Nope, emails aren't part of registration, so it can't be added when you register .

As for difficulty, it is increased by variable difficulty if your minimum difficulty is not high enough for the hash rate of your connection.  When pointing multiple machines at one proxy, the total speed of all hardware pointed at the proxy is used for vardiff (since stratum defines difficulty per connection, not worker).

Just a reminder (since it has been a few months since the last time most servers were restarted):  Check to make sure your miners aren't doing something stupid, ESPECIALLY if they use the slush stratum proxy.   If you have idle warnings and an email on your account you'd be notified but many users never register an email to receive them.

NMC wallet checks should be working again in the next few minutes.  Payments/earnings are going to be paused for at a minimum 24 hours, since 50% of my nodes were stuck on random blocks when I woke up this morning due to something broken in the hardfork block checking.  Normally just earnings would stop, but the *payment* namecoind also got stuck during these issues.

Namecoin generation is currently running sub-optimally and payments have been paused because of the incompetence in this hard fork.  Identical servers running the same code/dependencies are moving themselves to an orphaned chain and refusing to accept the longest chain on the network, while others move on as normal.

For those who ignore the news updates on the site:  Make sure you update your namecoind/Namecoin-QT if you run your own node!  The hard fork is happening soon and you don't want to get left behind.  As of this evening BTC Guild is fully switched over to the new version.  If you're not sure about your namecoind, "getinfo" should return the version as 35100.

Sorry about the '.d'.  That was me adding a little debug text to figure out which part of the code was triggering the error.  Should be all fixed now!

I've been doing a few updates to logging for brute force attacks through the various vectors that are under constant 24/7 attack (logins, password resets, etc.).  Are you still seeing the error?

You're looking at the per share rate for shifts.  RECENTLY luck has been bad.  PPLNS (and all non-PPS methods) have variance, meaning your reward is based on the pool's luck.  If it's bad, PPLNS will earn less than the PPS rate.  If it's good, it will earn more than the PPS rate.  In the long run, it will always pay more, but that is made up of highs and lows (just look at the graph at the bottom of the page).

Below the red line = bad luck, above the red line = good luck.  Black line = the average since it has been tracked across multiple difficulties.  If it's just a little under the red line (96% or higher), it is paying above PPS.  Otherwise it is paying below PPS.

Sounds like your stratum proxy is messed up.  It tends to do that randomly.

PPLNS is based on luck (as are all other payment methods except PPS).  BTC Guild has historically (last 2.5 months) had positive luck.  At neutral luck, you'll make 4.5% more on PPLNS than PPS, not counting NMC or TX Fees.  The last week has had swings in both directions.

In the long run, PPLNS will pay significantly more than PPS.  24-hour tests are useless for this type of comparison due to variance (same issue with comparing pools for short periods of time).

Few small updates today, one will probably eliminate a lot of support emails now that I tracked it down:

1) Namecoin payout history can now be exported to CSV on your settings page.
2) Cookies for BTC Guild now work on the subdomains, eliminating the error some users have had when confirming their wallet/email where they used https://btcguild.com while all the links for confirmations were https://www.btcguild.com

Local issue, or you're screwing with your miner settings causing the 1-hour average to be invalid because of downtime.

Before bringing in the factor out of anyone's control (variance/luck), there is one thing to remember on ALL pools:

Your expected value per share is in no way tied to the pool speed.  Your expected value per share is Your Speed compared to Network Difficulty.  A certain hash rate will always *expect* to get a certain payout at a given difficulty.  It doesn't matter if you're 300 MH/s or 300 TH/s.  It doesn't matter if your pool is 1 GH/s or 3 PH/s.

As far as I know, there is no payment method where this is not the case.  There may be small caveats, but in general if you mine at X pool, it doesn't matter what that pool's speed is, or what it's particular brand of payment method is, as long as it's not a flawed method (hoppable), and as long as the pool is stable and doesn't have any kind of bug hampering it's overall BTC generation.



What larger pools offer is reduced variance.  This does not mean variance immunity.  Since you're on BTC Guild, you can flip over to the PPLNS Stats page and look at the graph at the bottom.  Each point on the graph represents approximately 50 minutes (one shift).  You can see certain times where a block of 50 minutes worth of hashing only made 42-50% of what it would expect.  Other times where 50 minutes of hashing may have made 150-200%.  In the long run, it has been ~3.5% above expectation (lucky).

The big difference on a larger pool is how quickly the pool returns to the expected payout range.  You might have really bad luck.  You might have really good luck.  That doesn't change on any pool (except for PPS-based payment methods, which are higher fees).  The difference on a large pool is generally if you look at the average variance during a single difficulty, it is more likely to be at expectation.  Smaller pools will (generally) be further from expectation (but it can swing in your favor just as easily as against you).

Manual payouts (full payout) will probably be added to NMC next week, so you can do a full cashout.

The reason auto payouts pay the amount you set are to keep your wallet clean of useless amounts (0.000xxxxx).  The logic being auto payouts are for if you plan to continue mining, so getting regular payouts it doesn't matter if the small bits are paid or not, and it just makes the wallet cleaner (less fragmentation/fees in the long run too).  Manual payouts were full balance, so if you were going to quit the pool, you just do that and the whole balance is zero'd.

It makes no difference.  Here's the 'need to know' bits about blades & proxies (or any large farm behind a proxy):


Stratum connections assign difficulty on a per-connection basis.  When mining on a proxy, all your workers are on one single connection.  This means your individual worker stats will always be slightly off.  The total of all your workers should average out to the proper rate, but one worker might show 2x and two workers might show 0.5x due to share variance.  It mostly depends on how many miners share the proxy, and if all the miners are similar speeds.

Using separate workers helps on the pool side because you can see if one individual worker is not performing.  Internal monitoring is generally more reliable, but many pools like BTC Guild can alert you when a worker is no longer submitting shares.  If you have too many workers on one proxy, you may want to turn that off, or run 2-3 proxies and split your workers.

Update on the API server that was being promised:  It is currently on hold.  The original plan was to use a database slave server to serve the API.  Unfortunately, the server being used had significant lag in responding to API requests whenever it was flushing the latest database updates.  The lag was bad enough to not be worth moving to yet.  Looking at other options right now, including buying a new DB slave server that matches the current DB specs (faster processor and SSDs).

Thank you Luke.  By far the best detailed post of why most of the currently existing altcoins being called scamcoins is a legitimate term.  To date, I can only think of 3 that are not, directly, in that category:

Namecoin:  Is not designed or marketed as a currency, but instead as a PoW-secured name value store, which has been adapted into a decentralized DNS system.
Peercoin:  Attempt at a proof-of-stake alternative to the Proof-of-Work system used by Bitcoin.  Not taking a stance on if that is meaningful in any way, but at least it's something marginally different.
Primecoin:  Attempt at a proof-of-work currency that has a "useful biproduct" as the result of all the electricity used.  I personally feel it's still a complete waste of electricity, but at the very least you're getting *something* out of it rather than just a hash.

As a result, I would not call the above "scamcoins", though I certainly don't feel any of them really have a value above pennies a piece if that.

If there are some I've missed, I'm sorry, but that's what happens when every week has a new scamcoin competing for attention.  I've not ventured into the alternate currencies subforum in months as a result.

Less than a week's notice after the forum was unavailable for almost 2 days straight?  I certainly hope you give your users at least until the end of December.  I wouldn't even dream of trying to shutdown my pool without giving users 6-12 months of time.

DVC and IXC are offered on bitparking, have been for a long time.  Of course, DVC and IXC are both completely worthless, so no other pool is going to waste time and server resources to run altcoin daemons for a less than 0.1-0.2% increase in earnings when it could cause extra stales, software failures, more bandwidth usage, and a lot of wasted CPU/HDD access time which will likely add up to more than a 0.2% loss in the long run.

Odds are your computer has no compatible hardware for mining.  CPU mining is not enabled by default in cgminer/bfgminer because it's a waste of time.  GPU mining is also a waste of time these days, but it does work if you have proper drivers and hardware.