Only extra worry from cex.io/ghash.io that is different from past concerns is accountability.  If a public pool *attempted* to do something nefarious that pool just committed suicide whether they succeed or fail at the gamble.  When a pool that has ~1 PH/s (based on estimates looking at their speed fluctuations during known pool issues for public vs private) privately owned, there is no accountability left.  Pair that with using a 0% fee for what was already the 2nd largest mining entity before the public was allowed in.  If they attempt something, there is basically no downside.  If the public hashrate leaves due to an attempt, they aren't actually losing anything (no fee) other than the mining time on their private farm.

For those that don't read the top of Bitcointalk.org:

Your username+password on the forums may have been captured IN PLAINTEXT during a 38 hour long window.  I have already received multiple confirmed break-ins on accounts that used the same credentials on the forums as what they used on BTC Guild.  If your username/password was compromised, having an email on the account would still have sent confirmation emails for any account changes before they could take affect.  Similarly, if your wallet was locked, you were immune to losing any coins even if your email and account were both compromised.

Shift sizes were increased ~20% (1.2b vs 1b).  So that's why your shares per shift went up.  Contribution % shouldn't have changed much (although the pool has gained a bit of speed in the last two days).

API programs shouldn't be having any issues.  It was only a brief outage.

If the sellers are using kh/s, they're referring to litecoin mining.  Litecoin hash rates are much lower than Bitcoin hash rates.

Ignore capitalization in general, all sellers and most websites are quite careless with capitalization when it comes to KH/MH/GH/TH/PH.


K = 1,000 hashes/sec
M = 1,000,000 hashes/sec
G = 1,000,000,000 hashes/sec
T = 1,000,000,000,000 hashes/sec
P = 1,000,000,000,000,000 hashes/sec

It is true, at least in practice.  As more coins are out there, the inflation % decreases with each new block, even without the halving.  Additionally, coins can become permanently lost if they are sent/generated to an address where the private key has been lost (formatted or never existed).

Eventually, the rate of loss will equal the rate of inflation and establish equilibrium where the available money supply does not materially fluctuate in either direction.  You would not know with certainty the exact quantity of coins available, but you don't know that now either (nobody knows exactly how many BTC have been lost forever, but it's likely significant due to early day miners formatting machines).

~13.8% decrease in expected earnings from a 16% diff increase.

At least 60-70% of their hashpower is owned by ghash/cex, not contributed from miners.

It's a USB A-to-B cable.

Eligius and P2Pool pay you with "generation" type transactions.  These can be orphaned, and also can't be spent for 120 confirmations.  BTC-e's system for processing deposits will not properly recognize a generation type transaction.

BTC Guild's payments are all sent using standard address-to-address type payments.

You're probably screwed on getting your "Paid Out" number to be a nice round number.  As you posted, the main reason to not have complete control over the withdrawal amount is that does directly encourage using your pool balance as a debit card and treating it like a bank that slowly fills back up as you mine.  Auto payouts are nice round numbers because the extra decimals don't mean much if you plan to continue mining.  Manual payouts are full-balance because if you want to quit it lets you fully liquidate every last satoshi so the idea that the pool is holding your spare change hostage isn't valid.

API pollers would've died when the website was having issues earlier.  Shouldn't have been having any new problems since then though.

The website issue screwed up worker speed estimates, so a few minutes worth of shares were condensed and being marked as if they were received all at once.  Nothing too big, it will fix itself as the averages get more data and the big bulk of shares rolls out of your estimate window.

Website was unavailable briefly, should be back up and running.

Oh, so no worries then.  I'm sure this'll turn out great.  Just like when pirateat40 claimed he'd be sending everybody's coins back in no time.

Bitparking only does it for a handful.  There's a lot of others.  My assumption is that's what this thread was about.  Specifically the few SHA256 coins which are "almost" worth as much as BTC.  Of course, the second they become merged minable they'll drop to virtually worthless very quickly, which is why they don't allow it.

Are you using the namecoin main branch from github yet, or is it the old version?  I'm about to push the updated namecoind to all my other servers (only running on 2 of 6 pool servers at the moment).  I'll take a peek at my logs to see if there's been any noticeable jump in stales for Guild since updating 1/3 the pool to the latest namecoin hardfork version.

The only requirement for merged mining is that your worker must be set to the PPLNS payment method.




No changes have been made to the API yet.




http://explorer.dot-bit.org/a/MzAx5buAA8FNV7tYhJTefXLfJXnHyaHgtd  shows 67 NMC has been received by that address.

I've never been a huge fan of Thanksgiving, neither were my parents.  We'll probably go out for some breakfast or something the day after instead.  I can't fathom how this holiday turned into Christmas Jr.  Hell, depending on what day of the week Christmas lands on, some people get more time off for Thanksgiving than Christmas!

Total PPLNS earnings will be visible on the Payments page later today, so that the total earnings & payouts are both reconciled on that page.