It's been pretty rocky - our VPS provider randomly decided to shut down the cluster of proxies we'd set up to mitigate the (ongoing) attack.

Could you please email our support address? I'm not sure we have your correct email address.

If your worker is gone, perhaps you were one of the users who had duplicate logins. I will look into this and get back to you via email.

I know some of you are still getting higher than normal stales; we're working on the issue and hope to resolve it soon, getting us back to ~0% stales. Where we should be

The estimated reward doesn't get reset each round any more. It will continue to grow in real time as you find shares. Whenever the pool finds a block, we will use the block reward, plus the buffer, to pay your shares; when that happens, your estimated reward decreases, and your confirmed reward increases. W're going to be renaming these to "Pending Reward" and "Available Balance", respectively. And there is no longer an unconfirmed reward, since we pay *all* shares, even for invalid blocks.

I agree. We're going to add various things to the round history soon: duration, total shares, total donations, ESMPPS buffer, total reward paid.

If you would email us your login name or email at the support address, we can help you. Thanks.

This issue is fixed now, everybody's estimated reward should be displayed correctly now. Sorry about that guys 

Neat, thanks!

Our name is actually "bitpit", is it possible to change that? No big deal either way.

Thank you for the suggestion, I've done so. Still though: if anyone really needs more than this, we can handle that, you just need to let us know.

If any miner or proxy operator out there has a LOT of requests to us from the same IP (like more than 30 per second), or wants to set up such a proxy, please just let us know first so we can work out priority access. Otherwise, our proxy will likely drop your connections. If you suspect this is already happening to you, please PM me or email support with your IP.

Yikes! That's not good...
I guess that's what we'll be working on today, then.

We totally understand, and you're welcome back any time! Sorry to everyone that it's taking so long In addition to the testing, it's been long hours at the day job lately. 

Even if the pool's hashrate falls, your expected BTC per your hashrate is the same. This is reflected by your estimated reward rising. Now, in a proportional pool, long rounds do suck, because they pay you less than average value for your shares. But we've had many quick rounds too, that paid more than an average one. The goal of ESMPPS is to even out your reward over time, and not feel the pinch of long rounds (or reap extra benefits from short rounds). We're working on it We are testing the code thoroughly, because when it comes to accounting for your BTC, you can't be too careful.

We don't store each individual share. That would be wayyy too much data

One reason proportional is nice is because it's so very easy to implement. You just need to store a shares count per user and round. ESMPPS has additional data storage needs, but still doesn't require storing every share.

FYI, the thing that ends up taking the most amount of data for us is actually the samples we use to estimate your miner hashrates. Good rate estimates require lots of samples

I really don't like ever taking stats down - hiding stats except for trusted miners doesn't really solve the root problem. We're doing it for the time being just to reduce hopping in the short term.

But I think you'll be happy with ESMPPS - it has a very low payout variance, much lower than with proportional. In other words, short vs. long rounds won't affect your payouts negatively except in the case of very long bad luck streaks.

Can you clarify? How can it try to make up the difference in the future if it doesn't remember the debt? Thanks.

I agree, SMPPS is mostly tempting for me because it does a very good job of reducing variance. I can't help but think that two week round could have been made less painful, due to the three lucky rounds that came before it.

I didn't fully understand your concept of achieving even payment ratios per share, but I'm very interested; can you describe the idea more?

I think the way http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Shared_Maximum_PPS phrases it is confusing, but the line "If not, the miners are paid proportional to available funds.", in addition to this equation in the pseudocode: Pay each miner PPSamount / idealPayTotal * availableFunds, tells us what happens on long rounds. There is no mention of a payout queue; but it doesn't simply revert to proportional payment of 50 BTC. Instead, if switches to proportional payment of the 50 BTC plus the entire "buffer" from short rounds, instantly depleting the buffer.

Wow, looks like we've solved 3 blocks today

See, variance isn't always horrible

We've certainly talked about it, but I'm not convinced yet We may end up there, though.


Wow, that is weird! It wasn't even after a new block or anything. I'll have to find out what's causing that. Thanks for the tip!