Topic: Lots of network issues with several Vertcoin pools [solved] [nope, not solved] (Read 515 times)

Oh, man, I think I am going to give up on VTC after I get to the minimum payout of 0.5 on Give-Me-Coins; I mined it for *80* hours at 14.8 MH/s average and my balance went from 0.24 to 0.31; I should've received 0.6 VTC. I suspect it has something to do with the pool only finding 1 block in that time so most of my shares - despite being valid/accepted - went towards solving a block that some other pool found first. I'm not too sure on how things work in that particular situation.

Anyway, I switched over to mining FTC on the same pool and have accumulated close to the expected number of coins vs. time (a much harder target to hit as the difficulty for FTC varies a lot more wildly) so it's not the pool short-changing me, per se, there just seems to be something dodgy about this coin.

Feathercoin mines quickly so it was easy to confirm that give-me-coins is paying the expected amount, and since difficulty for FTC has risen dramatically since this morning and my missing VTC balance ended up reappearing, I decided to switch back to VTC on GMC. Besides, I need to get the balance there up to 0.5 VTC before I can cash it out.

Oh, and the time to find a VTC block on GMC has dropped down to about 24 hours, so not nearly as bad as the 105 hours when I last checked it.

In a bizarre twist, Give Me Coins now shows a balance of 0.17 VTC (vs. 0.073 expected) while SOAT seems to have lost a send transaction of around 0.11 VTC somewhere as my electrum wallet says I've received about 0.36 VTC in 3 separate transactions while SOAT says it has paid me 0.47 (with an unpaid balance of 0.099 - because min. payout of 0.1, lol...).

Right now I've switched over to mining Feathercoin on GMC because it takes too long for my puny 1050 Ti to earn the minimum payout in VTC and no pool seems to accurately represent how much I've earned until days - literally days - later. If I had a much more powerful mining setup I'd be pissed at pointing it at a pool that showed 0 earnings for 24+ hours.

Thanks for replying here; the comment section on YouTube should be reserved for posting insults, inflammatory rhetoric and proclaiming one is "1st!"...  

You run a new pool; I'm a new miner - probably a recipe for disaster - but I am an electronics engineer for my day job so I should be less prone to stupid f-ups than the average Nicehash miner... Or, at least, my f-ups will be more spectacular... and with big arcs!

As for the block reward halving on Dec-12, I suspected that the difficulty would halve along with it so I didn't stop mining, and that seems to have been the case, more or less (difficulty ranged from 70-90k prior to the halving and it is now in the range of 40-60k; okay, so a bit more than half the difficulty for half the reward...).


Granted, I've only been mining for about 2 weeks now - and I only just bought my first GPU specifically for mining* (so the mighty 1050 Ti has some competition) - but even in this brief time I've noticed that VTC is one messed up coin to mine. The p2p pools seem to be a total disaster, and your comment that running a VTC pool requires more work than average might explain why.

I have just one request for your pool at this point, and it is something which I feel will make your life easier if it can be implemented: report immature earnings assuming a block has been found. What your pool (and many others) currently do is report 0 earnings until a block is found. You can probably guess what that makes most miners think is happening on your pool - they are doing a whole lot of work for someone else's wallet.



* - an RX 570 that was on sale at Best Buy for $230 (so only ~$40 more than MSRP...   )

Hey Magic!

Thanks for trying out our Vert pool! We are fairly new with vert so we do have very few miners. The low miner count was also partially due to the halving, as we lost a lot of miners in that process for one reason or another. We were closer to 8-10 gigahash previously.

I will say, in the defense of ALL Vert pools, this coin has definitely been one of the most difficult to manage pool-wise as it requires a lot of attention/babysitting. Please feel free to reach out to us on our discord with anything you might have questions on! https://discord.gg/pcQJ75C

If there's anything we can do, we'd be glad to try.

Okay, I've been mining to the VTC pool at multipool.sonofatech.com for 45 hours with very few rejected shares (99.8% acceptance) and my earnings are finally approaching the predicted amount. It's still underestimated, but now the difference is between 0.26 reported vs. 0.34 predicted, rather than 0.003 reported vs. 0.17 predicted... I suspect the long time to find a block at SOAT - around 12 to 16 hours - is partially to blame for the under-reported earnings, and if so, then the estimation should improve the longer I mine there. As a result, I am going to give it another day at least, even though I was planning on switching the mighty GTX 1050 Ti over to mining ZEN this morning.

The situation at give-me-coins.com is even worse: the time between blocks is estimated at 105 hours!?! So while I no longer think there are shenanigans going on at GMC, I also don't want to waste time mining there; 12-16 hours between blocks is already trying my patience as it is.

Okay, so I'm not imagining it! That's both good and bad to know...

I agree that the rewards for VTC aren't particularly compelling right now, but my current (and evolving) philosophy is to mine coins that are in the middle of the pack on whattomine.com and sell those I've previously mined/accumulated that are closer to the top. Or to put it another way, mine while network difficult is average; sell when network difficulty is high.

At any rate, the VTC multipool at Son of a Tech seems to be operating much more fairly than any other I've tried, but the long interval between found blocks is making it difficult to evaluate. At least I seem to be getting credit for the vast majority of shares I've submitted (3400 out of 3402, if I understand the text output from Vertminer correctly); at pretty much every other pool 25-50% of my shares were marked stale and tossed out and/or I had lots of connection issues. The former issue may be a case of pools (possibly intentionally) mining identical blocks while the latter is what you might expect if some kid decides to set up a p2p pool in his dorm room or the like.

noticed this with vert as well, tried a few pools that were supposedly good and they all had issues.  went back to what I was mining previously that was recognizing every drop of hash power out of my rigs, ESTIMATED profits a little lower, but honestly with network errors, bad pools, down time, etc I bet it's the same if not better. was done with vert after a few hours of messing around.

Yep, but difficulty seems to have dropped, too. Not quite in half, so it still takes more time to mine a coin at a given hashrate than prior to yesterday, but in my case I am getting credit for something like 1/50th what I should. I just switched over to multipool.sonofatech.com (after seeing some of his videos on YouTube) so I'll update this thread after I've been mining long enough for a balance to show. Based on whattomine.com I should accumulate VTC at a rate of about 0.00737/hour and I switched over exactly at 8:00AM.

As of 12/12/2017 Vert coin has halved their rewards so you should be seeing 50 % less coin payout if you where getting 4 coins now payout is 2 coins. .

After 12 hours of running at 14.8MH/s average I've managed to accumulate a whopping 0.0015 VTC on give-me-coins vs. an estimate of 0.0727, or about 48x less than expected... Ping time is 16ms so that clearly isn't the issue, and this dismal track record applies with two different miners.

So far every single Vertcoin pool I've tried is not reflecting my contribution at anywhere close to what my miner should be producing. I will try one last pool - Son of a Tech's - and then I am done with mining VTC.

Well, first I needed to figure out how to correctly configure the switches on a typical command-line miner to work with GMC (aka give-me-coins). Yes, I did /attempt/ to RTFM on GMC's support section, but every time I clicked on "Miner configs" I just got a reload of the top level category descriptions; no actual miner configs, that is.

Through sheer cussed persistence I figured out that you don't specify your wallet address in the command-line switches, rather, you specify your login name (e.g. - MagicSmoker) and your default first worker is named "1". So now my command line for vertminer* looks like:

vertminer -D -r 3 -o stratum+tcp://vtc.give-me-coins.com:3337 -u MagicSmoker.1 -p

Hopefully this will help others that want to use give-me-coins a try because I really like the UI - it's my favorite of all the pools I've tried so far, in fact - and it seems to be accepting most of my shares (rather than discarding >80% of them as stale).


* - I believe vertminer is the actual miner used in One Click Miner,

Look @ the last pages of excavator topic, i give out configuration example for lyra2v2, you should be able to figure it out for gmc 

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.25663169

I hate to ask this sort of thing as I've been using computers since the bad old days of DOS 4.01, but could you provide your command string for excavator to work with give-me-coins? I just d/l'ed Excavator 1.3.7 Alpha and it seems like a hot mess compared to vertminer or ccminer, but I wasn't able to connect to give-me-coins with the latter 2 programs, either, after only changing the url:port in the command string for both programs.

EDIT - here is my ccminer-x64 command string:

ccminer-x64 -D -r 3 -a lyra2v2 -o stratum+tcp://vtc.give-me-coins.com:3337 -O wallet.worker1

I have Debug mode turned on and max retries set to 3 so it doesn't endlessly loop when something fails. Wallet and worker name are fake, of course. Not sure it is a security risk to post actual values here, but, well... I'm paranoid.

Alright, well then try GMC, hope it far better for you 

Ahh, ok. Well, I d/l'ed the latest versions of both Vertminer and the tpruvot ccminer directly from their respective Github releases page and had the same connectivity issues with both programs.


I didn't try the "givemecoins" pool but I just checked it out and it certainly looks a lot less clunky than the ones I have tried. I was also considering giving the pool by the guy that publishes the Son of a Tech videos a try.

The pools I have tried so far and which had connectivity and other issues were:

vtc-poolmining - worked the best with nearly 16 hours of continuous uptime, but then I got booted off and couldn't reconnect for >5 minutes. During that time I poked around on their support forum and found out that no one was getting credit for the last 12 hours of shares they submitted so I decided not to waste any more time with them.

vtc.alwayshashing.com - relentless connectivity issues; in fact, can't even bring their static monitoring page up right as I type this.

Webster, US p2p - 67.253.140.201:9181 - the "least worst" p2p pool, but over 50% of the time the miner software was reporting that GPU #0 was waiting for work, and then when it finally did receive work it was marked stale when submitted over 50% of the time... so, my already slow card was running at 25% of its mining speed, effectively.

Montreal, Canada - 66.70.178.185:9171 - the first and worst p2p pool I tried before I better understood that I should be on Network 2 (port 9181 for most sites, I gather?). Relentless and random disconnects; would run for up to an hour before booting me off and miner couldn't connect with the 3 retry limit and 60 seconds between tries (so at least 3 minutes of downtime) and around 20-25% of my shares were being marked stale. This would have been the least-worst p2p pool /if/ it weren't for the disconnects; at least the Webster pool let me stay connected for the entire time I was evaluating it.

What i meant was that you could have pools that enforce newer stratum protocol and that older miner don't connect to them properly, so i was kinda suggesting you to try a new one, i've been mining this algo/coin for alot of time without experiencing any issues.

Which pool are you using ? Do you have the same issue with give me coin pool ? (that's the one i use)

That's unlikely. I have a newish cable modem, a decent router (using hard-wired ethernet, not Wi-Fi), and while mining Zcash on Nanopool for the last 4 hours or so I haven't experienced any connectivity issues and only one rejected share (out of 131 and counting... lol).

I always ping a pool before I connect to it and all the Vertcoin pools came in under 60ms, but I still experienced several dropouts every minute and unrecoverable disconnects (that is, the miner reached the 3 time retry limit I set and I couldn't reconnect to the same pool for several minutes). In contrast, the UBQ pool on Pool Sexy had a ping of about 140ms and while I did receive the occasional stratum warning or temporary disconnect from ethminer 0.12.0, I didn't experience any unrecoverable disconnects; that is, ethminer was able to automatically reconnect and resume operation.

I just find this curious and want to know if others are experiencing the same issues, or if they have found a reliable US pool for small miners (which I am given to understand is "Network 2").

Might just be your internet.

Yeah, I'll definitely be trying different miners out after the network connectivity issue is sorted out.

I probably should have mentioned that I had the occasional "stratum port disconnected" error when mining Ubiq to Pool Sexy, but no full-blown disconnects. I stopped mining Ubiq temporarily because the difficulty spiked to 25 from 15 (!!!) and I wanted to try other coins/algorithms out. Vertcoin was my second choice but since that hasn't worked too well I am now crunching away on Zcash at nanopool (I am also trying different pools as well as coins at this point).