Merge mining enabled

[Chris Sokolowski]

Today, as part of our update, we enabled merge mining of Dogecoin on the pool. Your shares will show you mining Dogecoin in addition to the primary coin.

This change has increased profitability by 10-15% effective immediately. You should expect to see our average profitability creep up over the next day as the averages readjust.

[Chris Sokolowski]

I have detected a bug in the 1MH/s expected payout chart and the ticker in the top bar. Both items are only showing the profitability of the most profitable coin, not the sum of all coins being merge mined. Everything else is working properly and we are paying out the merge mined rate, but until I fix this bug you can expect to earn more than what the top bar and 1MH/s expected payout chart says you will.

[lare]

When the transition was made my error rate has increased dramatically. I use another pool concurrently which has not changed and I've made no changes to my miners , software, etc.

Is there any technical reason that this might happen?

Love your pool, just want to keep efficiency up as best I can...

[Steve Sokolowski]

Do you have your miner set to a static difficulty or the default dynamic difficulty?

If you have it set to the default, try using a password of d=2048 or d=1024. Some miners, for some reason, are inefficient at higher difficulties.

[lare]

I tried d=1024 but the errors were high so I tried d=512, but the results appear to be the same. Prior to this I had experimented with this setting and found that d=1024 worked the best.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Thanks - I'll look into this issue and get back to you soon.

[lare]

Things are looking better this morning. I thought it would help if I showed you a screenshot of what I'm seeing here: zeropoint.com/downloads/Screenshot.png

I really like your pool and the effort you've gone to to provide meaningful information.

Thank-you Steve for looking into this. My big miners arrive in December, but I've been experimenting with some small ones in preparation for their arrival.
Thanks!

[Steve Sokolowski]

I hope that by December we'll have Poloniex trading enabled too, so that then we don't have to deal with Cryptsy's constant downtime and outages.

What is the hashrate that you expect to get with your miners?

[lare]

240MH with another 300MH miner by January. I want to add about 300MH/month. I still have a lot to learn, but this is all so interesting!

[Steve Sokolowski]

If you are getting the same miners as Kristof purchased, then you might unfortunately be disappointed in your purchase. His miners have been nothing but trouble. Every time a new block comes in, the miners do nothing for as long as ten seconds.

He's stuck between either running here, where his miners get poor hashrates, or switching to a litecoin pool, where the profitability is less. Even in a straight litecoin pool, the miners are still likely to lose 25% due to that problem. I have a fix for this issue ready to go, but we need someone to test it to see if it actually improves hashrate. The idea is that people with these defective miners can choose to sacrifice profitability in return for fewer work restarts. I'm going to have Chris contact you to try it out in development to see whether we should release it, or whether it's not the correct solution to the problem.