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You've got part of it right. A block is like a box that's been filled with transactions and then filed into the blockchain. However, it's more of the following:
1) There are hundreds of transactions floating in the network that are not yet included in any block.
2) Miners group those unconfirmed transactions into a *potential* block, and start trying to come up with a hash that will meet the current network difficulty for this potential block they've assembled. They pick transactions based on priority, which is a mixture of the age of a transactions inputs, the size of the inputs/outputs, and the fees attached to the transaction.
3) If a miner creates a successful hash for their potential block, they broadcast the block to the network that they now have a new block properly added to the blockchain. This gives transactions their first confirmation. As future blocks are added to the chain based off this one, they gain an extra confirmation.
3a) If two competing miners come up with a block solution at the same time, it's possible your transaction *loses* its confirmation. If the competing block found at the same time (roughly) does not include it, and the following block on the network uses this competing block, your transaction will lose its confirmation and end up floating across the network again waiting for a miner to pick it up.
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For bitcoin BTCguild....
Care to elaborate? They're an expensive pool with average features. If reliability is a concern, you can simply set your miner to failover to any number of lower-fee pools giving you the same or better uptime as just mining at one big pool. Why do people seem to think that bigger = better? I stay away from BTCGuild, my profitability is better mining elsewhere. Some have probably been there since 2011.. I guess I could understand that. Not sure why someone new would start there though, esp. when you have a whole bunch of quality 1% pools available, if you don't feel like messing with something like p2pool (I think Eligius might be 0 fee too, not sure). I think the reason a lot of new miners go to BTC Guild is that the idea that bigger is better appeals. It actually just means less variance in the short term, but over the long term that evens out and a 3% fee over a 1% fee means you will earn 2% less. Except there is no 1% fee pool that offers the benefits of BTC Guild that reduce variance even more. IE: BTC Guild pays for orphaned blocks. Bitminter does not (without users paying an extra 1%(or more?)). That's a ~1% effective fee reduction. Now you're looking at a 1% fee difference in exchange for a massive reduction in variance, and an admin whose only source of income depends on making sure the pool is running smoothly 24/7. Hey eleuthria, I'm not knocking the Guild, I know it is a very well run pool. I mined there myself for a long time. The way the last round of Ddos attacks were handled was excellent. IMO the number of orphans does not justify paying the optional fee at Bitminter. The point I was really trying to make is that lower fees are more important than lower variance. There is a minimum hash rate to make a pool function effectively, but I personally cannot justify paying extra to reduce variance beyond that as it has no long term impact on income. That's fine. But making it sound like there is some huge different in earnings is dishonest. It is a *1%* effective difference between Bitminter and BTC Guild, and less variance to boot. Orphaned blocks *do* eat about 1% of your earnings (AKA: Hidden 1% "fee"), and on BTC Guild they are paid. And while pure BTC earnings are unaffected in long term by variance (within certain limits), USD earnings *can* be impacted. More consistent earnings means you're more readily able to execute market positions with a steady supply of coins rather than being left dry during short term spikes. |
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For bitcoin BTCguild....
Care to elaborate? They're an expensive pool with average features. If reliability is a concern, you can simply set your miner to failover to any number of lower-fee pools giving you the same or better uptime as just mining at one big pool. Why do people seem to think that bigger = better? I stay away from BTCGuild, my profitability is better mining elsewhere. Some have probably been there since 2011.. I guess I could understand that. Not sure why someone new would start there though, esp. when you have a whole bunch of quality 1% pools available, if you don't feel like messing with something like p2pool (I think Eligius might be 0 fee too, not sure). I think the reason a lot of new miners go to BTC Guild is that the idea that bigger is better appeals. It actually just means less variance in the short term, but over the long term that evens out and a 3% fee over a 1% fee means you will earn 2% less. Except there is no 1% fee pool that offers the benefits of BTC Guild that reduce variance even more. IE: BTC Guild pays for orphaned blocks. Bitminter does not (without users paying an extra 1%(or more?)). That's a ~1% effective fee reduction. Now you're looking at a 1% fee difference in exchange for a massive reduction in variance, and an admin whose only source of income depends on making sure the pool is running smoothly 24/7. |
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To add merged mining, the altcoin requires a hardfork. Additionally, once it's added, you're guaranteed said altcoin will be WORTHLESS. Merged mining reduces the value of coins, period. A bunch of people with no interest in the coin will sell them at whatever price some idiot is willing to pay. Meanwhile, the difficulty shoots through the roof at the same time. The coin would be dead in under a month.
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Update: No, BTC Guild did not just lose half it's speed. The time change just screwed things up. Should be back to normal within the hour. I thought this was all fixed but apparently something in the DB is still using a local timestamp instead of UTC.
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The new Dashboard is already a big improvement, but I did like seeing the total number of shares earning rewards under PPLNS.
Will that stat be included in the further tweaks that are still coming?
Yes, a total line will be added shortly to the PPLNS stats listed. I'm still playing with the new dashboard trying to find a way to fit in all the stats I want without overhauling the UI (I really like that the website works great on my phone, tablet, or PC without any changes). |
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yes, I have something back-asswards here, trying to figure it out. no offense intended. host computer specs should not have much to do with it? switched in an old amd laptop to host the BE's and a BFL jalapeno.
my stats look apporx. correct 2 workers 26GH/s total. >1% stales,both workers connected. just 1/2 the shares per shift.. weird. have to see what 24hrs. does for earnings I guess see how it all washes out
Ok ay I see whats up there, I think, I accidentally had 1 of my workers on PPS that would account for it. Yes. 200,000 shares PPS this difficult. Last difficulty, I only had 22 shares PPS. "check the stupid stuff first" Glad you figured it out. That's actually a pretty common one, but for some reason it's the last thing I think of. |
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BTW I like the new look, easier to see stats than switching pages;
I have been reworking my set up, since I fired up the 49 port hub, removed 1,000+ watts of power and moved my controller to a laptop. All my hashes are now from 2 machines. But when I first fired it up, I was getting 11K shares /shift. dropped down to 5,000. seams weird. just set my workers back down to diff 2, I assume the pool's vardif will kick them up a notch or 2?
here's a few shifts ago with all my hash on btcguild:
shifts 11640- 11648 roughly 11,000 shares per shift.
shifts since then have been 1/2 that. I admit I have not been 100% on BTCguild, but have been 100% since 11766 and only 5,000 per shift.
paranoid from 50BTC's 'evilpool' have I been compromised and don't know it?
50BTC's evilpool doesn't exist as far as I can tell. It's just a theory from people who seem to know a lot less about mining than previously thought (50BTC team/owner). Makes sense considering the massive blunders they've had any time they were required to update *anything* on the pool as Bitcoin has evolved. As for your shares dropping...you definitely have *something* going wrong on your end if your shares per shift have dropped that drastically. |
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my shares per shift seam off? I just increased difficulty on my workers could that do it?
isn't difficulty a factor of shares per shift? like dif 2 = 2 shares, 4= 4 shares ect...?
I was getting 11K shares per shift, now only 5K?
Sounds like some of your miners are offline or on a different pool. Difficulty wouldn't affect your shares per shift more than +/- a few % (higher variance if you set it above what vardiff used to put you at). EDIT: That or you're looking at the top shift on the dashboard (which is clearly labelled as IN PROGRESS), which will obviously not be the same # of shares as a completed shift. |
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curious about some of the history; Answer if, or as you will any of the following:
would you comment on how much of the pool's hash rate is your own personal miners? How does BTCGuild's position as one of the top pools affect attacks? Are you confident the major pools out there are relatively secure (Re: 50BTC's recent tragedy)?
right around the 51% issue BTCGuild was facing, when the Avalon ASICS first appeared, I noticed there was a user ASICMiner on your pool. then shortly after the ASICminer pool started showing up on the block origin rankings. was there any connection between ASICminer and BTCGuild? Were you involved in helping them set up their pool? Or was that 2 separate entities?
ASICMINER is a private mining company that developed the first mass production ASICs. They used BTC Guild as their pool during initial deployment for stability. I did not know who they were (that they were actually ASICMINER) until after the fact. A similar situation happend with the "100TH" mining group. They were using BTC Guild during initial testing/deployment. Eventually those large companies have gone solo mining, which is expected when you're controlling a fairly large hashing power (although at this time I wouldn't be surprised if 100TH ends up joining a pool again due to how fast the network is growing). My personal mining power is between 0 and 10 GH/s at the moment. I've recently turned off my Avalon (batch 2) due to the profit over electricity being very low, just not worth the constant noise if generates while I'm working all day. |
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First stage of thew updated dashboard is in. You can now see recent PPLNS shifts and recent block solves on your dashboard. Live updating will probably be added within the week. A few more tweaks are coming as well.
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A lot.
only for some like btcguild for example started out with a 0% fee and just took transaction fees, back in 2011. i have no clue when/how they changed their fee structure, but they probably bumped it to 1% first before going to 2% or 3% or whatever. this way, people won't change pool BTC Guild was 0% Fee donation based proportional for May 2011 to late October 2011. Pool hopping became a big problem (it was basically automated for those who wanted to do it), and as a result BTC Guild changed from donation based proportional to 5% Pay per Share only. BTC Guild made a *little* money early on, but donations aren't a sustainable way to run a pool. The larger the pool became, the lower the average donation % became. This was a big problem back then because getwork was extremely poor at scaling, and the pool had to run many servers to keep up. In late 2012, BTC Guild added 3% PPLNS, plus txfees, plus orphan blocks. In April 2013, when BTC Guild was becoming a 51% threat, it made PPLNS the default payout method, and increased the PPS fee in order to encourage users to voluntarily leave the pool (if they wanted to stay on PPS). There was never a gradual fee bump. BTC Guild makes quite a large profit these days. It has been my full time job since May 2012. However, it wasn't that profitable until mid-2013. I actually went back to work from December 2012 to February 2013 because the price of BTC and size of BTC Guild wasn't enough for me to feel safe depending on it as my only source of income. Since then, it is a very different world now. BTC price has gone up ~20x since that time, and BTC Guild has also increased it's share of the network from ~15% to ~30%. |
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I don't how to analyze the blockchain. But if this is really true, double spending bitcoin is big news.
Double-spending a 0-confirmation TX is not new. It doesn't even require 0.1% of the network hash rate to do it. This is why accepting unconfirmed transactions is foolish. Allowing 0-confirm txes to count as a payment should only be done for online services that are easily revokable without impacting the business for the period before it was a confirmed doublespend. |
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Store Update
ASICMINER has run out of USB Block Erupters, meaning I can only sell what's left in inventory. At current rates, that's ~1-1.5 weeks before they are sold out from the BTC Guild store. Possibly less since now there is a little urgency if anybody wants to grab one of the little trinkets before they're gone.
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- Lots of downtime in the past 5 days
- Currently ghash.io and cex.io offline (cloudflare) again for the 2nd or 3rd time
- Approx 3-4 times my miners have hopped to their secondary pool
- Multiple times I think their mining server goes offline, several stale shares in a row (5 stale blocks out of the past 100)
- Whenever I see a very long blocktime (5 hours at 800GH/s is a very long time) I wonder if their backend is down. The consecutive stale blocks were a 3hr stale, a 1 hour stale, followed by another 3 hour block
- Large swings in hashrate, from 820GH - 600GH - 820GH
I've been playing with cex.io a bit, mostly because of how easy it is to turn a quick profit in speculation/manipulation. I've noticed these, and I'm going to *guess* they are actually related. 1) Downtime is *probably* due to attacks [my guess is they're just overloading the webserver, not actually a bandwidth saturation ddos] 2) See #1 3) Failing over to secondary pool is probably network related (NL servers aren't always the most stable in my experience). Could also be attack based, or even just growing pains since they never really operated a public pool before. 4) The mining server offline and several stales would be related to #3. 5) Also may be related to #3, but also: VARIANCE. Even at 800 TH/s, 3 hour blocks aren't that uncommon. 6) My guess: GHash.io's internal speed is in the ~600 TH/s range. The remaining ~200 may be other miners, or personal miners of the people involved with ghash.io (BTC Guild has a miner that comes & goes at over 100 TH/s, might be using ghash.io as primary since they don't show up on any major public pool when they're not on Guild). When they drop from 820 to 600, that may be their public pool server failing, either actually crashing, or simply not communicating with their backend properly. All of the above are guesses, but they're educated guesses from someone who has been running a pool with multiple servers in multiple regions for 2 and a half years. A lot of the problems you mentioned are extremely likely to stem from the same cause. |
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Some interface changes planned for early November. Specifically, the Dashboard is going to be updated to be less worker-centric, and more PPLNS/earnings centric. Instead of giving you a breakdown of each worker, it will give you a full account summary like it does now at the top, a section for your total speed/accepted/rejected rates, and a section dedicated to PPLNS shifts and recent block payments received. Hopefully, this will make the PPLNS system more intuitive for new users, or even old users who still aren't quite sure how PPLNS works internally.
Part of this update will also be preparing the dashboard for AJAX functionality to allow auto updating of the dashboard stats. It won't be enabled initially, but will be before the end of the month. Users without any workers on PPLNS, or users who do not like the new interface, will be able to revert back to the "classic" dashboard on the Settings page once the new version is added. I've been very anti-AJAX due to "idle tab on your browser" syndrome where users leave the dashboard up all day, sometimes on multiple computers. Now that the database server has been upgraded, and a new API server is almost ready, this shouldn't be an issue anymore, even with how many thousands of people use BTC Guild daily.
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When did you start using Speedy?
It's been enabled by Cloudflare for quite a while I think. When did you start using Speedy?
What are you talking about? |
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No any normal person would not be there mine, until they pay the debts of
So you would say, liquidate and not let them trade out (in business terms)? More an American type of logic... where as if they do have financial issues and they can trade out and everyone gets their btc... is that not a better option than them shutting down and all the users losing out, because some people just don't care? Please do not be offended, I am not suggesting you are American, just it is that type of mentality that I see from them, an observation if you will... I am not American.  Unfortunately, my guess are that the pool will not be back to normal as long as they do not pay honestly earned coins. I do not want others Bitcoins - I want to get my back. and more. Pool speed drops and drops - people do not believe what they write. sorry for my english OK, lets do a little business 101 here... (and some common sense) If there was a theft of coins which appears likely, how would you suggest they pay them back to people who earned them (the members who effectively had their coins stolen by a third party that were held at 50btc)? How do you think they make an income? with the percentages (in the form of commission) as you would figure out with basic understandings of most mining pool business models... So if you keep the above in mind... how would you expect them to cover the outstanding balances with zero income? Unless you *ASSUME* they have other funds hidden somewhere. You could see this as a company seeking bankruptcy protection whilst attempting to trade out of the bad situation so everyone would get paid eventually. Finally here is how I can see it working, if they are honest (do we have any proof of any dishonesty? what happened last time there was an issue like this?) then they would need some form of income for new %s (as a commission) off the top of the hashed/mined coins from here on in, as you can not pay people with money you do not have unless you steal from someone else, which would be rather unethical to me and I would not trust a thief (remember they are claiming theft from them via one means or another, ie they claim to be a victim here also), I do not suspect that their motive is to steal (from past history and) as they are still functional (to a degree) and have not said (like abcpool.co - I know different story but I lost coins there too) that they would close up. To me it looks like they have intentions to trade through this, time will tell and you would be right to think it is a gamble to push hashes their way but in the same breath it may be the only way people will get paid out and for them to grow again. I also hope that if/when the get through this storm they show appreciation to those who stood by them and had faith in their commitment. If they lost user's money, it should be paid out of previous profits they took in. Just like any other pool that has had a theft/hack occur. You either close the pool, or man up and take the loss. If the pool keeps running and people are expected to just give up the coins they've lost as a result of 50BTC's failed security, this thread should be moved to the Scammer section instead. |
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Eleuthria do you have any blade backplans laying around?
I'll have to dig through my inventory room. Recently stocked up massively on packing supplies due to ramping up USB sales, and also preparation for next gen (I really hope I'm not waiting til February for that). I want to say there were 2 backplanes leftover, but when I was paying some friends to help clean up the place to provide *some* order to all the boxes, envelopes, packing materials, etc., I think that box got shifted somewhere not readily available. |
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Congrats on exceeding the 1PH/s mark! things can only get better right? BTCguild has 32% of the network, Ghash.io has 20%, does that mean if you btcguild and ghash went down someone could take over the network?
I don't think BTC Guild is actually at 32%. If you look at our luck chart, it's amazing how massive our luck has been the last 3 days, including a few record breaking shifts that paid *more than double* 100% PPS to shares submitted during those shifts. Either way..knocking off > 50% of the network doesn't make a 51% attack a trivial task. They'd still have to have more hash rate than the remaining part of the network combined. Not to mention BTC Guild has servers that are completely hidden to the public which would not go down in an attack, and I highly doubt ghash.io has any publicly exposed servers that would affect their in-house hashing (which is the majority of their hashing). |
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