People are drawn to Ghash.IO primarily because it has a high hash rate which provides quick results (people like instant gratification). The website is slick with the automatically updating stats. It merge mines several coins (perceived value, even if some of those coins are not worth much). There is zero fee. It allows someone to automatically split up the mining proceeds by percentage, for example, for a group buy. There is also the gambling / trading aspect of cex.io which has its own lure. Additionally, and perhaps most hurtful of all is the marketing aspect that incentivises people to advertise for them.

I agree that it is a big threat, and there is no way to know for certain that cex/ghash do not have additional hashpower running on other "unknown" private pools. Knowing that they will hurt themselves if they dump too much into cex.io at once. It is also unknown just what the ratio of their own hash power to individual's personal hash power pointed at that pool is. The other threat is that there is no representative (that I have seen anyway) that interacts with the community. They do not seem to be publicly interested in cleaning up their name in many of the threads about their past with double spending, for example. Ask yourself for a moment - how do they make any money themselves? They charge no fees for trading, minimum fees for withdrawing, very minimal fees for their own hash rate rentals. There is something else going on there, and this puts them in a class by their own.

I do not agree that something "needs to be done" about BTC Guild. The pool admin seems a very standup guy who is himself interested in the health of the community. I think that if it ever did come down to short term personal gain or the community, he would do the right thing for the community, and ultimately his own long-term personal gain as well. The vast majority of the hash power there is voluntary - meaning that people could pull their miners en masse and the pool could instantly be smaller. The pool has also not had the same bursting growth rate as ghash.io, and right now is also the biggest weapon the community has in fighting cex.io if it attempted to run a 51% attack. When bringing up new mining equipment, putting it on any pool other than those two is probably the best thing any of us can do individually, but it doesn't help that (from my testing) the most profitable pool is BTC Guild - in spite of its fees. If I'm in a group buy or trying to get a full return on a piece of hardware, it is silly to mine on a pool that I know will return a lower profit over enough time that I know variance isn't the cause.

Anyway - my 2 cents. I think what the rest of the pools need (other than the top 2) is very clear so I won't spell it out unless someone actually wants me to.

If you would be so kind, could you please explain your reasoning for switching to Slush instead of any other pool? I tried to run my miners there, but there are constant issues with payouts and reward calculations. It is like the opposite of the stability, reliability, and transparency that HHTT had. I want to support a lower hash rate pool, and I don't mind the variance so much, but not at a significant cost in profitability.

Thank you for your input on this!

Four different miners running, each with a single USB Block Erupter, pointed at 4 different pools to compare the real-world profitability of the pools. The start of the experiment is here http://techbypc.com/2013/12/14/experiment-bitcoin-mining-part-6-beginning-experiment/

Just thought I'd update this again.

As of 201401080920 (Eastern US)

    BTC Guild: 0.00361892
    Eligius: 0.00343944
    EclipseMC: 0.00305889
    Ghash.IO: 0.00299150 (0.07122612 GHS * 0.042)

Each pool had a single USB Block Erupter pointed at it starting December 14. At the time GHS was around 0.0735. I find it interesting that even with the loss in vale of GHS that it is still holding its own against EclipseMC.

How is Cex.IO supposed to protect you against a poor password on your yahoo email account?

Eligius has a block with 10,139,820,992 shares a couple days ago. We're a little over half way there.

Edit: Hah! Timing luck! Too bad it is another block with no rewards. Now that was odd.. I saw it say none none and then refreshed a minute later and it was updated.

.105

I'll get it started. 0.4

Not everyone joins a pool knowing its advantages and disadvantages. I think most people join initially because of popularity. A pool needs to have an attractive quality to pull people away from a popular pool. A selling point of Slush is that it is the oldest pool and well established. To see quirks like this is disappointing at best and reason to switch pools at worst. Most people who are hashing at lower hash rate pools want to see the network diversified, and I should think others would want to keep people hashing here for the same reason. I recently switched some of my hashing here from HHTT since it closed, so I am new to this pool, and the recent quirks don't speak stability. I'm willing to wait it out, and I'm not "crying" about anything. I would just prefer to not be seeing a consolidation of hash power in just two pools, which is what I think quirks like this will cause.

I'd much rather see BTC Guild on top than Ghash.IO though.

.02

I noticed that too.

Before the publication of the first demand you should send to us

Is the word publication just a poor translation or does it have some kind of significant meaning in this context? I would take the word demand as the legal definition and therefore to make any withdrawal you should have this information sent to them first. I wouldn't call clicking a withdrawal button a publication though. The word "should" is also different than must, so does this mean that they will allow withdrawals until an account gets flagged in some way as suspicious? I really don't know what they are trying to do. Probably just cover themselves if a government comes after them, but otherwise it will be business as usual.

It would be nice if one of our lurking lawyers gave us some unofficial advice on this.

.05

I had forced difficulty, but not at 1. Just tried setting 1 now moving five blades over to it. It seems to be artificially inflating my successful share rate with a bunch of worthless low difficulty shares. My DOA is 25% after running it a bit. It is better in that my observed hash rate is better, so if I were to get a share I suppose it would be better, but the DOA rate is still crazy high compared to my other equipment.

Edit: My DOA is now steady over 32%

I was not able to get the blades to work very well. I tested it against the latest P2Pool and my blades locally just the other day. The lowest DOA I saw was 25% but it was continuing to increase so I sent them back to a normal pool. If anyone has a solution for this I'd be glad to test it out.

Thanks.

Edit: I should say I have successfully run BFL, USB BLock Erupters, and a Chili on my own P2Pool node.

Trust is an issue, but I think diversity is a more important one. We just saw HHTT close its doors and I expect some other pools will as well when they experience similar longer periods of dry luck. I would feel a lot better about renting temporary hash power if it were going somewhere other than ghash.io, for example.

By mining directly they mean generated block payouts such as is done with P2Pool or Eligius. You are fine with Multipool which transfers payment to cryptsy rather than using it as a generation address.

Just set all your payouts from multipool.us to cryptsy and set autosell there. I personally don't do this for all coins since there are some I'd like to hold.

I don't know of any other sites, sorry.

It wasn't free for him to provide the service to you either. In my opinion he has no moral obligation to do this for any of us. He certainly has no contractual obligation to do anything. He mined in his pool and lost the same future reward potential as everyone else with the shutdown.

On the blade configuration, make the second value the same as the first value. For example:

Ports: 8330,8330
Server address: 192.168.0.111,192.168.0.111
User pass: be1:be1,be1:be1

Thought some of you would like to gloat now that Ghash.IO/Cex.IO price is down

As of 201312302325 (Eastern US)

BTC Guild: 0.00251479
Eligius: 0.00245285
EclipseMC: 0.00235689
Ghash.IO: 0.00166406(0.04497477 GHS * 0.037)