Yeah, I planned on adding them LONG ago but it wasn't received too well at first.  Now a few other pools have added them, and I think with the new interface it will be nice.  The old interface was pretty cluttered already without adding Teams.

Upcoming Changes (This weekend hopefully):

1) New email server being deployed to avoid the outgoing email limits imposed by Google Apps.  Once it's confirmed to work, this means Idle Warning settings will not be disabled once an email has been sent.

2) Mining Teams.  Yes, I know it's not an important feature, but it can help bring back some spirit of competition among miners.  You might not be able to be the fastest or the luckiest on your own, but it can be fun to see how you and your friends compare to other groups.

My main questions which weren't answered in the post:

1) How will this transition effect withdrawal limits?
2) How will this transition effect the verification process?
3) How will this transition effect users which have already gone through the verification process with MtGox?
4) Will this transition remove the ability to use Dwolla for withdrawals?
4b) If it is removed, is there going to be a similar virtually free withdrawal method ($0.25 at any size is tough to beat)?

Hot wallet maintenance is complete and all payouts are now being processed again.  I did a manual run on automatic payouts to catch up on the two that were missed.

Hot wallet maintenance has started.  While I've given the estimate of being done around noon (PST), I'm hoping it will be done much earlier than that.

1 Hour Update:  Hot wallet has been upgraded to 0.8 bitcoind and is resync'ing the blockchain in the new format just to be safe.  The private key for the wallet coins are mined to has been imported and it is nearly sync'd.  Coins from all the change addresses were moved to the cold wallet, and fresh coins have been sent to the hot wallet address.  As soon as these coins have a few confirmations the hot wallet will be put back online.

1h 20m Update:  Hot wallet is now set to process auto payouts at the next interval (11 AM).  Manual payouts still frozen until a few more confirmations hit.

CGMiner (all recent versions for the last couple months) supports stratum by default.  You will not hash faster, but will likely have lower stale rates.

Stratum with variable difficulty is designed as "infinitely" scalable without increasing the amount of data required between the miner and the pool.  So it's small and massive miner friendly.

Stratum is a persistent TCP connection.  It's push-based because you don't ask for work from the server, the server just pushes new work to you whenever it has new work.  The work supplied by the server is more than 4.2 billion times more work than what you would have received from getwork [and can be expanded further easily], meaning you will never run out of work before new work is sent.

The reason that idle warnings are not in the dashboard any more is that soon (this weekend) they will remain turned on after they are sent.  I'm setting up a new outgoing email server with proper RDNS settings and SPF records so hopefully they will not get completely dropped by some email providers.  I had to turn them off after they were sent before due to the daily outgoing email limits imposed by Google Apps, which is what I've been using to make sure the emails don't get marked as spam. 

Setting up the new outgoing email server is my next project after the hot wallet maintenance (which starts in just over 1 hour).

High-diff shares are counted as multiple shares, so it's Diff1 equivalent submissions .  The actual amount would be more like 1,953,125 actual submissions (estimated).

Congratulations to ASICMINER, the first miner to submit 1 billion shares since October 2011 (share counts from proportional were not carried into the PPS/PPLNS systems).

Your wish is my command.

Getwork was an HTTP based protocol, with a pull-based method of obtaining work.  It also used longpolling, which was basically just an HTTP connection that was held open until the pool had notice of a new block.  Getwork by default could only support 4.2 billion hashes (4.2 GH/s required a new getwork every second).  There were some extensions added (nTime rolling) to increase that range a bit, but it had the side effect of completely skewing the timestamp on blocks.  At extremely high speeds, it has the potential of damaging the network if a significant number of blocks are found "in the future" due to nTime rolling.

Stratum is a persistent TCP socket based protocol, with push-based work.  The pool provides you the information to build your own work locally.  It updates the work at regular intervals so you're including more transactions in the block as time goes on.  Since it's TCP based, it eliminates the overhead of having one always-on HTTP connection paired with potentially dozens (or hundreds) of opening/closing connections each minute.  It also uses an extremely small payload, since it doesn't require HTTP headers, and doesn't require as much data as getwork.

BTC Guild put forward a version of the new protocol at the same time that slush announced his Stratum protocol.  Since slush's implementation was done in a more friendly language (python), and included an open source poolserver, BTC Guild pulled its own protocol proposal and adopted the Stratum protocol.  Today, there are three protocols in existence.  Getwork (which is now outdated), Stratum, and Getblocktemplate.  GBT is a great system for local/solo mining on high end hardware, but does not match the performance of Stratum in a miner<->pool relationship.


As for phoenix, I do not believe any version of phoenix has added Stratum support yet.  You can still use phoenix if you want to run a Stratum Proxy (which connects to a Stratum server, and then relays the work to your miner as getwork on your LAN).  Windows binaries can be found here: https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy/downloads   and that also links back to the github page for source you can use on Linux.  You would run the proxy with '-o <pool server> -p 3333'.  You would then connect your miner to the proxy as http://127.0.0.1:8332 (if it was running on the same machine as the miner).

CGMiner is highly recommended for serious miners, and has native support for Stratum.  Later versions of GUIMiner also support Stratum when using the default (poclbm) kernel.

A new Stratum server has been added in EU (Germany).  This is the new primary Stratum server for the EU.

To directly connect to this server, you can use:  eu-stratum.btcguild.com:3333 .  Future servers in the EU will be added to the same DNS entry, similar to what was done with US based Stratum servers.  You can also directly connect by IP at 144.76.36.41:3333.

The old EU Stratum server will stay online for a while, but users are encouraged to switch.  The new server is much faster than the old one, and does not share resources with a getwork poolserver.


I have also updated some error handling on the Website<->Stratum interactions, to help reduce the chance of one server using old data (wrong payment method/wrong min-diff).  If any single server fails to respond, you will be given an error message asking you to try changing your settings again.

I've always been afraid of sites that use Google sign-in, specifically because it makes it so easy for a phishing scam to take place.  It requires you to be on abnormally high alert at all times.  I'm fine with that, but the VAST majority of users will see Google logos and enter their information into the boxes.  By training them that this is a legitimate way to log in to non-Google sites, it makes it so much easier to creating phishing websites.

PPLNS on BTC Guild uses an 'N' value of 30 million, split into 10 even chunks of 3 million shares each.  This means that once 3 million shares are found, regardless of the time involved, a shift is completed.  When any block is found, the payment is divided evenly between the last 10 completed shifts (thus paying out to the last 30 million shares).  The initial reason for using '30 million' was because it put a shift at roughly 1 hour, but it was also chosen because that was roughly 10x higher than difficulty.  This meant it was extremely unlikely for a shift to ever receive 0 BTC [this has only happened to one shift out of 3000].

The time it takes for a shift to complete is mostly irrelevant, it all comes down to the 'N' value (30 million).  As network difficulty rises, it is likely that N will be increased in March as a result of climbing network difficulty.

All our Stratum servers produce Version 2 blocks.  Only getwork is still on v1 (and will always be v1 until they shut down at this point).  ~2/3 of our blocks are produced on Stratum now.  You may have noticed the new site emphasizes stratum over getwork as well.  I won't turn off getwork while there is still demand, but the guides on how to use BTC Guild both use native stratum miners, and give the host as a stratum server in the write-up/screenshots.

Performance Charts now live.  All 3 charts (24h/72h/2wk) are now on one convenient page.

All the major stratum servers are running fine at the moment.  PM me your worker and I can test from here just to double check.  What hostname/port/software are you using?

That change is coming soon.  Right now I'm restoring Password Reset functionality (something I completely forgot about when setting up the new interface).

Current battle plan:
1) Password Reset
2) Worker Performance Charts
3) PPLNS Last 'X' Shifts Rate Relocated


UPDATE: #1 Completed.  On to #2!

Many users which have been inactive for a long time have come back recently.  The Hall of Fame is set to ignore users who hadn't logged in for the last month, so you're starting to see a few older accounts return to the Hall of Fame.

As for the Blocks Found count:  Only Stratum servers record found blocks ever since the last reset of that counter (previous counters were polluted with Namecoin blocks).

New website is live, and nobody caught the few moments where the site was "down" apparently.  There are a few small changes that will be made during the day, but all the main features are up and running already.  Mostly a few cosmetic changes are all that remain.