Good job AntPool, continuing to mine absurd numbers of empty blocks and contributing to backlogs on the network!  You just mined 2 empty blocks in under 10 minutes.  The fact that miners continue to feed you hashpower when you do this shit so often is appalling.

Haven't checked your math on the miner power consumption, but just to add:  The power needed to COOL that amount of power sucking equipment is immense.  Cooling efficiency decreases when equipment is packed more densely.

It comes from solved blocks, which Slush is failing at pretty hard right now.

I know it's a joke, but you have no idea how many emails I got over the last 3 months of people saying they forgot their username and password (and their email didn't match any account ever registered), but were adamant they had multiple BTC in their balance and were demanding help.

Except even running your own p2pool node will have issues with rejected/orphaned shares.  Running your own full node and solo mining at that speed is much better than p2pool.

There's a couple thousand accounts with less than 0.01 but more than 0.0001.  There's a few (less than 100) very old accounts with no email, no wallet, etc. assigned to them with more than 1 BTC owed, that haven't been logged in to since 2011-2012.

There will always be *some* chance involved in orphan blocks.  But he's lyingdishonest in saying that you don't have direct impact over the behavior.  If your orphan rate is above ~1%, you have something wrong.


EDIT:  9 of his last 200 blocks have been orphaned.  There is CLEARLY something wrong with either the hardware, software, or network level for Slush.

I'd assume something else is the issue.  I highly doubt he has more active miners than ever, just higher speed ones.  There's way fewer small fries out there today than there were a year or more ago.  In a proper implementation of vardiff, the speed of connected miners should have absolutely no impact on actual server load, only the number of miners in general.

More likely it's just Slush's pool backend not updating to other blocks on the network fast enough (or being really slow in releasing its own blocks).  He's the only one having such absurd orphan rates, the problem is on his end.

After giving it a lot of thought, the FINAL, deadline for withdrawals of BTC on BTC Guild, as well as any other information exports, will be

December 12, 2015


This date represents 180 days from the initial closure announcement.  It also covers the majority of the holiday buying season, where I expect there will be an uptick in the number of people trying to find the coins they had stashed away on various sites.  This effectively *doubles* the original time frame given for withdrawals which was already extremely generous.  It will also mean that more than 10% of the total time that BTC Guild existed was devoted entirely to letting people get their coins out after the service was closed.

The previous warning regarding CSV exports is no longer applicable.  The new "lite" site will still have this capability.  However, it is still recommended that users utilize the CSV export feature for their own tax/accounting records.  Once the "lite" version of the site goes down, this information will no longer be available to you.

EDIT:  Added CSV export options to the Dashboard page so it's more obvious (used to be on Settings page).

Good luck with that.  Miners already get uppity over fees of 1-3%.  Adding an extra 0 is sure to go over just fine with them.

I just deleted 1.3 million accounts from the database.  These accounts all had *zero* earnings during their entire history at BTC Guild, either because they never mined at all, had only submitted bad shares (trying to run a scrypt miner on a BTC pool), or had only mined during shifts that had not found any blocks.


EDIT: 

Just to clairfy:  Only accounts that had never earned even 0.0000001 BTC were deleted.  If the account earned a single satoshi in its lifetime, it is still present in the database even if the full balance has been withdrawn.

The pool website is undergoing some modifications to create a "lite" version that can be used to continue facilitating withdrawals after the servers are pulled.  Withdrawals may be paused occasionally during this process, but they will be queued and sent out within 24 hours (though most likely they'll still go out every 6 hours).


Namecoin has been completely removed from the site at this time, no more withdrawals will be processed.



If you have not downloaded a CSV export of your BTC earnings/withdrawals, you should do so within the next 72 hours.  The "lite" version of the site will not have your complete history available, only a snapshot of total earned, total paid, and balance owed.  Accounts with no balances owed will be completely removed from the "lite" version of the site.

2nd item in the FAQ:




Fourth item on the terms of service:



Sixth item on the terms of service:


Seventh item on the terms of service:



As you can tell by the giant red notice on the site, I've actually continued to allow withdrawals well beyond the 90 days, currently more than 30 days beyond previously established closing process timelines.  Even beyond that, I loosened up withdrawal rules beyond what was previously promised, removing the transaction fee (0.0001) for amounts under 0.01, and instead just making 0.0001 the minimum at no fee.

I also never exercised the account pruning option in the terms of service.  Accounts were only pruned once (on accounts dating back to 2011 when the pool was proportional and donation based), but all data was kept in a separate database and is restored upon request if somebody comes back to an old account.

I have no pity for anybody who tried to use the pool as a long term storage of coins.  So far the pool has given people FOUR MONTHS of time to withdraw, and continues to do so.  Additionally, if you had looked at the pool topic which I continue to bump infrequently, the very last post (2 days before this garbage topic) states that withdrawals were reduced to once every 6 hours.  The pool pays above average transaction fees, and over the last 2 weeks it was occasionally paying a TX fee higher than the amount being withdrawn, since withdrawal fees on amounts under 0.01 were removed completely after the closure.


You got no reply to your email because by the time I looked at your email you had already received your BTC.


EDIT:  And as stated above:  I have ALWAYS and *often* warned people to not leave balances on my pool or any other pool.  They are not wallet services.  BTC Guild took that a step further by eliminating the ability to request precise payouts.  You either got a 0.01 interval via automatic payment or the entire balance.  This was done purposely to eliminate anybody attempting to use the pool as a wallet.

The servers are being pulled from colocation in about a week.  I'll be creating an even more stripped down version of the site for continuing to handle withdrawals.  Currently withdrawal requests are processed every 6 hours.  After the servers are pulled, they will only be processed manually every few days.

https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv-mining

It's only happened twice that I know of, both times were luckily caught early, though the first incident was 6 confirmations long.  One thing to note is that the "1 tx blocks" that AntPool, F2Pool, BTCChina, and a few others generate are the result of SPV mining, which causes transactions to take even longer to confirm because the pools aren't doing their jobs of processing transactions.  SPV mining is shortcutting the validation of blocks in order to try to gain an extra second or so of mining time on a block switch, but it can only be done by building an empty block based on the last block header (which is *assumed* to be a valid block but as we saw in July, isn't always the case).  

Note that if you're saving 2 seconds on every block switch, you're going to get about 0.3% more mining time in the long run (2 seconds every 600 on average).  The tradeoff is that you're slowing down the network's ability to process transactions by sending miners empty blocks.

As Kano has pointed out in the past:  Properly optimized pool software running on good hardware makes more impact than SPV mining.  CKpool and BTC Guild were frequently able to push work out for a new block faster than pools that use SPV mining techniques, and neither of us had to resort to short-cutting block validation in order to do it.

At least on my end:  It's because Antpool (and unless they changed, Discus Fish/F2Pool as well) still engages in SPV mining, meaning that they are not relying on a fully validating Bitcoin node to mine.  Which has caused them to fork the chain once in the past already, and means that they mine empty blocks at a significantly higher rate because they will move on to a new block header before their bitcoin node actually sees a new block.

SPV mining is something that people should NOT be okay with.  There's no excuse for it, and it is directly harmful to the network for such huge amounts of the hash rate to be mining on pools which will start mining a new block without validating the previous one.

Of course, it's easy to support a blocksize increase if you're willing to use SPV mining instead of running a proper full node at all times.  It also helps when the majority of the hashrate is local to your country's shitty internet giving you an advantage in orphan races caused by larger blocks.