[850 TH] Slush's Pool (mining.bitcoin.cz); TX FEES + VarDiff

[850 TH] Slush's Pool (mining.bitcoin.cz); TX FEES + VarDiff

Hi all,

since the bitcointalk has been hacked few months ago I temporary lost the access to this forum. Now the access is recovered, but I'm not planning to continue with the pool support in this thread anymore, for more reasons. Mostly as newbies cannot post here, it cannot work as a full customer support; I've received many complains about this particularly. Then, it is spaghetti-style forum and it is very hard to follow the discussion.

Few days ago we started official pool support ticket system at http://support.bitcoin.cz. This support system is integrated also withsupport@bitcoin.cz, so writing an email to support@bitcoin.cz is the right place if you need authorized reply from one of pool admins anytime soon. Right now we're processing quite long backlog of emails there, but our target is to reply to all tickets in 24 hours. On http://support.bitcoin.cz is also knowledge base where we're filling more and more Q&A every day.

I would like to invite you also to IRC #mining.bitcoin.cz, where is quite many people online, ready to chat and provide basic help with all the stuff.

I'll leave this thread open for unofficial discussion, but it is out of my time possibilities to follow the discussion here.

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Join us on http://mining.bitcoin.cz!
EDIT 27.12.2010: wiki page about pooled mining
EDIT 17.03.2011: DaCoinMinster published GreaseMonkey script which tweaks the pool website - it's 3rd party tool, use it on your own risk.

What is Pooled Mining?

Pooled mining is a way for multiple users to work together to mint bitcoins, and to share the benefits fairly.

Why do I need it?

Bitcoins are ordinarily only ever created in chunks of 50 at a time, with the whole 50 paid to a single person. Furthermore, the race to get the 50 BTC prize in a given block is highly competitive.

If you set out mining on your own, it may be a long time before you can make a return. Pooled mining allows you to receive smaller, more frequent, steadier payouts instead. If you have a slower computer, or a CPU miner, then pooled mining may be the only way that you will ever mint any bitcoins at all. 

How do I get started?
You need less than 10 minutes to start mining in pool. Visit http://mining.bitcoin.cz and follow instructions.

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Original post:
Once people started to use GPU enabled computers for mining, mining became very hard for other people. I'm on bitcoin for few weeks and didn't find block yet (I'm mining on three CPUs). When many people have slow CPUs and they mining separately, each of them compete among themselves AND against rich GPU bastards ;-), because everybody counts sha256 hashes from the same range. Two separate CPUs with 1000khash/s isn't the same as one 2000khash/s machine!. But new feature of the official bitcoin client called 'getwork' now enables work of many computers together, so they don't compete. Because there is now standalone CPU miner (thanks to jgarzik!) and 'getwork' patch is in official client now, I have an idea:

Join poor CPU miners to one cluster and increase their chance to find a block!

How that should work? There will be web page where you can register, enter your wallet address and get URL and your personal rpcuser/rpcpassword for your CPU/GPU miners. When you start own miner with these credentials, server will send you work which was not calculated yet by other members of cluster.

But when your client find winning hash, you do not get full reward for block (50BTC right now), but only proportional part, which you calculate. When you offer 1000khash/s for one day and whole cluster performance will be 20000khash/s and it takes two days to find a block, your reward will be (50/20/2=)1.25BTC.

Advantages? When you have poor standalone computer, you need to wait many weeks or even months for finding full 50BTC reward. When you join cluster like this, you will constantly receive small amount of bitcoins every day or week (depends on full cluster performance).

Disadvantages? You need to trust in central authority (me) that I don't steal block for myself. But I'm goofing around for few week and I'm amazed with bitcoin idea, so I don't plan to steal anybody right now :-).

Another possible problem is that somebody will ask for new work very often, but in fact he will not count real hashes. In this case it will look like he has very strong CPU and he should get big part of reward if cluster find a block. But there is a simple defense against cheaters: Central server sometimes send work which leads to 'winning' hash. Worker which don't return this hash as matching will be permanently banned (login/password and IP address). This was succesfully solved by letting miners calculate proof-of-work. It is not anymore possible to be a part of cluster and not count hashes.

Are you interested in?