we create a block we put transactions in the block. We earn the new coins created in the block, plus the transaction fees for the transactions we put in the block.

Hi Rifleman,

I got myself confused between 'pays TxFees' and the idea that we were somehow going to get income from hashing transactions that occur on the network and we could collect income just from processing the normal transactional behavior of the network. Someone collects all those little .00002 bitcoin fees from each transaction on the web and I was thinking that these coins would go to the people doing the hashing. So even though we weren't finding a block, we would be doing useful work for the network and there would be the possibility of deriving some income from it. I thought that was what the 'pays TxFees' meant in the description of the pool. I can see now that I was mistaken and did not understand things properly. I'm fully cognizant that other pools only pay when the blocks get found. I just thought we were special in some way in that we shared in this other kind of income as well, it was a misunderstanding of how things work.

That's the way it works for any and all pools.  You have to find a block first.

Thanks Biffa, I didn't know that. I thought that some fraction of our hashes were actually being used for generate transaction fees on the network and we would be getting those paid to the pool. I was unaware that we only earned transaction fees upon the creation of a block. Thanks again.

You only get the fees if you find a block, there are no fees to distribute if a block is not found.

Hi again,

I'm happy with the payout system for blocks, I've been happy with it forever. Just cause it says newbie here doesn't mean I'm a newbie to mining or to the pool. I was just thinking about the income from the transaction fees could be distributed a little more frequently than once every block is found now that that blocks will start coming more slowly. That was my comment. I don't know if that is any interesting amount of bitcoin or not. I would say to use the say last 10 shifts format for this kind of payout scheme as well. I don't know, maybe I'm advocating uncoupling the payout of the transaction fees and the blocks from each other. Both should still be PPLNS though.