Bitcoin Forum

Is it really possible (or should I say likely) that BTC-Guild with 25% of the mining could go seven shifts with zero blocks found.  just previous to that it went 6 blocks before it found three.

It seems like they may be having problems and just not notifying anyone. (Through their news)

Good I'm not the only one who has been staring at his screen with a tilted puppy dog head today.  Although the pool luck chart is an abysmal %24 right now so it isn't like there is any cloak and dagger stuff happening.

I'm such a n00b at mining I actually emailed their support earlier today because I thought I was broked...lol

Then again if I was mining solo at my pitiful 100gh/s it would take me (on average) 1.6 years to generate a block so maybe I should just smile and STFU.  :)

Must go around in waves... Slush's pool had a horrible stretch for a few days last week, 9-14 hour rounds seemed to be the norm. We recovered with a nice, but short, stretch of good luck and things seem to be slowing down again...

It's rare, but bad luck like this can happen. It was being discussed in the BTCG thread in the Pools sub.

It was two really bad rounds (~4 hours each) in close proximity.  That is not unheard of, and it can be quite a bit worse.  The blocks were 7/8x difficulty worth of shares.  Pools have had 10x difficulty worth of shares to solve blocks before.  And as stated for nearly a whole page in the pool thread:  There is absolutely nothing wrong with the pool.  Luck cannot be controlled, and when you have two bad rounds close together it makes the luck for the nearby shifts take a complete dive.  At least the shifts on BTC Guild are long enough that even with those two huge rounds, no shares went unpaid, whereas on ghash.io and BitMinter it is possible to have a share get paid 0.00000000 BTC if rounds like these were encountered.

I remember when Ozcoin canceled PPS due mostly to a 9x followed by a 11x difficulty block.  On BTCGuild that would look like all 0's and maybe a 1 on the last shift  :o