Quick updates
02.02.2014
Datacenter connectivity issues have caused short drop in the hashrate. The problem has been resolved and all stratum servers are now reachable. This all happened when 900 Th/s was within a reach. We will get there again with your support and participation in mining ;-)
17.01.2014
We were having an extremely lucky yesterday's mining session. Unfortunately, around 1.30 AM UTC, we were experiencing stratum server issues that eventually spread across all our stratum servers. The problem has been resolved now and mining continues.
13.01.2014
The pool database backend has been successfully migrated to a new hardware. The website is now fully operational. The whole migration process has been accomplished without interrupting the actual mining.
13.01.2014
We are currently migrating pool database to a new machine. Mining will continue without interruption, only website will be down for 1-2 hours.
18.12.2013
Some recent payouts didn't go thru bitcoin network because of unsatisfied transaction fees. We're finding a soluton and all payouts will be processed soon
16.10.2013
In recent days we experienced some successful thefts of user's funds using compromised email accounts. We strongly encourage all users to change email passwords. There's no reason to think that pool security itself has been compromised.
08.07.2013
Getwork protocol support ended. Please be sure your miners support Stratum protocol. You can still use your old getwork miners with Stratum proxy installed on your mining rig.
21.05.2013
Bug in bitcoind caused many invalid blocks generated in recent hours. Thanks to cooperation with bitcoin developers, a bugfix has been deployed. Pool is now back in normal operation.
26.04.2013
Because the user database has been compromised in recent hack, please change password to your pool account!
25.04.2013
Pool is recovering to normal operation from previous attack. delayed payouts will be processed in the afternoon (UTC).
18.04.2013
Pool is recovering from DDoS attack.
14.04.2013
As announced in Getwork deprecation plan. the hashrate on Stratum is far above 90%, so workers which are still using the deprecated Getwork protocol are now charged by 10% fee. Please update your software and start using modern Stratum miners to reduce your fees back to 2%!
12.03.2013
Bitcoin network recently experienced global problems which caused some pool blocks to be invalid. Everything seems to be fixed now.
10.03.2013
Default mining URL for Stratum is stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 . If you're still using api.bitcoin.cz, please fix your URL to prevent fallback to deprecated Getwork protocol.
08.03.2013
Stratum proxy version 1.5.2 has been released. This is bugfix release which add compatibility with some old miners (phoenix, Diablo).
03.03.2013
Stratum proxy version 1.5.0 has been released. All proxy users are encouraged to update .
13.02.2013
ASIC mining become a reality. Jeff Garzik (bitcoin core developer) is testing first shipped unit of Avalon ASIC miner on our pool.
30.01.2013
Native IPv6 address is now available. You can use ipv6.stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 in your miner if your miners have IPv6 support! Please note that IPv6 works only for Stratum miners.
08.12.2012
If you're using old miners from early 2011 or you're mining on URL "mining.bitcoin.cz:8332", please update your miners and use "api.bitcoin.cz:8332" in your configuration instead. Mining on URL "mining.bitcoin.cz" is not working anymore.
27.11.2012
Only one day remains to halving block reward from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. Thanks to this change in Bitcoin world, mining income will be drastically reduced. As a countermeasure, pool is now paying block fees to miners. Everything you need to collect block fees is to use miner with Stratum support .
24.11.2012
Pool is now giving transaction fees to Stratum miners! Use miner with Stratum support (latest version of GUIminer, cgminer, bfgminer, poclbm) or use your favourite miner with Stratum proxy to improve your mining income!
19.11.2012
Guiminer with Stratum support has been released. Upgrade is highly recommended.
12.10.2012
All users are encouraged to install or update Stratum proxy to current stable version 1.1.1. Instructions are here .
12.10.2012
New version of cgminer has been released. Please update cgminer to version 2.8.3 . which fixes serious bugs introduced in previous versions.
10.10.2012
In effect from 01.11.2012, pool increases the lower limit for payouts ("send threshold") to 0.05 BTC (around $0.6) as a protection against high transaction fees for tiny payouts. If you have a balance of less than 0.05 BTC and want to withdraw them, please do so before November 1.
20.09.2012
New version of poclbm miner has been released. All poclbm users are encouraged to update their miner, latest version includes major optimization.
11.09.2012
I'm seeking for beta testers of new mining protocol called Stratum mining. If you want to join testing, please download the proxy and point your miners to it. Thank you!
08.07.2012
Do you have some bitcoins from the mining and do you want to sell them for cheap? Add your offer to localbitcoins.com and find a buyer in your neighborhood!
11.06.2012
Follow pool's page for recent updates and news!
05.02.2012

poclbm/GUI miner is affected by serious bug. If your miner is crashing on 'unexpected error' message, please follow miner forums for the newest versions.
26.01.2012
Pool is now supporting BIP 16 protocol extension, as described here. It is just internal change on the Bitcoin network, miners don't need to update anything.
08.11.2011
Implemented prioritization of long polling. Fast miners should expect lower stale ratio.
10.10.2011
Merged mining for Namecoins added. Please fill NMC address on your profile to start collecting Namecoins! Accounting isn't finished yet, but will come very soon.
03.10.2011
Bitcoin.cz is official sponsor of European Bitcoin conference 2011. See you on 25.-27. November in Prague!
26.03.2011
Second server added
Total hashrate at 60Ghash/s
Bitcoin Android
19.01.2011
We're over 20 Ghash/s
20.12.2010
Center for Financial Services
Description
The Center for Financial Services oversees the operations of the UBS Simulation, Learning, and Research Lab, conducts a Trading Challenge for students, and organizes an annual Wall Street on Campus financial strategy education seminar. The Center plays a key role in fulfilling the School’s mission of providing a comprehensive business and management education to students, by enabling them to gain real-world knowledge, practical skills, and the enhanced ability to research and analyze business issues. It is a vital resource for teaching, learning, and research, and it has been a showpiece for the School of Business. The activities of the Center enable faculty to integrate real-world perspectives into their courses and enhance the practical utility of education through experiential learning-by-doing for students. The Center has been instrumental in generating enthusiasm for School of Business students among recruiters. In recent years, several leading firms have been attracted toward hiring our well-prepared students, either for the first time or in larger numbers. Dr. Sandip Mukherji, CFA, Professor of Finance, has served as the Director of the Center since its inception, and he is supported by a second-year graduate assistant.
Mission Statement
The mission of the Center is to provide business students and faculty with advanced computer resources, access to practical knowledge and skills, and real-world environments, for researching and analyzing business issues. The Center’s goals are to encourage and facilitate use of the UBS SLR Lab by students and faculty, and student participation in Trading Challenges, besides successfully organizing and encouraging student participation in the Wall Street on Campus financial strategy education seminar.
Set up as a trading floor, the UBS SLR Lab has 26 computers with dual monitors, 3 LCD projectors, a live ticker, and an LCD monitor tuned to business news. The computers in the Lab provide access to an array of cutting-edge software programs and subscription websites for investment information and analysis (MorningStar Direct, Standard & Poor’s Research Insight, and Value Line); risk analysis using simulations, forecasting, and optimizations (Crystal Ball Professional Edition); statistical analysis (SPSS); technical analysis (Metastock Professional); and a Trading Challenge (Stocktrak). Use of the Lab has grown significantly since its inception. In the 2010-11 academic year, 20 faculty members used the Lab for 39 classes and 149 assignments in 34 courses. In addition, there were 240 student visits to the Lab for independent work on assignments.
The Trading Challenge is conducted for 11 to 12 weeks each semester through the dedicated website of the School of Business provided by Stocktrak. Several courses require participation in the Challenge, and it is also open to all School of Business students. Securities available for trading are stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options on stocks and futures, spot currencies and commodities, and most popular commodity, index, and foreign currency Futures. Initial funds of $500,000 can be leveraged with 50% margin, but the position limit is $100,000. The maximum number of trades is 500. Short sales and day trading are allowed. Students with the top five portfolio values share $2,500 in scholarship awards. In the 2010-11 academic year, the Challenge attracted a record 460 student participants.
The Wall Street on Campus financial strategy education seminar is held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on a Friday in the first half of October each year. The goal of the seminar is to expose students to practical knowledge and insights on financial strategies from leading professional experts, and to provide students with information about careers in financial services. The fifth annual seminar in 2010 had one-hour sessions on Economic and Market Outlook, Outlook and Recommendations for Stocks and Bonds, U. S. Municipal Bond Market – A Global Perspective, and a panel discussion on Careers in Financial Services. Mark Rosenberg, Chairman & CEO of SSARIS Advisors, the Hedge Fund Affiliate of State Street Global Advisors, delivered the keynote Brown Capital Management Executive Lecture. Bank of America, BlackRock Private Investors, J.P. Morgan, and UBS provided six speakers and panelists for the event, which was attended by 156 students and 8 faculty members from seven universities: American, Bowie State, Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, University of DC, and West Virginia State University. Other leading financial institutions, such as Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley have provided speakers and panelists for the seminar in recent years.
Beginners Guide to Mining Bitcoins
One of the biggest problems I ran into when I was looking to start mining Bitcoin for investment and profit was most of the sites were written for the advanced user. I am not a professional coder, I have no experience with Ubuntu, Linux and minimal experience with Mac. So, this is for the individual or group that wants to get started the easy way.
First thing you need to do is get a “Bitcoin Wallet”. Because Bitcoin is an internet based currency, you need a place to keep your Bitcoins. Got to http://www.bitcoin.org and download the Bitcoin client for your Operating System. Install it the client will begin to download the blockchain. Downloading the blockchain can take a long time and will be over 6GB of data. If you have data caps, I would recommend ordering a copy of the blockchain on DVD to keep from going over as it is growing exponentially. Click to order the bitcoin blockchain by mail. Once the client is up to date, click “New” to get your wallet address. It will be a long sequence of letters and numbers. One of most important things you can do is make sure you have a copy of the wallet.dat file on a thumb drive and print a copy out and keep it in a safe location. You can view a tutorial on how to create a secure wallet by clicking the link on the top of the page. The reason is that if you computer crashes and you do not have a copy of your wallet.dat file, you will lose all of your Bitcoins. They won’t go to someone else, they will disappear forever. It is like burning cash.
Now that you have a wallet and the client, you are probably roaring to go, but if you actually want to make Bitcoin (money), you probably need to join a pool. A pool is a group that combines their computing power to make more Bitcoins. The reason you shouldn’t go it alone is that Bitcoins are awarded in blocks, usually 50 at a time, and unless you get extremely lucky, you will not be getting any of those coins. In a pool, you are given smaller and easier algorithms to solve and all of your combined work will make you more likely to solve the bigger algorithm and earn Bitcoins that are spread out throughout the pool based on your contribution. Basically, you will make a more consistent amount of Bitcoins and will be more likely to receive a good return on your investment.
The pool that I’m involved in is called Slush’s Pool so I will be giving instructions on how to join there but feel free to look at other options. Follow the link to go to their site and click the “Sign up here” link at the top of their site and follow their step by step instructions. After you have your account set up, you will need to add a “Worker”. Basically, for every miner that you have running, you will need to have a worker ID so the pool can keep track of your contributions.
If you are mining with an ASIC, please go to our Mining with ASICs page. The following will only pertain to GPU miners.
Most of the mining programs out there are pretty complicated to setup and will frustrate your average user. Recently a great program has come out to get the most basic of users started. The program is called GUIMiner. Click the link and download the program (Be careful, some of the ads are set up to look like the file download). Install and run the program and add in your information from Slush’s Pool. Remember that the user name is actually the worker name. The worker name will be your user name, dot, worker ID (username.worker ID) and the password from that worker ID.
Mac users should look into using Astroid
Now that you are set up, you can start mining. If you feel like you want to make more Bitcoins, you might want to invest in mining hardware.
To see how much your current hardware will earn mining Bitcoins, head over to the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator .
If you found this information helpful, please donate to 1G1ehppEgjiFTUSHFz2xs9KLSQuWLPYF2o
How To Mine Bitcoins
Twitter Pushes Android App Update To Fix The “Me” Tab Bug
Mining bitcoins – a process that helps manage bitcoin transactions as well as create new “wealth” – is the new Beanie Babies. Luckily for us, however, bitcoins seem to be going up in value and should maintain their value over time, unlike your mint condition Tiny the stuffed Chihuahua.
But how do you get bitcoins? You can begin by buying them outright, but the market is currently wild. At $188 per coin, the direction of the bitcoin is anyone’s guess right now and, unlike equities, these things don’t split. In short, you should probably mine. But what is bitcoin mining?
Think of it as work done by groups of people to find large prime numbers or trying keys to decrypt a file. You can read a lot more about it here but just understand that for every block mined you get 25 coins or, at current rates, $4,722.25. Currently a single bitcoin is valued at $188, an alarming result that is probably caused by money movements related to Cyprus and a general bubble-like excitement over the platform in general. In fact, many wager that the DDOS attacks on many bitcoin-related services are direct action by hackers to inject instability in order to reduce the price.
As it stands, mining solo is very nearly deprecated. The process of finding blocks is now so popular and the difficulty of finding a block so high that it could take over three years to generate any coins. While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual bitcoins are worth.
Pooled mining, however, is far more lucrative. Using a service like “Slush’s pool” (more on that later) you can split the work among a ground of people. Using this equation:
(25 BTC + block fees – 2% fee) * (shares found by user’s workers) / (total shares in current round)
While this is simplified, it is basically how the system works. You work for shares in a block and when complete you get a percentage of the block based on the number of workers alongside you, less fees. Using this method, I have been able to raise about $1.50 over the weekend by running a dormant PC. The astute among you will note that I probably used twice that amount of electricity.
Being a neophile, I’m surprised it took me so long to start mining. My buddy Tom explained how to set up a pooled mining account so I thought it would be interesting to share the instructions.
1. Get a wallet. You can either store your wallet locally or store it online. Coinbase.com is an online wallet that is surprisingly simple to set up. Wallets require you to use or download a fairly large blockchain file – about 6GB – so downloading and updating a local wallet may be a non-starter. Like all wealth storage mediums, keeping your bitcoins “local” is probably a better idea than trusting a web service, but that’s a matter of private preference. There is no preferred wallet type and there are obvious trade-offs to both. Privacy advocates would probably say a local wallet is best.
You can download a local wallet here but make sure you keep a copy of your data backed up.
Once you’ve created a wallet, you get an address like this: 1BEkUGADFbrEShQb9Xr4pKPtM8jAyiNQsJ. This, without the period, is a direct way to send bitcoins to your wallet. Make a note of your address. In Coinbase, the wallet address found under linked accounts.
2. Join a pool. To mine in a pool you have to work with a group of other miners on available blocks. The most popular is Slush’s Pool found here. You can also try guilds like BTC Guild as well as a number of other options. Each of the pools is characterized mostly by the fees they charge per block – 2% for Slush’s pool, for example – and the number of users. Pools with fewer users could also have a slower discovery time but pools with many users usually result in smaller payments.
How can you be sure the pool owner doesn’t steal all your bitcoins? You can’t. However, as one pool owner, Slush, notes:
In theory, as the Bitcoin pool operator, I could keep the 25 BTC from a block found by the pool for myself. I’m not going to do this, but I completely accept that people do not trust the pool operator. It is their freedom of choice, and Bitcoin is about freedom.
For simplicity’s sake, I’m using Slush’s Pool and have created three workers. First, create a pool login. Then add workers. The workers are sub-accounts with their own passwords and are usually identified by [yourlogin].[workername]. I have three workers running, currently – one on my iMac and two on my old PC.
You must create workers to mine. The instructions are very straightforward for most services so don’t become overwhelmed. Like any online club, you can dig deeply into the subculture surround bitcoin as you gain experience. I like to think of it as a financial MMORPG.
Also be sure to enter your wallet address into the pool information. This will ensure you get your bitcoins.
3. Get a miner. There are a number of mining options for multiple platforms although OSX users may find themselves in a bit of a pickle. Miners use spare GPU cycles to power the mining operation, much like services like SETI@Home uses spare cycles for finding intelligent life. Miners, on the other hand, use these cycles to help handle peer-to-peer processes associated with bitcoins. Thus by doing “work” you are maintaining the network as well.
GUIMiner is the simplest solution for Windows users as it allows you to create miners using almost all standard graphics cards. You can download it here. 50Miner is also a popular solution. Both require you to enter your worker info and pool and they’ll start mining.
Linux users can run miners like CGMiner. An excellent guide to installing a miner on Ubuntu is available here .
OS X users can use DiabloMiner. a two-year old command-line program that will mine using OpenCL. Sadly, it uses deprecated calls to Bitcoin and is quite a bit slower. As a result, you need to run your own proxy, Stratum. that allows Diablo to connect with services like Slush’s pool. Both of these programs usually run without issue on OS X although you may need to install OpenCL for OSX .
To mine I’ve created a script that I run in Terminal that simply runs the proxy in the background and then connects Diablo. Note the last two arguments are necessary for Mountain Lion.
/stratum-mining-proxy-master/mining_proxy.py &
/DiabloMiner-OSX.sh -u WORKERNAME -p WORKERPASSWORD -o localhost -r 8332 -w 64 -na
RPCMiner is far easier to run – you simply click an icon and enter some data – and both have very rudimentary, text-based interfaces. Running Diablo on my iMac has not had much effect on application performance under OS X although it does slow down my Windows 8 machine considerably.
4. Keep your mind on your money. Bitcoins are baffling in that they are wildly simple to use and mine. Speculators, then, would probably be able to throw hundreds of machines at the problem and gather bitcoins like raindrops, right? Wrong. As more bitcoins are found, they become more difficult to find. This profitability calculator will help you understand what you’re up against but understand that this isn’t a sure thing. I’ve run my systems for a weekend and seen a mere $1.50 – enough for a coke – but other users may have improved hardware and methods to succeed. In short, if it costs more to run your hardware than you gain in bitcoins, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Good luck in your journey and enjoy your first foray into this wild and wooly world.
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