All emails have now been answered.  The oldest one was from Christmas Eve (at night), which was not even 48 hours old.  Many emails were answered on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and this morning while I was still away, if they did not require me to access the database to verify account information.  Some were not answered over the holidays because they were not important enough to require immediate response on the only holiday I've taken the entire year, but they have been answered now.

BTC Guild has no support staff for one simple reason:  I do not trust ANYBODY with ANY access to account information.  I will not be paying a support staff if all they can answer are general questions that are answered on the support page or Bitcoin wiki.  And I will also not be hiring a support staff if it means they need access to user records to do their job.  I would rather spend 12-16 hours per day working on the pool alone than take the risk of letting anybody else near the database records.


EDIT:  Heavily modified due to being written after a 9 hour car drive in bad traffic.

Pool is back online and running.  Website back as well.  Sorry for the outage.  There is one problem that occurred during the outage.  A shfit was being closed at the same time as the DB server was overloaded.  In order to get the pool back online immediately, I force reset the database server, killing that shift of data.

PPS shares are logged every 10 seconds, so they were not materially affected.  PPLNS lost a shift worth of submissions.  However, this just means the current 10 open shifts will remain open for an extra hour, and get paid accordingly.  The only users that would be affected negatively are users who happened to *just* turn on more hash rate (or just start mining) during the shift that was lost.  All other users aren't really affected since no *blocks* were lost, just a shift worth of how the blocks should be split.  So by losing that shift, it just uses the previous 10 shifts worth of data instead of 9 shifts + the one that was lost.

Working on it ASAP, figures something is hitting the pool on Christmas Eve.

While the pool speed at slush has been increasing, it has been decreasing as a percentage of the overall network steadily for quite a few months.  Compared to July, it is half the % of the network it used to be.  If a pool shrinks in its share of the network, the average round length will go up.  Looking at the *time* a round takes is a meaningless number compared to the Shares rounds take in comparison to difficulty.

Additionally, smaller share of the network means you will have more variance.  While your expected reward is the same, it will be made up of higher highs and lower lows when looked at over reasonable time frames (such as 30-days).

That's ASICMINER.  They found a ton of blocks on BTC Guild before they went solo.  Looks like they had hardware failover (Hall of Fame only shows users active in the last hour), or perhaps some equipment was sold that defaulted to their BTC Guild account.

Some work is being started (won't see much progress til after Christmas) on a rewrite of the Stratum servers.  The backend BTC Guild has been using was written in C/C++, and was actually designed for a completely different protocol which I had hoped to release before Stratum (more efficient, but less noob-friendly with the lack of JSON).  While the current servers have proven to be rock solid (can go months without restarts), I'm looking to extend their capacity significantly, as well as make the different parts of the system handle threading better and as a result, make it more modular.  Not much point in having quad/hex/octo core servers if the threading model puts most the load in one or two threads!

This new system will end up being tested on (gasp) an altcoin first, to get a sense of any bottlenecks/bugs, and give the modular nature a stronger test with multiple coin chains on a single service.  Once proven, it will end up deployed for the BTC side as well.

Keep an eye out for the news section around the start of the new year if you'd like to give it a test with your old GPUs.

The API key is read-only.  It offers no access to accounts and is not used to "prove ownership" of any accounts if somebody is trying to recover a lost account.

It's only been about a month since two relatively close blocks at 8-9x diff for Eligius .  But yes, Eligius hasn't had any "really bad" blocks in the last few weeks.

8-9x difficulty aren't all that uncommon, which would be 8-10b.

Even more fun:  Looks like NMC will probably break 1b difficulty in another day

Luck is based on shares submitted / blocks solved vs Network difficulty.  If you average more shares submitted per block than the network difficulty, your luck is bad.  If you average fewer shares submitted per block than network difficulty, it is good.

Difficulty mostly influences variance.  If a pool doesn't grow roughly in-line with network difficulty, they will see higher variance (higher highs, lower lows).  But they would still expect to average the same.

Could always just stay with BTC Guild .

Hiding block contents just means the pool doesn't let you request the full raw block of data.  AFAIK none of the stratum pools have this enabled at the moment.  bfgminer complains about that.  Transparency would be nice, but it's at the cost of massive bandwidth requirements (raw block contents can be 300-500 KB or more), creating an easy way for malicious users to cause massive bills/exhaust available connection bandwidth.

We can only estimate, but it's definitely way above 400 TH.  If it's not over 1 PH/s, it's extremely close.  Anytime their public pool has issues (almost daily), you can get a rough idea of their private mining speed.  Similarly, you can see the opposite when their private mining has problems.

Don't forget the losses they're referring to were from more than a year prior to the "hack" that they suffered 2 months ago.  Deliberate misdirection by referring to past losses and the fact that they "covered them all" but not related to the losses that were currently being referred to.

And just going to point this out yet again:  If they could cover all the losses, they would have.  This "individual basis" recovery is just a delay tactic.  If they can recover individual balances, they can recover all balance values.  They're choosing not to.

Thanks for the link jojo69.  It's probably a good time to restate BTC Guild's stance on some of this:

BTC Guild's primary focus is neutrality when it comes to the network.  Unless forced to take a stance (such as the BIP16, version 2 network blocks), the pool follows the standards currently in place in the official bitcoind client.  In the event of fast action being required (hardfork earlier this year), the choice will always be the one that keeps the network compatibility as close to 100% as possible with the given options.

When it comes to transactions, BTC Guild makes no prioritization of any transaction, nor does it deprioritize/block any transaction that follows the official client rules.  No modifications are made to the selection process, only the block size values (such as increasing the minimum block size to 150kb, and maximum to 500kb currently).

At this time, there are no plans to ever stray from the official bitcoin branch, unless a change within that main branch goes against the above stances, such as blacklisting, whitelisting, or immediate hardforking without a proper upgrade path, long timeline, and REASON to do so that is justified.  Example: The v0.8 upgrade which broke compatibility with some 0.7 clients in order to fix the problem of blocks with many affected transactions from being accepted by the network.  Once the hardfork was reverted, an upgrade path and time frame were made available in order to move the network forward.  The reason for this fork was it brought the client in line with the original protocol, which had a 1MB maximum size, while the 0.7 branch had the chance to reject blocks that fit within the previously defined parameters of what a valid block is.

GHash.io's private farm is likely in excess of 1 PH/s.  They would be the only ones that have that kind of privately controlled hash power at this time.

While the 10x net isn't an unusual valuation for an established business, it's not even close to accurate for a startup business, especially ones in a high risk environment like Bitcoin.  You'd be looking more at a valuation of 1-2x annual net, if that.

Just a reminder since they've come back only offering PPS so far:  If they haven't paid back user funds because they can't, that also means they don't have an adequate buffer to actually prevent the pool from going bankrupt on PPS.

Or 0BTC if they wanted to be honest.