Can you screenshot and PM me what you're seeing?  Honestly, I've never seen a captcha with cloudflare, only a javascript interstitial when attack mode is on.  If you're getting these captchas and errors a lot, it sounds like your IP is on the same subnet as some very bad people.

Not quite.  The only thing that really matters is:  Your hashrate vs Network hash rate.

Beyond that it is only variance, pool reliability, and pool fees.  If the pool you're in is small relative to network hash rate, you'll have more variance (which can be good or bad).  But your expected return is dictated by your percentage of the overall network speed.

The website has been getting "attacked" on & off all day, yes.  I have to occasionally switch the settings to 'Under Attack' mode which uses those browser verification pages.  The pool itself is unaffected though.

How long have you been mining?  The pool hasn't found a block in about an hour and a half.  And a heads up on PPLNS, your shares takes ~8 hours to be fully paid as blocks come in (which also means if you stop mining, your earnings will still be ticking up for about 8 hours).

My Avalon is setup as: stratum+tcp://stratum.btcguild.com:3333 and works great.  Are you sure you put in your worker name correctly?  Also put a password like '123', it might not work if you have it blank.

Which is funny because the vast majority of their business that even put them on the map was people moving money to exchanges.  When they were posting about their record growth rate in 2011, their timeline was almost a perfect mirror of the BTC:USD exchange rate.

Yes, the getwork server isn't responding at the moment, trying to fix it.  You absolutely need to upgrade to the Stratum Proxy though, because the getwork server will be shut down within the next few weeks.  How did you start the proxy?  By default it tries to connect to slush's pool.

A few false positives may have been banned during this latest round of additions to the site security.  If you're getting a cloudflare error related to a ban, send me a PM with your IP and I will fix it.


As posted previously, the website performance is not tied to the pool performance in any way.  If you can't load the website at all, but your miners still work, you are fine.  The only time to be worried would be:
A) The pool isn't letting you mine
B) The website is showing you inactive while your miners are running

Website is under attack again by somebody trying to break into accounts using usernames/passwords from database leaks from what looks like hundreds of unrelated websites. I'm working on ways to prevent this attack from slowing down the website still.

As of right now, the website is now in 'under attack' mode with Cloudflare, which seems to have eliminated the slowdown.


These attacks are only affecting the website frontend, not the pool servers.

No plans to support GBT.  It uses significantly more bandwidth for no gains.  GBT has some potential for semi-decentralized mining, but at this time no pool has managed to figure out a way to properly implement a method where users can pick their own transactions for a block, meaning it does nothing that Stratum doesn't do for less bandwidth.

Minor update to the website:  Worker minimum difficulty now allows 512 and 1024, due to the ever growing number of miners in the 500GH-1TH/s (or more) range.  No change on the pool software itself, since vardiff already allowed you to go above and beyond these difficulties.

The new block erupters are the same as the old ones, just slightly improved build process.  They're not any faster/efficient.  My inventory is supposed to arrive tomorrow, which will have these minor improvements, to clear out backorders.

EDIT/ADDITION:  There's also no price drop given to resellers yet, but there will be another round of ASICMINER's coupon/promotion program which should provide ALL the remaining 1.05 BTC orders with an extra unity.  Inventory for that program should arrive this week.

Pretty much the above.  The pool is stable, no planned maintenance in the near future.  The only changes recently are either Store related, or the change of default minimum difficulty to 2 for all new workers.  The only upcoming news expected is a brief maintenance next month to migrate the database server to a new machine, and finally killing off the last remaining getwork server.

45 days isn't that long when you're mining on a pool that is a significantly small share of the overall network like Ozcoin.  organofcorti would be needed to give any hard numbers, but being ~15% under in a 45 day period doesn't sound that unusual when dealing with a pool that has only been 2-5% of network hash rate during that time frame.

Every pool has its own slightly different method of estimating miner hash rates.  In the end they can only guess based on submitted shares.  Beyond that, each pool does their own slight tweaks in terms of how long they examine share submissions (longer time frame = larger sample = more accurate), whether or not they include rejected shares, etc.  If you are *always* showing up lower than your actual hash rate, and it's any kind of significant percentage, then it may be a concern.

DGM *should* pay out at expectation given proper implementation and neutral luck.

The pool can check every single share, and should be.  When you submit a share, that is a single hash you found that is appropriate for difficulty.  The pool only has to do one double-sha256 hash to determine if the share was valid or not, whereas the miner (on average) does ~4.2 billion hashes in order to find that share.

No hidden fees on Ozcoin.

While pool downtime will hurt your earnings if you don't have a backup, pool downtime should not actually impact overall pool luck.  Mining has no "memory", so if the pool goes down, there was no "progress" towards the next block that was lost.  Having a proper backup pool is always recommended to avoid downtime affecting you, no matter which pool you use.  For the second part, it is always possible that software bugs are causing the downtime, so there's always a chance that can lead to negative trending luck.

Mining in the pool you like the most (interface, features, etc.) is always preferred for someone who isn't in it as a primary source of income.  The more of a business mining is to you, the more other factors come into play (variance, reliability, notification features, security, etc.).

1) No way to run a subscription service [huge amount of porn revenues are from trial accounts that auto renew at full price]
2) No way to verify age from a Bitcoin address
3) Primary users of Bitcoin know where to find lots of it for free legally
4) Primary users of Bitcoin know where to find the rest of it illegally

The support page for Block Erupters has been updated with new links to bfgminer after Luke-Jr's previous server went offline.  If you were having problems downloading the Win32/Win64 binaries, they should work now.

Just to clarify, MY understanding is "all the old orders" still only applies to the orders sold by BTC Guild at 1.05 BTC, not 0.60/0.50.  That is the main reason I'm holding off on distribution, because I have no idea how many are showing up (they just said they're sending the rest).

ASICMINER did confirm that we'll be getting coupon units for all the old orders, but I'm not distributing those until I actually have them (my understanding is they either haven't shipped, or only shipped out in the last 24 hours).

Our old friend, the idiot who has hundreds of thousands/millions of username/password leaks and a botnet is back, doing a mass distributed login attempt.  Added a few more twists & turns to the login process to identify his attack before it even bothers connecting to the database and verifying the login information.  Hopefully the site performance impact should be gone now.

9,732 as of this post .