I've found the problem!  Working on a fix now.  It's related to case sensitivity.  Fix will be deployed soon I hope.

EDIT/UPDATE:  Fixed your settings Joshwaa, all your workers [non-hidden] have been reset to diff=1 [most won't drop below diff=2 without a reconnect though].  Future changes will go through as expected.

Oh, you have no idea.  Your blood will boil with the endianess and byteswappery nonsense.

2 BTC and up -always- requires confirmation [this is after hundreds of games], regardless of the fee attached.  I know my 1 BTC bets used to get instant response when they had a fee attached, but I never made any between 1 and 2 to determine where the exact cutoff was.

It would be nice to have the old instantaneous SatoshiDice back, but I can certainly understand the need to wait for confirmations on large bets.  It's just too easy to attempt a double spend when you lose, and on large bets, there is significant incentive to do so.

Alright, I'm seeing on my worker that vardiff isn't reducing difficulty on an already connected miner after minimum difficulty is decreased.  However, a reconnect is immediately fixes the problem.

Still looking at why vardiff won't eventually reduce difficulty on an established connections when you decrease the minimum.

I saw in the logs your worker immediately bumped up to a higher difficulty as soon as the server restarted.  Additionally, looking at the Stratum proxy for my own farm, it IMMEDIATELY changes the difficulty when I increase the minimum.  Note:  It will never allow you to decrease difficulty on demand.  Lowering minimum difficulty will have to wait for your miner to naturally get adjusted downward by the normal vardiff formula.  Also note that the Stratum proxy by default [I think] will continue to serve work as diff=1 to your workers, but will only relay shares of the proper difficulty upstream.

Perfect .

I've done a brief restart on the pools, and the logs now show that once your worker reconnected you were immediately increased to the minimum difficulty you specified.

It should work on all Stratum servers.  This is a MINIMUM difficulty though.  If you mine too quickly, variable difficulty will still retarget your difficulty to the ~20 shares per minute target.



EDIT/UPDATE:  Fixed!  When adding the Germany server to the list, I used the same variable for opening the socket to push the command to that server as the one used for one of the two US servers, overwriting the connection.  I'm going to manually push some difficulty changes so all servers have the same difficulty settings cached for workers.

When sending coins, the inputs used are previously received amounts [outputs from other addresses, or possibly even the same address].
The balance of an address is the sum of unspent inputs.  When sending coins, you must reference these unspent inputs to create the outputs.

- Address 1Guy has 10 BTC in total, made up of 10 individual 1 BTC payments from various sources.
- 1Guy wants to send 3 BTC to 1Girl.
- 1Guy's transaction to 1Girl requires 3 separate inputs to complete the transaction.

Hi organofcorti,
  2 small changes for BTC Guild.  As of last night all the servers are now running at 20 SPM target variable difficulty.  I also added user-definable minimum difficulty to the Stratum interface.

Good point, I hadn't thought of the idea of buying a single ticket that lasted for a significant time.  An every-100 blocks payout ticket would definitely be a good compromise there.  I just hate seeing the blockchain bloat and difficult to spend outputs filling a wallet [glares at SatoshiDice].

Minimum difficulty settings are now enabled for the US-based Stratum servers.  The EU/Germany Stratum server will be updated later this evening to include the API calls needed to update difficulty.

The link can be found under 'Manage Workers', labeled "Difficulty Settings".


EDIT:  I know the interface is a little clunky for users with a large number of workers.  I will be making subtle changes to the interface over time to make it easier to mass edit and keep track of which workers you're changing.


UPDATE: EU/Germany stratum server has been updated to the latest version, and now supports minimum difficulty modifications.

Love the site, very well done.  Only one thing I'm a bit confused over:  Is there a reason you decided to have the tickets pay out for each play?  The current method is going to end up filling wallets with a lot of small inputs, making it harder to spend without long delays and/or high fees.  Perhaps a separate address to purchase a ticket which sends your total winnings after the ticket fully matures?  This saves you money, and the player as well in the long run.

Your solution is impossible, since there is no guarantee of blocks being generated within 10 minutes, and forcing timestamps to show up as if they were 10 minutes apart would just be putting purposely bad information into the block headers.

As for the main question, there is still the massive problem of luck.  Creating a block is a purely random process.  If you've never looked yourself, you should leave blockchain.info up on your screen one day and take note of the varying time between blocks.  Some blocks are generated within seconds of each other, while other blocks have an hour gap between them.  This isn't the result of network hash rate growing/shrinking, just the standard variance associated with mining, spread across the entire network.

The only way to "guarantee" a block is made within 10 minutes would be to set the difficulty so absurdly low that blocks average LESS than 30 seconds.  It is not impossible for a block to take more than 20x the expected amount of work to be completed.

Fun game.  Been making my rounds through some of the various Bitcoin casinos/games.  First couple bets went well, though for some reason my 4 latest bets aren't showing up even after 4/5 confirmations each.  I'm sure they'll probably show up eventually, just pointing out that something seemed to get stuck [possibly due to how long it took for the first confirm?].

Getwork was a bit more of a bandwidth hog in the old days, especially on fast miners. With the Stratum protocol, bandwidth was reduced significantly, since it's using a persistent TCP stream and sending condensed messages.

An average Stratum work push is about 1 KB. Most pools push work every 30 seconds, which means you're at 16 kilobits per minute downstream, roughly 273 BITS per second.

Submitting a share on Stratum is [roughly] 80 bytes of data. With a variable difficulty pool, you're looking at 12-30 shares per minute depending on the pool. Using the highest (30 SPM), that translates to 2.4 KB uploaded per minute, roughly 330 BITS per second.

The pool then responds with the status of your share, roughly 50 bytes, which would be 1.5 KB per minute, or 200 BITS per second.

Grand total with Stratum: Upstream is ~330 bits per second. Downstream is ~500 bits per second.  That is 101 megabytes uploaded per month, and 154 megabytes downloaded per month.

These are using above average estimates/approximations. Pool settings, the size of the block being hashes, etc., can make these numbers higher or lower, but generally lower.  This bandwidth is per Stratum connection.  cgminer opens one connection per machine (or per cgminer instance launched).  poclbm requires one per GPU I believe.  If you have a large farm, you can combine all of your machines into a single connection by using the Stratum proxy from slush (https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy).  When using the proxy, the above data rates are roughly the same regardless of how many machines you have, as long as the pool is utilizing variable difficulty.

Looks like it's starting to catch up to the backlog.

Minimum difficulty interface is almost completed.  Very sorry this did not get released last weekend like I had hoped.  Unfortunately, it's hard to come up with an easy to use interface for settings like this, especially when some users have a large number of workers, leading to very unwieldy form entry.

There will likely be one restart on each Stratum server to complete the change, currently planned for 12:00 PM (noon) PST on Sunday.  The minimum difficulty interface may go live before this time, and will work on the US based server.  The stratum server on Germany will not support minimum difficulty until the restarts.

I would be more than happy to help theymos.  Registered member for almost 2 years, and I have had  ~750,000 BTC pass through BTC Guild since inception (exact records from before the pool changed to PPS aren't available to give a concrete BTC generated amount).

100% reserve available, multiple backup encrypted wallet file stored offline, and available for being returned in a short time frame (generally under 12 hours unless requested on the rare occasion where I don't have physical access to my storage for a few days).  Only restriction would be I would need a very clear writeup on how requests for returning the money would be handled/authorized to ensure they don't go where they're not supposed to.  Available at no charge, or a nominal amount like 1 BTC/month you want it to be a clear business arrangement.

Also, my personal information is readily available, I make no attempts to hide it [points to real name under his avatar].  And while the BTC Guild whois information is registered through a proxy, other domains [tradewithcoins.com, infocircuit.com, thoseoldgames.com] are not.

Bumping so we can keep our 10k BTC pizza story around through the ages.  Also:  http://blockchain.info/taint/17SkEw2md5avVNyYgj6RiXuQKNwkXaxFyQ?reversed=true  - Reverse taint analysis to show addresses which have received coins from the legendary pizzas.