Bonus Payouts Tonight - cloudmines.net

[CircuitSix]

Alright, we are at it again. The giveaway will be happening tomorrow night and in addition to the free coin giveaway we will also be giving out zero pool fees for the life the account for two users. To be eligible just be an active miner with at least one transaction to your wallet.

[CircuitSix]

I need to update stratum soon to the latest version. There seems to be a problem where either the block height or shares not being recorded correctly and at times the block completion rises very high, sometimes into the 1000's. This is easily corrected with manual intervention but I am hoping the new stratum corrects this.

I am planning to do this either tonight or sometime this weekend. I should be able to complete it with very minimal downtime, hopefully less than 10 minutes.

The one question I have with this is if anyone would like to be able to set their own difficulty?

[LightScribe]

I would like to be able to set my own, thanks in advance.

[sizzflair]

Explain the difficulty part for me.

[CircuitSix]

So right now Stratum changes the difficulty or the amount of work per share based on your current hash rate. It aims to increase or decrease the difficulty so that you submit one share every 30 seconds. If I allow custom difficulty settings you could control how many shares you submit over a set amount of time. Keep this in mind though, if you set a low difficulty you may submit 100 shares in 30 seconds but those 100 shares may not equal one ACTUAL share. Where as a high difficulty with only 3 shares submitted may equal one actual block share.

When difficulty is low a true share can be broken into parts so that slower miners can complete shares without having to do it all in 30 second chunks.

Hope this makes sense, best way I know how to explain it.

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Now a word of caution. If difficulty is set too high then the submitted shares may end up being stale and not accepted, otherwise invalid. The new stratum will ban workers that submit too many invalids, this prevents attacks on the pool. So it should only be set if the user knows what difficulty produces the best results for them personally, otherwise stratum can figure it out on its own. You can squeak out a few extra shares doing a custom difficulty but it is a little more riskier.

[sizzflair]

So right now Stratum changes the difficulty or the amount of work per share based on your current hash rate. It aims to increase or decrease the difficulty so that you submit one share every 30 seconds. If I allow custom difficulty settings you could control how many shares you submit over a set amount of time. Keep this in mind though, if you set a low difficulty you may submit 100 shares in 30 seconds but those 100 shares may not equal one ACTUAL share. Where as a high difficulty with only 3 shares submitted may equal one actual block share.

When difficulty is low a true share can be broken into parts so that slower miners can complete shares without having to do it all in 30 second chunks.

Hope this makes sense, best way I know how to explain it.

-----

Now a word of caution. If difficulty is set too high then the submitted shares may end up being stale and not accepted, otherwise invalid. The new stratum will ban workers that submit too many invalids, this prevents attacks on the pool. So it should only be set if the user knows what difficulty produces the best results for them personally, otherwise stratum can figure it out on its own. You can squeak out a few extra shares doing a custom difficulty but it is a little more riskier.

Thanks for the explanation.  I think it's fine as is for me since it's taken care of and I want to mine without having to tweak it constantly.

Speaking of which... my replacement psu finally came so happily mining on 2 4gpu rigs now! Crossing my fingers for for stability since I also ended up replacing the wireless network card from usb to pci. Much faster network speed now

[CircuitSix]

The winners of 0 pool fees for the life of their accounts are beetlebailey and LightScribe! Winners of this weeks coin giveaway are paxshannara, griffga, max28, PullUp, sizzflair - Each of you were sent bonus GLD directly to your wallets!


Man Sizzflair, talk about luck, you have been getting bank

[sizzflair]

You know you wanted me to win the 0 percent fees... more to donate haha!

Thanks for your hard work. A guy at my work just ordered 4 7970s to start his mining experience and I told him about gld and this pool

Waiting for that day when gld becomes $1+....

[paaco1981]

Every time I look at the Pool stats you make me sad Sizz, With your 1k+ coins per day lol. I have been buying some right now while they are priced so ridiculously low though, hopefully at some point in the future it will all pay off for both of us

On another note, thanks for all the hard work keeping the pool running smoothly Circuitsix, has been nothing but stable and I love the new site layout.

[CircuitSix]

Sizz, thanks for the recommendation, I hope he gets everything up and running soon! Paaco, thanks for the kind words, hopefully there will be more improvements once I get my workstation working again.

[sizzflair]

Every time I look at the Pool stats you make me sad Sizz, With your 1k+ coins per day lol. I have been buying some right now while they are priced so ridiculously low though, hopefully at some point in the future it will all pay off for both of us

On another note, thanks for all the hard work keeping the pool running smoothly Circuitsix, has been nothing but stable and I love the new site layout.

Sad?  You should be happy!  Donating and contributing to the pool = more bonus payoffs for you guys

[CircuitSix]

It is almost time for another giveaway! This weeks coin payouts will be higher than normal due to increased pool activity!

What would you all rather have?
1. 2 payouts of 100 GLD
2. 4 payouts of 50 GLD
3. 10 payouts of 20 GLD
4. 1 payout of 100, 1 payout of 40, 1 payout of 30, one payout of 20, and 1 payout of 10?

I will look at the comments before the drawing to see which answer has the most votes. The drawing will be held on January 10th at 10pm EST.

[sizzflair]

It is almost time for another giveaway! This weeks coin payouts will be higher than normal due to increased pool activity!

What would you all rather have?
1. 2 payouts of 100 GLD
2. 4 payouts of 50 GLD
3. 10 payouts of 20 GLD
4. 1 payout of 100, 1 payout of 40, 1 payout of 30, one payout of 20, and 1 payout of 10?

I will look at the comments before the drawing to see which answer has the most votes. The drawing will be held on January 10th at 10pm EST.

I think #3 or #4 would be cool.   I like more winners here 


One question I had though... I realized the increase in querytime over the past few weeks.  They used to be around 30-60 back in the day and now they are reaching 200ms.  Does this affect the way we are mining and how?  I also noticed a big decrease in my payout per round, but I think that's mostly due the decrease of shares that I've been getting with new miners coming in even though the difficulty hasn't changed at all.... or is it the querytime that's affecting it?

[CircuitSix]

The query time is affected by the number of users and the amount of shares being processed. If there is a lot of miners at low difficulty this will tend to increase the query time, less than 400ms or so should not really impact mining, I am trying to make sure we never go above 200ms but in order to increase performance I would need to upgrade the server. At the moment the pool does not make enough for me to justify the increase in cost.

On the other hand I have been making tweaks to the database to increase performance. I may end up opening a donation option and if it works out I can upgrade even more, we will just have to see how things go.

I will always keep the query time visible, be wary of sites that have this hidden as it typically means very high query time and poor performance. Once I upgrade the stratum we should see an increase in performance as well.

[sizzflair]

Thanks for the explanation.  I don't mind donating, but I do mind leechers. If there was a separate pool with only the dedicated miners who do donate for a better server, then I'd be in... but at least I'm still mining.