Port 80 getwork is still offline due to a hard drive failure.  I'm hoping to have a new server ready and available within the next 24 hours.

Blockchain.info has always been completely terrible at identifying Deepbit blocks since Tycho doesn't have anything special in his payout address/coinbase (last I looked).

Looks like Deepbit hasn't found any blocks in the last 25 hours.  At ~2400 GH/s and difficulty over 10,000,000, this is not unusual.

Correct.  50%+ doesn't give anybody magical powers.  They can't change the core rules of Bitcoin, they can't take other people's money.  It simply opens up two major attack vectors:

1) They can deny all other blocks except their own since they will always eventually produce the longest block chain.
2) Double spending becomes extremely easy/almost guaranteed to be successful due to #1.


Both of these cannot be done in stealth, there would be signs of something happening.  However, just the fact that it COULD happen if an entity went rogue is a bad situation, and would be harmful to Bitcoin's reputation, even if it never took place (there would be no economic incentive for a pool charging reasonable fees to do something that would kill Bitcoin).  Unfortunately, the problem also shifts to:  Well what if somebody compromised the 50%+ pool and did something evil with that power without the owner's knowledge.

Getwork server (mergedmining/btcguild.com:8332) locked up after namecoind had a segmentation fault (what a surprise, an altcoin that has no active development gets a random segfault).  Restarting and should be back to normal within a few minutes.


UPDATE:  Getwork still suffering, trying to get it back online.  At this point I will reiterate what I've said on IRC for months:  If you refuse to update to Stratum, I recommend moving to a different pool.  I do not have any plans of throwing more hardware at the problem.

I'm hoping after the last few weeks all pools have experienced, he has upgraded his baseball bat to an armored van with mounted turrets.

While I can't answer probability for the luck figures:  The sample size is VERY small (48 blocks).  There's also no guarantee Bitcoinchain has properly credited all of bitparking's blocks (doublec could answer that though).

Ozcoin pays transaction fees with their DGM method.

Social Engineering Notice

The last ~36 hours, somebody has been working to get into BTC Guild colocation by pretending to be me over the phone.  A similar event has also been revealed as happening with doublec's bitparking pool.  I've been on the phone with all the hosting companies over the last two days, making sure they are aware of the issue, and that extra steps are in place to confirm "my" identity before they take any action or reveal any information about my account.  I've also talked with Amazon's EC2 support, and am confident in their security/callback to authorized phone # requirements, as well as changed my Security Questions (which were set over a year ago) to complete random gibberish, so no amount of reserach can reveal the answers.


This notice is to users:  If you receive an email claiming to be from BTC Guild asking you for account information, DO NOT REPLY.  The only time I will ask for any information about your account is if you email me asking for support first and I need more information to locate/identify your account.  NEVER send your password (some users have done this in the past even when it was not asked for).  BTC Guild only sends the following emails:

1) Wallet Change Notification/Confirmation
2) Email Change Notification/Confirmation
3) Idle Miner Alerts


While I highly doubt this will happen (there has been no actual access to the servers, so no database/email leak), it is very possible.  There have been many security breaches of external bitcoin services over the last two years that BTC Guild has existed, and if somebody sent emails to the people in those database leaks, they are probably going to see anywhere from 10-20% of those emails are of users that at one point or another setup a BTC Guild account.

Years of playing World of Warcraft [it kept me sane during college and a bit after] have just instilled the need to troll whenever I see 'rouge' .

I can't resist responding...I'm so sorry friedcat for putting these here, but it's irresistable:

Rouge	Rogue

Fees are not required for high enough priority transactions.  BTC Guild uses default bitcoind (0.8 with 0.8.1 patches) transaction selection, other than providing more than 17 kb per block to high-priority/low fee{or no fee} transactions since we also mine larger than the 250 KB default max size.  (blockmaxsize=475000, blockminsize=250000, blockprioritysize=50000 are the arguments used with BTC Guild's bitcoind instances for most servers)

No shares should have been lost, though the pool did have some brief downtime when the shift was being corrected due to a partial DB lockup during the transaction..  All that happened was a shift failed to close, causing a huge backlog of shares.  You'll notice Shift #5487 (https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=pplns&shift=5487) has over 50 million shares being paid.  The way the payout for PPLNS works is it will distribute the block reward evenly among the last 10 shifts of SHARES, so this shift will receive ~3.5x more of the block rewards until it is closed.  It ends up being what you would expect if it was split over 3 separate shifts.


No pool can gurantee 24/7 uptime, and while I try to get as close to that as possible, it is always recommended you set backup pools just in case!  Since the pools did disconnect users when the DB locked up, miners with backup pools *should* have been routed to their backup pool without issue, resulting in very minimal lost mining time.

Everything is back up, but it looks like the Load Balancer detected health problems with the instances due to the temporary DB locking.  Everything should be back to normal now.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Small bug on the dashboard, showing worker speeds much higher than they should be.  Should be fixed shortly.


EDIT:  The bug caused a PPLNS shift to not close properly.  I'm running the script and have disabled the website temporarily to reduce database load while the shift is manually closed.

Automatic payouts are multiples of 0.01 only.  Manual payouts have no charge.  The previous post said a small chaNge .  It hasn't happened yet, but it won't involve any type of withdrawal fee.

Thanks for another great week of information organofcorti.  Glad to see that BTC Guild is slightly dropping on network hash %, I've been dreading having to start my 51% mitigation steps.

Also loving the violin plots in the full post!

Small website outage for people whose DNS updated quickly.  Website is now being proxied through a colocated server rather than an EC2 server.  Additionally, I have restored the forced-move to HTTPS for users connecting to the website without entering https://.

It's my fault for not getting back into the Support/FAQ sections and getting more documentation added.  I'm hopeful that I can get in write in some new information for users regarding the API, and also answers to common mining related issues.  If all goes well, this weekend it should start to show up in there.

Click on the API key in the settings, it takes you to the API URL with your key, spitting out JSON for your account and worker statistics.