I'm assuming that was the person who made a thread title like it was a BTC Guild announcement (it's deleted now)?  I was going to report the thread, but figured why bother since nobody was bumping it.  Once it leaves the front page it might as well not exist.

The private DNS provided in 2013 during the attack still works, and while it has been leaked, it is unlikely to be noticed.  There's a second private DNS that is given out specifically for DDoS protection.

In both cases, they have been unaffected by recent attacks which were only hitting stratum.btcguild.com (and only the initial server used to validate clients).

It would add up to basically nothing.  Most zombie machines are "mom and dad's computer", the ones that are 5-10 years old with no graphics card.  Sure, there's some gamer rigs infected out there due to people pirating games with trojans embedded, but they are relatively rare.  ASICs have virtually killed Bitcoin mining botnets.

DDoSes on pools have almost always hit multiple targets, ever since 2011.  It was extremely rare for only one pool to be hit (one at a time maybe, but normally it was always at least 2-3 simultaneously, if not more).

Kind of ironic that BTC Guild is on the hitlist when we're not even 5% of the network these days.

An attack is hitting the initial pool connection server again.  As usual, this only affects new incoming connections.  If you already have an active mining connection, it is recommended you do not do anything that would cause your miner to restart or change which pool it's connected to for a few hours.  If you do, have a backup pool setup or you may end up with hardware doing nothing while it tries to connect to the frontend mining server.

Thanks for helping out the last two pages kano.  Was very limited in my ability to use the internet the last few days, was in a car for 30 of the last 48 hours.

Miner's will see about a half second of downtime during the restarts.  Based off the last few times restarts have been required, modern software/hardware is able to reconnect fast enough that you wouldn't even know it happened unless you were watching it at that exact moment.

BTC Guild will be temporarily pausing automatic and manual payout processing at 4 PM (PST) in order to clean up the hot wallet fragmentation.  This process should take approximately 2-3 hours to complete, after which time any delayed manual or automatic payouts will be processed.  This will not have any impact on the website or mining servers.

UPDATE:  Maintenance window is being postponed to Monday at 4 PM (PST) in order to line it up with a set of mining server rolling restarts.

You will get 4-8x more stales on Satellite than your current connection (100-200ms vs 800ms).  That is how your performance is affected by latency.  There's no way to change that via software/pool choice.

You may end up even worse off than that, since most satellite connections are rarely able to hold an 800ms ping, they frequently go above that in my experience.

The frontend server used to filter botnet/DDoS traffic got a huge spike this morning and was causing it to drop a lot of incoming connections.  Established mining connections were unaffected, but restarting/disconnecting your miners may have resulted in being unable to get back on.  It should be working normally by now.

No.

My understanding was Slush is still using the same old system it always has for score, just tweaked some of the variables to account for modern difficulty/pool size.

BTC Guild's luck % is actually based on overall shift luck, I don't even track per-block luck (nor do I have any implementation to do so).  The payment per share for every share of a given shift compared to what you would earn under 2% PPS.   There's no extra math involved.

I've always used Luck as a representation of actual earnings vs expected earnings, because that is what most miners are concerned about, and it is easy for them to understand.  If luck is 200%, they made twice what they expected to earn in that period.  If luck is 50%, they earned half.  CDF is nice for explaining the odds of bad rounds, but most miners are only concerned with earnings, and CDF doesn't help with visualizing what they earned compared to what they "should have" earned.

Their direct wording is any business involved in the transmission of Bitcoin to a New York resident requires a license.  Transmission has no exemptions for mining.  Now, if you're *solo mining* in New York, you wouldn't need one, since you're not transmitting to anybody.  If BTC Guild used coinbase payouts, it would also be able to bypass this, with one exception:  There is no pool doing coinbase payouts (other than p2pool which is not exactly a pool) that doesn't require a failsafe wallet to catch dust/errors, and running a manual fix to distribute the dust/errors later is transmission.  Unless BTC Guild turned itself into p2pool by setting a minimum share difficulty high enough that you would always have enough work in the PPLNS system to receive a payout, it's not an option.

Obviously you can't do anything about VPNs, but all accounts will be required to agree to an updated TOS affirming they are not residents of New York, on top of the Geo-IP ban to anybody accessing the site from New York.

BTC Guild's luck is reported in the same way.  Orphaned block solves are not included.

Warning to New York Residents

The latest draft of the BitLicense proposal is out, and it is even worse than the last one when it comes to pools.  This is an approximately 75-day notice that if you are using the pool from New York, you will need to request your withdrawals and change pools.  Once the comment period ends (approx. 30 days) and the BitLicense is approved, unless it is changed, it will leave a 45-day window before it becomes effective.  Once the 45-day window begins, the pool will be implementing Geo-IP to ban the creation of accounts from New York, and a splash screen will appear to users who already have accounts telling them that the pool is no longer able to serve them and that they have 45 (or less) days to request their withdrawals.  After it becomes effective, the site will no longer be available for access from New York.

Well, BTC Guild doesn't include orphan blocks we've found in the luck calculations, which I think most other pools do, but that's not a huge impact.  BTC Guild's orphan rate has always been ~1% (you'll rarely see more than 2 out of the last 200 blocks on the pool stats page as being orphaned).

Everything is running normally, there are no issues with the servers.  People like to throw around withholding attack on every pool having bad luck (plenty of people were talking about the same thing on Eligius).  There is no large scale withholding attack, unless they are doing it in a way that involves a significant number of accounts.

All of the fastest users on the pool (who make up the majority of the pool hash rate) are well within expected block solving rates.  That doesn't mean there isn't withholding, or bugged hardware out there, but it means that the only accounts exhibiting enough hash rate to have a noticeable impact are definitely not withholding blocks.



EDIT:  Just to clarify:  "well within expected block solving rates" does not mean they are functioning at +/- 5% luck, since if that was the case the entire pool would probably be at +/- 5% luck over the last month.  However, there are no accounts that are showing a blocks solved vs blocks expected rate that is severe enough to be a block withholding flag, such as the ones that were discovered last year when a large scale mining farm was discovered to have an error in their miner when dealing with shares resolving to a difficulty greater than a 32-bit value (4.2 billion).

There's been no issues with payouts.  Automatic payouts happen once per hour for amounts over 0.10, twice per hour for amounts under 0.10, and twice per hour for manual withdrawal requests.

EDIT:  Unless you have a different username, your account hasn't had a balance owed in 5 months, the last bit of the balance was withdrawn in August.