I can't really help with the above, other than suggesting you add eu-stratum.btcguild.com as your 2nd pool.  The US server is online and running solid (as noted by the unchanged pool speed), which means the connection issue is local, not on the server side.

I do sleep, but it tends to shift by +/- 2 hours as to when I actually go to bed each day, so it can create the illusion of never disappearing .  Then you've got the remaining 16 hours/day where I can make my appearance as needed.

Small reminder (I've gotten a few emails/PMs):  Tomorrow is a holiday in the US (Veteran's Day), and there won't be any mail processed, which is why some orders placed Friday do not have tracking yet, even though it says "Ships Within 2 Days".  No point in packing the current orders on Sunday when they can't be shipped until Tuesday.

Shares per shift (and your % of each shift) will drop as the pool speed grows.  The pool speed has increased ~15% since the bad luck the other day.  Here's generally how shares per shift/% of each shift will change over time:


1) While the pool is growing (which is almost every day), your shares per shift will drop as your speed vs pool speed shrinks.  Your % of each shift will also shrink.
2) This does NOT affect your earnings, because the shifts will complete faster as a result of higher pool speed.
3) When shifts get too fast (~30 minutes), the 'N' value is increased to bring shifts back to the sweet spot (40-60 minutes).  When this happens, your shares per shift will increase.  Your % of each shift will NOT change, since your % of each shift is purely based on [Your Speed] vs [Pool Speed].

Were you mining on the pool for the past 32 hours?  One thing to remember is that PPLNS is a time-delay reward method.  When you submit a share, it starts getting paid once the next shift completes, then continues getting paid over the course of about 8 hours.  Since counting the payments during that time would always lead to understated 24-hour earnings, the 24-hour earnings stat uses the last 24 hours of *closed* shifts.  In a very poor ASCII text format:



The 24-hour earnings stat uses only Hours 9-32, since that is the most recent 24-hour period that has been *fully* paid.


Based on the screenshot, that's my guess, since I can see your shift contributions average ~0.21%, but your most recent block rewards are 0.09-0.15%, implying you don't have shares in all the open shifts.

Thanks again for your work.  I'm actually relieved that the BTC Guild CDF wasn't *that* bad.  That 24 hour period of bad luck was brutal, and felt like it was going to drag the whole week down to a 0.99-1.00 CDF.

This!


BTC Guild luck has been positive by a decent margin the last day.  Just like it was negative by a big margin the day before.  This was explained to you in your OTHER thread, and the main BTC Guild thread already.  Your earnings have been dropping every difficulty change by a large margin for the last month.  You mention 0.5 BTC/day.  Right now your hash rate (~250 GH/s) will only make 0.24-0.25/day at the network difficulty.  This will be affected by luck on any pool, but your expected return is not 0.5, it is 0.25.

I'm not sure how you didn't notice difficulty increases over the last month.  However, in the time frame you mentioned, BTC Guild has paid better than you could've expected (luck has been > what you'd make on a 0% PPS pool for the last 6 weeks).


You had one day of bad luck and apparently lost your mind, making two threads (even after the luck recovered) and also posting about it on the main thread.


EDIT:  Just looked back and you did not start the other thread, you just posted in it.  Still, this exact thing has been explained in two separate threads that you've participated in already.

Vegeta screams at you and crushes the display.  Seriously though, I'm pretty sure BitMinter's graphics always show the pointer near the next large round number, and it auto extends as needed.

An automatic payout failed about an hour ago due to a depleted hot wallet from the bubble causing higher withdrawal activity than normal, paired with the bad luck from the other day which meant there weren't many coins with 120+ confirmations in the wallet maturing in the last 24 hours.  The wallet has been replenished and the payout was removed from your history.  It will execute again shortly.

Sounds like your miner is on strike.

They have never been priced based on USD.  They make BTC, and they're sold for BTC.  The only part that is based on USD (international shipping and USB price which is essentially shipping) have already been adjusted.

A new user is registered under the name "coinflipz" who is sending out phishing PMs.  They send what looks like a link to a bitcointalk thread, but the actual link is different from the text, linking instead to http://bitcointlak.my-board.org (actual link is a bit longer leading to a clone of the Bitcointalk.org login page).

The PM I got was targeted to me as a pool owner.  I'm not sure how many others are getting something similar.

Quoted for added effect.  This really is the key takeaway.  Bitcoin probabilities are inherently "awkward" to look at under a microscope.  You can look at the last 2 days for an example of that, the network has had more than one period of an hour without a block from *any* pool on the network.  It has also had periods of 7 blocks in 20 minutes.

There's always people hopping from one to the other thinking they can game luck.  In the end they'll end up behind though.  You can't hop PPLNS, meaning if you were successful in moving to PPS and making more out of that, it was only due to luck that you did so.

The pool has been 1/7th - 1/8th PPS historically.  We're a little closer to 1/6th at the moment due to the bad luck lasting about a full day.  You can view it yourself by looking at the detailed view of a shift.  It shows you how many shares in that shift were contribued by PPS users.

I apologize if my responses in the last day have been aggressive.  One thing most don't realize is that while luck hurts your earnings, it *costs* me money when luck is this bad.  I've lost nearly 40 BTC from luck (even more if you count the fact that I haven't earned any coins in the last 24 hours roughly), and another 25 from an orphaned block just as this bad luck kicked off.  Even at 7.5% fee on PPS, when luck is this bad I'm paying out a lot more than I'm making off the fee when the blocks finally do hit.

It does all even out in the long run though.  You can still see our luck since September 27th is holding strong at 103.9% currently.

Your 24 hour earnings have been decreasing 30-40% every 10 days roughly due to network difficulty changes.  That's an inescapable rule of mining, your earnings are mostly dictated by network difficulty, the rest is variance.  Right now the 24-hour luck is ~50% of expectation, so your 24 hour earnings would be reflecting half of your expected earnings at neutral luck.

PPLNS is on a time delay, roughly 8 hours.  It takes 8 hours from the time a share is submitted to the time it is matured (fully paid).  Look at the chart on the PPLNS stats page and you can see its already starting to go back up.

Your 24 hour earnings will obviously not fully reflect this because the bad luck has NOT EVEN BEEN 24 HOURS.  This means right now you have *high reward* shifts rolling out of your 24 hour window (decreasing the 24-hour earnings).

BTC prices have been increasing for the last MONTH.  Luck has been positive for almost that entire month.  You're just having selection bias that at the peak of prices (which so far are STILL going up) we happened to have a SINGLE DAY of bad luck.

PPS is the only payment system that is not subject to short term luck.  Your always ".4 or .5" earnings are a myth by the way, difficulty has changed many times over "several weeks".  Luck has always fluctuated a decent amount, it's just that for the last 5 weeks BTC Guild's luck has been neutral/positive.

This bad luck has not even lasted a full 24 hours, and it's already looking like it's about to swing back positive based on recent shift block solves.

Always happens when a pool has a period of shitty luck.  Just funny that it happens to Guild within 12 hours of bad luck (but still solving blocks), while other pools will have 10-20 hours on ONE block before they start to really lose any speed.