Status as of Thursday, June 30

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good evening. Here's today's status:

• We made a number of improvements over the past few days. The first that is worth mentioning is that we discovered an issue where miners could be assigned stale work, which would result in an increased number of orphans. We fixed this issue and orphan rates appear to be falling across the board, increasing profitability.
• The litecoin orphan rate was particularly high. In addition to the general fixes above, we also found a way to improve the connectivity of our litecoin nodes, so that there are hundreds of connections. There hasn't been an orphaned litecoin block since then, suggesting that the fixes have worked. As time goes on, the existing orphan blocks will fall off the back of the time window that the orphan rates are calculated by, and the floor of our profitability will rise.
• Chris performed some calculations and determined that work restart penalties were being calculated incorrectly. Miners with average work restart times were being significantly penalized, while miners with poor work restart times would make much more than they actually contributed to the pool. This difference explained why some miners complained about poor profits even though the pool was significantly exceeding litecoin profitability. We've reworked work restart penalties to reduce this issue.
• Some customers have pointed out that they find more blocks when their difficulty is low. The system assigns low-difficulty miners to the easiest coins, which is why they see themselves finding a lot of easy blocks. The number of found blocks is not related to profitability. Do not adjust your miner's settings based on how many blocks are displayed on the "earnings" page. Not finding blocks means that your miner's characteristics are best suited for difficult coins, which will earn you more than easier coins because your miner won't be receiving work restarts unnecessarily.
• We expect that, if nothing else were to change, we would see profitability increase by 0.25% by day for the next month as the orphan rates level off with the new code.

As always, feel free to offer comments.

[CritterDog]

I have a question about finding blocks. Does the pool split the profit of all the found blocks between all the miners? Also Is finding blocks the main way the pool makes its money? I will see coins come up that are assigned to us to mine but when you look at them on http://coinmarketcap.com some of them are going down in price not up. So sorry if this sounds like a dumb question but I am confused what is the main way this pool make its profit for miners? Is it finding the most total blocks or is it trying to figure out which coin will start going up in value and then throw hash rate on rising coin values? I don't understand if you say finding blocks does not matter in profit then why do you show when my miner finds blocks if it does not matter? Just trying to learn how this pool works.. Thanks

[Chris Sokolowski]

Steve phrased the situation inelegantly. I'll explain it a different way.

We are a pay per share pool, so, for miners, it doesn't matter how many blocks are found; they get paid at the same rate. Miners' earnings are paid based upon the expected number of blocks to be found, not the actual number of blocks found like a pay-per-last-n-shares pool. For Steve and I, as the pool operators, we of course lose money if miners find fewer blocks than expected on a given day, but over the long term, we earn the pool fee because the expected number of blocks approaches the actual number of blocks found.

In this specific scenario, miners are lowering their share difficulty to find more low-value blocks. While these blocks are slightly more profitable per MH/s, they cause hashrate to suffer, earning the user and us the pool operators less money. The pool will automatically assign your miner to the most profitable coin, and there is no correlation between how frequently blocks are found and profitability (since each coin has a different block time). If you want to adjust difficulty, adjust it so that you have the highest hashrate possible, not so that you find the most blocks possible.

As far as prices go, in nearly all cases, the falling price is due to our consumption of buy orders. The falling price does not affect our profitability because we price (and choose to mine) coins based upon the best order available after all unconfirmed blocks are sold. As a result, the prices you see on the site are always lower than the current market prices because they account for us selling unconfirmed coins.

[CritterDog]

In this specific scenario, miners are lowering their share difficulty to find more low-value blocks. While these blocks are slightly more profitable per MH/s, they cause hashrate to suffer, earning the user and us the pool operators less money. The pool will automatically assign your miner to the most profitable coin, and there is no correlation between how frequently blocks are found and profitability (since each coin has a different block time). If you want to adjust difficulty, adjust it so that you have the highest hashrate possible, not so that you find the most blocks possible.

So the miners are paid per share submitted to the pool and finding blocks makes no difference I get it. So there really is no reason for the screen that shows who got what blocks then? What is weird is I find the d=512 on my 110Mhs A2 is where it seems I do get my best hash rate. Here is a example. On litecoin pool. I do not set my difficulty the pool sets it for me. When I see the shares submitted on there main page I can tell my difficulty is set at 4096 because thats how many shares pop up on the shares submitted main page every few seconds. They come in batches of 4096 about every 5-10 seconds if this makes since.. Now on this pool if I set my A2 that normally hashes around 103-106Mhs to d=4096 or higher what was happening was my hash rate would suffer down to like 90mhs and it seemed I was submitting shares very very slowly.. Hence the low payouts...I will say I have not really tried it in a while since you have been working on it. Maybe its better now. My miner likes the higher difficulty because I think maybe I get less rejects. But what was happening at least before was it seemed like things were moving very slow on the higher d= settings. I mean the shares submitted seemed very slow and payouts seemed very slow of what ever coin I was mineing. On litecoinpool the payout updates about every 5 seconds submitting shares.. And the hash rate was also normal at about 103-106Mhs. I will try again with higher d= settings and see.. I did try letting the pool set it to dynamic but what was happening was in dynamic it was going all the way up to 32768 and just staying on one or 2 coins and did not seem I was submitting very many shares and payouts were low. You have done much work though since then so I will try it again now and see what happens. I really like this pool because of the choice of coin to mine and all.. It seems most other pools only allow you to exchange to bitcoin and or they are PPNS?? Not sure if I got that correct..LOL.. It where you have to wait for 100 confirmations before getting paid.. I really prefer this the PPS even if I make a little less.. Thanks Chris!

[CritterDog]

I am trying the A2 on dynamic and it has started out fine with 103.2 MHS.. I tried static 4096 first and it dropped my hash rate down in the 80-90 range

[Chris Sokolowski]

So the miners are paid per share submitted to the pool and finding blocks makes no difference I get it. So there really is no reason for the screen that shows who got what blocks then?

Yes, it's just for your curiosity. It makes no difference on how you get paid.

What is weird is I find the d=512 on my 110Mhs A2 is where it seems I do get my best hash rate. Here is a example. On litecoin pool. I do not set my difficulty the pool sets it for me. When I see the shares submitted on there main page I can tell my difficulty is set at 4096 because thats how many shares pop up on the shares submitted main page every few seconds. They come in batches of 4096 about every 5-10 seconds if this makes since.. Now on this pool if I set my A2 that normally hashes around 103-106Mhs to d=4096 or higher what was happening was my hash rate would suffer down to like 90mhs and it seemed I was submitting shares very very slowly.. Hence the low payouts...I will say I have not really tried it in a while since you have been working on it. Maybe its better now. My miner likes the higher difficulty because I think maybe I get less rejects.

The best difficulty for the pool is the lowest difficulty that your miner can accept without losing hashrate. If that's d=512, then keep your miner at d=512.

But what was happening at least before was it seemed like things were moving very slow on the higher d= settings. I mean the shares submitted seemed very slow and payouts seemed very slow of what ever coin I was mineing. On litecoinpool the payout updates about every 5 seconds submitting shares.. And the hash rate was also normal at about 103-106Mhs. I will try again with higher d= settings and see..

That's how share difficulty works. The number of shares submitted is inversely proportional to the difficulty. So, for example, if you submit a d-4096 share every 5 seconds, you will submit a d=16384 share every 20 seconds since it is 4 times harder. However, you will also be paid 4 times as much for a d=16384 share compared to a d=4096 share, so in the end you make the same amount of money. The reason to set your share difficulty higher is because mining software can only submit shares so frequently; I've found that cgminer begins to lose shares if you submit them to any pool more frequently than every 0.5 seconds. Higher difficulties will also decrease bandwidth usage. The problem with high difficulty shares is twofold. Since there are fewer shares, statistics like hashrate that average over a number of shares will be less accurate (your computing power is no different though). The other issue is that high difficulties reduce flexibility in the pool assigning coins. Since network difficulty=65535*share difficulty, you can't mine on any networks less than your share difficulty/65535. So if you have a share difficulty of 32768, you can't mine coins with difficulties less than 0.5, which can exclude some profitable coins from the pool.

I did try letting the pool set it to dynamic but what was happening was in dynamic it was going all the way up to 32768 and just staying on one or 2 coins and did not seem I was submitting very many shares and payouts were low.

Dynamic difficulty targets 5 shares per minute (I think, Steve can correct this). It will switch coins less frequently with the higher difficulty due to the reason said above, but just because you aren't mining the quick coins doesn't mean that someone else isn't. There's only a limited amount of hashrate we can assign to these small networks, so your higher difficulty may have changed the assignment of miners but not the pool's coins being mined.

You have done much work though since then so I will try it again now and see what happens. I really like this pool because of the choice of coin to mine and all.. It seems most other pools only allow you to exchange to bitcoin and or they are PPNS?? Not sure if I got that correct..LOL.. It where you have to wait for 100 confirmations before getting paid.. I really prefer this the PPS even if I make a little less.. Thanks Chris!

If they are PPS, then they will have steady payout day-to-day. A PPLNS pool will have less steady payouts but may charge a lower fee because the owner assumes no risk.

Thanks for the kind words. We have made a lot of changes in the past week or two, and I think you will see that even though the payout shown in the front page has not changed tremendously, your individual earnings should have gone up. I always appreciate your comments on the pool's profitability and status because we only have one type of miner we use to test the pool so we are never completely sure how our changes affect other miners.

[CritterDog]

So the miners are paid per share submitted to the pool and finding blocks makes no difference I get it. So there really is no reason for the screen that shows who got what blocks then?

Yes, it's just for your curiosity. It makes no difference on how you get paid.

What is weird is I find the d=512 on my 110Mhs A2 is where it seems I do get my best hash rate. Here is a example. On litecoin pool. I do not set my difficulty the pool sets it for me. When I see the shares submitted on there main page I can tell my difficulty is set at 4096 because thats how many shares pop up on the shares submitted main page every few seconds. They come in batches of 4096 about every 5-10 seconds if this makes since.. Now on this pool if I set my A2 that normally hashes around 103-106Mhs to d=4096 or higher what was happening was my hash rate would suffer down to like 90mhs and it seemed I was submitting shares very very slowly.. Hence the low payouts...I will say I have not really tried it in a while since you have been working on it. Maybe its better now. My miner likes the higher difficulty because I think maybe I get less rejects.

The best difficulty for the pool is the lowest difficulty that your miner can accept without losing hashrate. If that's d=512, then keep your miner at d=512.

But what was happening at least before was it seemed like things were moving very slow on the higher d= settings. I mean the shares submitted seemed very slow and payouts seemed very slow of what ever coin I was mineing. On litecoinpool the payout updates about every 5 seconds submitting shares.. And the hash rate was also normal at about 103-106Mhs. I will try again with higher d= settings and see..

That's how share difficulty works. The number of shares submitted is inversely proportional to the difficulty. So, for example, if you submit a d-4096 share every 5 seconds, you will submit a d=16384 share every 20 seconds since it is 4 times harder. However, you will also be paid 4 times as much for a d=16384 share compared to a d=4096 share, so in the end you make the same amount of money. The reason to set your share difficulty higher is because mining software can only submit shares so frequently; I've found that cgminer begins to lose shares if you submit them to any pool more frequently than every 0.5 seconds. Higher difficulties will also decrease bandwidth usage. The problem with high difficulty shares is twofold. Since there are fewer shares, statistics like hashrate that average over a number of shares will be less accurate (your computing power is no different though). The other issue is that high difficulties reduce flexibility in the pool assigning coins. Since network difficulty=65535*share difficulty, you can't mine on any networks less than your share difficulty/65535. So if you have a share difficulty of 32768, you can't mine coins with difficulties less than 0.5, which can exclude some profitable coins from the pool.

I did try letting the pool set it to dynamic but what was happening was in dynamic it was going all the way up to 32768 and just staying on one or 2 coins and did not seem I was submitting very many shares and payouts were low.

Dynamic difficulty targets 5 shares per minute (I think, Steve can correct this). It will switch coins less frequently with the higher difficulty due to the reason said above, but just because you aren't mining the quick coins doesn't mean that someone else isn't. There's only a limited amount of hashrate we can assign to these small networks, so your higher difficulty may have changed the assignment of miners but not the pool's coins being mined.

You have done much work though since then so I will try it again now and see what happens. I really like this pool because of the choice of coin to mine and all.. It seems most other pools only allow you to exchange to bitcoin and or they are PPNS?? Not sure if I got that correct..LOL.. It where you have to wait for 100 confirmations before getting paid.. I really prefer this the PPS even if I make a little less.. Thanks Chris!

If they are PPS, then they will have steady payout day-to-day. A PPLNS pool will have less steady payouts but may charge a lower fee because the owner assumes no risk.

Thanks for the kind words. We have made a lot of changes in the past week or two, and I think you will see that even though the payout shown in the front page has not changed tremendously, your individual earnings should have gone up. I always appreciate your comments on the pool's profitability and status because we only have one type of miner we use to test the pool so we are never completely sure how our changes affect other miners.

Thank you for taking the time to explain this.. I now have a much better understanding.. And I tried the dynamic and it was fine for a while like 10 mins but it went up to 32768 which was ok for a while and then it started changing coins and diff started changing and all was looking fine. Hashrate was steady at 103 but then i looked away for a while came back and hash rate dropped back down in the 85 range. And seemed stuck there. So I am trying 8192 now so far seems ok at around 100mhs... It is good to know I can go back to 512 if need be I was not sure if by doing that I was hurting the pools profits... And yes anything I can do to help on my end I will try.. I have 2 A2s I just bought a second one is a 5 card the other is a 6 card. I also have a Gblack running on Minera software on a rasberry pi. Then I have some gridseed blades also running the minera software on rasberry pi.. The A2 cgminer software I am using I downloaded from the bitcoin forum "cgminer 3.9.0 innosilicon-12chip-v0p5" AnxA2-09012015. Ok thanks again and I will keep you updated. So far d=8192 seems ok.