As the time approaches, I've finalized my playlist for when we're on the last few 50BTC blocks:

1) Europe - The Final Countdown
2) REM - End of the World

We're in the last ~21 hours before the reward drops.  I'm posting advanced notice that all BTC payouts will be frozen when we are 6 blocks from the change, and it will be unfrozen hopefully within 30 minutes of the drop.  I don't want to fall asleep after the change (staying up all night just in case the network has good luck today), only to wake up with 0 BTC left in the wallet and a lot of people that have withdrawn 100+ coins more than they should've been able to .

Merged Mining update:

Merged mining has been removed from all pools except for mergedmining.btcguild.com as of about 3 hours ago.  I will be pushing an update to the My Account page shortly which will hide any NMC information if you do not have an NMC wallet set.  After the BTC reward halving, I will also be resetting the NMC wallet address/wallet lock (not BTC lock) for anybody that has not been mining on the mergedmining.btcguild.com pool, and hide the NMC stats for those users as well.  All you have to do to restore the NMC statistics is add an NMC wallet back to the account (same one as before or a new one).

Yeah, not sure why I was imagining I had a few extra days to be honest.  Maybe I thought November had 35 days in it ;p.

At least I bought a nice batch of energy drinks so I can stay awake if that timer gets too close to a time I'd normally be asleep.  There's one change I have to make manually since the reward change doesn't line up with a difficulty adjustment, and the way the PPS database is structured can't have two block rewards tied to the same difficulty.

The reward halving has put a lot of this work on hold until the first week of December.  There's just too many things that could possibly go wrong and cost me a LOT of money if I don't put all of my focus on making sure the site has all hard-coded 50 BTC references removed, and run test data through my payment code.  I honestly hadn't been keeping up to date with the date for halving, and was thinking I had 5-7 days more time than I actually did to make sure everything else is ready for the change.

Yes.  The only requirement will be that you're on Stratum.  If you set a worker to PPLNS but connect to a getwork pool, you will end up being reward PPS regardless of your settings.  Other than that, you will be able to switch live between the two methods.

For those wanting a look at PPLNS, you might want to look at http://www.btcguild.com/pplns_shifts.php throughout the day as I build the stats.

Currently the PPLNS page is designed to assume the reward is already down to 25 BTC/block.  This page shows fairly clearly how the graph of payments would resemble a wave, oscillating between above normal payout and below normal payout.

For reference, these stats are currently as of difficulty=3368767, using 25 BTC reward, 3% fee, and an 'N' value of 30 million.  This means the expected average payout of a closed shift is:

30,000,000 / 3,000,000 = Each shift gets 10% of the block reward when one is found (30 million shares split into 10 shifts of 3 milion shares each)
30,000,000 / 3,368,767 = Average of 8.905 blocks found before a shift expires (neutral luck).
25 BTC - (25 BTC * 3%) = 24.25 BTC paid per block.

24.25 BTC * 8.905 * 10% = 21.595 BTC paid per shift assuming neutral luck.

The final version will:
1) Your Reward [how much you were paid for the shift]
2) Shift Payout Luck
3) Detail view - See the breakdown of share submissions by UserID
4) Detail view - See which blocks were paid during the shift

The merged mining server has been updated to remove the Stratum redirect.  I've also fixed the 24 hour NMC earnings statistic.

I've found the problem with mergedmining.btcguild.com.  It still has the X-Stratum header which means any client with Stratum support ends up redirecting itself to the Stratum servers (which already removed NMC merged mining).  I'll be updating it in a few hours to remove the redirect from the mergedmining.btcguild.com server.

Highly unlikely.  The interest in namecoin has been very limited since the start.  Right now the notice has been on the website for a little over 24 hours, and only 23 workers are on the new server right now.

Yeah, I knew it wouldn't work with all GUIminer kernels since that would require a working phoenix implementation.  But like you said, almost everybody on GUIminer uses poclbm since that's the default kernel.  It's still great news, since I've noticed far more users on GUIminer than I originally thought.

An update to users who use guiminer:  guiminer has been updated with the latest poclbm, meaning you can now utilize Stratum with GUIminer (poclbm kernel).  Based on the current poll results I don't expect too many people in the thread to need this update, but this is something that didn't get quite as much buzz around it as the cgminer support a month ago.

Wait...GUIminer was finally updated for Stratum!?  Why haven't I heard this breaking news.

PPS will be the default.  You will be able to swap workers between PPS and PPLNS as long as they're using a Stratum server.  Getwork servers will only work on PPS (even if you try to change it to PPLNS).

I'll be working on an option for new users so they can sign up and see the two payment methods side by side and select the default method for their workers as well.  In the long run, PPLNS should pay more (lower fee), but you'll have to deal with the frustration of some days making 2-3x more than expected, while making far less than expected on others.

A new poll is up just to gauge the difference in who looks at the forums vs who looks at the website.  After over a month since cgminer added support, the Stratum side of BTC Guild has finally started to close in on 50% utilization.



You can expect to see some more PPLNS information show up this weekend, with the final launch soon after the 25 BTC reward drop.  The following settings will be used for PPLNS when made available:

'N' will be 30 million (roughly 10x difficulty).  So any block solves will have their reward (25 BTC - 3% fee = 24.25 BTC) split evenly among the past 30 million shares.  The payment per share is floored at the 14th decimal place to minimize the effects of rounding even over the course of a year, without getting into any goofy floating point math.

To ease the payment process, shares are bundled into shifts of 3 million shares at a time, and each block pays the last 10 completed shifts.  At the current pool speed, a shift takes around 50 minutes to complete.

N will be adjusted in two ways as difficulty and pool speed change:
1) Shifts will be increased/decreased in size to keep the time for a shift to complete between 30 minutes and 1 hour.
2) The payment range on blocks will be increased to keep 'N' at roughly 10x difficulty.

These factors don't affect the fairness of payments, they only increase/decrease the expected variance or maturation time on shares.  With PPLNS, there is a fine balance.  A lower 'N' value results in shares getting paid more for each block solve, but only being paid for a shorter period of time (higher variance).  A higher 'N' value results in shares getting paid less for each block solve, but they are paid for a longer time (lower variance).'

New Merged Mining Server Information

Users that wish to continue merged mining should direct their miners to:  mergedmining.btcguild.com  port 8332.

This server is up and running as of this post.  In approximately 72 hours, the other getwork pools will be restarted with merged mining disabled.

PPLNS is going to be a 3% fee with invalid (orphaned) blocks paid.  No changes to PPS, considering even at 5% I'm at the third month straight of losing money (not even counting costs to run the servers).

PPLNS is working behind the scenes on Stratum, and the getwork pools will be updated to acknowledge the PPLNS system (but you won't be able to use PPLNS on the getwork pools).

The PPLNS option will become available after the block reward is reduced to 25 BTC, so that I can have a few days of testing PPLNS with my own account to make sure the reward calculations and stat tracking are working properly.  You will probably see some PPLNS references show up over the next 48 hours as the testing is taking place.

The merged mining specific server will be added tomorrow, giving everybody 3 days to move to that server if they want to deal with merged mining.  Merged mining will be completely disabled on November 26th (around noon PST) for all pools except for the merged mining server.

All of the getwork pools still support merged mining.  Tonight I'll be setting aside one specific server as the "dedicated merged mining server" and adding a DNS entry to allow people to switch over during the next few days before it is disabled on the other getwork pools.

The Stratum based servers will be restarted around 12 PM (PST).  Expected downtime is about 5 seconds per server.  This restart will get the ball rolling for PPLNS, which will be made available tomorrow.

This update will remove Merged Mining from the Stratum servers.