Dallas datacenter is having packet loss issues, which runs the Merged Mining server.  Should fix itself soon I hope.  Stratum and other getwork servers are not affected.

Yes.  When mining on getwork, you are paid as PPS, regardless of worker settings.

Posting this as a reminder:

User accounts can have both the email and wallet locked.  Doing these two things makes your account impossible to compromise.  If your login+email were compromised, the worse someone can do is mess with worker names and reset your password a few times, but they could not take your account from you (email lock), and cannot take your coins (wallet lock).

Since 2011, the pool has averaged 0 or 1 emails per month regarding a compromised account.  In March 2013, that number currently sits at 7.  There is no reason to expect a breach on the BTC Guild side, especially due to the sample of accounts that have been reported as compromised.  The most likely culprit at this point in time is a keylogger which has been used to sniff out pool information.  With 76,000 accounts and a price of $70/coin, it's an extremely profitable target if the account is not protected with a wallet lock.


I am currently looking into adding an optional 2-factor authentication to accounts using Google Authenticator.  This is another security option, but I don't believe it is needed. Losing your authenticator (in most cases, phone) should be significantly easier than losing your wallet.dat file.  However, 2-factor auth will allow users to keep their wallet unlocked if they want to send their pool balances to wallets they do not control (eWallets/exchanges).  I will post an update later this week once I've looked into how to implement Google Authenticators.

All good suggestions .  I'm going to be working on how to organize some of these events early April.  Some pool work to be done this week to help strengthen the Stratum servers now that botnets are starting to use Ufasoft versions with Stratum support -.-

My expectations for the Social/gaming community with BTC Guild:
  1) Formalized StarCraft 2 ladder including game times [probably split into 3 ladders based on time zones]
  2) Battlefield 3 dedicated server for BTC Guild, with designated times for larger events.
  3) Minecraft server - Looking at some options for Bukkit/plugins to make it more entertaining
  4) Mumble server - Might as well offer voice chat if we're going to have all these games!

It would remove ~15% of the pool's hash power, including the part of the pool that contains the most undetected botnets, which is yet another plus for getting rid of getwork.  However, I don't think it will be needed.  BTC Guild is still under 40% at this time.

Not sure about lower leagues...but it's extremely balanced at high skill levels.

HHTT has open sourced their Java based Stratum server: http://hhtt.1209k.com/sockthing.php
Slush has an open source python based Stratum server: https://github.com/slush0/stratum


I haven't tried either of them.  I don't believe either of them include much in terms of statistics tracking by default, though HHTT's SockThing might(?).

I'm not sure we need a Getwork Support column, at least not until we reach the point that it's hard to find a pool that still offers getwork.  Hopefully that will be within the next few months .

Only one person ever returned any coins (47 of the 1254).  A second round of emails was sent in Chinese, but did not receive a single response.  The btcguild_donate worker earned about 7 BTC, and donation address received about 14 BTC.  On the bright side, BTC Guild luck was quite good last difficulty, and a significant portion of the remaining ~1200 BTC was earned back.




Minimum difficulty is not needed for most users.  BTC Guild's vardiff is quite aggressive, so running on ASIC at diff=1 will almost immediately get bumped to a higher difficulty.  They will receive a -few- rejects due to latency during the first difficulty adjustments.  Compared to their overall throughput, it's mostly unnoticeable.  However, some users may prefer running at higher difficulties for lower bandwidth.  It's not necessary in my opinion, but the option was added for those who want it.

PPS/PPLNS are almost split 50/50 these days.  At BTC Guild's current % of the network, PPLNS is "almost" guaranteed to pay out more during a 2 week (difficulty period) span, but day-to-day variance can cause some miners to panic.

I almost included WoW and Rift actually!  Even though I haven't played them in a long time (not enough hours in the day).  But as you said, it's hard to do any kind of organized competition.  I'm looking to do some more things to try to make BTC Guild more community driven though.  I will probably be putting up a Mumble server and Minecraft server for the users in the next month. 

This is all in the same thread as Teams.  I'd love to get users more involved outside of hashing for coins .  We've had more than 75,000 users sign up over the years, so why not try to find a way to interact outside of a single forum thread.  Expect some kind of 'Social' icon to be added next month for some of these events.  I don't want to set up a pool forum though, I like to keep the conversations out in the open for all to see.  And don't worry, you won't start seeing G+, Like, and reddit buttons in the Social tab.  There will also be strict rules disallowing Zynga & Co. .

Everything should now be functioning normally.  Users who were receiving "Payout already pending" errors should be good to go, all bad payouts are removed, and automatic payouts run enough to catch up to the current balances.  If you were receiving "invalid wallet address" errors when trying to add/change your wallet, this error was also related to the same crash.

As usual, please let me know if you're having any other problems!

I've run 6 passes through the automatic payouts just now to clean up the back log.  Manual payouts were on briefly, but currently paused.  I'm going to be restarting the payment bitcoind in a few minutes with a crash-catching script that should give it a kickstart if it happens again.  Sorry for all the trouble!

It's safe to carry on mining.  This was purely a payout error+PPLNS stats error.

UPDATE:   PPLNS Stats are now fixed.  The timestamps on blocks were a bit screwed up, so I've applied the 24 blocks found evenly over the affected shifts.  This means even earnings in some close shifts were increased since some of them should have received extra blocks before being closed.


Next on list:  Removing bad payouts from history.

bitcoind on the payout server crashed.  This server is also used for identifying blocks and recording them.  bitcoind is being brought back up.  I am going to have to manually edit which shifts the blocks are applied to.  Everything should be fixed shortly.

It probably was not clear since the original post was pushed back a page. Right now the idea is to have an online competition for members. Something mostly for fun but with a few prizes thrown in. I would like to make it something regular if it is well received. At the very least it is a way to get to know some of your fellow miners outside of the Bitcoin environment.  It may even be a long term competition where we can keep an internal ladder/ranking system. It all depends on reception and time available.

This isn't a game giveaway, but asking members which of those games they would enjoy competing in the most.

They didn't prioritize getwork.  Their getwork was still running on pre-0.8 nodes, so they were simply left online during the fork since they were safe (and helping the recovery) to leave online.  But yes, it did take them about 6-8 hours after the fork was over to turn Stratum back on.

Looks like 31 orphan blocks paid.  200 BTC to a change address (you'll notice one address was paid 200 BTC, which would indicate an address that a pool mines directly to, but the address has never been used before).  This matches the length of the orphan chain:  225430 - 225461.

The only minor concern is that the 0.7 chain was restored at 07:30 UTC, which means 6 blocks in the 0.8 orphan fork were mined AFTER the issue should have been resolved if running a standard bitcoind (as far as I'm aware).  However, if the decision was made to pay out the orphan chain, it would seem unfair to withhold that compensation on certain blocks in the chain.

ASICMINER used to have ~2 TH/s on Ozcoin prior to the hardfork, but consolidated on BTC Guild after that event.  My understanding/expectation is the second ~6 TH/s will likely go back to Ozcoin.  Obviously this may be changed radically when we start seeing 50 TH/s worth of power.  Whether it will be split among many pools, solo mined, or a mixture, it should be another interesting few months.  2013 has offered a lot of excitement .

Glad to see this was resolved before I found it.  If you ever have problems in the future, the best methods to get it resolved ASAP are any of the following:

1) #btcguild on freenode IRC
2) webmaster@btcguild.com - I can generally respond to support emails in under a minute if I'm at the PC, and maybe 10 minutes if I'm not at the PC or on my phone.  Sleep obviously slows this down .
3) BTC Guild forum thread in Mining / Pools.

BTC Guild miners have already/always been paid for orphaned blocks, but this is a greatly appreciated gesture after the losses incurred by the pool earlier that week.  Thank you very much Gavin & "few groups of people".