Does Bitminter run its own pool software? If not, what software does it use?
All custom made.
My only complaint is that I'm not really a fan of merged mining, but with only 70GH of my hash here it's not a real concern for me at this point. I would be interested to hear (unbiased) why this pool merge-mines and what the pros/cons of it are.
Why don't you like merged mining?
Pro: free namecoins.
Con: the time I spend to keep our namecoin nodes running could be better spent on something else. The namecoin software has been very unstable in the past. One pool controls a large majority of the hashrate in the namecoin world. That pool modified their nodes to hardfork at an earlier time than everyone else, causing problems for all the other pools (many orphaned namecoin blocks).
If you are concerned that you will get rejected (stale) bitcoin work when there is a namecoin block change, you don't at this pool. Old bitcoin work is still valid at Bitminter unless there was a bitcoin block change.
If you still don't want the server to tell your client to flush old work when there is a namecoin block change, then you can turn this off in your worker settings. Uncheck the "Merged mining stale flush".
Changes I have been considering:
- Make "Merged mining stale flush" opt-in rather than opt-out.
- Make namecoins opt-in. If you don't opt in your work is still used to create namecoin blocks, but you do not get namecoins and you do not have a namecoin balance shown on the website at all. Of course there would be no namecoin work flushing for your workers. This would remove the annoyance of namecoins for those who don't like them ("why am I getting namecoins" is one of the most common complaints). It could also be a small extra income for the pool.
