Topic: [masterpool.eu] DISCONTINUED - shut down at the end of February (Read 8945 times)

No more support at support[at]masterpool.eu neither do I get a reply on a PM to nodemaster ... sad story..
(I lost my coins)

wow you dont miss an opportunity eh?

Ozcoin miners have been rather happy
http://ozco.in/content/share-payout-comparison-bitcoin

+10 to join P2Pool... 

someone with me giving https://miner.ecki.net:444 a try when masterpool shuts down?

Hate to see another pool go down, but I hope you encourage all your users to join another of the smaller pools or P2Pool.  I would hate to see any of that hashing power go to one of the "Big Three".

sad indeed. will you keep up the namecoin dns?

sad times. now I need to find a new place ;<

Well, switch back to prop? Or, let your work live on like Yourbtc and Ozco?  I'll take it, but I would go with DGM or Prop.  PPLNS was too limiting for me when you were previously a very good prop pool...I like to visit many pools and mingle.

Good luck on your next move! I am glad to have mined with you...just not on PPLNS...

There is only one master of the node...

It's a shame so many pools are closing lately. But have fun with your son and good luck with everything.

It was funny reading your blog post. So many times I went to bed thinking I sure hope that when I wake up we have finished this long block. I hadn't thought about it before but I guess all small pool operators have it the same way.

It is sad to see another pool closing.
best of luck in your future endeavours

Graeme

Hi all,

Unfortunately I have to announce that MasterPool will shut down its service on the end of February. All information about why this is nessecary and when this will happen can be found on the MasterPool blog. Please have a look there: http://blog.masterpool.eu/2012/01/masterpool-will-shut-down-its-service/
Like always if you have any questions or feedback please use this forum, or the comment section on the blog.

Thank you all for your time, effort, feedback and support

I guess it depends on your point of view. In terms of hashrate it was a success in getting rid of the sudden peaks in hash rates. The hashrate however is (as expected) much lower in comparison to proportional. The last days we see a very slow increase in hashing rate due to about 1-3 new users a day. But IMHO this is not due to PPLNS but more because of the increasing BTC prices. I got very positive feedback from some users regarding their now more constant overall income. Furthermore the payouts increased slightly for constant miners in comparison to proportional payout scheme. However this is feedback from miners who were eager to change to PPLNS thus this may be a one sided view. Personally I'm quite satified with PPLNS. The biggest difference for me speaking as a pool operator is, that I have the possibility to interact with users giving them hints in order to optimize their mining setup. We achieved several improvements on the pool and on their setups which is very rewarding in a small community. This was not possible with pool hoppers.

However please keep in mind, that MasterPool is no "business". It's a spare time project and fortunately there is no nessecity for me to make profit. My main focus is to build a rewarding community. Having this in mind I have to say: " Yes I'm glad with changing to PPLNS". However this does not mean, that it's the best option for all pools. If I wanted to make profit I guess it would've been better to stay with proportional.

In retrospect, are you glad you made the change to PPLNS? Did you anticipate a higher hash rate?

I added german translations to the website and thus opened another thread in the german subforum. If you like get support in german. Please have a look there: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/masterpooleu-merged-mining-1-fee-pplns-deutsches-webinterface-53558

As announced before the pool was switched to PPLNS this night. The next solved blocks will be rewarded using the PPLNS system.

Yeah must be quite a couple of days  It seems you face a problem with some cookies we had last month: Have a look at this Jumble. This should fix it: https://www.masterpool.eu/jumble/comment/52

Thank you for being that patient. However please don't hesitate to post on the Forum, Twitter, or Jumble if you experience such problems. Furthermore you can always contact support@ via email. There is no need to wait a couple of days for problems to get fixed. Just drop a line and I'll try to sort it out.

Hmm, I just logged in without issues.  Try clearing all cookies from *masterpool*, I remember having a similar problem previously when I would sign in from 2 different locations.  The page would just go blank.

Haven't been able to login to my dashboard for a couple of days.  Is there a fix coming?

As already announced we’ll change the reward system from proportional to PPLNS. This will happen on 26. Nov 2011 00:00 UTC. The first block on each blockchain solved after that date will be rewarded as PPLNS block.

If you need some more information on PPLNS please have a look at the blog as I compiled some information there:

http://blog.masterpool.eu/2011/11/pplns-facts-and-myths/

If you are still missing some information don’t hesitate to discuss it on the blog, the forum or on jumble.

I wanted to give some quick updates on the PPLNS progress. PPLNS is up and running on https://alpha.masterpool.eu which is running on testnet. Feel free to register and play a bit, but keep in mind that it is still alpha  We have a neat new feature which I called round explorer. Due to the design of PPLNS you will sometime be awarded for shares that was committed in previous rounds or you may loose shares if the round is very long. In order to keep the calculations transparent I'll introduce the round explorer. Here is an example:

https://alpha.masterpool.eu/statistics/block/5ef6c40fab320bb1c08db96e924945d568ecc809241af8da8e32e114d3a2ad38

Both blockchains on MasterPool alpha use a difficulty modificator of 2 at the moment. This may change before the new version is rolled out to production. If a block is found (difficulty * 2) previous shares are used to calculate the reward. On the round explorer above you'll find your real submitted valid and total shares but also your amount of shares that were used in order to calculate the PPLNS reward (if it was a PPLNS round).

At the moment we have the funny situation, that NMC difficulty is twice as high as BTC difficulty on testnet, thus expect to get more NMC than BTC. This is not a bug but a feature 

Please feel free to come up with suggestions for improvement.

Please find some updated information about the pools status on the blog: http://blog.masterpool.eu/2011/11/current-pool-status/

From what I can tell most of those 80% who didn't vote were inactive for quite some time. For sure they didn't either respond to the invitation to the survey nor to the reminder send out after some time. Thus I guess they already left or they didn't care. Nearly 20% response rate on a customer survey with this preconditions is very good and quite representative.

your survey is invalid, 80% of those who didn't vote obviously do not want any changes otherwise they would vote, rest who voted are 54% vs. 46%

if you want a change - do it, but don't claim it was voted for, let's see what happen with those 80% that haven't voted, will they leave or stay?

Some time ago I started a survey asking if MasterPool should change its reward type. Now the survey has been evaluated. Here are the most important points in a nutshell:

MasterPool will be changed into a PPLNS pool within the next weeks. Furthermore I won’t implement a PPS option. The most used ingress server is EU01. Thus if I need to dismantle one mining ingress server due to too low usage it will be US01. However if BTC prices rise again and MasterPool needs further ressources then the next server will be added in Asia right after the US followed by Australia.

Please find all information and the results of the survey on MasterPools blog: http://blog.masterpool.eu/2011/10/masterpool-member-survey-102011/

Here are more details on my system in case it helps:

Windows 7 64-bit
Intel i7 920 @ 2.67 overclocked to 3.2
9 GB RAM

ATI Radeon 5870
Catalyst Version 11.5
overclocked to 990 MHz core clock; 300 MHz memory clock; default voltage

Today I got hands on a Windows PC and installed the latest version of GUI miner. However I only had the possibility to use CPU. But I guess this shouldn't make any difference for testing connection issues. It connected without a problem hashing at about poor 8 MHash/s. I waited some long polls and submitted a share. Is anybody out there who can confirm this issue?

Thank you for testing. I'll install some Windows to my Linux Box and try to reproduce it the next days. Honestly I don't undestand it, as last poclbm is running fine under linux. I have reports that it is working on windows without flaws as well. Perhaps this is a GUI miner speciality.

Still getting the "AttributeError: 'HttpTransport' object has no attribute 'failure'" error.

When I set it up in 'GUIMiner v2011-08-24' I choose the "File > New miner > New OpenCL miner..." option, so it is running poclbm,
according to the GUIMiner thread:
GUI mining - updated Aug 24 with new miner versions 

I made a big bunch of improvements to the pool (have a look at the blog: http://blog.masterpool.eu/2011/10/the-quest-for-performance/). The pool is again running smooth with very low stales. Furthermore I fixed some stuff that should make it better compatible with newer versions of mining software. If you have the time would you mind to test again with your current version of GUI miner?

It won't connect at all with that latest GUIMiner client but it worked fine with the last version, so the port and all the other information is correct.

I can use the old client if I use your pool. It is just a hassle as I say if I have to switch back and forth between clients due to this or that pool being
down. Just inquiring in case there was a known and easy solution I could use to avoid that hassle, but not a big deal if not. 

BTW. Did a mod change the topic or am I getting paranoid 

Mhmm, that's really strange. I'm not using guiminer. But after the database had some time to settle I'm now getting pure accepts from my miner. Don't know if you still care to sort out this problem. If yes. Is this problem occuring occasionally while mining or is it even impossible to connect to the pool? In the latter case have you chosen the right port? Unlike most BTC pools MasterPool uses port 8888.

As mentioned before I don't know much about GUI miners (as I'm using Linux). But poclbm has a neat failoverfeature. Perhaps you might want to give it a try?

Still getting that "AttributeError: 'HttpTransport' object has no attribute 'failure'"  error. 

Slush's pool is back up though, but it is a hassle having to manually load up the old GUIMIner client to go to this pool when they go down, instead of an automatic fallback.

In most cases I'm quite confident that rollouts run flawles as I'm using only cfengine in order to administrate production servers  Unfortunately it doesn't prevent stupid mistakes while designing a database layout. Such as plugin would've come in handy.  

Welcome back. Pool is back online and operational. Downtime was about 18 minutes. Thank you for your patience. Happy mining!

Huh, reminds me my times back in January :-). Good luck with update.

Yeah, I'm sorry  I guess this is related to the problem above. It should be fixed after the rollout.

With the recent amount of new users the pool faced a massive problem with high stales and was responding very slowly. I analyzed the problem and found out, that the database is the bottleneck. I prepared a solution but it means a major downtime for the pool. In order to circumvent the bottleneck I need to split some tables. This however took about 30 minutes on the testing mashine. I guess it'll be the same for the production database cluster (perhaps a bit more, as they are synchronizing themselves). In order to get the pool back on track. I'd like to roll out this update very soon and apologize for this short announcement. But as the pool sometimes stops responding for some seconds anyway I guess it's better to address this ASAP.

I'll start with the rollout at 8 pm UTC.

You may want to switch your miners to another pool for this time or make sure you have configured a failover pool.

(registering to the thread)

When I try to connect to your pool using using the latest GUIMiner - v2011-08-24, I get this error:

2011-10-20 09:34:23: Listener for "masterpool" started
2011-10-20 09:34:23: Listener for "masterpool": Traceback (most recent call last):
2011-10-20 09:34:23: Listener for "masterpool": File "poclbm.py", line 67, in
2011-10-20 09:34:23: Listener for "masterpool": File "BitcoinMiner.pyo", line 34, in __init__
2011-10-20 09:34:23: Listener for "masterpool": File "HttpTransport.pyo", line 20, in __init__
2011-10-20 09:34:23: Listener for "masterpool": File "Transport.pyo", line 46, in __init__
2011-10-20 09:34:23: Listener for "masterpool": AttributeError: 'HttpTransport' object has no attribute 'failure'


That version of GUIMiner works with all other pools I have tried.

Thanks

No, it's not condoned (as this would imply that a customary right might be derived in future). At the moment however it's a fact that it's technically possible to hop pools with MasterPool. Furthermore I have no bullet proof possibility to know for sure if someone is pool hopping or if it is coincidence (however there is a strong evidence that some miners are doing it). But as long as I have no possibility to proof someone is pool hopping it wouldn't make sense to prohibit it. For that reason it is tolerated at the moment, as long as it happens in an acceptable manner (acceptable in terms of not disturbing the pools performance).

My current focus is on having a bunch of merge mined BTC being verified, awarded and sent out to the miners. If I'm confident there is nothing else to tweak I'll have the registered (and active) members decide whether or not we change the distribution scheme. I tend to not go with proportional payouts and I have quite some requests from miners to change it. As soon as we have a decision on this all pool members will be notified via email with at least one week time to change pools if they don't like the new scheme.

@Nodemaster:

Considering that most of your top10 contributors are hoppers, does that mean Masterpool condones it?

MasterPool at your service, Sir! 

Thanks for changing the userbar code Nodemaster!

Maybe you missed the announcement on dot-bit.org some time ago? JSON Stats moved to: https://www.masterpool.eu/jsonstats and includes BTC stats. /api is obsolete and will be removed in future. Have a look here for description: https://www.masterpool.eu/faq

Can you please put the BTC share count into your api? Thanks.
Other than that everything including merged mining is working great.

Thanks, found it.

Nodemaster pointed that out very precisely. I want to dispel fears of any of you who's thinking that some big player is "stealing" coins for himself.

Yes, I'm testing merged mining on my pool with some backends. And no, I'm not going to "steal" those blocks for myself. But implementing MM on pretty big pool is really pain and I didn't want to announce it before I'll be sure it will work *somehow*. But after spending ages on weird bitcoind crashes using MM together with my custom performance patches, I'm starting to be pretty optimistic.

I need to finish GUI for NMC support, then I'll also start giving away all those mined blocks (already over 100 NMC block mined during my tests) back to pool users to spread Namecoins between people.

Btw first merged mined block ever was #148744 (BTC) == #19274 (NMC)

It might be Eligius,

Maybe Luke got it up and running sooner than he thought

I know of some pools who are trying to implement merged mining. However ATM there are some perfomance issues that even MasterPool suffers from at about 50GHash/s for which I have workarounds in place but it needs to be fixed permanently. Not to mention that MasterPool architecture was designed to deal with this splitted blockchains stuff from the beginning. Everybody is working right now lowering the foot print of merged mining. You have to understand that big pools optimized their complete architecture for mining one blockchain. Now they have an additional blockchain, merged mine proxy and additional calculations in their backend. It feels like hitting a concrete wall with a jet   The problem is you CAN'T simulate large load easily on testnet. Thus I guess some pools are turning it on occasionally in order to make sure merged mining optimizations are working properly turning it off if they gathered enough data to do the next optimization iteration. So please don't panic and wait a few days.

Deepbit is probably doing some merged mining. I just sense it. Or BTCguild etc.

Damn scammers !!! Who knows how long they have been doing it for as well etc.

Hey Nodemaster,
Do you think some large pool is secretly merged mining?
According to http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php,the network is over 500 gH/s strong.

Alright sent you a PM.

It looks like the transactions for NMC are now there.

From my point of view the pool is working without a problem. Please send me your user ID or username via PM. I'll have a look into it.

Edit: This is the last scheduled payout (last night): http://explorer.dot-bit.org/tx/67041. Of course you can always choose to do an instant payout (However payout fee will be 2 instead of 1%)

^Thanks for that,my transactions have not updated at Masterpool for the past 6 hours or so and was trying to find out what the issue was as it seemed to be working alright earlier in the day.

New to the pool and was wondering under Merged mining how many shares equal an NMC and BTC ?

Unfortunately it works only for small-midsize attack. Largest DDoS which I had come with 2+ milion connections per second, which overloeded routers in server room, so there was nothing to filter on pool servers .

it works from time to time, so I can't replicate it right now

Thank you for that hint. Unfortunately I have no testing environment at hand. But I'll have a look into it. Would you mind testing if it is possible to (de)activate worker notifications in your dashboard? This is the ony JS which is only used on that page. This would help me figuring out the error.

getting a javascript error on the dashboard:
Security error: attempted to read protected variable: open

using latest Opera on Windows 7

yeah mining on eu01 right now

Have you tried EU01 instead? M8R still sieges the US server with his botnet. Getwork requests are very slow from time to time.

trying to connect to http://US01.masterpool.eu:8888/ and it's not working with my username/password

Here is a pretty neat tool for formatting JSON: http://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/ Just load https://masterpool.eu/jsonstats there. IMHO this makes it much easier to understand how to iterate through the data:


{
   "workers":79,
   "hashrate":"22.53",
   "blockchains":{
      "NMC":{
         "shares":"34803",
         "stales":1117,
         "roundduration":7489
      },
      "BTC":{
         "shares":"46267",
         "stales":1542,
         "roundduration":27818
      }
   },
   "updated":1318082048
}


In most programming languages there are functions to convert JSON into an array.

Yes, thank you.  Unfortunately, I don't know enough Python/json api to differentiate between the NMC "shares" and BTC "shares".  Falling back to trial and error coding ... 

It's fixed: https://masterpool.eu/jsonstats

Thanks again for reporting this issue!

  Thank you for raising this issue. I'm on it!

Please update so that https://www.masterpool.eu/jsonstats shows statistics for BTC.  Currently shows only zeros.  Thanks.

Yeah, I guess I'll come up with something like slush implemented on his pool. It's really neat. Only allow connections from known users. But I'll do it later  

ATM it doesn't make any sense to mine on the pool. We have 80k+ incoming connections from a Botnet. Unfortunately I have no possibility at hand to filter the connections (as they are coming from several IP addresses). For that reason I'll shut down the mining ingress servers. Unfortunately this means you can not mine on MasterPool. But we need the hashing power on NMC blockchain and I just hope most miners have configured a fallback and will be switching to another pool.

MasterPool will be back as soon as the storm is over (and I got some sleep).

The complete roundup can be found on NMC Forum: http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2110#p2110

I disabled automatic merged mining activation as I don't want to start it without having an eye on it under this circumstances  I'll activate it by hand as soon as I got some sleep and the DDoS settles.

At the moment the pool cluster seem to face a DDoS. Please find more information here: https://www.masterpool.eu/jumble/comment/27

Sorry for the way too late answer. But it seems I managed to disable notifications for this thread   I already answered you question regarding payout system some time ago via PM. If merged mining started succesfully and is stable for some time I'll let all users vote.

However (and IIRC this was not answered in PM) unfortunately I won't offer PPS. I know this is very popular demand but I'm not willing to take the risk. I'll provide a fully fledged and hopefully rock solid BTC pool, but the main intention is to strengthen the namecoin blockchain. As you might know NMC is not really a currency like bitcoin (at least not forever. However at the moment it seems like). It's ONLY there to "bootstrap" the naming system stuff and is destroyed over time (unlike bitcoins). Merged Mining and MasterPool is one thing to make sure name resolution and registering is still possible if all NMC are gone some day. However this will be at the time where the block reward is no longer existant at BTC network as well (or it is very low and the share is determined from the TX fees). At that time it will be very hard to estimate a PPS value. I know this is long time. But MasterPool is here to stay for long time and so is its design. BTW: This is the reason why MasterPool also distributes the TX fees among its miners as there will be a time where only transaction fees are left for distribution 

Thus I don't see any possibility for PPS  

hi nodemaster,

i really like your pool. it's one of the fastest right now (0.02% stales constant is very good!).

but please consider another payout system (or make a vote).

i do prefer *PPS - but only reason is that i dont like the idea of some shares getting worthless.

51% Attack - Countermeasure Roundup: http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=308&p=2003#p2003

Dear MasterPool user


you are getting this email because you registered on MasterPool. I'd like to inform you about a severe issue on namecoin blockchain.

Due to the upcoming 51% attack to the namecoin network as outlined on the forums [1][2] MasterPool can not guarantee the safety of your namecoins. In fact if BitcoinEXpress will succeed with his attack and resets the blockchain to block 10000 all blocks ever mined on MasterPool will be undone. This is not only a problem with MasterPool but with all exchanges and pools. The attack is scheduled for block 19100.

At the moment the community is trying to mount countermeasures but it is still unclear if we get enough hashing power to counter this attack. So if you are unsure about what to do and want to be on the safe side it might be the best to withdraw all your namecoins from MasterPool, stop your namecoind, backup your wallet.dat AND your blockchain and wait for the storm to pass.

Your other option is to not withdraw your namecoins from MasterPool. However I CAN NOT guarantee for their safety. Thus you take the risk of loosing ALL your namecoins. I will however do my best to keep them safe. But if the blockchain is reset to block 10k they are gone anyway :-(

MasterPool will stay up during the time of attack. And we'll try to start merged mining on block 19200. If you are brave enough and want to help overcome this issue please consider to put all your available hashing power onto the namecoin blockchain. At the moment this seems to be the only possibility to effectively counter the attack. If you want to help secure the namecoin blockchain please register on at least one other pool to make sure you have an alternative if MasterPool is forced offline during this attack for any reason. Other namecoin pools are for example:

* DoubleC's Namecoin pool: http://bitparking.com/pool
* Davincij15's pool      : http://www.nmcbit.com/

Due to the attack Davincij15 offers a very competitive payment of 0.00003030 BTC (yes correct: bitcoins!) per namecoin share [3]. Thus if you are mining BTC in pay per share mode you might want to consider this offer in order to strengthen the namecoin network and get a bunch of bitcoins. Please tell your friends as well!


Happy mining!



[1] http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=292
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43465.0;all
[3] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.521575

Due to the possibly upcoming attack of BitcoinEXpress ( http://bit.ly/poTuzs ) MasterPool will start validating NMC blocks beginning with the next round until further notice. The current block will still be paid out directly.

Also see: https://www.masterpool.eu/jumble/comment/21

MasterPool started as a Namecoin Pool but was the first pool who implemented merged-mining (http://dot-bit.org/Merged_Mining).

The pool at a glance:

• first merged mining pool (and the only one who also was tested publicly on testnet so far)
• PPLNS payouts of block rewards including its transaction fees
• no mining fee substracted instead you pay a payout fee
• scheduled payouts each night (with 1% fee)
• instant payouts (with 2% fee)
• redundant master servers located in east and south germany
• email notifications
• micro forum for feedback, suggestions and small talk
• JSON stats for website and your miners

If you want to have a look at the pool I'd suggest to start on our statistics page: https://www.masterpool.eu/statistics. There you'll find a countdown for merged mining, too. If you want to start mining right away please join at: https://www.masterpool.eu/signup.