Seems to have fixed itself?  Not seeing it on my end.  Generally anything like that is just a generic Cloudflare problem that only lasts a few minutes or so.

I'll do an exact count later.  They are not winning more orphan races than usual given their hash rate.  But for the most part, the seem to more often than not lose an orphan race to anybody else if they didn't solve the next block themselves (because rarely is their block the first seen by the rest of the network when they're in a race), and they definitely are participating in an unusually large number of orphan races for being ~30% of the network.

I'm more inclined to say incompetence over malice.  I honestly think they don't have the slightest clue what they're doing when it comes to setting up a pool and bitcoind node, as demonstrated by their almost daily outages of either their public pool or private mining side (or both).

Most pools are in at least decent datacenters, which happens to mean they have low latencies with the other pools since they're both close to backbone bandwidth providers.  This reduces overall network orphan rate because the average time between block notifications between the majority of the network hash rate is significantly lower than what it would be between people just running on random local ISPs.  At the same time, GHash.io has abysmal latency and/or absolutely no peers setup between pools, or they're purposely ignoring competing blocks sometimes based on the sheer number of orphan races they compete in.  This is based on admittedly more casual observation rather than deep analysis, but I know other pool ops have been seeing more losing orphan races than usual as a result of ghash.io.

Yeah...but it's reddit posters.  Long term memory isn't their strong suit.

You can send ghash.io your thanks on that one.  Their connectivity with the majority of nodes/pools is downright malicious in how bad it is.

Thanks for the insight.  I'm a bit surprised at the lack of uproar myself.  It's probably because reddit is currently on hold with the suicide hotline after today's crash, so they had to pause their Guild-hating posts for a day or two.

EDIT/UPDATE:  For those not aware (since it may have changed by the time you see this), the top post in /r/bitcoin was a number for the Suicide Hotline this morning, and it was there for the majority of the day.

3% PPS was absurdly low (VERY high chance of bankruptcy).  Additionally, it's highly unlikely the pool was started to be a scam.  Far more likely is they were using user funds as a form fractional reserve banking and selling coins that they owed to users under the assumption that a lot of old account balances were abandoned/only a certain % of funds would ever be withdrawn in rapid succession.  Then the rally hit, and as any long time pool owner knows, withdrawal frequency goes absolutely nuts during an all-time high rally and they couldn't pay their debts due to selling the coins early.

Uhm...somebody call in organofcorti.  I want to know how astronomically large the odds are that 25-28% of the network hash rate manages to pull off 11 blocks in a row!

DVC/IXC are truly worthless.  They would be even more worthless if BTC Guild bothered to merge mine them and roughly doubled their difficulty again.

Knowing the load that altcoin daemons put on servers (because they all use extremely old bitcoin forks), I'm pretty convinced that you end up hurting your earnings more than they will add to them just due to the increased rate of stales/time to perform longpolls/work restarts.  Combined they don't even add up to 0.1% additional earnings *at current difficulty*.

Of all the scamcoins/altcoins out there, the only one that is actually something new/useful is Namecoin, even though I'm personally not a major fan of it.  But all the others are mindless clones of Bitcoin that bring nothing worthwhile to the table.  At least Namecoin was designed to do something outside of a cash grab.

Actually...275399 IS a BitMinter block.  Coinbase signature is included.


While Doc is right in most cases, Blockchain.info actually rarely uses the relayer, it uses Payment Addresses/Coinbase signatures first, then falls back to relayer if those don't match (AFAIK).  For example, I don't recall ever seeing a false positive for BTC Guild.  However, I can see a few obvious errors in their assignment to BitMinter once in a while (like an HHTT block that shows as BitMinter's).

These external stratum proxies are good for people just starting, but I highly recommend users with getwork hardware eventually learn how to set one up yourselves.  Most ASICs that use getwork are extremely inefficient at dealing with latency for results, essentially stopping all work until the result is responded to.  Given how rapidly most ASICs will generate results, especially things like ASICMINER gear which report all results that meet diff=1 regardless of server settings, you can end up losing a significant percentage of your expected hashrate.  A local proxy is always a more efficient idea!

NMC is only awarded to PPLNS.  There is no option to earn NMC when mining under PPS on BTC Guild.

My guess:  'Other - Local Problem'.  No reports of an outage in IRC, and haven't had any problem loading it from my phone or PC all day.

If the transaction history is still there and you can still see your wallet balance, I can't imagine the keys to that wallet were lost (otherwise you wouldn't be able to spend anything).

A lot of pools (BTC Guild, Slush, ASICMINER, Ozcoin, Eligius) have returned massive fee errors in the past.  But...now all those pools pay txfees to the miners except for ASICMINER (since they're not a pool, just a huge solo miner).  So it's time to start being more careful with raw transactions, since the pools are no longer keeping txfees, meaning expecting them to return these amounts will either require them to claw it back from miners (which will hurt their business as a result) or pay it from their own pocket for someone else's mistake.

16.

The only advantage in doing so is if you have high end equipment.  Lots of high end ASIC miners tend to have a few problems when running at very low difficulties due to the amount of communication required when running at hundreds of GH/s at a low difficulty.  The pool will automatically adjust your difficulty if it's not high enough, but it takes a minute or two to find the sweet spot.  By setting a minimum difficulty, you can bypass this startup phase which will save you a few rejects early on.  It also cuts down on bandwidth, though that isn't a huge deal for anybody with broadband access due to how little bandwidth it requires in general.

Higher difficulties do have higher variance, but the recommended speeds in the drop-down are set to levels where the variance is minimal as long as you have that much speed or better.

Hi organofcorti,
  If I had to guess...your ghash.io average speed is wrong.  They were ahead of BTC Guild up until the end of this week based on my interim checks.  Then again, the luck *seems* off (I don't think pool luck has been 104% this last week, it wasn't good for the first half of the week at least).  I'll take a look on my end to see if I can find what my calculated luck % was for the week.

Your 560 reported speed will include hardware errors (probably 1-3%).  Additionally, the pool can only estimate your speed (as posted above).  The general variance for the pool is +/- 10% on the dashboard.  You can see on your Charts page a longer term average which shows you how it fluctuates.

The average should be roughly:

Miner Reported Speed - Hardware Error % - Rejected %.  BTC Guild's speed estimates ignore invalid shares, so it's your EFFECTIVE speed.