Pool Block Policy

• Blockmaxsize is currently set to 900 KB on our Stratum servers.
• Blockprioritysize is currently set to 10 KB.
• Min TX Fee is left at the default of 0.0001/KB.
• No special rules have been put into place for transaction prioritization or blocking.

Pool Policies

• 1) BTC Guild users are tracked psuedo-anonymously.  IP logs are not kept of users, and no contact information is required as part of registration.
• 2) As a result of #1, restoration of lost accounts when no email is attached for password recovery is extremely rare, and done on a case by case basis.
• 3) Users opening large numbers of connections to the pool may be banned without warning due to botnet detection scripts.
• 4) If strong evidence is provided that identifies a user as a botnet, the account may be frozen without warning.
• 5) Team names containing racial slurs, foul language, etc., may be deleted/renamed.  Repeated offenders may have their accounts closed.

PPLNS Common Misunderstandings

Balance Updates - Your balance on PPLNS updates as soon as a block is found.  You do not have to wait until a shift is closed for the payment to hit your balance.

Current Shift - The current shift does *not* receive payments from blocks.  If this was done, people would have a slight indication for pool hopping.  People would be able to jump into the pool if the current shift found a block or two within the first few minutes.  It wouldn't be a guaranteed profit like proportional hopping, but it would be fairly likely to produce above average results.

24-Hour Earnings - Because the open shifts are not done receiving payments, they are not included in the 24-hour earnings.  Instead, the pool uses the last 24-hours of closed shifts to calculate 24-hour earnings.  This means there is a 9-10 hour lag on 24-hour earnings.



Pool Shutdown/Closure Process

When the day comes that BTC Guild will be shutting down, the following is an outline of the process.  Deviation from this process may be required if the shutdown is due to external factors (changes in law/regulations requiring immediate shutdown for example).

Pool Halt Notification - Notice that the pool will be halting will be provided 2 weeks prior to any servers shutting down.  Automatic payouts will likely be stopped, so that users can use manual withdrawals in order to claim their full balance once they stop mining without the risk of fractional amounts being left behind after an auto withdrawal.  This notice will be provided via forum post and news post on the website.  It will not be announced via a mass email to avoid phishing attempts mirroring an official email with a compromised link.

Withdrawal Process - After halting pool services, the website will remain online so users can use the manual withdrawal request to claim any unpaid balances.  This will follow the same policy of 0.01 or great amounts being done free of charge.  Amounts less than 0.01 will still have to pay the network transaction fee, but the minimum withdrawal amount will be adjusted to allow any amount greater than the transaction fee to be claimed.

Withdrawal Window - The website will remain online for at least 10 weeks after the pool has halted mining, meaning 3 months after the initial intent to shutdown had been announced.

If the shutdown is due to a pool wallet compromise - In this situation, the process will not change much.  During the 2 week notice prior to shutdown the pool fee will be reduced to 0%.  The withdrawal process will be first come first served.  It is expected that the amounts in "abandoned" accounts will cover all withdrawal requests even if the pool loses coins from a compromise.  The pool generally has more than 85% of all funds owed in cold storage.

I have manually set all blocks on the old pool to 120 confirmations to allow immediate withdrawal at old.btcguild.com for proportional rewards.  As stated in the previous thread, any unclaimed rewards on old.btcguild.com will be moved to the main PPS pool in a few days.

Awesome....
Last but definately not least..LOL..... New Pool seems to be missing the 24hr counter, or will that appear only after the first 24 hours is complete ?

That looks awesome...much better than a seperate column.

The performance of the new PPS pool is unbelieveable. I have generated a whole 1 stale in over 2,000 shares and it came from a laggy-Wifi-connected machine using 1 worker account that has 4 actual worker threads....so basically my own fault.

Keep up the good work.

So, I read the last few pages of the other thread, and now this one, and one thing wasn't clear.  At least not clear to me, maybe I'm just feeling dense today.  Also, I wanted to subscribe to this thread so I don't have to go looking for news and updates.

My workers appear to be using the new PPS system without any action from me.  Will this just keep working, or do I need to change anything?

While we are at it, are you down to a single server?  My failover proxy has like 4 different (old) hosts set up for BTC Guild.  Should I drop them all down to just a single entry for btcguild.com?

Everything switched over seamlessly in terms of workers/users (except for the old PPS Guild only accounts).  If your miners are active, they are currently working on the main pool (PPS).  You can remove ALL failover hosts for btcguild.com on your miners.  We have one URL (its been this way for a few months): btcguild.com

The old ones still point to the server, but they are not separate servers.

Thanks for making everything so easy for us..   

I'm interested too.. what do we need to do?

cant seem to create a password for my workers.

Im also a bit confused as to what you've done with the PPS pool. woke up Saturday and all mu miners were down - have you moved it away from beta ? I can't seem to connect anymore

yes he did switch the beta pool to the main pool but he should be on later and fix the problems as he always does