# PPS+ vs PPLNS – Payment Options for Mining Pools (2018 ...

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##### Working of Cryptocurrency Mining pool

 Source - https://coinscapture.com/blog/working-of-cryptocurrency-mining-pool ​ Working of Cryptocurrency Mining pool Cryptocurrency is the most discussed and trending topic on various internet forums, communities, and social media. Many individuals are keen to enter the cryptoworld and unfold all the profits within it. Cryptocurrency can be bought from an exchange or mined through the mining pools. In this guide, we’ll understand the working of the cryptocurrency mining pool. What is Mining Pool? Cryptocurrency mining is the same as mining the metals from the earth. The individual or company that digs out the metal from the earth becomes the owner similarly the individual who discovers first the valid hash using the computational power becomes the owner and earns a block reward. The crypto mining can either be done solo using his/her own mining devices or through a mining pool. As more and more enthusiasts participated in mining to earn a block reward became equally difficult and it would take centuries for a miner to generate a block because the probability of finding the hash value first and generating a block is directly proportional to the computing power in the network. The smaller the computational power the smaller is the chance of generating the next block. Hence a solution, to this problem mining pools were formed. A mining pool is a group of miners pooling/combining their computational power together in order to mine a cryptocurrency quickly and earn a block reward consistently. Each contributing miner earns reward according to their investment in processing power. The working of mining pools depends on certain algorithms that are designed to check the authenticity and validity of the transactions. Miners are required to solve a complex math problem that requires millions of calculations with the help of High computational power. When the miners combined their computational power the block generation process happens at a much faster rate as compared to a single mining rig. For more understanding of mining please refer our previous blog (What is Bitcoin mining?) Types of Mining Pools Single mining pools: This type of mining pool mine only single cryptocurrency Multi-currency pools: This type of mining pool mine different cryptocurrencies and gives the miner a chance to choose the cryptocurrency for mining timely depending rewards points offered. Cloud mining pools: Cloud-based mining can be combined with mining pools by making an online contract. This type of mining pool allows individuals to participate in mining activity without even buying specialized equipment. How rewards are shared on mining pools? The rewards shared after successfully adding the new block to the blockchain vary from currency to currency. The reward sharings also depend on the factors like mining difficulty, the exchange rate between different coins, the hash rate and the block generation time. Some of the followed reward structures are as follows: Pay-per-share (PPS): This method offers instant payout depending on the miner’s contribution to finding the block. The payment is done using the pool's existing balance and can be withdrawn immediately. Shared Maximum Pay Per Share (SMPPS): It is the same as Pay-per-share (PPS) but limits the payout to the maximum that the pool has earned. Equalized Shared Maximum Pay Per Share (ESMPPS): This method is similar to (SMPPS) but the rewards are distributed equally among all miners in the pool. Proportional (PROP): The miner is rewarded the share that is proportional to the number of shares he has in the pool with respect to the pool’s total shares Advantages of mining pools Mining pools offer a more stable income Mining pools lower costs of mining Mining pools helps in generating a higher income Disadvantages of Mining pools There may be some interruptions in the Mining pools There is a sharing of block rewards There may be sometimes unfavorable pool reward structure Widely-Used Mining Pools Antpool: The largest pool available on the web offering mining of cryptocurrencies like BTC, BCH, LTC, ETH, ETC, ZEC, DASH, SCC, XMC, BTM Minergate.com: A public mining pool mining of cryptocurrencies like ETH, ETC, ZEC, BTG, BCN, XMR, XMO, FCN, XDN, AEON Btc.com: The most popular mining pool among miners offering cryptocurrencies BTC, BCH, ETH, ETC, LTC, UBTC, DCR to mine BTCC: The largest Chinese pool in the world mining 7% of all existing blocks. Slush: The most trusted mining pools on internet mining 7% of all available blocks. Mining pools can definitely be a change to the entire mining process offering the highest and the real income without spending years depending on the computational powers. Hence, investing in a mining pool can be beneficial but always choose the mining pool that fits your personal needs and facilities. submitted by coinscapturecom to u/coinscapturecom [link] [comments]

##### Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol

arXiv:1510.02037
Date: 2015-11-11
Author(s): Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Emin Gun Sirer, Robbert van Renesse

Abstract
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols have inherent scalability limits that trade-off between throughput and latency and withhold the realization of this potential.This paper presents Bitcoin-NG, a new blockchain protocol designed to scale. Based on Bitcoin's blockchain protocol, Bitcoin-NG is Byzantine fault tolerant, is robust to extreme churn, and shares the same trust model obviating qualitative changes to the ecosystem.In addition to Bitcoin-NG, we introduce several novel metrics of interest in quantifying the security and efficiency of Bitcoin-like blockchain protocols. We implement Bitcoin-NG and perform large-scale experiments at 15% the size of the operational Bitcoin system, using unchanged clients of both protocols. These experiments demonstrate that Bitcoin-NG scales optimally, with bandwidth limited only by the capacity of the individual nodes and latency limited only by the propagation time of the network.

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##### An in depth look into Sparkster and why I believe it is in a league of its own

Introduction
Today I am writing about a project I truly believe in. I am on the same page with Ian Balina when I state that I see this project is an all-star ICO. This is not your average run-of-the-mill vapour ware ICO with No MVP. This is a working platform with a great team behind it. You can find AMA’s on YouTube(Link 1)with live demonstrations of their TPS progress to date and you can also try out their platform for yourself on their website, these are linked at the end of the article for your convenience. Also, they have a pretty good bounty programme running at the moment which I shall link also(Link 2).
Please don’t consider this investment advice, I hope you will read this article and consider it a starting point for your own research. At the time of writing the market has taken another nasty dip, however this is the time when smart investments need to be made, And I truly fell this is one of them. I would also like any of you who enjoy this article to please upvote it and check out my previous work and stay tuned for more.
I will be diving deep into this whitepaper (Link 3) today and basing my article off videos and my personal experience on their platform. All this information can be found within their website and whitepaper. As such I imagine this is going to be a long article.
So, to begin Sparkster is essentially a decentralised cloud platform that will allow anybody to build software in plain English via simple drag and drop function. In their whitepaper they confess that this was inspired by MIT scratch. In today’s world programmers work in various kinds of code languages, these all require training in different types of languages. For example solidity is one of the most popular used today which “is a contract-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts” (Wikipedia, 2018). This is currently used on many blockchain platforms, it was developed by Ethereum’s project solidity team for use on the Ethereum virtual machine and is the most popular language used at present.
Sparkster aims to provide a platform which will allow smart contracts to run at 10 million TPS per second, which would make it the fastest decentralised cloud software in the world.
Concept development
In their whitepaper they suggest this project was conceived after spending 14 years working with software engineers designing and building ERP software for a start-up. Sparkster was born from the frustration of this process and after 6 years of R&D they have the working product we see today. This is an enterprise ready platform. They also claim they have already signed deals with large tech companies (ARM & Libelium).
They also talk about how the entry is trying to make things more practical but it is not far enough. Sparkster are the market leaders here as they are targeting an audience of 99% non-software developers and allowing them to build software. Interestingly in 2018 at the mobile world congress they presented the use of this platform using AI facial recognition to detect a cleaner in a house and opening a door lock, I seen this on YouTube video, which I will link below(Link 4). This is a team which have proved they have a working product.
Claims/ Vision
1. In their whitepaper they claim they want to become the world’s first platform where people can build their own visions into reality and create financial independence for themselves and contribute to society.
2. Sparkster will tear apart the barrier to entry to software creation. Their drag and drop functionality on the platform allows this. Up until yesterday I had no clue how a smart contract worked at the basic level, now I consider myself an expert software developer- Who would have thought I could throw away my old life and upskill over 24 hours? Ha.
3. What I also love about this project is that it will empower people to bring their own ideas to the table and be able to sell them, thus creating financial independence.
4. The Sparkster, (2018) website(Link 5)suggests they will further disrupt the 200 billion cloud computing industry and combat the extortionate prices large centralised cloud provides like AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM charge.
5. This is a finished product guys, please try it yourself if you don’t believe me.
Problem today
As per Sparkster, (2018) claim the biggest problem faced today is that organisations and individuals who wish to implement AI, IOT and smart contract technology have limitations placed on them. Most notably being that their own IT departments are adapting too slowly and there is a serious lack of experienced personnel in these areas. When I watched the AMA that Sajjad Daya (CEO) did with IAN Balina, he described that it is hard to interpret what you want to a developer and get the result you require; the end result then often does not meet your expectations. This of course leads to time wasting as it requires much back and forth correspondence. He stated that this can be months down the line (Something I have experienced in my own organisation). This traditional “software development lifecycle” is truly a slow and painful process, just as they claim in their whitepaper. Also, when changes need to be made to the software down the line it is very expensive.
Further-more the team claim that most business software used today (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc… is in-capable of interfacing with the technologies of the future (IOT, AI, Smart contracts). The Sparkster whitepaper further goes on to suggest that the talent is just not there in the industry today to face this challenge either and much up-skilling is required. The team believe that the high capital cost and time periods to replicate vision onto software in the traditional manner is the biggest problem facing enterprises today as it curbs innovation. I concur with this sentiment.
How they will achieve/solve this
According to their whitepaper, this platform is the solution to all of the above problems. It is a Platform which targets the new era of AI, IOT and smart contracts and all tailored to non-developesoftware experts “making is accessible to the 99% who do not know how to code and don’t want to learn” (Sparkster, 2018).
They will create this platform by targeting users of cell phones, notebooks, laptops and other personal devices- who in essence will all become miners on the network. This will then in turn provide users with Spark tokens as a reward for contributing spare capacity. Using these devices is far cheaper than todays centralised systems according to the team. They further proclaim in their whitepaper this lower cost will arise from using inexpensive nodes and as this scales the cost goes down; compared to traditional cloud computing which remains constant. Companies will provide the value via paying for the software creation.
Fees
To scale the platform, they will make personal use free, but limited to a certain number of transactions per month. This restriction can be lifted by referring others. The commercial use will be via ongoing fees (licences, transaction fees, storage fees etc...). The team also describe how the platform and cloud are complimentary, which will allow users to build software 100x faster and cheaper than traditional means, so this will be a very popular mass blockchain adoption platform in my view.
Their plan for growth
A marketplace will essentially become available when users sell their software creations via peer to peer transactions. So, value really depends on how users use the platform. Also, users lending their free memory (CPU) on phones etc… will be awarded spark tokens. These can all be used to negate the fees paid.
According to their whitepaper they will also focus on strategic partnership. As mentioned above they have already partnerships with ARM (World’s largest computer chip designer) and Libellium (Industrial sensor and gateway distributor). They also plan to target vertical markets, specifically IOT and smart contracts as growth is forecast to be huge in both. I personally see the use of smart contracts in society as the single biggest use case of blockchain in the future.
Platform
What is amazing about this platform is that you can actually try it for yourself on their website. I conducted the 6 walkarounds myself and was very impressed by what I experienced. I have never attempted to try create anything with software, but the process was made so simple by Sparkster. You can literally drag and drop different interfaces together and define the behaviour of each block. It’s a very simple and intuitive approach to building smart contracts. As described by Sparkster, (2018) whitepaper you just snap together blocks that describe the “what” you want without worry about “how” it works, they even attribute it to building with Lego. The walkthroughs bring you through how to create a simple calculator and by the 6th lesson you have developed a complex insurance smart contract from which premiums can be calculated and payments automatically made.
Sparkster claim that this will make the creation of smart contracts 100 times faster and cheaper than traditional software development, a claim which I am starting to believe after experience their walkthrough. This is a rare project which already has a working platform- Why wouldn’t you be impressed?
Most ICO’s today are nothing but vapourware, who look for you money and don’t even have minimum viable projects to offer. I would advise you all to look at their AMA’s on YouTube and partake in their walkthroughs and you will see for yourself.
A more detailed look into their platform
According to Sparkster, (2018) their smart software is made up of:
1. Flows- The definition of the software, made up of all core components of the platform.
2. Functions- Single building blocks that perform units of work which can be plugged together to build processes (e.g. an insurance policy as seen in their walkthrough video). The have a well-defined user interface also.
3. Documents- Basic data storage entities on the platform, they differ from functions as they are there to retrieve, persist, update and delete data. Sparkster say that they are there to represent an entity in the real world e.g. a user’s car insurance policy. Furthermore, storage nodes on the cloud will be rewarded for this storage and retrieval of data.
4. Integrations- This is the interface to the outside world. Sparkster say they provide a simple abstraction to a 3rd party API or webservices. What I like about this is that somebody can create this (e.g. shipping quotation) and allow others to use after its created via the market place. Sparkster aim to allow people to do this without worrying how it all works.
5. Devices- These replicate devices in the real world comprising of commands and fields (Bidirectional data transfer). In their whitepaper they use an example of a temperature probe in a greenhouse where the temperature feeds back to the action field. It is very complex stuff.
6. Gateways- these represent a group of devices connected to one gateway. Sparkster say these are all connected to the internet allowing the platform interact with them all individually or as a group.
7. Smart Contracts- This is the element I found most fascinating during the Sparkster walkthrough videos. This allows you to create smart contracts to allow transactions on the platform. Currently they are using Ethereum smart contracts and Iota smart transactions. I found the whole process so easy. They further state that all the above components can interact with the smart contracts, which was proven to me in the walkarounds.
Their claim of 10 million TPS
From what I can understand from their whitepaper and from an AMA with their CEO this will be a step by step approach to 10 million tps, admittedly a few years down the line but they already proved their platform works and is running at over 50k TPS with 50 cells. They don’t seem to have hit any scalability issues just yet. And I should not need to remind you that 50k TPS is much more than other blockchains products out there.
In their whitepaper they tell us that this is designed to be a specialised blockchain for the use of “smart software”, What is important to understand is that they can reach higher TPS because they don’t have to “act” like other blockchains, in that most of their clients will want to keep data private which “eliminates the necessity of maintaining global state” (Sparkster, 2018). This in turns allows them to shard their distributed hash tables into client groups, where “one shard never needs to have any awareness of another other shard” (Sparkster, 2018). They will essentially isolate cells from one another in order to scale to this level. They give a great example in their whitepaper where if a company like Air BNB want to put customer data into cells (usernames broke into separate letters per cell), where millions of customers make up their base.
Overall their theory is that there is technically no limit to the number of TPS they can achieve, this is just a target number. I have full confidence they can pull it off, what other blockchain is proving this live on air like this team is?
Decentralised cloud
Sparkster, (2018) website describes how traditional cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google have huge costs, relating to server costs, backup power, staff, security and cooling. Decentralised cloud computing will be the death of these organisations. For instance, Sparkster claim that by executing small software components on one’s mobile phone these costs fall near to zero, they envisage a world where a lot of these miners will join the decentralised cloud and make reduce the costs further.
Their cloud will facilitate the execution of smart software created on the platform. Their whitepaper further suggests that one can simply download the Sparkster mining app on their phones which will provide user generated smart software environment (SRE). Companies will stake bids on the exchange for their software to run in a decentralised fashion and stake Spark tokens (Amount willing to pay). The team are envisaging this as a free market where bidders can stake as much as they like and miners ask for anything they like. Payment is made to the miners via these tokens.
They further say computer and storage nodes can join the network and be paid in Spark tokens, but they are required to stake tokens themselves as collateral to ensure they operate honestly. Sparkster will have verification nodes to validate transactions from computer and storage nodes and if any “bad behaviour” is found then they take these staked tokens in the form of a “bounty”. In my opinion this will make it a very secure platform
Sparkster Technology Stack
The below image from their whitepaper shows the levels “smart software” goes through to facilitate decentralised cloud computing.
https://preview.redd.it/4qnqlgowyf311.png?width=357&format=png&auto=webp&s=fa68bc369d37c14073dcbd4869518f3b1485c057
Source: Sparkster, (2018)
Throughput
What is very interesting is the high throughput they can sustain with such a high TPS. If you know anything about blockchain you will understand this is a challenge for every blockchain, the more users to a platform the more scaling is required. For instance, in the bull run in December I remember how slow the Ethereum blockchain became, this was also attributed to the increase in ICOs and DApps launching on the platform.
Sparkster claim their cloud is capable of “scaling linearly without any overhead curtailing its meteoric performance” (Sparkster, 2018). They can achieve this by isolating cells within the chain. They further claim that the whole Idea is to “isolate” chains, essentially creating independent blockchains which have their own hash tables and never synchronize with each other- they describe this like a human cell, which once splits never shares anything with another cell. It is a very simple concept, user’s data is stored in a specific cell, so why would another unrelated company using the Sparkster platform need to know about of access the information in the 1st cell. Each “cell” is capable of 1000tps and because they each have their own hash table this results in 2k tps and so on and so forth.
Essentially data is streamed in parallel but synching is never needed. This is huge- this is a platform which unlike any other blockchain is designed for mainstream adoption. Any company can use it and store data and be sure of a high throughput. As mentioned above they are already at 50k TPS- which is far better than most blockchains today. This is a true working product and I can see this getting to 10 million.
Consensus
Time for a quick history lesson, bitcoin uses proof of work and Ethereum use proof of stake. These are two most common consensuses used today by blockchains. Bitcoin relies on the party with the highest hashing power whereas Ethereum on the party with the highest amount of money. This team has chosen to implement the Steller Consensus Protocol (SCP), because it is better.
Sparkster describe this as a commercial version of the Federate Byzantine Agreement System (FBAS) (1000tps per second). They will also implement a layer for incentives to keep parties honest and minimise risk of attack as SCP does not have this. This will be done by awarding of Spark tokens to computer (donate CPU memory on device) and storage nodes (contribute storage space and network bandwidth). Clients of the platform will be covering these incentives. The team believe this extra layer is required to ensure the platform surpasses traditional cloud platforms and I tend to agree with them.
Their whitepaper further suggests that a proof of work consensus will be used to calculate these incentives. This will allow misbehaviour to be detected and stakes taken from them by verification nodes. Page 35-39 of the whitepaper goes into detail how these are all calculated, which is linked below for your interest.
Consistent hashing
As they don’t use global state this algorithm allows the platform to “hash the clients ID and extract a bounded number” (Sparkster, 2018). This will identify a particular client within a cell.
Privacy
One of the biggest fears of any data platform is privacy protection. The Sparkster team say that their cloud deconstructs data into fragments, encrypts them and disseminates them across the network of nodes. This is particularly important now with the EU’s general Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as discussed in their whitepaper. So, any hack to the platform will wield meaningless returns. They also claim they use “zk-SNARKs… a zero-knowledge proof to ensure that client data is obfuscated, even from other network participants” (Sparkster, 2018).
Security
They also claim they can detect software intrusions such as tampering with the code, memory or thread. Once their system detects this all client data is automatically deleted from the memory along with the access keys to the Sparkster network, as claimed on their website.
In their whitepaper they also claim that any software built on the platform is “entirely bug free”. This is true because even though you as the users dictate the logic, the actually underlying code is very uniform and consistent.
Their app will also use public/ private keys and digital signatures and check sums will be used to detect file tampering. In their whitepaper they also state that cache data won’t be stored, all data will be encrypted, all communication is SSL/TLS and they will employ 3rd parties to detect malicious payloads in the memory.
Multi chain interoperability
Sparkster can already be used with both Ethereum and Iota, with plans to increase this down the line. This is all to cater for preferences of the user. This is a very transparent platform and tailored around usability and ease.
https://preview.redd.it/c23z7yl2zf311.png?width=451&format=png&auto=webp&s=81c05aeb65a528dd482fc97c4803cb2712b40fd7
Source: (Sparkster, 2018)
Token economics
Stats
• Symbol: Spark
• Circulating supply: 290,000,000
• Token Type: Utility
• ICO price: 0.15 USD
• Token spec: ERC20
Value
The value model proposed by their whitepaper suggests that the global marketplace will be the value driver of the platform. So, people can create and sell content on an open peer-peer market, with the value flowing though the Spark token. Small platform fees will be charged on transactions on the platform (Not on free contributions).
It is a utility tokens because its purpose is to facilitate payments, it will also be the only currency accepted on the platform. Once the decentralised cloud is released in Q4 2018, miners will be able to earn Spark tokens.
I believe this will be a market leader when it comes to mass adoption of blockchain, this is truly a one model fits all platform and it is with growth of the platform which will drive the value of the tokens up. Also, the Spark token is essential to the cloud functionality as miners need to stake tokens to ensure good behaviour, if the opposite occur verification nodes claim these takes, this makes the tokens essential to the smooth running of the platform.
Breakdown of token distribution
• Token sale: 67%. This is a very healthy amount, something which is being avoided by many ICO’s out there today. This will be a strict whitelist only ICO. The majority of these were sold at presale (250 million tokens) for investors buying more than 25k, the remaining 38 million tokens are earmarked for their crowd sale (Excluding US persons).
• Sparkster initial investors: 20% (Vested 2 years). I am happy with this also as it shows they are some big investors on board and they don’t hold the majority of the tokens.
• Sparkster team: 10% (Vested 2 years). This is fair as I believe incentives are essential in any organisation to drive work performance.
• Exchange listing liquidity: 2%. This I am unsure about, I would probably like this to be slightly higher and to secure some high-volume exchanges upon release. They do state in their whitepaper any unsold tokens will go towards this, but I see this ICO being a sell-out.
• Sparkster dreamers charity: 1%- This is nice to see, something for the good of humanity, this will go towards educating the poorest in the world in technological innovation, according to their whitepaper.
Use of funds:
• Corporate and large account sales team: 25%. This is great as this means they are targeting large organisations off the bat.
• Marketing: 25%. I am very happy to see this as this ensures the word will be spread, I have to hand it to the team their marketing so far is top notch.
• R&D- 20%. Also, very happy with this as it shows that even though the team have a working product they will continue to improve on their platform.
• Developing a global customer success team- 10%.
• Expanding infrastructure- 10%
• Reserve- 5%
• Accounting/legal fees- 3%
Team
In my view the team has a huge wealth of experience within it. This consists of:
• Professor Gary Leavens who is well regarded and known for his experience in programming software.
• Juan Albelo who is the senior vice president of SAP.
• Sajjad Daya (CEO)who has founded several companies, he come across as very confident in his AMAs which is something I like to see in a team. He is not afraid to show his product to the world himself.
• Amit Kumar- Has worked with Sajjad for 11 years and is VP of technology. He has a wealth of experience in IT.
• Shabeer Kirmani- He is the technical evangelist with great experience in fortune 100 firms. He also conducts the product walkthroughs on the Sparkster website. He has been friends with Sajjad for 6 years.
• Dayanie Rajeev- She is the VP of Human Resources with a lot of experience in her role. She has also worked with Sajjad for over 10 years.
17 further team members (Sparkster Warriors)
· These team members range from software engineers, developers, designers, project team leaders, programmers and digital marketers.
· There is so much experience in this team it would take all day to write about them, but a wide encompassing team like this shows they are serious about what they doing.
Conclusion
This is a not to be missed ICO. I really feel like this is one of the all star ICO’s this year. There is nothing more that really needs to be said, I would just advise you that if you are considering this project then go to their website and test the platform for yourself. It is the walkthroughs that sold me on this project and one which I will be investing in.
Link 2- Sparkster bounty programme: http://sparkster.me/try?r=DU2VUW45
References
· En.wikipedia.org. (2018). Solidity. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidity [Accessed 11 Jun. 2018].
· Sparkster (2018). Build and Run Decentralized Software in Plain English. [ebook] Sparkster whitepaper, pp.1-57. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_341kbDEDc9PWn4lbsCGpAmcqDqcggUq/view [Accessed 11 Jun.
· Sparkster.me. (2018). Sparkster – Build Apps, Write No Code. [online] Available at: https://sparkster.me/ [Accessed 11 Jun. 2018].018].

##### To arms Bitcoin community! Help us to complete this mining installation for the Zürich MoneyMuseum. We are not asking for funds. Only your expertise needed! 20$tip if you give us the relevant clue to solve or mitigate our main problem. Nice pictures of the exhibition inside as well… Edit: A big thank you to all people who helped us we can now mine true pps with diff1! The people in this thread which have helped most have been awarded. I want to mention also the operator of btcmp.com denis2342 and Luke-Jr. Actually looking at the miner screen in the Linux terminal helped a lot ;-). The pool constantly resigned to stratum with variable difficulty. We can now mine true pps with diff1. Getwork with long polling seems to be default after disabling stratum... We will probably post again, when there is a video of the installation in action... Again many thanks. Learned a lot. Edit: Thank you for all the answeres so far! We will try different things now and report back. Tip bounty will be distrubuted as soon as we found out what finally does the trick. Ths could take a few days. The offerd tip will be distributed and very likeley a few others as well. First of all, let me tell you that the Bitcoin Exhibition at the Zürich MoneyMuseum is most likely the biggest and most diverse of it’s kind. Please read more about the museum and the exhibition below. Help us solve the following problem we experience with our “Muscle Powered Proof of Work” installation: Me and a friend have invested a lot of time to build an installation for the Museum. It is basically a 10GHash/s miner and RapberryPi which is powered by a hand generator (Maxon DC motor with planetary gear). Here are some pictures of the installation, although not entirely put together yet. There are still some changes planned. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0qcvl3wu4romhnt/AAAYF08lnVAy6W6KEepE7e2Ua?dl=0 Now let’s get to the core of our problem: We are mining at the getwork diff1 pool btcmp.com as it is a true pps pool with getwork diff1. The visitors in the museum can power the generator for 2-3min and see directly how many Satoshis the "network" (actually pool but we don't want to confuse the visitors to much at that point) has given the museum for their work. This all works well so far but one problem remains. Sometimes the pool does not get a share from us for more than 40 seconds or even more than 60 in some cases. I have calculated that with 8.4 GHash/s we should find a share about every 0.5 seconds in average (diff1). I think when the pool gets a share it gets all the hashes as it then accounts for several Satoshis. Statistically we get per minute what we should get in theory. We would very much like to lower the time between the accepted shares by the pool, however. This would help to make the overall experience much smoother for the visitors. Please look at this screenshot from MinePeon and answer some questions: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lb1jei4trc9kqe5/MinePeonScreenshot.png?dl=0 We see that we get a lot of diff1 hashes. However, only 11 shares/packages have been accepted. The Is there a possibility to set the miner SW so it submits to the pool as soon as a share is found? It seems to send them in packages which sometimes have 4-5 seconds in between but sometimes a much as 80 seconds. I would like to submit packages of hashes much more often. How can this be influenced? What exactly are the Getworks (GW)? What exactly are the Accepted ones (Acc)? This is where the TipBounty is. Help us to get a better Acc/diff1 ratio. Best would be 1:1. What exactly are the rejected ones (Rej)? What exactly are the discarded ones (Disc)? What exactly are the difficulty one hashes (diff1)? Now some of these questions seem very very basic but it is important for us to understand what these are and how we can influence these. We have a 1:1 correlation between the Acc and the pool side acknowledgement of shares/packages. So whenever the MinePeon shows one more for this value the pool value for last submitted share goes to “moments ago”. Does the miner SW have a setting where we can set after how many diff1 hashes a package of hashes is sent to the pool? If no, do you have another idea why so few are sent? Ideally we would set it so the diff1 hashes are sent every 5 seconds or so, probably even more often. Is stratum with fixed diff1 possible? If so, would it be better to use stratum? Are there critical settings if we should know of? (we have tried --request-diff and --no-submit-stale) We are using BFGMiner on MinePeon if that matters. We could switch to CGMiner if that would help. Any help is very much appreciated. The museum is doing a great job explaining Bitcoin basics. We had special focus on interactive learning and have several things to underline this. I hope to hear back from you so we can improve our installation. Please don't hesitate to ask if you have further questions. We are both not mining experts. Thanks for reading and AMA. SimonBelmond Current features of the Bitcoin exhibition at the Zürich MoneyMuseum: Current Features: • Life screen with various stats/charts/parameters/transactions… • Printed infographics. • Muscle powered PoW: Hand generator with 5v and 3.5-5A output, Raspberry Pi, MinePeon, 5x Antminer U2+ plus a screen to show the hash-rate at the pool and/or in MinePeon web interface. This screen will not be hand powered. This installation will complement their coining die (go to 1:27 to see what I mean). • The Bitcoin mining evolution (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC) • A few short (2-3 minutes) interviews. • Other wallets, Trezor, PiperWallet • ATM Prototype, functional • MoneyMuseum Bit-Cards • PiperWallet to use. • Casascius and other physical Bitcoins, Wallets (also some commemorative coins), Paper wallet like one out of the first Bitcoin (A)TM ever • Bitcoin Quiz • 12 Picture tours • Bitcoin for beginners • Bitcoin advanced • Debunking 13 Bitcoin myths • What you definitely have to know • The history of Bitcoin • Bitcoin und traditional forms of money • Alternatives to Bitcoin • Citations about Bitcoin • How do I open an account? • How do I get Bitcoin? • Bitcoin community and economy • Bitcoin as a platform I see this as a good opportunity for Bitcoin, so let’s embrace it. I am especially excited to compare the traditional forms of money which used proof of work to the new money which also uses proof of work. I think in that context it will be much easier for the visitors to value this concept. A lot of schools and other groups book guided tours at the museum. It is open on every Friday from December 05. On. Entry is free of charge. Edit:Markdown, typos submitted by SimonBelmond to Bitcoin [link] [comments] ##### **Warning:** ViaBTC Cloud Mining "Social" Contract Scam This is not the same cloud mining contract offering by viaBTC.com Roger Ver's twitter account has been hacked faked and the hackers scammers are sending out the following email trying to entice you to buy viaBTC mining shares at a discount. Note, the BTC receiving address is different than viaBTC's Block 1 receiving address: ViaBTC Cloud Mining Contract — Batch 1 Social ViaBTC is now launching our cloud mining product — an easy way for EVERYONE to mine your own Bitcoins. Our first cloud mining contract — ViaBTC S9 will run with Antminer S9, the most advanced mining rigs today. All cloud hashrates will come from the miners ViaBTC purchases and deploys. Now we have deployed our Batch 1 Social of 2.4 PH/s cloud hashrates for global customers to purchase. Contract Details: 1. Purchase unit: 1 TH/s per SHARE. The Batch 1 S9 hashrates will be divided into 2,400 SHARES; 2. Power consumption & electricity cost: 100 Watt per SHARE; 0.84 CNY per day per SHARE (0.35 CNY/KWH); 3. Manage fees: 6% of the mining income will be charged as manage fees, which cover the costs for mining farm maintenance, deployment, repairs, staff expenses, emergencies, risk prevention etc.; 4. Mining income: The miners will mine in ViaBTC pool which adopts a PPS+ method. The mining income will be the theoretical PPS+ yields which won’t be affected by the operational conditions of miners. 5. Settlement: The mining income, deducted by manage fees and electricity costs will be the actual yields. The daily electricity cost will be calculated against the CNY/Bitcoin rate from China’s mainstream exchanges. The daily income will be settled at 8:00 AM Beijing Time (GMT+8) the next day; 6. Redemption of miners: To guarantee efficiency, all miners will run in high-standard facilities and in ViaBTC pool. Redemption of miners and change of mining pool are not available for the contract. 7. Termination of contract: The contract will be terminated automatically when there’s zero actual yields for 10 consecutive days. ViaBTC will redeem all contracts priced with the remaining value of the miners at the time. All miners will be owned by ViaBTC. Purchase: 8. Batch 1 Social on sale: Nov. 16th 2016-Nov. 22nd 2016 9. Batch 1 Social price: 0.15 BTC per SHARE (minimum 20 shares) 10. Way of purchase: Please purchase the contract by an integral number of SHARES and send the Bitcoins to the address:127n8yQPbcNepiNYNY1J9Q9btpJiq6Ysig (do not send any bitcoins to this address, OP) from your wallet that you own the private key. This wallet will receive the daily mining yields. If your payment cannot cover a full SHARE, it will be sent back to the original address. If the total orders overrun our stock, the excess will be sent back to their original addresses as well; 11. Effectiveness: We will confirm your order and start to calculate the yields within 24 hours on receiving your payments. Yields & Risks: 12. About Antminer S9: S9 is currently the most advanced and power-efficient mining rig which guarantees the longest life cycle for a miner. Visit Antminer’s site for more details; 13. Income calculation: ViaBTC users can check at “Home” to find out the expected daily yields for 1 SHARE which is now around 0.00098611 BTC; 14. Warnings: Price fluctuation is frequent for Bitcoin and the mining difficulty will be adjusted every other week. Price drop and increase of difficulty will lead to a drop of mining income per SHARE. ViaBTC won’t promise a 100% ROI whether in Bitcoin or fiat money terms. Please evaluate the risks you can handle before investing in Bitcoin mining. Follow-up Plan: 15. ViaBTC will deploy more miners in the near future to meet your demands; 16. Our cloud mining exchange platform is under development and will be soon integrated into www.viabtc.com. At that time users can freely trade their cloud mining contracts. Early-stage contract holders can direct their contacts to www.viabtc.com then by signing their wallet addresses. submitted by clone4501 to btc [link] [comments] ##### Ever wonder what those numbers mean? The relationship between difficulty, shares, hashrate, etc. explained. After being confused for a long time myself, I went and crunched some figures, and found out where all those numbers came from. To save fellow shibes from having to do the same, I'm making this guide. First of all, what is difficulty? It is a number d such that the expected number of hashes required to find a block is d * 232. That is to say, the individual probability of each hash finding a block is 1 / (d * 232 ). (You can read up on how a geometric distribution based on a Bernoulli random variable of probability p has a mean of 1/p.) So if the difficulty is 1, then a valid hash would require 32 binary zeros at the beginning (usually represented as 8 zeros in hex). If the difficulty is 1024, then 32 + 10 = 42 binary zeros are required. For a difficulty that's not a power of two, you're going to have an odd mix (e.g. the first digits of the hex must be less than 000000000c8.) Now how is difficulty calculated? For Dogecoin, difficulty is recalibrated every 240 blocks. It is adjusted so that a block would be found every minute, on average. Example: The average hashrate was 100 GH/s over the last 240 blocks. We want a block found every 60 seconds, or every 1011 * 60 = 6 x 1012 hashes. So d = 6 x 1012 / 232 = 1397, and the difficulty will be set to 1397. The pool difficulty (also known as share difficulty) is a closely related concept. It is up to the pool operator, but almost all define it as being difficulty * 216. That is, pool difficulty is a number d' such that the expected number of hashes required to find a share on the pool is d' * 216 (since 32 - 16 = 16). It is basically there for notational convenience, because no one wants to talk about mining at a difficulty of 0.000244 (translated to pool difficulty, that would be 16), just like how people use kilodoge or millibitcoin. What about a share? Pool operators may vary, but usually a share is defined as a valid hash at pool difficulty 16. Pools may set a pool difficulty that everyone mines at, automatically adjust pool difficulty for each individual miner depending on their hashrate (called vardiff), or allow users to set their own difficulty. They might even create different strata with different pool difficulty levels. A share at a higher pool difficulty is harder to find but worth more. Basically, if you're currently mining at pool difficulty 16 and switch to 32, you'll mine shares half as often but every share you mine is worth two shares. (Unfortunately, the definition of "share" appears to be overloaded - it can mean either each thing a miner submits to a pool or its equivalent for a pool difficulty of 16. It's like how a "standard drink" is 0.6 oz alcohol - if you had a 24 oz beer at 5% ABV, you could say you had a drink, but technically you had two drinks in terms of alcohol content.) A round is the period of time since the last block was found by a pool to the next time a block is found by the pool. Round shares are shares (i.e. equivalent shares for difficulty 16) that have been found by pool miners. Estimated shares is an estimate of how many shares it will take for a pool to find a block. This number is the same for each pool regardless of hashrate, and only depends on the current difficulty. It is equal to d * 212. Why? Note that a share at pool difficulty 16 is 16 times as difficult as a share at pool difficulty 1, and pool difficulty 1 is 216 times easier than difficulty 1, so the overall effect is 216 / 16. (PPS only: The baseline PPS rate is the amount a miner is paid for each share at difficulty 1; pools PPS rate is the amount a miner is paid for each share at difficulty 16. Pools PPS rate is calculated by dividing the block reward by the estimated shares. So for Dogecoin currently, you divide 500,000 by 5,645,699 to get pools PPS rate 0.088563.) The Bitcoin wiki has a page on difficulty, but it's somewhat technical and doesn't really talk about mining pools, so I created this post because I couldn't find anything better on Google and ended up using a bit of math and common sense to figure these things out. Though I do recommend reading it for the technically inclined. For other things like Prop, PPLNS, PPS, etc. there are many existing well-written resources, so I'm saving my breath. This page lists pretty much every single pool structure you might encounter. PPLNS (basic guide, advanced) is probably the most common but also somewhat difficult to understand. submitted by tony_1337 to dogecoin [link] [comments] ##### [uncensored-r/btc] Bitcoin Tech Rant: Smart Contracts - December 27 2017 The following post by L14dy is being replicated because the post has been openly removed. The original post can be found(in censored form) at this link: np.reddit.com/ btc/comments/7mg6l1 The open modlog reason it was removed as reported by /btc was: spam The original post's content was as follows: Bontshour Moonboys. This is a really really long one, so I'll put the TL;DR at the top. TL;DR: I am ICOing next year for a free online Crypto Univesity where I will be doing things differently than ever done before. The token structure will be Colored Coins on BTC and I believe that people who get their degrees for free will donate to the project, and the donations will be redistributed to the token HODLers. I will be responsible for all/most of the content at the beginning, but anyone will be able to provide me with content, and noone will get paid for making content, just participate in the ICO if you think it's good shit. The degrees will be accredited from an actual Top 10 university, and degrees will be issued as colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain signed by yours truly. ICO pre-sale address is: 1H3HuW3edwmxfWv73ebs7hcLDHYfMy4RAP (Haha, No SegWit :DDDD) @Mods, please dont ban me, I love you. Smart Contracts are not that great, but here's how they work from a deep deep deep mathematical level, and here's one way (out of literally thousands) they were implemented in CryptoCurrencies. ICO: I'm starting a website where I will do things in a more serious fashion. I'm planning to ICO a blockchain academy where you will be able to get an actual Bachelor's and Master's degree (accredited from an actual university) for free. Everything will be 100% online and it will be a Math/Comp Sci major with a focus on Cryptography, Game Theory and Distributed Systems (nothing else, even though I could do Chemistry, Bio, Physics and maybe even some Engineering disciplines.. Maybe Later.. maybe also some economics). It'll be called something like www.L14dy.com... www.SoYouThinkYouCanBitcoin.com... www.CryptoCunts.com... www.ShillinIsAHabit.com... Something funny. If you want to post ideas on the name for the website, please feel free to do so. It'll be great! Everything will be completely free, but there will be a payout structure for donations. That's why I want to ICO it. I want people to have skin in the game, and I expect that people who get their degrees there for free will actually pay in the form of donations, which will be redistributed to the Token HODLers. The whole thing will be built on Colored Coins, and even the degrees will be issues as colored coins signed by yours truly. Stay tuned. ICO pre-sale address: 1H3HuW3edwmxfWv73ebs7hcLDHYfMy4RAP No SegWit, cuz I dont have access to a computer rn, and I dont have my wallet app. I actually manually computed this address using my iPhone's random number generator. It's legit, I have the private key :D NOT trying to shill here, but there is really no harm in posting it in case someone just wants to YOLO in. Please don't send big amounts... It's more just a joke because I hate ICOs, but feel free to do whatever you please with it. I'll do something cool for the pre-sale like issue you a special color (Big fan of Purple, cuz my pimp game is strong). Please don't send any large amounts of BTC, I'm not looking for money, I'm looking for a BTC success story. DO NOT SEND MORE THAN 1BTC UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. PPS: @ mods... Please don't ban me. I know I have a problem. I will do better. I promise. Im not looking for a handout either. I'm looking to make Crypto a success. Here goes nothin: RANT: Ok, now that we've had enough time holding each other's dicks, it's time for the big tech rant..... This time it's about... WAIT FOR IT.... SMART CONTRACTS. Holy fuck... There is literally nothing I could care less about that Smart Contracts (except shitcoins). I think it's the dumbest shit since Beanie Babies. But... I guess others care, so whatever. u/GenghisKhanSpermShot asked me to do a tech rant on RSK, so I guess here goes nothing. Once again though... I really think RSK is vaporware, I couldn't give two shits about any of the BS coming out of the shitcoin industry regarding Smart Contracts and I truly believe the entire market missed the point of this whole thing... Bitcoin Script is a way better option for creating "Smart Contracts". It's just cleaner, more elegant and I personally think MAST blows all this shit firmly out of the water... So I've decided to give you guys an overview of the current state of Smart Contracts as well as my utopian technical view on "Smart Contracts" in Bitcoin. No Bullshit RSK, Ethereum, Cardano, EOS, whatever the fuck else is out there. I seriously think it's all junk, and I can get into a lengthy discussion as to why but I have honestly decided to just let sleeping dogs lie and just be the best me I can be. If you like the bullshit they spew, then please just don't post it here. I will report your post to the mods (again, mods... please dont ban me. I love you guys, I love this sub and I love Bitcoin). Don't ask me about other shitcoins and just please leave me the fuck alone about your "Blockchain X.0" bullshit. Agree to disagree I guess. You're just mad you missed the boat on BTC and now you need to lie to yourself to make up for it. Take a good look in the mirror and embrace the truth: There is only one true coin It's name is Bitcoin Satoshi is a genius (RIP Hal) This is religion This whole market is super overinflated, and I'm pretty sure we will see a 90-95% correction across the board one day (over the course of weeks/months)... Yes, even Bitcoin will go down a FUCKTON. But not today I guess. Ok, so now on to the main course. Smart Contracts is nothing new. It's just a new way of saying Code tbh. If you can do it in a Smart Contract, then you can do it on a regular server in some Turing Complete language. My personal favorite language in C (but only because I fux hard with assembly), but Python and Go are other great options. Never learned Rust, but planning on doing so. Hate java... never wrote a single line of Java in my life, but apparently others like and I think whoever came up with Haskell deserves the turing award and the fields metal for their beautiful handling of monads (unpopular opinion). I come from the school of thought of Euler, Bernoulli, Galois, Ramanujan, but I stumbled into Bitcoin due to my drug addition. Ok, so back to the rant. At it's most basic level, Smart Contracts are simply an implementation of what is commonly referred to as a Finite State Machine on top of a blockchain. The bitcoin blockchain and PoW based Nakamoto Consensus (read my post on mining if you have to) is used to achieve an eventually consistent state replication of a distributed fully-replicated database that tracks a ledger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledger) It's basically a Cryptographic calculator with the ability to memoize a bunch of variables. But Satoshi (all hail our god) was such a fucking genius that he included Bitcoin Script (which wasn't even in the fucking whitepaper - How was one man so fucking smart???? RIP Hal), and Bitcoin Script allowed to actually program some (but not all) the Cryptography needed to set conditions on when the memoized variables of that calculator could be changed (it still keeps me up at night how one man could be so insightful... I sit there staring into nothing wishing that I can one day achieve such greatness and be so god damn selfless that I give it out for free... Bitcoin is freedom for the people by the people and if you don't believe that, you just don't get it I'm sorry). Ok, so now we've gone into a lengthy discussion as to what Bitcoin actually is using our analogy of a calculator (and retards like Italic Buterin actually consider this to be an issue with Bitcoin... Saying something like ETH is a computer compared to BTCs Calculator... Bla Bla Bullshit) The thing is that it is VERY VERY possible to make Smart Contracts in Bitcoin. Not only is it possible, it's elegant, it's functional, it's amazing. I am not a huge cockstream fan (sorry guys... You're all great people, but the joke was too good to pass up), but their implementation of Simplicity (although overcomplicated and somewhat useless in my eyes is actually pretty damn insightful and deff goes very far down one of my personal favorit rabbit holes, Monads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(category_theory) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)) Feel free to reach out to me if you need help... You're going to need some fucking help unless you have a PhD in Mathematics. Ok, so back to the point here.. Sorry, I'm a little aspy tbh. The point is that Smart Contracts are a "change" (I would say a minute and non-interesting vaporware BS type of incremental change we shouldn't even give a second thought), where instead of using Pow based Nakamoto consensus on this globally distributed fully-replicated database to keep track of a decentralized ledger, we keep track of a decentralized Finite State Machine (shoutout to my main man Alan Turing, you went too soon... And I'm really sorry, because you didnt deserve what happened to you, nobody does. You do you in heaven my man... You do you.). And a finite state machine is interesting as fuck. There's a ton of stuff out there on FSM (Funny Slutty Mexicans... Na, Finite State Machine). If you don't know what it is, you deff should (Monads not so much). Basically, at any given point in time t \in [0,T], there is a a state S_t which describes the "state" of the machine. For the most part this is just an abstract thing and it can be encoded in a number of ways: one of which is just a union of ordered sets of fixed-length byte arrays that live in the power set of the ... submitted by censorship_notifier to noncensored_bitcoin [link] [comments] ##### How To Make Profit When Crypto Currencies Are In Red Earning money from Bitcoin has taken various forms since the world’s top digital currency became more popular. Some of them are new while others have been known to spread in reach along with the currency. Below are some of the best ways to earn money with bitcoin. Mining Despite claims that bitcoin mining is no longer profitable due to the high cost of the energy required to get the miners powered, the increasing difficulty rate and the recent halving of the bitcoin block reward, mining activities are still being carried out though at a more larger scale and with sophisticated mining equipment. Mining pool To make a profit mining has made joining a mining pool a great way to reap a small reward over a short period. A mining pool allows miners to pool their resources together and share their hashing power while splitting the reward equally according to the amount of shares they contributed to solving a block. Though the calculation of share of the bitcoins mined can be complex, the two most popular calculation schemes to ensure fairness for all parties are the Pay-per-Share (PPS) – offers an instant payout for each share that is solved by a miner from a pool’s existing balance thus transferring much of the risk to the pool’s operator. Mobile Games Some important applications have come about in the Bitcoin Android space. Some of them have been written about on CCN before. One of them is Oh Crop!, a game much like Plants vs. Zombies in which the player must defeat evil plants. Players earn free bitcoin in the faucet-like scenario where they view a video advertisement and receive a disbursement. There is also Coin Flapper which presents a situation for the recovering Flappy Birds addict to play and get rewarded for the time spent with a freely earned bitcoin balance. Earn free bitcoins by watching short videos One of such platforms is vidybit. All you need is an email for a Xapo account or bitcoin address. Then watch a short video for less than a minute and get free bitcoins. Your account will instantly be credited for each video watched. Those who opt to use a bitcoin address will need to earn 5430 satoshi before payment is sent. BitcoinGet also enable a user to earn bitcoins for watching videos, completing tasks, and completing offers. Earn money from trading bitcoins Aside the fear of exchanges being attacked by hackers and funds stolen as it was the case with Bitfinex and others, one can earn bitcoins by trading in it as well as with other digital currencies. Basic speculation would do – buy when it is lower, wait until the price increases then sell it at a higher rate to generate profit. Repeat the process over and over again. Understanding market trends and price patterns are key in this regard. Trading in bitcoin could also be through arbitrage – buy it cheap here and sell it at a higher rate there. submitted by mehra11vinod to Thecryptoadvice [link] [comments] ##### Announcing new LTC pool! stratum, getwork, sms/mail notify, and more! Greetings fellow miners, I've been working with Bitcoins a while now, but I got tired, so I've started with Litecoins. But none of the existing pools offered all of the services I wanted, so I decided to setup my own. Currently I'm developing the frontend to provide a better user experience. Requests for popular or usefull features can also be added on demand. The pool is quite new and the first block is not yet found, but all calculations I've done indicates that the first block will be found in one week, with only myself mining. Currently, it's a PPLNS reward system, but I'm planning to make it possible to choose between PPLNS and PPS per pool worker. I also plan to rewrite the whole frontend in the future. The url is: https://coinpool.in Features: • Mmcfe forked frontend with my modifications • Stratum + getwork (w/longpool) protocol support • International SMS & Email notifications (Free sms, with a daily limit based on donation percentage) • Server located in both Western Europe and in the US • Available on TOR and I2P • In constant development (own development environment) • Only 0.7% fee • On demand and automatic payouts • IPv6 support on getwork protocol IRC channels are available on Freenode (#coinpool.in) and I2P (#coinpool), and I will add forum if needed. I'll hope you join me! Best regards, Meeh https://coinpool.in submitted by meeh420 to litecoinmining [link] [comments] ##### Repost for a nice not-so-new pool looking for hashrate ! Hello guys. I'm doing a repost of our old thread regarding Hypernova (https://hypernova.pw) : http://www.reddit.com/litecoinmining/comments/1dcvcv/ann_ltceuusrbpps_hypernova_your_brandnew_mining/ It's been quite 1 month since we announced our opening. We and our fellow users thought it might be a good idea to talk about it again since the pool's maturity increased and features added up to the list (like replacing proportional reward system with CPPSRB) Let me show you the main features ! A nice looking and efficient web interface We'red tired about these copy-paste pools using the mmcFE-litecoin project. We've wanted something beautiful, original and useful. Soak managed to bring you the best web interface he could. Use it on your computer, phone, phablet, android, iphone, ipad, refrigerator, lawn-mower... Starting everything from scratch was our choice - and our pride. Capped Pay Per Share with Recent Backpay Reward System We didn't find something else longer to spell. You may have already seen this reward system currently live on the Bitcoin mining pool Eligius. To be short : it's a system that tries to be close of the classic PPS reward system. The main difference is : the pool pays the miners with the solved blocks funds. The pool doesn't take risks on short/long rounds. When a round's unlucky and the pool can't pay anymore for the work, we shelve your shares for further backpay. As the formula calculating PPS price is based on a ~60% luck assumption (It is the same formula for every classic PPS pool), mathematically we should end up with more frequent lucky (with no shelves) rounds than unlucky. With that system the pool doesn't take the risk of being bankrupt. So what we have there is a nice compromise between PPLNS with high variance and PPS with null variance (which is balanced by higher fees and a risk of bankruptcy for the pool operators). Custom difficulty choosable per worker We heard that a bunch of you doesn't like vardiff or fixed diff pools. That's why we let you the choice. Either you're a tiny cpu miner or a cowboy with GPU farms, you're free to choose your worker difficulty from 8 to 128. Sweet pool efficiency We've worked hard on our infrastructure implementation and Stratum. Our general overall efficiency always have been above 99%. At the time I'm writing these lines it is at 99.47% accepted shares versus 0.53% rejected. We're aware about the latency challenge. That's why we opened 4 nodes around the world to ensure the lowest round trip time : mining.eu.hypernova.pw (Europe, France) mining.usa.hypernova.pw (USA, New York) mining.usa.dallas.hypernova.pw (USA, Dallas) mining.usa.la.hypernova.pw (USA, Los Angeles) A helpful and nice community We're always happy to help you. By mail on [email protected] or on IRC Freenode's channel #hypernova with the pool operators and our fellow miners. Keep in touch with us, we're nice people always trying to crunch our 7950 to the best ! 1% fee Using a nice PPS reward system with a good compromise allows us to lower the fee thus allowing to help us pay for the servers and infrastructure. API with JSON encoded values So you're the cowboy with a farm of 7950 ? Enjoy our API to monitor your rigs ! How to join us ? Give a shot to the website : https://hypernova.pw and create an account. Once you created a worker, point your miner toward your nearest node and shout us your best battle cry at #hypernova on Freenode ! EG (for cgminer) : cgminer -o stratum+tcp://mining.eu.hypernova.pw:3333 -u JohnDoe.myWorker -p 12345 --scrypt ... Help us to spread the word ! We've put online a page especially for that : https://hypernova.pw/spread/ with links to every of our threads and useful buttons for Facebook/TwitteGoogle spreading. Message for those that were with us from the beginning Thank you ! We're happy to see our project moving forward. We wouldn't have been that far without you supporting us. Thank you again and see you in the future. So far, 2130 Litecoins redistributed to our fellow miners. Still counting... ! Hope to see you soon on Hypernova.. And sorry for the noise :) submitted by M0nsieurChat to litecoinmining [link] [comments] ##### Love KSC but don't use your CPU/GPU much for other games? Do IRL Science/R&D with the leftover processing power! So, a year ago, I got a strong gaming rig with GTX 680, i7 3770k and 16 Gb RAM. But since I got KSP, I haven't played any other game at all. This means that my computer never uses more than 30% GPU, 25% CPU and 25% RAM. What do I do with the rest? I thought, why not make my Kerbals proud and use it for real science research. After all, the greatest benefit that KSP does for society [besides the fun] is the interest in science that it creates. So I looked around and found Boinc, a virtual supercomputer grid project which uses volunteered computers to do math for research. If it were a physical supercomputer, it would be #4 in the world in processing power. That's what hundreds of thousands of computers all connected but running just ~10% of their processors each can do. The Project works like so - The volunteer downloads a client which acts as a manager for your share in the donated processing power. You can get it here. Once installed, you can use it set your preferences [Use CPU/GPU only when idle, schedules and usage limits for your processors, etc] and attach to research projects that are a part of BOINC. Having done this, the research project sends your pc a task for processing. Each task is usually just a few MBs in size. After the calculations are done, the result is sent back to be integrated in the research data. You can pause its processing at any time or stop it altogether. It automatically stops when CPU/GPU intensive programs are running. Each research project can be joined or left any time or its priority/processing share adjusted. Some of the projects include - Calculating protein folding results to aid in medical research for AIDS, Alzheimers, Cancer research etc; Tracking and resolving asteroids and other small celestial bodies; Calculating systems and research data for future missions to other planets [rover systems, transfer rocket statistics, etc]; process chemical, mechanical and quantum properties to use in nanotech research; analyze global weather data for climate change research; so on. Any thoughts? Lets discuss! TL;DR - Because KSC is light on processing*, use a small part of the leftover processing power to crunch numbers for Real world research projects as a part of the world's largest virtual supercomputer. Help research Medicine, Cosmology, Nanotechnology,etc. Ps. *KSC is actually very light in usage. The reason it gets terrible fps or crashes is that the Unity engine it uses does not optimally use current CPU/GPU/RAM capabilities. Note - This isn't like bitcoin mining. You can select how much of your processing power is given. You can give 10% of your CPU and 0% of your GPU so it doesn't even affect the temperature or power usage much at all, thereby having a negligible impact on your component life. The important thing is that even just 5% processing from an average computer will make a difference. PPS. You can copy and paste this to wherever you like if you want to spread the word. If you know a community on the internet or IRL that might like/support this, please share/repost it there. submitted by aaqucnaona to KerbalAcademy [link] [comments] ##### [Resources] Doge bookkeeping: Excel File Hello, my dear shibes! I've put together a small bookkeeping Excel to help keep track of your Doge investments. Over the past few months, I found it cumbersome to go through my bank statements and wallet history to calculate how much I have put in and how much my investment is currently worth. So, I created this document which keeps track of my mining and Doge purchases (In Euro and Bitcoin). If you input each purchase (amount of Doge and XBT or EUR spent) and current prices (XDG/EUR, XDG/XBT, XBT/EUR) the document will: • display the price you paid for each purchase (per Doge) • calculate weighted average for all your purchases (per Doge) • calculate total investment (EUR, XBT, EUR + XBT (converted to EUR) and XBT + EUR (converted to XBT)) • calculate current worth of your Doges (EUR, XBT, EUR + XBT (converted to EUR) and XBT + EUR (converted to XBT))) • calculate profit/loss in EUR Additionally, if you input your mining income and tips (outgoing and incoming) it will calculate your worth and profit/loss with those Doges included (in separate cells). I've also provided some room to add notes with each purchase or mining income ("On Prelude exchange", "From Rapidhash pool", ...). What it does not do: display the price of Bitcoin purchases in EUR at the time of purchase (how much EUR your XBT to Doge purchase was worth) keep track of outgoing transfers (except for a balance for tips) give you solid investment advice I'm not exactly an Excel wizard, so I was hoping I could get feedback and tips on how to improve this document. Especially the Bitcoin side of this document feels kind of funny to me, I just can't make it seem simple. Enjoy! It's helped me to put things into perspective :) PS Alter the current price of Doge for moon dreams! PPS You can easily change EUR to USD by pressing Ctrl+F, Replace, EUR to USD, Replace all) https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=A5832F84E72374F1%21372 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B63Q7rcIQ2YuWjlsRzBXUUtuMGc/edit?usp=sharing (Download this for easy use/viewing, Google Docs doesn't like the size of my Dogebook) submitted by striketwelve to dogecoin [link] [comments] ##### /r/bitcoin, Help me write my letter to Congress and the IRS All, any constructive feedback on this letter appreciated. Thanks! To whom it may concern, I am writing regarding the latest ruling of the Internal Revenue Service regarding Virtual Currency taxation (IR-2014-36). Due to several critical mistakes in this ruling, I am writing to recommend that the IRS suspend its guidance pending a period of public comment and Congressional oversight. Mistakes in the IRS guidance include giving the American public 20 days notice to calculate and pay$900 million dollars in new taxes, failing to provide any guidance on how to calculate the new tax, creating new tax law ex-post-facto, and ignoring the speculative nature of emerging markets.
In 2013, 1.5 million Bitcoins were mined. In December of 2013, Bitcoins were traded for $1300/coin. At this exchange rate, Bitcoin mining in 2013 constitutes$1.9 Billion in wealth. The IRS has ruled that this wealth is to be taxed as gross self-employment income; for most individuals this will be a 32% marginal rate combined with a self-employment tax rate of %15 for a total tax treatment of %47, or $900 Million in new taxes. While potentially a bold move to solve the deficit, this guidance was released March 25th, twenty days before the$900 million bill is due. The IRS guidance advised that all Virtual Currency taxes were due on April 15th and that all penalties, including criminal, will apply for late payment. This timeline gives Bitcoin entreprenuers, lawyers, accountants, and tax software authors a timeline of 20 days to calculate and move nearly a billion dollars into the Federal Treasury. This guidance is neither feasible, reasonable, or in the best interests of the United States.
To move nearly a billion dollars into the federal treasury in 20 days, tax must be calculated. The IRS has given the following instruction: "taxpayers will be required to determine the fair market value of virtual currency in U.S. dollars as of the date of payment or receipt". This simple guidance ignores the following facts of Bitcoin mining:
• Virtual currency mining is done through anonymous cooperatives known as "pools"
• Pools distribute partial payouts of virtual currency, when found, via complex share-based contributor contracts with various names, including PPS, PPLNS, and over 50 other contract types.
• Depending on whether the IRS "Doctrine of Constructive Receipt" applies to virtual currency, a miner can be said to have received virtual currency at many points during the satisfaction of said contract, sometimes taking as long as a month. Receipt of currency could occur when accounts are credited, when blocks are found, or when wallets are credited. Today, no one knows when on this timeline the IRS intends to apply tax. The IRS refuses to answer the question of whether constructive receipt applies.
• The speculative value of Bitcoin can and has swung up to 90% during the time intervals that pools use to distribute virtual currency, causing a corresponding 90% uncertainty in the amount of tax owed.
• The IRS has released no guidance on this timing uncertainty, and has refused to answer all questions on the subject, include those posed by this author by phone and in writing.
As a result, taxpayers must calculate and pay nearly a billion dollars in new income taxes, in twenty days, on threat of criminal penalties, with no guidance as to how much tax is due and up to a 90% variance in the possible amount of tax due. This is not sound tax policy, imposes an unreasonable burden, and deprives even the most honest & compliant citizens of the ability to calculate and pay taxes.

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