Back to a positive luck for the difficulty!

Update on Block Erupters:  My shipment arrived yesterday.  Over 1,000 units went out in the last 24 hours, clearing all US backorders, and a huge portion of international.  All remaining international orders should be out by Saturday, and US orders are being filled in under 24 hours.  Prices will likely see a drop on Monday after the backorder is cleared, giving me a weekend to relax (at least from the packing side of things).

Still no word on additional coupon units from ASICMINER yet.  I am considering my own coupon/discount program for past orders after the next price drop.  It won't be quite as drastic as what ASICMINER's coupons are, but it won't be something that's exclusive to a fraction of past orders either.  Expect more details after all orders (including international) are out the door.

Just a word of warning...Digital Ocean's connection stability is about as reliable as a shared hosting provider (translation: worse than home connections) based on the last few months I've used them for an IRC bouncer.

Avalons firmware produces more stale shares than alternative miners (Block Erupters, FPGAs, GPUs running at moderate intensity), similar to how the BFL FPGAs (not sure on ASICs) did.  This is part of the reason they were terrible at working with p2pool (although some improvements to p2pool have been made to apply a moderate fix).

My understanding is the reason for this is the strings of chips are not asynchronous.  There is no way to interrupt their current job, so when a longpoll/new block message hits, the chips will finish their current piece of work before moving to the new one.  As a result, they'll be submitting stales from that previous work since there was no way to force them to update mid-process.

I posted a similar guideline in Slush's thread when somebody was asking.  My rule of thumb for miners has always been:

Minimum Diffulcty = Closest power of 2 (rounded down) to your GH/s.  1-2 = 1.  2-4 = 2.  4-8 = 4.  8-16 = 8, etc.

This keeps your SPM between 15 and 30 (based on how close you are to the next cutoff).  This happens to be right in line with what almost every pool currently uses for vardiff.

General rule of thumb I always recommend on manual difficulty selection:  Round your GH/s down to the closest power of 2.  So 1-2 GH/s = 1.  2-4 = 2, 4-8 = 4, 8-16 = 8, etc.  In this case, 108 GH/s would be rounded down to 64, as you've attempted .  Using this method, you'll end up between 15 and 30 shares per minute, depending on how close you were to the power of 2, which also happens to be roughly what most pools use for vardiff.

Yes, they can, but there's a reason getwork is not recommended.  As posted earlier, there is currently a plan to get rid of getwork entirely in the next month or so.

Luck %'s fixed (will start showing once a shift that only took place during new difficulty is closed).  Was out of the house for the first part of the day when the difficulty changed.

Android wallet users with a locked address:  At least for now, as posted above, your best course of action is mining on a new account temporarily.

If you have a locked wallet from an android address, please do the following:  Send an email to webmaster@btcguild.com with a message signed using the private key of the locked address.  Please use the following message template:

"This is [Username of BTC Guild Account].  Please unlock my bitcoin wallet that has the following address: [Address]."

In your email to webmaster@btcguild.com, include the above sentence, and then include the output of the message signing for the above sentence so I can verify.  Since doing the above would require someone to have access to both your wallet private key AND your BTC Guild account, the above is adequate proof of identity to unlock the wallet (since anybody signing that message already has unlimited access to the funds in that wallet).

Minor pool update:  If you're having problems accessing the website, make sure you're using "www.btcguild.com" and not just "btcguild.com".  I was working on consolidating the last getwork servers, and a DNS entry was updating too quickly.



Semi-major pool update:  The getwork protocol has been lingering on for the last few months.  It still has around 4 TH/s, and it's hard to turn off a server providing that.  With the pool now hitting 110 TH+, that means getwork now represents less than 4% of the pool.  Users still on getwork should update to Stratum immediately.  Users with hardware that requires getwork (ASICMINER blades) should use a Stratum proxy.  A full guide for setting up a Startum proxy will be uploaded this week.

At this time, I expect to be turning getwork off entirely either by September 15th, or when the getwork is less than 2% of the pool's overall speed (which would happen around the time the pool hits 200 TH/s).  Given the last month's growth, the 200 TH/s number might happen before September 15th.

Send an email to webmaster@btcguild.com with the username and I can prepare a special confirmation link for your phone.

Prices will eventually drop, once there isn't an already huge waiting list.  We were only able to place our orders with ASICMINER starting yesterday, and now waiting for it to show up.  However, I will not even bother trying to compete with people offering erupters at .31-.35.  That simply isn't worth my time.  Up until ASICMINER ran out of inventory, the pool was starting to have a 24-48 hour turnaround on orders, and speeding up.  The goal with this next inventory batch is that BTC Guild will be able to offer a 24-hour turnaround once the queue is filled.

Unused coupons for Block Erupters (64 in total) were redistributed.  These now go back to Order #894.  As stated previously, there has been intent shown by ASICMINER to eventually extend the coupon program, but as of this time there is no way for resellers to obtain additional coupon units beyond what was initially provided.

The envelope with customs information includes a small invoice form.  The conversion rate used was $30 per Block Erupter on all orders.  If for some reason they need a 2nd copy from you, I can email you a copy of the invoice (but the one inside the package should work).

A miner is doing millions/billions of calculations per second (1 MHash/sec = 1,000,000 hashes per second).  Bitcoin has no concept of progress or state, each hash is an independent chance to win, just like a random lottery ticket.  So yes, while you will "interrupt" the calculation, what you'd interrupt is a single hash, which takes a millionth of a second or less to compute.  No significant loss.

BTC Guild has supplied the 1100 coupon units it received, almost all of them have already shipped (75 are not yet claimed).  This accounts for approximately 25% of the orders that were placed at the 1.05 BTC price.  I have heard from ASICMINER that they will be extending this coupon/promotion, but have not set any dates.

As far as I'm aware, all resellers are operating under the same situation;  They have 'X' units available to fill coupons already, and have distributed or are in the process of distributing them.  As of this time we're not able to order extra units to supply those coupons to the remaining orders.

A patch is going to be deployed to US Stratum servers in the next hour.  The bitcoind version used on the new servers apparently has a bug that is causing it to lock up randomly, which is why a few users had problems this morning, and some other users had problems a few days ago.  I'm rolling back to a known stable version.  Hopefully this process can happen without any disconnects/performance impacts.

Luckily this lockup has not happened frequently, and the pools/DNS generally do a good job at getting users moved to a still working server when it happens.


UPDATE:  The bitcoind replacement has happened, and it appears that no server disconnected users/stopped responding during the process!

It means there were only 700 nodes *connected to blockchain.info*.  There are significantly more nodes than that in total.

Current thinking:  13 BTC/ea for #1-3, 12 BTC/ea for #4-7, 11 BTC/ea for #8+ (as in, if you order 10, it's 3 @ 13, 4 @ 12, and 3 @ 11 = 120 BTC).

Based on comments in #btcguild, this is roughly $100/GH (11~14 GH/s are the rates people are getting).  As usual, this price already includes shipping+handling (Domestic).  I would not be selling them international (too expensive).

At this time, I do not believe the current generation of ASICMINER Block Erupter Blades will be added to the store.  Due to the low RoI expected, the knowledge that newer ones ARE coming out soon, and the very non-user friendly nature of them (no racks, no cases, no active cooling included), I will probably wait until their next generation of blades (and mini blades) before adding new products to the store.

If you're determined to buy them, I may offer private sales under the condition that you understand these are targeted at advanced users, and you will need to add your own active cooling/mounting for the units.

No other reseller is giving out coupons to every single order yet.  We were only given a limited amount (a little less than 30% of the total units shipped by BTC Guild @ 1.05).

I have finally heard back from friedcat about their inventory issues, and part of their response included that the coupon program *will* be extended beyond those units, but not immediately.