While it's difficult to prove somebody owns a certain wallet outright, it is possible to run an analysis on where their coins come from/flow to.  For example, if you tie your forum ID to it through a donation link or posting it asking for a payment, we now know you own a certain address.

If that address sends coins to another known address, we know that the other output from the transaction is a change address that is also controlled by you with high certainty.  A more complex analysis could be done to identify common payees/payors to increase the certainty that you are in control of other addresses, even though you have not linked yourself to them publicly.

Restarting the newbie thread after the significant changes to the website, making it more user friendly for both experienced and newbie miners.  If you have any questions about mining (even if they're not specifically related to BTC Guild), please feel free to ask in here!  Our IRC room is always open, and you will find me in there from ~8 AM to ~10 PM (PST) every day.

BTC Guild - https://www.btcguild.com

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Server Features

• Stratum Mining Protocol - Use only ~1 kbps of bandwidth regardless of how large your mining farm is!  Fewer rejects, faster connection, and less overhead!
• Variable Difficulty - BTC Guild's Stratum pool adjusts your share difficulty based on your speed, reducing the chatter between your mining software and the pool.
• Minimum Difficulty - If variable difficulty isn't high enough for your taste, set your own difficulty even higher for lower bandwidth usage and less frequent share submissions.
• Merged Mining - Earn Namecoins and Bitcoins at the same time without any reduction in your BTC earnings (PPLNS only).
• Idle Warning Emails - If your workers go idle, an email will be sent (if you have set one) to notify you of the worker not submitting shares.

Community Features

• Mining Teams - Compete with your group of friends, or create a group to compete with other collections of users.  You don't need a garage full of ASICs to find a way to have fun competition with other users.
• IRC Chat - #btcguild on freenode.net has been around since April 2011.  The pool operator is active for 12-18 hours a day, and questions are always welcome.
• Lightning fast support - Support emails to BTC Guild have an average turn around time of just a few minutes unless sent late at night/early in the morning.

Payment Methods

• True PPS - We pay a fixed rate per share, period.  There is no buffer, there is no limit based on good/bad luck.  If your share is valid, your account is credited for the value of that share within seconds.
• PPLNS - Alternative payment method to PPS.  Unhoppable rewards split similar to proportional.  Offers a lower fee than PPS, for users that don't mind variance.
• Block TX Fees - Block transaction fees are split with PPLNS users, reducing the effective fee compared to some other pools.
• Orphan Blocks - Both payment methods (PPS + PPLNS) pay users for orphan blocks, something no other PPLNS offers at this time.
• Automatic Payouts - Receive payouts automatically when they hit your threshold.
• Full precision payouts - Get all 8 decimals of your balance transferred when you request a manual payout.
• On-demand payouts - Request your balance be paid to your wallet at any time by clicking the Request Payout button on the My Account page (minimum 0.1).

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BTC Guild offers both "Pure" Pay-per-Share (PPS) and Pay-per-Last-N-Shares (PPLNS).  With PPS, every share you submit is worth a fixed amount based on the current difficulty.  With pure PPS, the pool assumes all risk of bad luck/variance and orphaned blocks.  Regardless of how bad the luck is, you will make roughly the same amount every single day (only changing when difficulty changes).  We assume all the risk of block finding variance, and will purchase additional BTC to meet our liabilities if we have not found enough blocks to make payouts.

With PPLNS, users have a lower fee option if they are okay with the downside (or upside) of variance.  PPLNS is offered at a 3% fee, but also pays orphaned blocks and transaction fees, reducing the effective fee to ~1.5%.  PPLNS is a unhoppable reward method, with payments very similar to proportional.  Current settings use 30 million for "N", meaning every time a block is found, the last 30 million shares (10 completed shifts of 3 million shares each) are paid.  A share can receive multiple payments before it "expires".  PPLNS has variance, but is not quite as bad (on a per-round/shift basis) as what you would experience under Proportional, Score, or some DGM solutions.

To point your miner at the pool, you can use the following (examples for poclbm and Diablo):
poclbm.exe -d1 --host=btcguild.com --port=8332 --user=[username]_[workername] --pass=[anything]
DiabloMiner-Linux.sh -b -o btcguild.com -r 8332 -u [username]_[workername]

Detailed instructions and download links for GUIMiner and CGMIner can be found on our Support Section.


Stratum Mining
Stratum servers offer fewer stales, better performance, and significantly reduced bandwidth for miners.

To connect directly to a stratum server, you can connect to stratum.btcguild.com:3333 for US servers, or eu-stratum.btcguild.com:3333 for our EU server (Germany).  Getwork based servers will provide X-Stratum redirects to users that continue connecting through other IP/port ranges.


PPLNS
Workers can be moved between PPS and PPLNS payment methods on the fly through the Manage Workers page.  The only requirement is that your workers are connected to a Stratum server.

Visit our IRC channel on FreeNode.net to chat with other members or the pool operator (Eleuthria): #btcguild

Verification failed, check hardware is a message coming from your miner, not the pool.  It means you're having severe problems with the hardware and it is not reporting valid shares.  Have you tried updating your drivers?

Small update to teams policy:

Many users are making teams for their country.  This is a great way to make a team that other users might join.  I will remove PINs on teams based on a country to keep them open to any users that may be from that country.

The old icon was classic, but it was used by a lot of sites, and even by GUIMiner!  This one is nice, simple, and fits the pool .  At least until somebody can offer me a customized/better one.

Ah, sorry .  It's been so long I don't remember giving out a URL, so I just assumed it was reading my coinbase flags.  Thanks for correcting it!

Hi kinlo,
  I noticed blockorigin stopped recognizing blocks from BTC Guild.  Not quite sure why, nothing has changed software side other than moving some servers around.  All the blocks still contain either 'BTC Guild' or 'Mined by BTC Guild' somewhere in the coinbase message.  The last block identified as BTC Guild on blockorigin was #223477.  I'm not sure if any are missing before that, but none show up after it.

More small updates.  Still having fun working on front-end/UI experience since the servers have been rock solid .

New favicon added to be a little less generic.
New iphone-icon graphic added for users who want to bookmark the site to their homescreen (delete it and try to add it again and you should have the new icon appear)

Teams are now live!  You can see join or create a team under the Settings Menu (Account Settings section).  Creating a public team just involves a blank pin (or 0000).


Next item is adding Rankings Aliases, so you can show up as a name rather than an ID (does not have to be unique or your username).

I don't think the problem was with bitminter.  A HUGE number of websites just became unaccessible recently.  A few people in my chat (in different countries/continents) were having the same issue loading a significant number of websites (including sites like ozcoin, blockchain.info, bitfunder, and even imgur).

Might be a coincidence...but about 1/3 of sites I'm trying to load right now are failing to resolve/timing out, and some people in my chat are having the same issue even on other continents.

Small visual display glitch fixed.  Previously the Hall of Fame was generated by emptying the table, then it was fed in the new rows one by one.  This caused the Hall of Fame to occasionally be missing users (sometimes almost all of them) when refreshed right as this was happening.  This update still empties the table, but it pre-generates the new table first, so it is nearly instantly restored with up to date information.

It sounds like you're refreshing the Hall of Fame when it's being updated.  The Hall of Fame on BTC Guild actually stores the rank for all ~72k users.  It flushes the entire table and loads it with new data every few minutes, so if you reload it while that's happening you won't be seeing the complete rankings.

As far as I'm aware, BTCMiner (all versions) does not support diff > 1.  So it ignores the difficulty field sent by the pool and just sends anything that is at least diff=1.  It doesn't hurt you, other than meaning setting yourself at higher difficulties serves no purpose.  Using ztex FPGAs through another mining client (like cgminer or bfgminer) fixes this problem.

I don't think Deepbit has updated their pool servers since X-Roll-NTime was invented 

I've just finished setting up a new outgoing email server.  I've sent many test emails through it to my various GMail/Google Apps emails, and it is passing all of their SPF checks as a validated IP for outgoing emails to come from.

I've set the pool to now use this new outgoing server for all notifications.  This also means that we are no longer subject to the Google Apps daily outgoing email limit, so Idle Notification Emails are no longer turned off once they've been triggered!

I'll be monitoring the new system for the rest of the evening to make sure other email providers are not bouncing emails back as spam.  Emails still come from webmaster@btcguild.com .

Depending on your email provider, you may need to whitelist webmaster@btcguild.com, or check your Junk/Spam folders and unmark them as junk/spam until the smart filtering stops putting it there.

I'm not currently advertising port 80, because I need to move it to a different server shortly.  I will be adding Stratum support on port 80 once it is ready.


Additional notice to users:  I will attempting to switch to a new email server tonight.  Some emails may get bounced back or lost during this time, and outgoing emails may or may not function.  I'm hoping it all works, but email servers are a real PITA.  I will make another post later today with a defined time frame for when the switch will start.

As usual, BTC Guild can take a bit of the credit/blame for the inaccurate estimate.  We were running close to -40% luck the last 24 hours, which as far as the network estimates are concerned means around 4 TH/s disappeared after the diff change.  Don't be surprised if it swings the opposite way and you see an 8 TH/s swing in the other direction after another day.

Teams will be simple to create/join.  When creating a team, whoever creates it will have the option of a Public (anyone can join) or Private (password restricted) team.  If you just want to join a team, there will be a drop down list to choose one (with password entry for private teams).