I've received this question by email and on reddit, so just felt the need to put it here as well.

Q: Can you confirm that you haven't been subjected to any national security letters, or any other subpoena that you're not allowed to publicly talk about?

A: BTC Guild has not received any notice, information request, subpoena, or similar instrument.  The only contact BTC Guild has had with a government agency is the IRS, California Franchise Tax Board, and Nevada Payroll authorities (I can't recall exact departments in NV at this time), all related to, obviously, paying the taxes the business owed.

The only partial exception to this is a subpoena that was received in early 2014 related to a lawsuit against Mt. Gox which requested information related to possible hidden accounts/mining activity they may have run through BTC Guild.  The response involved no information about pool users, only confirmed, based off the specifics provided in the subpoena, that there were no BTC Guild accounts owned by Mt. Gox and its related entities/officers which could be identified by the wallets and IP ranges the subpoena identified, and that to the best of my ability, there were no accounts on BTC Guild which were owned by Mt. Gox and its related entities.

There will be vetting of interested buyers.  The last thing I want to do is sell the pool, only to have it turn into a Goxxing 2 years down the road and take my name down with it tangentially.  Obviously there is no way I can guarantee this, but I will do my best to make sure the team that takes it over appear to be capable.

This is a small update, and is reflected on the website.  There is already interest being shown by multiple parties, at least two of which appear to be seriously interested, in purchasing BTC Guild.

While I absolutely recommend users prepare to switch pools, it *may* not be needed.  If the pool is sold prior to November 30th, or is in the final stages of negotiation, then the pool will continue to operate, hopefully without any downtime in the transition to new management.

Manual payout has been adjusted to only take a 0.0001 fee for payouts under 0.01.  Automatic payouts will be adjusted to send the full amount rather than the exact amount specified before the weekend is over.

Slush does not have any presence on his own pool thread (or the forum itself), continues to use a broken payout method even after saying he was going to change to a proper unhoppable method, and redirected a DDoS at BTC Guild in the past by pointing his DNS to my servers.

Correct.  Unless the pool is sold, users will need to move miners by November 30th.  The remaining 60 days are there for users to claim any balances left on their accounts.

Miners may wish to leave now, but it is possible that BTC Guild continues to operate under new management and the full closure does not happen.

After many months of consideration, I have finally made the choice to announce the planned closure of BTC Guild.  Below, I've outlined the closure process/timeline and reasons that this decision was made.



Closure Timeframe and Process

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As identified in the support section and in the 2nd post on this thread, BTC Guild has had an official policy for the amount of time that will be given in the event of closure.  The official date that BTC Guild will cease all business is January 31, 2015.  This post is the start of the identified 3 months of warning.

- Effective immediately, registrations are closed to new users.
- BTC Guild mining servers will remain online until November 30, 2014.
- After the mining servers shutdown, manual withdrawals between 0.001 and 0.009 will no longer have a fee deducted.  Manual withdrawals will be available for balances as low as 0.0005, with a fee of 0.0001 deducted if it is under 0.001.
- Users will have until 11:59 PM (PST) on January 31, 2015 to withdraw any remaining balances on their account.

The above timeline may change if BTC Guild is sold prior to the planned date of closure.



Main Reasons for Closure

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1) Risk/cost of a successful attack against the pool.  As pooled mining in general is shrinking due to large manufacturers creating private farms, the potential revenue for the pool has gone down as expected.  While the pool is still very profitable, the amount of time it would take to recover from an attack has increased due to the overall share of the network shrinking.

BTC Guild has, to date, never been successfully hacked.  However, I have seen a rise in attack attempts, and things like Heartbleed/Shellshock which show that efforts are being put into compromising common Linux services if possible.  Neither of those attacks had any affect on BTC Guild, but they were both reminders that under BTC Guild's own code, there are many services which could be a doorway into the pool's servers if a vulnerability was discovered.

One successful attack could cost close to a year of pool revenue, maybe more depending on what happens in the mining landscape over that period of time.  If something else happened in that time (subsequent attack or regulation forcing closure), it would mean continuing to operate the pool beyond this point has cost me more money than it might potentially make in the rest of its lifetime.


2) US government/regulators are already taking stances against specific business types in Bitcoin, applying requirements which would be impossible for BTC Guild to operate under if they attempt to extend regulation into pooled mining, either directly or indirectly due to unclear definitions.  Nobody will mine on a pool which requires them to provide personally identifiable information when they can change a single line in their configuration to point elsewhere.

Additionally, state regulators are starting to make noise about Bitcoin.  New York is the first to publicly put anything forward, but there are 49 other states which can put their own spin on things.  Due to the ability for states to establish a nexus for businesses dealing with their state's residents, it is a scary landscape to continue operating in.

I have no intention of leaving the US myself, and given the recent history of the US when it comes to online businesses, I wouldn't feel safe simply moving the business legal entity to another country while continuing to live in the US myself.



Aquisition and Users's Privacy/Funds

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In the event that BTC Guild is acquired prior to closure, users will not have their mining history and withdrawal history transferred to the new owner.  All balances up to the date of aquisition will be retained by myself, and a separate service will be made available to claim any funds owed.  I am unwilling to compromise on this, because I refuse to do anything where it puts the users of the pool at risk of not receiving what they've earned under my watch.



Pool Recommendations

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For users looking for a new home for their miners, I highly recommend BitMinter, Eligius, and p2pool.  I do not recommend Slush over any of those 3 options, and I actively encourage users to not use Discus Fish or GHash.io.  Other smaller pools exist which are run by honest people, but due to their size, it is difficult to recommend them to the average miner.


Closing Words

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When I got into Bitcoin back in March of 2011, I never expected anything that we've seen over the last 3 and a half years.  I had never built a computer before, never run a server beyond a Gentoo PC in a spare bedroom, and never setup a website that experienced even 0.1% of the traffic BTC Guild gets on an average day.

Bitcoin and BTC Guild have both radically changed my life.  While I am closing BTC Guild, I still plan to remain a part of the Bitcoin community.  I do believe, even in the face of over-regulation, that Bitcoin will continue to grow and become more useful and usable.  I just feel that it is time to move on from BTC Guild, and take pride in the fact that BTC Guild's closure can show that not all Bitcoin businesses end with somebody stealing funds from their users, either by "getting hacked" or outright theft.

Firefox isn't that great on Mac.  I prefer Chrome, then Safari, then Firefox, in that order.

It works in a way that is completely unreliable and poorly calculated.  It looks at the blocks completed in the last 24 hours, and the shares submitted to hit those blocks, and divides it.  All shares on the current block are completely ignored, meaning bad luck on the 24-hour period doesn't reflect that actual time the pool spent having bad luck.

That box is also next to every other page you have open, including ones which have absolutely no Flash on them.  But again:  This is what you get for using Yosemite+Safari less than a month after it's released.  A buggy piece of software.

EDIT:  It's also next to things which aren't even websites (com.apple.internetaccounts).

Slight correction:  The site "uses flash" if you're not logged in, since the front page has a YouTube embed of the We Use Coins video.  No other page has it.

Considering BTC Guild doesn't use Flash in any way, I fail to see how that could solve anything.

And your "napkin math" calculations are very close to the reported luck for the last month.  Who'd have thought that actual math trumps people's gut feelings?

I can't even recognize what browser you're using your screenshotlow quality picture of your monitor.  I'm going to guess Safari since it's in the other processes, though why that icon isn't next to https://www.btcguild.com (or why the hell your process monitor is even showing a specific website address).

Sounds like Yosemite's latest update + whatever browser you're using have a bug in their JavaScript implementation.  The PPLNS stats page can put a lot of strain when initially loading due to the amount of data in the table as well as the chart that is drawn.  Once it's done, it shouldn't be using any.  Welcome to why I've lost a ton of faith in Apple over the last year.  They keep releasing OS updates with a TON of issues that take a few months to sort out.

And BTC Guild, GHash, and BitMinter.  About a dozen gambling sites before any pools as well.  AFAIK nobody had paid up yet because doing so is just plain stupid.

It takes 12 hours for a share to fully mature (go through 10 shifts), meaning if you turned your miner off right now, you'd continue getting payments for 12 hours before it stopped.  Adding that to your currently already paid rewards, you're basically on track for the expected payout for your hash rate over the course of a week (~0.382 at a 2% pool fee).

There's an attack currently hitting the primary stratum server.  As in the past, existing mining connections should not be affected, but restarting a miner or starting up a new one may have difficulties connecting.  If you're currently mining and were planning on restarting a miner/changing a configuration, I would recommend waiting a few hours (or a day) to avoid being unable to reconnect.

EDIT:  The attacks have stopped for now.

People do know how SHA256 behaves.  What we don't know is if someone out there has discovered a way to shortcut/cheat the SHA256 process without the rest of the world finding out.

Not sure on any context of it, I don't didn't even know who the Austin Hill is until googling 'Austin Hill Bitcoin' in response to your post.  I don't do deals with anybody when it comes to BTC Guild for integration of another service or promotion of another service.  The closest was selling ASICMINER gear, but that was purely a retailer<->distributor relationship with no impact on the pool itself.

EDIT:  I get people trying to pitch things to me by email regularly.  I generally delete any email without even opening it if the subject line indicates that is what it's about.

The API hasn't been altered/changed in over a year.