Bitcoin Pooled Mining

This was the location of the first public bitcoin mining pool. I've left the page here with the original information for historical purposes as the pool no longer operates.

Historical Pool Information

Update 2010-12-17:Sadly so many people have left the pool already it'll now take too long to generate a block. I've shut the server down. You might like to try some of the other pools and cooperative mining systems that are coming online.

Update 2010-12-15:Unfortunately the VPS hosting company I used has started killing the server occasionally due to high CPU usage. As a result I'll be shutting the pool server down after we successfully generate the next block. A user on the bitcoin forums has set up an alternate server to take over on IP address 91.121.29.91. Once I close the server down you may like to switch to that. See this thread for details.

Update 2010-12-14:Important Note for MyBitcoin.com users. Do not use a MyBitcoin receiving address when running the pool miner. It looks like MyBitcoin does not handle receipt of 'generated' coins. This may also be an issue with other bitcoin web services that handle receipt of coins. You should use an address from an actual bitcoin instance you control.

Update 2010-12-12: I've update to puddinpop's latest server code. If you update your client you can now use set the number of threads for the client to use. No more spawning multiple miner instances needed. There is also an OpenCL GPU client.

Update 2010-12-12: The pool generated a new block today. Thanks to all those who contributed and congrats on getting some nice new coins.

Bitcoin pooled mining is where multiple machines work together to generate a block - communicating with a server that distributes the work so that the machines aren't working competitively against each other.

When a block is generated by the pool the 50 coins are split up and sent to each machine that worked on generating that block based on their contribution. This provides a way for lower powered machines to get a smaller number of coins faster than waiting a long time for the full 50 coins.

I'm running a pooled server using code from the pooled mining topic in the forums. I mirror the source and windows binaries for the server and client here:

I am not the original author of this code. That person is the original poster of the pooled mining topic. I'm just running a server for people to use.

Windows usage

To use the server, run the 'remoteminer-cpu' executable on Windows. You can connect to my server using:

remoteminer-cpu.exe -server=x.x.x.x -address=abitcoinaddress

Replace 'abitcoinaddress' with the bitcoin address you would like your share of any coins generated to be sent too.

If you have an OpenCL compatible video card (Recent ATI cards for example) you can use the optional client that uses the GPU for mining. This will give a much better hash rate:

remoteminer-opencl.exe -server=x.x.x.x -address=abitcoinaddress

If you have a CUDA compatible video card (Recent nVidia cards for example) you can use the optional client that uses the GPU for the mining. This will give a much better hash rate:

remoteminer-cuda.exe -server=x.x.x.x -address=abitcoinaddress

If you get an error with the CUDA miner about cudart32_31_9.dll not being found, you may need to find it and put it in the same folder as the remote client (based on a report from a user).

Linux usage

You need to build the bitcoin remote miner from source. To make this easier I've imported the source into a github repository. The 'master' branch is setup to just build the remote miner:

Clone the git repository: git clone git://github.com/doublec/bitcoin-pool Install 'cmake'. Run: cmake . from within the cloned repository. Run: make from within the cloned repository. The remote miner is cmake-bitcoinr/bitcoinr

To use my server, run the 'cmake-bitcoinr/bitcoinr' executable. You can connect to my server using:

bitcoinr -server=x.x.x.x -address=abitcoinaddress

Replace 'abitcoinaddress' with the bitcoin address you would like your share of any coins generated to be sent too.

Notes

The remote miner program by default uses all CPU cores available. You can limit the number of cores used using the 'threads' command line argument. To limit to one core, for example, pass "-threads=1" on the comment line.

The remote miner does not touch your existing wallet file or running bitcoin instance. It is a completely standalone generator only.

The server does not take any percentage of the generated coins. It distributes it amongst all contributing miners. If you'd like to donate bitcoins to the server you can send to 18qX2vxkG3NLzYeQnQEqjwdEEWZ8NSVj5E.

The server is using the 'contributed' method of distributing generated coins.

The pooled miner has generated the following blocks:

More information on bitcoin available at: