Bitcoin.com Mining Pool Official Discussion Thread

[mel]

Only 4 blocks mined on BCH and 2 on BTC for the last day. Are we mining less blocks due to the Bitcoin Cash DAA and swapping between chains too much?

How often does it check the difficulty? Difficulty adjusts on Bitcoin Cash every block now, so might be worth checking the profitability every BCH block rather than hour.

Also I'm wondering how it works. If the profitability check happens on the hour and the other chain is suddenly more profitable, does the pool immediately drop what it's doing (throwing away the current effort they've been doing looking for the next block) and immediately mine the other chain? Or does it keep mining to find the next block and only switch after the next block is found? The latter sounds better as we're not throwing away any mining effort in a mad scramble to start mining the more profitable chain.

I don't think there's a progress bar to next block mined. It's more a poisson distribution and the chance of mining a block is the same at any given moment, regardless of how long it's been since the last block. Switching therefore doesn't cause any progress to be lost. (someone plz correct me if I'm wrong)

Another thing to factor in is that mining profitability will hover around parity with the new DAA. Between getting BTC to an exchange in time to actually take advantage of the slightly higher profits and paying BTC transaction fees, it is unlikely imo that mining BTC ends up getting you more BCH after the DAA.

I have made the assumptions here that BTC/BCH price is trending up, and that your goal is to maximize BCH holdings.

[bangteh]

Only 4 blocks mined on BCH and 2 on BTC for the last day. Are we mining less blocks due to the Bitcoin Cash DAA and swapping between chains too much?

How often does it check the difficulty? Difficulty adjusts on Bitcoin Cash every block now, so might be worth checking the profitability every BCH block rather than hour.

Also I'm wondering how it works. If the profitability check happens on the hour and the other chain is suddenly more profitable, does the pool immediately drop what it's doing (throwing away the current effort they've been doing looking for the next block) and immediately mine the other chain? Or does it keep mining to find the next block and only switch after the next block is found? The latter sounds better as we're not throwing away any mining effort in a mad scramble to start mining the more profitable chain.

I don't think there's a progress bar to next block mined. It's more a poisson distribution and the chance of mining a block is the same at any given moment, regardless of how long it's been since the last block. Switching therefore doesn't cause any progress to be lost. (someone plz correct me if I'm wrong)

Another thing to factor in is that mining profitability will hover around parity with the new DAA. Between getting BTC to an exchange in time to actually take advantage of the slightly higher profits and paying BTC transaction fees, it is unlikely imo that mining BTC ends up getting you more BCH after the DAA.

I have made the assumptions here that BTC/BCH price is trending up, and that your goal is to maximize BCH holdings.

lol you get your daily pay out which is profit? ...if you got it just watch..i think all good and just need to improve for better looking at dashboard

[discipuloosho]

Pool manager, hello. A question, please:
Stratum URL (BTC/BCH Auto-profit) (stratum+tcp://profit.pool.bitcoin.com:3333) has Europe pool?
Thanks in advanced.

[deltazulu]

We check for profitability every hour because we don't want to switch chains too often.

When we switch chains, we immediately stop mining the less profitable chain.

I think that's doubly bad if we immediately stop mining the less profitable chain because then we're throwing away all the work that has been done to find the next block and then we're jumping into the other chain, but the work to find the next block on that chain has likely already started by the other mining pools so they have a big head start on finding the next block than us (0-20+ minute head start) and they're much more likely to find that next block. So in effect we throw away the chance of mining 2 blocks. Then if the profitability check happens every hour and the profitability now due to the Bitcoin Cash DAA is possibly different every check so that's potentially 24 times a day we lose the chance of mining 2 blocks i.e. up to 48 blocks a day lost out of the potential 144.

Maybe a better way is to only switch to the more profitable chain once a block has been found on it (then we have the same chance as finding the next block as the other mining pools). Or the other option is to only switch once a block has been found on the current chain (then we don't throw away our current effort). Then we only lose the chance of mining 1 block. The most optimal time to switch to the more profitable pool is if a block is found on both chains within say 10 seconds of each other (but this will be the rarest scenario).

I think the switching algorithm could be improved I think. Most of the time there will be some loss/tradeoff between switching chains so often. I have seen my profits go down considerably the last few days. It affects everyone really I think, especially those mining a single chain consistently. Usually there's about 35-40 PH/s constantly mining BTC, 11-12 PH/s constantly mining BCH and approximately 160 PH/s on the auto profit switching mechanism (according to watching the pool.bitcoin.com main page). The pool would stand to gain the most blocks in a chain if everyone was mining a single chain because we're not losing blocks by switching around so often, also the full hash power is dedicated to one chain (to get the best chance of finding blocks you need the most hash power and we're competing with other pools that have 20x as much hash power).

Because of the DAA the profitability will probably remain roughly the same on both chains. It will toggle between 1.3x on BTC and 1.3x on BCH every few blocks. If we all mined BTC we need to save it up in the pool wallet for several weeks before withdrawing or it's not economical to withdraw due to fees. Then if we're thinking of doing the "mine BTC, exchange to BCH" thing then it's not economical to do either because when we do a withdrawal we need to send it to our wallet, then send it from our wallet directly to an exchange, then there's a fee on the exchange, then there's another fee to our BCH wallet. 3-4 fees. Mining BCH seems to be the option with the least hassle and the least loss in terms of fees.

[GreyWyvern]

We check for profitability every hour because we don't want to switch chains too often.

When we switch chains, we immediately stop mining the less profitable chain.

I think that's doubly bad if we immediately stop mining the less profitable chain because then we're throwing away all the work that has been done to find the next block and then we're jumping into the other chain, but the work to find the next block on that chain has likely already started by the other mining pools so they have a big head start on finding the next block than us (0-20+ minute head start) and they're much more likely to find that next block. So in effect we throw away the chance of mining 2 blocks. Then if the profitability check happens every hour and the profitability now due to the Bitcoin Cash DAA is possibly different every check so that's potentially 24 times a day we lose the chance of mining 2 blocks i.e. up to 48 blocks a day lost out of the potential 144.

Hi deltazulu! Glad you're so enthusiastic about helping the Bitcoin.com pool improve its service.

About your concern though, you don't have anything to worry about. The way you describe how mining works is not how it actually works. Miners aren't building blocks slowly over time and losing that work if they switch chains. Rather they are rapidly trying to solve math problems, many times per second. When a miner comes across a problem they can solve successfully, that means they have mined a block. Only the single solved problem counts; all the "work" they did before did not contribute to finding (or building) the block. If the miner decides to switch chains at any time, all that work is not lost, because none of it is kept. Only successfully solved math problems count.

Mining is easier to understand if you think of it as a random number generator (RNG). Say the difficulty is 1 million and all the miners spin up their RNGs generating numbers between 1 and 1 million. If a miner's RNG produces the number 123,456, then a block is mined! For any other number, no block is mined and the RNG must generate the next number. In this way, when any individual block gets generated is entirely random, BUT over time we can predict the rate at which they will be randomly generated and adjust the difficulty accordingly.

So, if the Bitcoin.com's pool is busy mining (RNGs trying to generate the magic number) BCH and BTC becomes more profitable to mine, the pool can switch hashpower (RNGs) over to BTC and no work at all has been "lost."

I hope I explained that adequately.

[Fbernals]

I've seen the transaction fees are very high and you're only paying 5% bonus. Shouldn't it be 10% now that they're high?

[farzin]

There have been some doubts on this forum about contracts not paying off the initial investment. In case people are interested, I am now in the black in my contract. My initial investment was a $745 lifetime contract in July. I have now mined about 0.09028 bitcoin (which is about $650), plus a little more than 0.30 BCH, and the 0.30 BCH certainly puts me over $745.

My original estimate (when I started mining in July and bitcoin was around $2,740) was that I would break-even on my contract sometime in March through May of 2018, so it happened quite a bit sooner than my original estimate.

[thallios]

There have been some doubts on this forum about contracts not paying off the initial investment.

I think the main concern people express is whether they will generate more coin than they started with. If a mining contract costs 0.24 BTC and you only get 0.23 back by the time the contract ends, then you have lost money overall, even if the BTC price increase means your 0.23 is worth more than the total value of the BTC you used to buy the contract.

In the above example, If you had just held onto your 0.24 BTC, then you'd have seen more profit than only getting 0.23 BTC back from your contract.

[zowki]

Pool manager, hello. A question, please:
Stratum URL (BTC/BCH Auto-profit) (stratum+tcp://profit.pool.bitcoin.com:3333) has Europe pool?
Thanks in advanced.

Currently we only have auto-profit servers in the USA and China.

We are planning to add a Europe server later.

[SergTheMiner]

Guys??
What is going on today?
We haven't found a BTC block and we have only 2 BCH blocks?
why are we running so slow today?
All the other pools have found loads of BTC blocks today.

[bitkilo]

Guys??
What is going on today?
We haven't found a BTC block and we have only 2 BCH blocks?
why are we running so slow today?
All the other pools have found loads of BTC blocks today.

You can see on our homepage that most of our customers are currently pointing their hashrate towards the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chain: https://pool.bitcoin.com/index_en.html (this may change by the time you look)

BTC - 35.98 Ph/s
BCH - 166.78 Ph/s

[SergTheMiner]

Why does my contribution always go back to 0.01%?
i am running 42th

[zowki]

Why does my contribution always go back to 0.01%?
i am running 42th

We display contribution for each block on the blocks page.
Your contribution is reset when we start mining the next block.

This information only matters if you're mining with PPLNS.
PPS only depends on your hashrate, not blocks.

[SergTheMiner]

Thanks for the info. I am mining pplns. How come sometimes it goes to 0.03%?

[zowki]

Thanks for the info. I am mining pplns. How come sometimes it goes to 0.03%?

Your contribution to the block is higher if the pool hashrate decreases, or your hashrate increases.

[SergTheMiner]

Thank You.

[khachau86]

hello. please confirm my Purchased Contracts with ID: 25987. I paymented on monday in this week. please help me

[Fubukiryuu]

In order to improve our services to serve you and our fast growing customer base, we increased our fees from 0% to 2% for both PPS and PPLNS payouts. This will apply to all users on 20th November 2017.

We remain the pool with the lowest PPS fees in the world, even after this change. Thank you for mining with us and supporting on-chain scaling!

Correct me if I'm wrong, it's 2% BEFORE the daily fee payment, right ? That means a real loss of 2,5% (25% more than what you say), as long as the daily fees are about at 20%… But they'll increase because of the difficulty adjustment, so the 2% will be in reality much more higher. The day we'll produce 50% less value, these «2%» will be in fact 3,3%, 65% more than what is told. When we'll produce only 1/4 of current value (0,38$/d), fees will represent 8,23% ! And, guess what ? They'll also help to close the contracts faster as we'll be not profitable much sooner than expected

First you reduce the block reward. Then you add pool fees. Next time, you'll increase the daily fee (already 2 times ViaBTC's fees) ?

Good news is that contracts are definitely bind to this pool, so we are trapped and no escape is possible.

By the way, anybody realized that ALL lifetime contracts will terminate at the exact same time, either you bought it right now or earlier this year ? And that they'll produce less coins during their lifetime than an older contract ? (but the USD price increased well : it was 129$, it's now 400$, and they will not produce even 50% in BTC/BCH of what the 129$ will produce…) ?

Think about it, we are just milking cows. I'm really surprised people are buying current contracts as they are totally unprofitable since the first price increase (just after the release of GreyWyvern's calculator, how strange…).

[GreyWyvern]

Think about it, we are just milking cows. I'm really surprised people are buying current contracts as they are totally unprofitable since the first price increase (just after the release of GreyWyvern's calculator, how strange…).

Whoa, hey. Profitability of plans was up and down for many weeks after I posted about my calculator here. You can go back through this very thread and see times when I recommended buying plans AND recommended against buying. In fact, I kept watch using my tool each time prices changed and new TH/s were added, and I bought two 6-month plans based on it.

The trouble is, the Bitcoin landscape has changed a LOT since I built it, and there are a LOT more variables in play. Especially because there are two competing chains which vary in profitability between them. A landslide move from BTC -> BCH or vice versa could literally happen at any time, invalidating any estimates the calculator might make.

When there was only one chain, it was much easier to calculate

[Fubukiryuu]

Haha ! Don't worry, I would never talk against you GreyWyvern. I remember well this time and you've been very helpful with this tool

I was like you the first months, they were profitable (I had a big 1 month contract and made more than 10% benefits on it), but it's definitely no longer the case since they saw it was so profitable using your tool. They charged it much more, then came back, then did it again and again. They pushed for long term contracts and lifetime. And now, we are all locked in, so it seems it's time to milk the cows…

My message is mostly against the rules changes after contracts are subscribed and now it's impossible for us to move. It's unfair. I understand it can be justified for contract-less miners but should be included in huge fees already payed with contract mining. We took them with a 0% pool fee at this time and nothing was supposed to change there. I pass the 110% bonus, then 120%, that nearly disappear while transaction fees are currently very high… Pool maintenance is justified, but hey, don't tell me you are not already taking a part on mined blocks AND on transfert fees… Even Exodus wallet has lower fees

Contracts are obviously made to take our BTC with a biased promise, knowing they won't be even at end with what have been payed. It's definitely a «give us your coins, we'll give you a little more fiat in exchange».
Just look at their price evolution, they seem to be USD priced but are in fact priced in BTC and the price is just based on an estimated BTC amount produced during the lifetime of the unit. This will be easily verified next month with the availability of «new» lifetime units (but they still have plenty of 1year contracts, very strange as it's the same device by the way…).

[bangteh]

Fee Announcement
In order to improve our services to serve you and our fast growing customer base, we increased our fees from 0% to 2% for both PPS and PPLNS payouts. This will apply to all users on 20th November 2017.


fee 0% to 2% for cloud mining or for hardware mining? if for cloud mining is ridiculous your maintenance fee also at high then + 2% for cloud mining? trust me everyone will go viabtc pool because lowest fee and high bonus now for btc at viabtc about 129% ...

[zowki]

Fee Announcement
In order to improve our services to serve you and our fast growing customer base, we increased our fees from 0% to 2% for both PPS and PPLNS payouts. This will apply to all users on 20th November 2017.


fee 0% to 2% for cloud mining or for hardware mining? if for cloud mining is ridiculous your maintenance fee also at high then + 2% for cloud mining? trust me everyone will go viabtc pool because lowest fee and high bonus now for btc at viabtc about 129% ...

We're the highest paying pool for BCH.

ViaBTC has a 4% PPS fee for BCH.

[KableK]

Will the pool ever pay out transaction fee rewards again for BTC? They have been consistently over 10% of the block reward lately.

https://fork.lol/reward/feepct

[bangteh]

Fee Announcement
In order to improve our services to serve you and our fast growing customer base, we increased our fees from 0% to 2% for both PPS and PPLNS payouts. This will apply to all users on 20th November 2017.


fee 0% to 2% for cloud mining or for hardware mining? if for cloud mining is ridiculous your maintenance fee also at high then + 2% for cloud mining? trust me everyone will go viabtc pool because lowest fee and high bonus now for btc at viabtc about 129% ...

We're the highest paying pool for BCH.

ViaBTC has a 4% PPS fee for BCH.

thats not the best way to expand your business with increasing fee...i know bitcoin.com pool pay more on BCH. With the lowest fee as of now i believe you will be much popular with BCH but If you still want to increase fee that will effect btc and bch pool.. im sure hardware miner and cloud mining will try other cheapest platform to invest rather than bitcoin.com pool so think about again...you wan to have more costomer or not its up to you...your answer is unaccepted

[tomppa]

We're the highest paying pool for BCH.

ViaBTC has a 4% PPS fee for BCH.

But your daily fee is almost twice of that what viaBTC has. You are also most expensive provider what comes to cloud mining contracts, by a wide margin.

It's like taxes. By raising taxes again and again governments think that tax revenue will increase. However usually it's the case that those will go down. Either tax payers and businesses just try to avoid those at all costs or flee from the country to a cheaper one.

C'mon. Tx fees are all time high so why is this needed now? I can't think any reason except you just wan't to milk us until there's nothing left.

I would understand this decision if it was only for miners who manage their own mining equipment. They can make their own mind if they agree with new terms or not. However for cloud miners this breach of contract sucks and is not what your clients originally agreed with. What's next? $0.5 daily fee per TH? Sure, why not.. The thing is that changing terms post contract is not acceptable and eats the trust relationship you have with us.

Sortsighted greed is one of the most common reasons for business failure. Once you lose your rep within your clients, it's 10x harder to regain it, if not impossible. Just go ahead and get some insights from Hashflare's Facebook page.

[KableK]

*delete this post, posted twice by mistake*

[KableK]

Will the pool ever pay out transaction fee rewards again for BTC? They have been consistently over 10% of the block reward lately.

https://fork.lol/reward/feepct

Also this page is still advertising a 105% block reward and 0% fees (how long ago was the 5% block reward removed?), might wanna take that down..

https://pool.bitcoin.com/index_en.html


Also, from the "Cloud Mining Terms and Conditions"

3.0 Revenue
Customer may only receive PPS (Pay Per Share) payments while a contract is active. Customer will receive 13980 shares per minute per TH/s. PPS payments are subject to our block reward bonus (currently 5%) which St Bitts reserves the right to change at any time. PPS rewards will be credited to the users pool balance at 6:00AM UTC. Customer may choose to withdraw their revenue automatically or manually as long as their balance exceeds 0.01 BTC.

I noticed in the contract details it says you reserve the right to change the block reward bonus at any time but there is nothing in the contract about PPS or PPLNS fees at all. The "4. Fees" section only talks about the cloud mining daily fees. Is this an oversight or was it *conveniently* left out of the contract terms? I agree with other posters saying that this fee probably should not apply to cloud mining contracts (feel free to add it for people mining with their own hardware though, since they have the ability to switch pools), it was never made clear to me that those fees could change during the contract unlike how that was made clear about the block reward bonus amount. Why does this come at a time like now when the average fee percentage of the block reward for BTC is so high? Please reconsider the 2% fee, or at least give us a permanent minimum block reward bonus of 5% on BTC to make up for it. I don't really like that last solution since it would still make BCH mining less profitable but it's something...

[yyanpolski]

Increasing fees like this is similar to a car loan issuer deciding to increase the APR in the middle of the term. Totally unfair to existing customers.

[zowki]

I'm reading all your feedback and I understand.

As our pool grows, we require more pool servers and we cannot provide this service for free and charge 0% fees anymore. Especially since BCH has not much transaction fee reward at the moment. We still have the lowest PPS fees compared to every other pool even after this change.

[Fubukiryuu]

I'm reading all your feedback and I understand.

As our pool grows, we require more pool servers and we cannot provide this service for free and charge 0% fees anymore. Especially since BCH has not much transaction fee reward at the moment. We still have the lowest PPS fees compared to every other pool even after this change.

If charges increases because of new customers, then charge only new accounts. Easy and fair for old customers.

Between 2% and 0% there are many steps. Why not 1% ? Why not 0,5% ?
Why not a fixed rate ? After all, server cost is always the same, so why fees are not fixed too ?

True reason is not about your increasing maintenance fees.

If you take 2% just on 100 TH/s, it's more than 90$ fees each month at current exchange rate (3$/day). How much TH/s can handle a server ?

Now let's take your figures. You have 270PH/s on 18 servers. That's around 15PH/s for each server. That means each server can generate 13500$/month @ 2% mining fees. No hardware cost this much. The most high end and expensive server here is between 380€ / month (online.net) and 1000€ / month (ovh.com), depending on the host company.

I think I'm far from reality. Some servers can handle more than 85PH/s (us19). A 85PH/s server makes 76500$ with 2% pool fees.

For your 270PH/s, it represents 243000$ each month. Nearly 3 million each year.

It's much much more profitable.

By the way, for BCH, it's not 3$/day but 3,7$/day. So you can increase these amounts by 23%…

Fellow miners, don't forget : the ones who made money during gold rush weren't gold diggers. It were shovels sellers.

You are just applying the same rate as the others pools with no good and real reason other than increase profits and breaking the trust between you and your customers.

Doing that proves that it's more for increasing your profits than for new servers as you explain it. Sure, to say «we need more cash to improve your experience» it better than say «we need more cash to increase our income».