Yes, hidden workers will still mine.  They just won't be visible on your charts (if you unhide it, they will show up again).

It's something I'll consider.  If it's a big annoyance, one current workaround is hiding that worker.  Hidden workers will not generate idle notification emails.  Idle miner code is something I have been meaning to rewrite the script for to find a more efficient way to scan through the last share times of workers, so once I get to that (right now my focus is DDoS mitigation + new colocation), I will likely fit in the per-worker notification settings.

We have not found a block recently.  This is not directly related to the DDoS (other than losing speed = longer block solve time on average).  They just happen to be occurring simultaneously.

Long term would be a user that has been mining for more than a month or two in this circumstance.

About 45 minutes ago a DDoS attack was launched against the pool.  My alarms woke me up shortly after.  For the last ~40 minutes I have been actively launching proxy servers and changing DNS settings while redirecting traffic to backends without exposed IPs.  I am sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused.

Long term BTC Guild users:  Please contact me (webmaster@btcguild.com) to request direct access to one of the backend servers.   There has been a private server for a long time reserved for high speed users.  I am now ready to launch 1-2 additional private servers designed for slower miners who have been with the pool for a long time.

Sorry that the website has been up and down for the last few hours.  Last night I added some extra defense to eliminate the effectiveness of the person that was basically running a distributed password scan (posting leaked database details from other websites and trying to use them to login to BTC Guild accounts).  These attacks were lagging the site badly due to how hard it was hitting the database with constant login attempts.

I woke up this morning seeing a new attack, this time just flooding the server over port 80 passing complete garbage through, rather than trying to log in.  Whether it is the same person or not, I am not sure at this time.

Mining should not have been affected during these attacks, everything has been limited to taking down the website so far.

Well, it was close, but it looks like I won't hit the goal of having inventory on hand Monday.  A few big orders in the last 2 days have sold all but 14 units on hand.  I have more units on order to continue filling orders.  Any order placed as of this post should be shipped out on Monday.  Any orders after this post, save for maybe a few small ones, will likely not ship out until later this week (Thursday-Saturday) depending on when the next shipment shows up.

I'm sorry I couldn't reach the goal of a 24-hour turnaround for the week of July 22nd, it's hard to guess what demand will be after such a huge initial rush, and the last thing I want is to be sitting on a huge inventory of Erupters when the new Blades/Mini Blades come out (which will also be offered by BTC Guild unless something changes between now and when they become available).

Had a great time on Just-Dice today.  Spent a few hours, quite a few coins, and gave people a decent show to watch while still ending up breaking even.

Yes, EU is safe to mine on again.

I'm still going over what just happened.  This has happened one other time with EU servers, and its related to losing connection to the database server.  However, this SHOULD have marked the server as dead for miners!  When this happened on the US servers (attack), within about a minute miners marked the pool as dead.  But on EU, for some reason the pool is continuing to respond to miners when it shouldn't be.

The servers were rebooted and are working normally again.  I am going to work on a temporary workaround (auto server restart on MySQL failure) tonight.  Better to have the server go offline and restart than end up losing 30 minutes worth of work.

It's really not a big problem.  Yesterday I pushed out every on-hand unit that was ready to ship.  Next batch arrives today, and on Monday I expect to ship out every backordered unit with a little leftover to finally get into a 24-hour turn around (exception being I will probably run out before my next batch arrives, but for at least a day I should be ahead of the orders).

Shipping individually does generate the least profit, but it's still profitable and worth the time to do it.  No need to feel bad .



Update related to the top post on the page:

New colocation plans are getting finalized, equipment being ordered.  Hopefully by the end of the month, US Stratum servers will be relocated to a better datacenter without packet loss "hiccups" like what we saw the other day, and some extra work done to harden the connection against attacks with upstream filtering.  The current servers will stay online for a few weeks to allow DNS to update and people to reconnect to the new servers.

Holy thread necro...

There's a sticky at the very top of this forum that provides the useful information for mining pools.  It may not include as much information as the link on this thread, but it is everything a miner needs to make an informed choice.  It's also actually kept up to date.

The ISP for US based Stratum had a few hiccups earlier (packet loss).  Everything seems to be back to normal now.  Logs aren't showing any signs of hostile activity, so right now I'm blaming it on the DC.

Work is still being done to relocate all the US based servers to a DC that has historically had 100% uptime for the pool in the past.  More information on that hopefully next week.

A whole bunch of orders just got picked up by USPS, over 100 if I counted correctly.  Check your Order Status to get tracking information.  If you see weird tracking information, check the date.  If it's 2012, it's due to USPS recycling tracking numbers.  Apparently something went wrong in October and a bunch of tracking information wasn't deleted before the number was recycled.  It should get corrected the next time it is scanned in by the post office.

Expanding upon this:  A 1 GH/s miner is doing 1,000,000 Double-SHA256 hashes per second.  It will submit work every 4 seconds (assuming diff=1).  The server does *one* Double-SHA256 hash to verify the work.  Of course, the server is doing that over CPU, but even a CPU (server-grade) is capable of doing a couple million per second.

Just to correct some likely bad info above:  The difference between timestamp and received time is not an indicator of the time it takes the block to propagate.  The timestamp for a block is part of the work miners do, even if it takes them 30 seconds to complete that work.  It's also defined by the system clock of the node (pool server) that created the work.

ASICMINER's solo poolserver probably has some minor time shifting (ntp would fix that), or their setup is creating work in bulk and caching it for as long as its valid.  The only downside to work caching/not updating work frequently is you'll end up losing out on additional transaction fees.  If it's just a drifting system clock, that's not a huge concern unless it drifts significantly away from actual time.

Updates to the store.  Shipping queue position now updates every time an order is shipped, rather than in batches when I manually update the queue.  Additionally, the backorder queue is doing the same, so you can see the backorder queue continue to drop as orders move out .

Maybe if you're including "p2pools", but most actual pools are running custom frontends, not counting the huge number of abandoned/insignificantly small pools which are running the open source pushpool frontend  from late 2011.

It's been a LONG couple of days!  Fixed .

Funny enough, I learned about Bitcoin from the Security Now podcast.  While testing chips I was going crazy, so I've been listening to podcasts and audio books.  For fun yesterday, I turned on the old Security Now podcast that goes over Bitcoin.  Steve mentioned in the video (sounding quite amazed) that the network speed was estimated to be 186 GIGA hashes per second at the time.  Amazing how far it's come in 2 and a half years.  Each of the top 50 users of the pool are now faster than the entire network was back then.