Yes, most the servers are being DDoS'd.  I'm very sorry that it took this long to react, the alarm that should have triggered when the servers went down never made it to my phone.  Working on it now.

Full time job would be 40 hours/week (US).  I'd kill to only work that many hours on my pool, and I'm sure Graet is the same way

1) Automatic payouts are now available in 0.0x intervals.
2) Port 80 stratum may happen, but is not currently planned (the majority of port 80 mining is done by botnets, there are very few legit reasons for miners to require port 80)
3) I have no plans to add merged mining to my Stratum code.  Nothing about any new protocol prohibits merged mining.  However, I would have to do significant research to figure out how to build proper merged mining coinbases, and then rely on running namecoind on the nodes.  That's just yet another point of failure.  NMC is only worth something right now because somebody spent ~50 BTC a few weeks ago to Pump & Dump the price.  It has no future.

Currently automatic payouts are only allowed in 0.10 intervals.  Looking at changing this shortly.

Rebooting the website machine now.  I've made a few config tweaks to apache2 and also some kernel settings.  Hopefully the site should be back to normal once it finishes restarting.

UPDATE: So far things are looking good!
UPDATE2:  One more swift reboot and now things are looking much better!

Website is running extremely slow, but is not down.  Looking into what is happening to cause it to slow down so much.

That's why the 45% step in the 51% plan is removing getwork entirely.

A lot of users still refuse to update their miners to Stratum or go through the trouble of running a stratum proxy for miners that have no support (like phoenix).  I'm very hesitant to cut it off entirely (it's ~3.5 TH/s), so I've just been trying to urge users to move to Stratum by making it less and less obvious how to connect to getwork on the website, and by not offering the level of support that Stratum gets (getwork is noticeably less efficient than Stratum on BTC Guild due to overloaded getwork servers).

The primary getwork server is basically under attack by a very large botnet trying to connect (connections in the 10s of thousands, all trying to open longpolls).  Working on the problem.  Stratum servers as usual are not being affected.

Update:  My previous post is still accurate, there are definitely keyloggers out there that will now look for pool login credentials.  However, after talking to a few victims in the last few days, it looks like the compromised accounts had a few things in common, and the one that sticks out the most is many of them had accounts on other pools and Bitcoin websites dating back to 2011, and used the same credentials.  For those who weren't around in 2011, there were a significant number of Bitcoin related sites that had full database leaks due to MySQL injections, and many of them had either plaintext passwords, or unsalted md5 passwords.

I would recommend anybody who has ever used the same credentials on ANY other site (but especially if it was Bitcoin related) as what they used on BTC Guild to change their BTC Guild password.  I'm working on adding back this functionality to the Settings page, but until then you can request a password reset at https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=reset_password

I've re-enabled a feature that was turned off a year ago when the pool began sending too many emails and ended up being throttled to the point it was unusable.  When changing your email or wallet address from now on, an email will be sent to your current email to confirm the change before it is made active.  It still won't solve the most common attack vector (compromised email + password reset request), but it will prevent a keylogger that only grabbed your pool credentials and not your email credentials.  Just make sure it isn't the same password on both!





The servers for 'stratum.btcguild.com' are actually with OVH in Canada now.  I've had to diversify in recent months to make DDoS attacks less effective (no single point of failure for all servers like the previous colocation).  I'm working on diversifying further with colocation in multiple datacenters.  Until recently the pool was not earning enough to pay for multiple colocations, and I had to wait to see if this was going to be another $32-40 bubble followed by another rapid crash before I invested money in buying more hardware and paying the much higher costs to colocate.

Just another reminder:  Lock your wallet address if you're positive you won't lose control of your wallet!  There are multiple keyloggers out there right now that will look for logins to Bitcoin pools.  If your wallet is locked, even a compromised account is completely safe, outside of the person messing with worker settings/names.  Your coins cannot be withdrawn to another address if your address is locked!

I've received a response from the ASICMINER team.  They are aware of BTC Guild's growing share of the network, and have told me that their next batches of power will be split among more pools or even solo mining to avoid a pool reaching 51%.  They have also identified that selling hardware is on the table if their own share of the network approaches the 51% level.  This doesn't mean the 51% plan in place will change, but it hopefully means the pool will not hit the 45% stage, and any increases in fees if we hit 40% should only last for 1-2 weeks.

I've received a response from the ASICMINER team.  They are aware of BTC Guild's growing share of the network, and have told me that their next batches of power will be split among more pools or even solo mining to avoid a pool reaching 51%.  They have also identified that selling hardware is on the table if their own share of the network approaches the 51% level.  This doesn't mean the 51% plan in place will change, but it hopefully means the pool will not hit the 45% stage, and any increases in fees if we hit 40% should only last for 1-2 weeks.

A majority of users would have to upgrade the software for the cap to be changed.  Even if 99% of mining power moved to the new cap, the old software would not be compatible with the new fork.  It would split the network in two, since users of the old version would see a block that includes a subsidy larger than what is allowed, thus considered an invalid block.

I can't comment on missing shares, other than odds are you have had rejected shares due to connection issues.  It sounds like you're not using the GUI Miner available on the BTC Guild website (Support page), which utilizes the Stratum protocol.  Getwork pools are far more likely to have connection problems than Stratum, and are not highly supported anymore.



mergedmining.btcguild.com:8332 is getwork only.  I do not have any plans to rewrite my Stratum pool software to add merged mining due to complete lack of development in the namecoin project ever since the introduction of merged mining over a year ago.




Sorry for the lack of responses in this thread, it gets no responses most of the time (first one was over a month after my last post), so I do not regularly check it like I should have been.  It's set to my notify list now so hopefully future responses don't have multiple days worth of delays.

LTC uses a different algorithm for proof of work (scrypt instead of SHA256).  Scrypt is [roughly] 1000 times slower than SHA256 on most mining hardware.  As a result, you cannot compare its speed to non-scrypt altcoins.

I have emailed the ASICMINER team about their plans for the distribution of hash rate.  They are supposed to be deploying a significant amount of hash power soon.  Depending on where that hash power is pointed, this entire problem may be gone very soon (at least for the BTC Guild part...ASICMINER may be the new threat though if BFL doesn't get their act together after screwing around for 9 months).

I'd love to hear your idea of how to get users to leave the pool willingly.  Kicking them off entirely is not an option since not all miners have backup pools defined.  Not accepting new users is not an option since the vast majority of speed being added comes from pre-existing accounts.

I'm giving users advance warning of what will happen if the pool continues to grow too fast.  They also have time to move before fee increases actually effect them.  The whole point is trying to make other pools seem more attractive so that users will re-distribute more evenly, not try to lock in users and then jack up fees.

Unfortunately, that doesn't fix the problem of one person (pool) controlling the majority of the network.  It just makes it look shady because now people have to consciously add the two pools together when evaluating the threat.




I'm not quite sure on the exact cause of the error.  I would recommend updating to the GUI Miner available on the BTC Guild support page, which will utilize the Stratum servers and does not rely on the getwork server in any way.