Topic: Continuum Mining Pool: No fees; Client uptime monitoring via twitter and email (Read 50243 times)

So is it official yet? The pool's been offline for a few hours now. Will it be back online to finish the last block??

Hey so uh... as far as I can tell my miners still pulling work so I've just left it going on this pool when it runs.  We sticking it out until we get the last block done?

Also what does this mean? I've seen it from time to time while running my miners.  Anything serious?

continuumpool.com:8332 08/07/2011 18:16:41, long poll exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "BitcoinMiner.pyo", line 326, in longPollThread
  File "BitcoinMiner.pyo", line 284, in request
  File "httplib.pyo", line 974, in getresponse
  File "httplib.pyo", line 391, in begin
  File "httplib.pyo", line 349, in _read_status
  File "socket.pyo", line 397, in readline
error: [Errno 10054] An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host

Unless something fishy is going on with the larger pools, it just means the smaller ones were lucky during that time. Smaller pools have higher variance, which means you're more likely to get payouts significantly more or less than the average. But the average is the same.

I find its more beneficial for me to be in a lower speed pool. Maybe the pool was just 'lucky' during that time, but I got a lot more BTC/day on avarage from continuum and lower speed pools vs any other pool, eclipse included, or so it seems so far.
Example, my cashout per day is lowest on deepbit, by a LOT, which has the highest speeds. Cashout on continuum was higher, but less regular, which was fine by me.

What could that mean? Generally the higher the better, and EMC is tiny.

Hi martok, are you still intending to shut down? It looks like a few of us harddiers (~10GH/s) are still hanging on to the last bit of it Are we waiting for a last block?

Thanks for the heads up about eclipsemc
Total speed is a little higher then I would like, but it looks like home for now.

Looks promising: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16385.msg335985#msg335985

Meni, thank you very much for your analysis. I can't judge if you are right, but I also have the feeling, somethings wrong with the MaxPPS-method. I think it would work, if old shares wouldn't count forever. If for example all shares from more than 20 rounds ago wouldn't be considered anymore such problems as you described should not arise.

Anyway, if Eclipsemc really uses your scoring method [1], my problem will be solved and you'll find me there. ;-)
Of course I'm still sad that Continuum goes away...



[1] I'm going to find out / ask and report back.

Eclipsemc is gaining ground and uses your scoring method, Meni.

Ahh So sad news T_T Here I've been mining on this pool for so long. Thought we'd make one more block until shutdown. I'd be happier if we close it once we find the last block.

Ohh well.. where do we go now?

Thanks for your reply. So basically, I will get nothing if no one find a block until the shut down.

Because your balance is zero.

The last block found was on 28th of June. The pool is shutting down 3am UTC tomorrow, so you can watch it until then.

Nooooo!
Don't go away!
I'll pay a fee too.
I dislike all other pools I've tried except this one.
If i'm not mining for Continuum I'm solo mining, which doesn't really do anything for me

I would stay, too. We're really lucky to get a block (or two?) in the final 24 hours (Edit: sorry, apparently I was delusional)

If I hadn't stretched my free time so much with building mining hardware, I'd even volunteer to  relocate the server. But I really cannot commit.

How much bandwidth does the pool required? Would a home server sufficient to handle it? How much maintenance does the server need?

I mine in continuum for the last 24 hours. I try to check my balance at
http://www.continuumpool.com/balance.php?worker=my_btc_adr

But this page output nothing.

What is my balance ?
Where can I find the pool solved block history ?
When will I get paid ?

thanks

I went back to slush. Passable scoring method, low variance, simple worker monitoring.

[Edit: The following should be correct for MPPS.]

It isn't any good if you ask me. Sure, if you make an oath to mine for eligius forever until the end of time, it will even out eventually. But if you just want to mine for it for any limited amount of time, the odds are against you.

If you mine for such a pool for the duration it takes the pool to find on average 1 block, you get a penalty of 1/e on average, so your expected payout is only 63.2% of the average in other methods. If you mine for the duration of finding on average L blocks (where L is an integer), your penalty proportion is exp(-L)L^L/L!, which by Stirling's law is roughly 1/sqrt(2 Pi L). So for L=100 your average penalty is 4%.

Given that pools are supposed to drastically decrease your variance while having insignificant impact on your expectation, I find this reduction in expectation, or alternatively the long-term commitment, unacceptable.

Edit: Actually, I'm still not sure how exactly MaxPPS works. Whatever it is, though, I suspect these calculations are at least approximately true.

[Edit: The following is for SMPPS]

Reading the more detailed description it looks like it doesn't work like I at first thought. It looks very difficult to analyze, which is why every time I try to think about it I come up with different conclusions. However, according to my current understanding it is doomed to failure. What will happen is this:
The pool balance (total earned - total owed) follows Brownian Motion.
Which means that it will reach any given level with probability 1.
So at some point the balance will be deeply negative.
So any newly submitted share will receive only a fraction of the expected payout.
Seeing this, miners will leave to greener pastures.
This will slow down the recovery, until everyone is fed up with it and the pool collapses.
Everyone who still has a pending reward will never receive it.


Note that there are several perfectly valid hopping-proof methods. PPLNS is hopping-proof and has less variance than the geometric method (mine), but it involves the extra complexity of crossing round boundaries. It has two variants, with or without double-counting shares.

I would stay and pay the 1%.

Actually I don't really know where to go. PPS-pools are out of the question, the original Multipool is not operated anymore (and I didn't see my coins from there yet), Multiclone is also not stable, deepbit-PPS is too expensive.

Meni, would you care to comment on Eligius' new MaxPPS-system?

Thank you for taking the time to incarnate the scoring method. It was a pleasure while it lasted.

Have you considered taking a fee for the pool? Maybe something like f=c=0.005 (1% average). I don't know if many people would mind, and it might make it worth your while even without participating yourself.