Depends on what your overhead is.  If you make $0.50 profit per day at $8.50, you'll make significantly more profit per day at $15 (until the price/difficulty ratio catches up).

Years of coding and being an extremely fast typist .

I'd recommend just converting this to a table like this:

Pool Name	BTC Rate	NMC Rate	Notes
Mt. Red	0.0000228220259397	0	No fee, requires confirmations
Bitparking	0.00002225	0.00004600	Also merged mines IXC/DVC
ABC Pool	0.0000224797	0	Proxy pool
BTC Guild	0.00002168093424286754	0.00004481855091717626
EclipseMC	0.000021680924642674000678288504	0
OzCoin	0.0000216809243468108	0
NMCBit	0.0000213007096905	0.0000440325474170
Deepbit	0.00002053982334569	0

I believe he means that MOST PPS pools don't require waiting for confirmations, which you have as a benefit for BTC Guild currently, but not some of the other pools.  And just because I'm a jealous person ( ), any reason you put "Large established pool" for Deepbit and OzCoin but not BTC Guild?  Larger than OzCoin and been around longer than all the pools listed except for Deepbit .

BTC Guild will be introducing anonymous (mine-by-address) mining in the next month hopefully, when the new pool software (with the new protocol) is enabled.

BTC Guild rounds the difficulty down to a whole number, I think your pool might be applying 5% to the difficulty (including decimals), which would offer a very slightly (insignificant) smaller per share amount.

Nope, slush is still very hoppable at the moment.

The people sending me emails probably don't check forums, but doing this anyways:

By now you're all probably aware that the market has turned into a roller coaster.  At the same time, the network has been pretty slow churning out blocks that actually have a decent # of transactions in it.  Right now there are many payouts unconfirmed.  They are all sent (if they have a link, it means the TX is on the network waiting for confirmations).

There is nothing that can be done to speed these up.  Right now there are THOUSANDS of unconfirmed transactions across the entire network because of the panic being caused by the current market movements.  If your payout has a link in Payout History, it has been sent and you have to wait for a block to come that includes it.  They include the standard satoshi client fees if needed already.

EDIT:  And if the delay wasn't bad enough, it looks like a good chunk of transactions got put into an orphaned block and haven't been accepted into any new blocks since.  Trying to force the ones I know of to re-broadcast over the network.

But orphans don't get 120 confirms.  That's why they're orphans.

I know they have an API, but do they have the ability to execute trades through their API yet?

EDIT:  Okay, looks like btc-e actually has a full API now instead of just informational.  I'll look into offering the ability to run an NMC->BTC conversion.

24 Hour Earnings statistic has been re-enabled.  Sorry for taking it out for the last 24 hours!

While a few pools do this, I'm not comfortable with it.  There is no namecoin exchange that offers an API to execute trades, so all I can do is poll the last prices whenever somebody wants to do an exchange, then pray that rate doesn't change to much by the time I sell them.  It could cost me money to do that with how many people mine at BTC Guild if the price swings too much between selling batches of NMC.  It may not happen *as* much these days, but that market can get very volatile when somebody decides to screw around with it.

Translation:  He pays his chinese sweatshop workers (probably children, that monster!) to type out each text message by hand.  I bet they don't even get to use a smartphone that has a virtual keyboard, they're doing it all by numpad!   

It hasn't been over a day, it's been about 12 hours .  The 24 hour earnings stat will be unavailable until later tonight (~10 PM PDT).  Since the 24 hour earnings stat is based on your actual share submissions in the last 24 hours, and last night I had to reset the table which marks your shares each hour, the stat is currently missing a full 24 hour period.

To be fair, generally the Slashdot Effect only took down shared hosting plans.  If you're on any decent VPS server (or almost any dedicated server) you can easily handle the traffic from Slashdot articles.  Everytime I can recall people saying a story had been taken down by Slashdot (or digg, or reddit), it was generally responding with some kind of hostgator/bluehost/godaddy error page once it came back online.

Some updates to worker speed calculations, hall of fame calculations, and graphing were made.  Unfortunately the changes to worker speed calculations made the previously recorded data unusable, requiring a reset on all worker performance graphs.

In lighter news, the new setup for servers is working extremely well.  Those users who have been granted access to the private server DNS entries are encouraged to update their miners.  The goal of these recent changes is trying to create a special defense layer to allow dedicated BTC Guild miners the ability to keep running if the servers are targetted by a DDoS.  Obviously I can't know it will work until one happens, but the outlook is very good.


EDIT:  The worker speeds reported on the My Account and API are currently overstated significantly.  The numbers will correct themselves over the next hour.

I know BTC Guild's first block, back when I was testing the software in April of last year was about 3x difficulty, on my personal mining farm before I opened it up.  Something like 290k shares @ 4 GH/s or so.  Pretty funny really, considering back then I had what people would consider a decent sized farm .

Just for the record though, your Blocks Found on BTC Guild includes Namecoin blocks, so if you want to check if you're lucky/unlucky, you should compare it to NMC difficulty rather than BTC .

Payouts may not work for the next few minutes, doing a restart on the hot wallet.

Those rate changes were posted back in July, originally intended to take effect August 1st.  I see nothing changed other than it got pushed back twice (once from Aug 1 -> 14, now from Aug 14 -> 20).  Back in July paybt.c confirmed that BitcoinMax would remain 6.9% though.  Interested to hear if something has changed behind the scenes though (like pirate no longer offering premium rates to the older & larger passthroughs).

I'm assuming you were mining on the DE server.  Last night there were some connection problems between the Germany server and the database server.  No shares were lost, it just had a period of about 14 minutes where the shares weren't being posted.  After that time, the shares for the past 14 minutes were all dumped to Chicago, which is why your speed estimates suddenly shot up significantly higher than what they really were.