Topic: Non Merged Mining Pools ? (Read 3161 times)

Sure, that cool.  I just finished the documentary on the Russian revolution with Netflix, so it was fresh on my mind.  Bastards...    

Miners are the customers of a pool. Running an honest business means maximizing your profits under the constraint that you do not deliberately mislead your customers - which is exactly what you're doing when you do merged mining when turned off by the miner, unless you've gone to some efforts to clarify this is what you do.

If someone thinks he can increase his profits by running a dishonest business, I can only argue with him on ethical grounds, not socio-economical.

Workers are not to control production in a capitalist system like a pool in business.  The market, or worker, will choose a pool that offers the best value.  The minute you introduce communism into your business, you will become inefficient and thus provide less value to the workers.  Wasting productive power due to an irrational argument from a profit side is inefficient.  No profit, no pool.

The intelligentsia often forget we are dealing with naturally instinctive people and not numbers...

So, I disagree with your opinion from a socio-economical perspective.  Inaba's example is a good case in point.

Potentially.  If you want to ensure you submit all work (even possibly stale ones) cgminer has an option "--submit-stale".  Work that is truly stale will report as stale on the server so reported stale count increasing (but that is simply moving work from dropped locally to rejected as stale).

If any of that work is valid then you will gain those shares.  Still the effect is very small depending on intensity we are talking about dropping "maybe" 1/64th of a share every extra LP.  On cgminer w/ intensity = 9 and vectors=4 the GPU processes 1/64th of the nonce range with each iteration.  At most you lose one iteration of work per "extra" LP.   With NMC difficulty so high there is only roughly 1 extra LP per BTC block.  So 1/64*6*24 = 2 shares per GPU per day.  At lower intensity of vectors it would be less.  We are talking about maybe a penny per week.

The only way to do it better would be a more comprehensive miner protocol.  If the protocol was expanded to have "LP submit work" vs "LP drop work" then miners could do "the right thing".  The server always has more info than the miner.   The alternative would be "smart miners" (which also solves the issue of large pools).  The miner constructs its own block headers indepdently thus it would always know if work is still "partially good" and submit accordingly.

TL/DR version.
The effect is small but if you are worried use cgminer w/ "--submit-stale" option.  It increases potential stales on the server (resulting in maybe 1% higher server load) but will ensure you get credit for all shares.

Please someone with a clue correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't your miner drop work and not submit it when it receives a long poll when it's already doing some work?

And extra long polls from merged mining then cause you to submit less work?

http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Where are you guys seeing network stats for NMC?

Exactly. Really the only pool with a chance of hiding it would be a pure PPS pool which provides no block data.
"We pay xxx BTC per valid share."  The agreement is simply a set  compensation per share.  In that case they aren't exactly cheating unless they are asked and lie.

As far as the 40%.  It isn't very easy to merge mine when solo mining.  If you could solo merge easier I think we would get over 50%.  Interestingly both NMC & BTC seem to have stabilized their hashrates.

40% sounds pretty close.  BTC Guild + Slush + Eligius alone aren't far off from it.  There certainly aren't any LARGE pools that are hiding merged mining as far as I can tell.  You can check yourself though by looking at blocks solved by "non-merged" pools.  You can't hide the fact that you're merged mining if you post which blocks your pool is finding.

Maybe that's how the other "non-merged" pools work, you don't know they are actually running merged mining, and they do keep them...

Rhetorical: The hashrate of Namecoin is now about 40% of Bitcoin; do all the pools with merged mining add up to that?

I don't think ThiagoCMC was making any accusations, rather an optimization suggestion. He said that Eclipse can, instead of not doing MM for opt-outers as is the current policy, do MM and keep the NMC either for the operator or for the other miners.

Personally I think it is reasonable to expect that if you disable MM then your shares will not be used for MM at all.

I guess you didnt read down a little before you posted? or are you making very strong unsubstantiated accusations?

and at the end of the day if it is making NO difference to BTC earnings and the MINER choses not to want nmc on a MM pool what is so bad about them remaining in the pool wallet. seems too many miners expect pools to be charities....

http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/FAQ has an interestring slant on it - register for nmc or the pool keeps them

of course the simple way to avoid these issues is mine on a non-MM pool (oh hang on i remember they secretly mine NMC but keep them all)- well according to some that post in these forums...

so much crap in these forums, i would have expected better from someone tagged as "staff"

I think that, if somebody turn off merged mining, the pool can turn it on for itself.
So, for every user with NMC off, the pool will in fact, not disable the merged mining and stay with that namecoins.

Which is very much expected outcome of increased production without (much) increased utility.  There is no something for nothing.  For example if we increased the Bitcoin block reward to 5000 BTC does one thing miners would make 100x as much?  Of course not.  The price of Bitcoin eventually would simply fall to 1/100th of its current value.

If utility for BTC & NMC increases 0% then we should expect the value of BTC & NMC to eventually be equal to BTC prior to merged mining.  The good news is the utility of NMC has increase (some) as it is stronger and that should increase confidence in the system.   If people value NMC more (as other issues get worked out) then the value of merged mining will rise.  If the utility decreases (because interest dies off) then value of merged mining will decrease.

Unfortunately, the profitability of merged mining over normal Bitcoin mining has fallen quite a lot since it was first rolled out but it's still a nice bonus (about 3.6% right now).  There was a period after merged mining became available that Namecoin mining was actually more profitable than Bitcoin mining (so the merged mining bonus was over 100%)!  Namecoin difficulty is still rising fast so this bonus should continue to drop.

That's exactly it. Misunderstanding how it works. I thought that your miners would be split between the two coins, jumping from one to the other, or whatever. But if you say that people merge mining will get the same amount of BTC as those using pools that are only mining BTC, then I'll stick with the merged mining.

Seems a bit hocus pocus to me, but I'll believe you. Hell, it was the original NMC run, way back, that paid for all my equipment, therefore I am very glad to be involved in it again

Good.  I would imagine that some people opting out of merged mining are specifically wanting to not support the Namecoin network.  Honestly though, knowing the mining community I would expect most people opting out mistakenly believe that doing so will boost their Bitcoin income.

Well at least you give them the option.  Interesting idea.  Funny that people would be that dedicated to run down "free money".

It is just not submitted to the Namecoind in the first place, so there's no test as to whether or not it's a valid share.  It's kind of a pointless feature IMHO, but I had a couple people ask for it.  Maybe some people just hate Namecoin?

Yeah what exactly happens to those shares?  Do you not solve the NMC block even if it generates a solution?

If a miner at your pool opts out of merged mining and they submit a share which would generate a Namecoin block is the winning hash not broadcast?  I couldn't find anything on the "Pool Disccusion" page about it.

At Eclipse, you have the option of turning off your Merged Mining if you want.  https://eclipsemc.com

You don't take some of your compute power away from BTC and into NMC. With the same computation you solve both BTC and NMC blocks. That's why it's called "merged mining". You get the same BTC and bonus NMC, which is why everyone is excited about it.

For a technical explanation of how it works you can read this stackexchange answer.

Why?

With BTC only mining if you get X BTC then w/ merged mining you get the same X BTC PLUS some NMC.  Even if you threw away the NMC you wouldn't earn any less than a BTC only pool.

It would be like if your boss paid you 10 BTC and 50 NMC per hour.  You don't like NMC so you quit and work for a company which pays you 10 BTC per hour.  How exactly did you come out ahead?

I may have misunderstood how it works then. I thought that merged mining meant the miners work on both BTC and NMC.

I want my miners to work solely on BTC.

I know Deepbit and Arsbitcoin do not currently offer merged mining.  Is there any reason you're looking for a pool that doesn't?  Merged mining doesn't take any of your bitcoins away, it just provides NMC as a bonus.  I know I certainly turned a lot of people away towards pools that offered it when BTC Guild did not.

Which pools do not use merged mining ?

Are they aiming to switch to merged mining ?

What's the best non merged mining pool out there ?