Hi all,

I am getting out of mining as it is no longer profitable for me. As such, I will no longer be running this pool as one of the reasons I set it up was to decrease my own variance. IE an alternative to solo mining. I am posting this to give everyone time to move away without experiencing downtime as a result of the pool just going dark so I intend to shutdown at 03:00 UTC or in approximately 24 hours of this post. I will of course pay out any found blocks between now and then manually in addition to paying out all pool balances to 0. I will also dump the current round and make that available at www.continuumpool.com/history for some time following shutdown.

All that said, it has certainly been fun writing this stuff and if anyone is interested in running it, I would be happy to make the code, database schema and transfer the domain with your paying domain transfer of course. I will likely put the code up on the web at some point soon in any case though.

I would also like to say thanks to Meni Rosenfeld for the fine algorithm on which the pool is based. Implimenting that in Postgresql was challenging and fun. I appreciate all the help along the way.

M

It's possible we haven't found a block since you joined. If you joined recently that is. The balance function will show your balance from blocks the pool has solved. Since we pay out at 0.1 BTC, a confirmed balance wouldn't really say much.

Use the balancecurrent function for the balance from the current block.

Actually, I don't believe the parent is trying to scare anyone away from mining. He is simply pointing out, and rightly so that depreciation costs represent a substantial cost over that of electricity for mining. Depreciation is hard to get right with mining though as even though we are seeing some of the lower end video gear being sold, (still not many 5970/6990), there is still a scarcity of good mining hardware.

I think another factor though which encourages me personally to continue mining is that I would like to believe that bitcoin has a real chance to succeed as an internet currency. To that end, I would like to remain a part of that.

Well that changes the limit for root. But you are not running pushpool as root right?

You're getting the stales because you're killing pushpoold. Pp keeps a log of what work it has issued and when a miner submits work to a newly restarted pushpoold, it won't accept the share because it is not in the pp log.

So it appears these other posts can be applied to the Linux situation as well. The current state is that the 6990 doesn't honour the memclock set with amdoverdrivectrl at 300. However, I can underclock mine as low as 755 using amdoverdrivectl and it will be honoured. Any lower and the clock jumps back to 1250. But 755 is certainly better than nothing.

Hi,

http://continuumpool.com does not exist and will always be down. www.continuumpool.com which is a web interface to rpc.continuumpool.com runs on my machine at home so does experience bits of downtime. It does not affect the pool nor the RPC service, just the web version. Someone has created another web interface to rpc.continuumpool though which can be found higher in this thread. It is more user-friendly than my cobbled together interface anyway.

Payments will go out once the block gets 120 confirmations. You can download
http://www.continuumpool.com/history/rounds.txt
to see the txids of the blocks to know how many confirmations they have. So once that happens, a cron script should pick it up within 15 minutes.

Hi,

Dumps for rounds 7 and 8 are up. They are compressed in xz format which though has excellent compression, you need xz-utils to uncompress. I think under Windows, 7zip might be able to handle them though.

With 160 machines all being CPU miners, you'll want to see what the askrates are on those boxes. bitcoind can only handle so many getwork requests and they currently all occur synchronously. For this specific workload, I would look into multiminer as it is able to take a getwork and break it down for CPU miners. Pushpool is an option but that just moves the getwork load down the chain slightly.

Bitcoind is appropriate for what you are doing, you just need to look at scalability.

Since BTC prices are so unstable, I am listing in USD. However, payment by BTC is still welcome.

Afaik, there isn't a constant cutoff but rather the shares degrade as new shares come in. So the actual amount of time you can be away before a block is found varies based on the hashrate of the pool. The higher the hashrate, the quicker a share will devalue but then at the same time, the more frequent blocks are found so your expected value remains constaint. Ok hopefully I have that right.

Anyways, we did find another block later today, hopefully you were around for that one.

Hello all,

Too many posts from me today, last one.

The files at www.continuumpool.com/history/ have been updated to reflect today's rounds. I have changed the format of dumps though to be more easily parced by scripts. Rather than the XML output, shares are in a simple tab delimited format. Note that "\n" appearing in a field isn't a newline but rather a NULL cfield. I have dropped the payout dumps as they are redundant and can be calculated by doing the math.

Balances should be updated though that particular worker doesn't seem to have current shares. The last share submitted by the above worker was at 12:10 server time (GMT-7). The block solution was found at 17:00 so there were nearly 5 hours between last share and solved block. Does this match your records?

Welcome to the pool.

Well fortunately I'm we found a block very soon after you posted this so we're standing on the other side of a very long round. It's worth noting though that the pool's hashrate was not constant throughout that time. The round is being dumped and the entire history will be up soon at http://www.continuumpool.com/history/

No longer neded 5830s. Would prefer to ship in a single lot and the price above assumes this. Will ship to the lower 48 United States and Canada. I am martok604 on #bitcoin-otc for rating verification.

Payment via BTC or Dwolla.

Hello all,

I am writing to inform everyone that I am discontinuing PPS mode in the pool. I had a set limit of losses for PPS and that has been exceeded. Beyond that, I want to focus exclusively on developing the best (in a technical sense) pool I am able. Going back to an entirely score based method will allow me to do that with a minimum of fuss. I realize that this will cause some to leave the pool, though I would encourage you to move your hashing power over to the score-based pool. It will continue to be immune to hopping attacks and will have its history published to ensure transparency.

Note: Once PPS is switched off, PPS miners will be completely paid out so long as balance is above 0.01 BTC..

Thanks.

Not only to 8 decimal places but TX fees are also added to the block reward and paid out as part of the round.

That is very possible. But whether people leave or join the pool for reasons of no blocks being found is not within my influence. I will note though that if everyone switched from PPS to score based today, we would be in a much better situation as far as finding blocks goes. and the variance would be much lower. We would have approximately 30 ghash in score-based hashing which would result in more BTC earned even for PPS miners due to the 0 fee setup.