The minimum payout threshold has now been dropped to 0.0001 for all coins.

The pool server is now down.  Coins will be shuffling back and forth between the local pool wallets and the exchange over the next few days to keep withdrawals functioning.  If you do not want your coins to be force-converted to BTC, you should set a wallet on them and a payout threshold.  Once the majority of users have withdrawn their balances out the full wallets will be liquidated in order to shut down the coin daemons.

On other pools, longer rounds pay you less per share, shorter rounds pay you more per share.  On Eligius, your per-share rate is capped (the C in CPPSRB) at 0% PPS, and anything extra from a block gets paid to shelved shares in order to help those previous work reach the 0% PPS rate.  In the long run, you're going to average the same either way.

A common sentiment among pretty much anybody who has been in BTC since 2010-2012.  I thought getting that couple hundred bucks from a BTC->PayPal site was awesome back in 2011.  $1 for a coin? You must be insane if you want to pay me that much, take them all!  I'll just make another 50-100 tomorrow.

It's basically one group of accounts (same owner) coming and going.  Not sure why.  Same thing happened last week.



Very little news at this point.  My lawyer's advice right now is just be cautious and wait for finalized regulations before taking action.  They do agree that if NY *wanted to* they could likely target any pool in the United States because this new regulation is defining virtual currency business interactions with NY residents as a nexus creating activity.  If a nexus is established, they are able to prosecute/tax/regulate.  However, my lawyer believes it is a winnable case if it came to that due to lack of physicality and lack of marketing directed at NY residents.  There's also the intention of the regulations, which is money laundering and consumer protection.  In the case of BTC Guild, nobody is investing/depositing funds.  This is the "real" target of regulations - financial services where users are either being encouraged to invest or store funds with a third party.

The problem is that winning such a case wouldn't matter, since the cost of defending myself would probably exceed the value of the business.  For now, everything remains unchanged.  Lawyer is still trying to determine if having users agree to a set of conditions ("I am not a resident of NY", "I do not run equipment located in NY", "I am not accessing the site from NY") agreement would be sufficient protection.

I believe he's referring to a making a second transaction using the inputs of the inadequate fee one (no confirmations), and attaching a large(r) fee to this second transaction in order to get the first one confirmed faster.  Which I could have sworn was part of bitcoind's default behavior...

No, this only affected the initial connection server.  The only way a miner would've noticed this is if they turned their miner on at the exact moment I was doing the restarts.  Anybody that was already mining was no longer connected to that server.

Some changes were made to the initial connection server to change how it caches bad workers.  Previously the bad worker list was cleaned up after every block, which caused that server to slow down a little after a new block hit.  This server is only used for the initial share submission, after which miners are redirected to different servers.  This process was updated to only expire bad workers after 1 hour, in order to stagger the clearing of the bad worker cache.  This should make the initial connection more responsive.  Most users shouldn't notice this, since you only talk to that server when first turning your miner on, or recovering from a disconnection.

Other is a catch-all for rare rejects which are almost always due to client-side errors.  Other contains 'Low Difficulty' and 'Unknown Work' rejects.  Low Difficulty will only happen if you don't set your miner difficulty and you just started mining (before vardiff has adjusted you), or if your software is screwed up.  Unknown work means you sent work that didn't come from the pool.  This will only be BTC Guild's fault if the servers were restarted (since they forget what work has been assigned), which hasn't happened in about 3 months and counting.  Unknown rejects can also be when you submit very old (and very stale) work for some reason.  The pool forgets about jobs from prior blocks after enough new work has been generated for the newest block.

LD - Only happens when first starting, and only if you don't set your difficulty.  Otherwise, client software error.
Unknown - Normally client side error, sometimes connection related (disconnected and reconnected to a different backend).

That tends to happen when you have a 7 hour, 6 hour, and 5 hour block in the previous 24-hours of shifts.  75% of the 24-hours only solved 3 blocks.


Could be worse though.  Slush has had 2x > 24-hour blocks in the last few weeks.  0.00000000 for 24-hours would be terrifying.

It was Comcast business service, but it was very quickly moved to proper dedicated servers once the modem started crashing every 10 minutes after a few days .  The pool actually started out being hosted out of my dining room on one of the mining rigs that was mining on the pool.

You're in luck then.  The majority of what I deal in are NES, SNES, and Genesis titles.  I target buying lots of games which have a few of the rarer titles as well (though they generally sold in under 48 hours once I listed them).

There's an entire support section on BTC Guild related to the PPLNS, and a section devoted to the Charge-Up/Wind-Down periods that all PPLNS systems have.

When you first start any PPLNS pool, your rewards do not increase rapidly since you do not have shares in the entire 'N-shares' window.  BUT, if you stopped mining at any point, you continue getting paid until your recent submissions have left the 'N-shares' window.  There is no loss, it's simply due to how PPLNS works.  It is a time-delayed payment method, shares get paid multiple times until they have matured.




With only 7 hours of mining done, variance isn't the answer in this case.  Variance is why your rewards might be much higher or much lower than expected.  This user hasn't even had a share reach maturity yet, so there isn't even an opportunity to compare expectation vs actual reward.

That's how Slush's system works.  It doesn't penalize people hopping into the pool, it penalizes people leaving (or even just reducing hash rate) during a round.

I answered it earlier in the thread.  The new project is nothing grand, though it will almost surely make more profit than ScryptGuild (which made very little).

It's a used (vintage/cartridge) video game store, with it's own website and extensive eBay integration as well (eBay fees suck, but I just count it as marketing costs for the independent website in the long run).  I'm focusing on that project because it's something my parents can help with.  My parents were always self-employed, but they're unable to continue their previous business due to my father's arthritis.  As such, I'm wanting to focus on this project as a way to help give them something to do during the day, and as a way to help support them.

I previously had one running before I discovered Bitcoin, and it was a lot of fun for me, a good hobby.  I got to tinker with eBay APIs to make it so I was able to manage the entire business (including inventory management and shipping) through my own frontend rather than eBay, so the two stores were always synchronized.


It will be taking Bitcoin from day 1!

6 blocks is currently ~= 100% these days, so you end up with pretty significant swings, since each block away from 6 is about 15% deviation from neutral.  In general (this is true for all pools at Guild's size and smaller),  a really bad block will probably end up taking a good chunk out of your 1-week luck, unless you get a big burst to offset it.

Our luck has been climbing pretty steadily lately (we were >100% for 1d/3d/1w/2w until that bad block last night), and the 3-month figure is finally becoming accurate again.  We're about 1 week away from the block withholder's falling out of the 3-month average.

"took your shares and split", implying that non-block solving shares have value?

As the pool is slowing down and users are pulling coins out, the balance between exchange vs coin daemon is continually being adjusted to continue letting people clear out their balances.

WDC is still completely screwed up due to Cryptsy (~90k WDC currently in limbo), but the coin was removed from the switcher as soon as I was made aware of the issue, so anybody continuing to mine won't be getting new WDC unless they manually picked it.

Please keep in mind that on August 10th  (Sunday), the pool server will be shut down.  Exact time isn't known, but you should assume any time after 12:01 AM it may go down, so moving prior to August 10th is recommended.

Once the pool server is shut down, minimum payouts will be lowered to 0.0001 and payouts will get processed once per 24-hours.  Amounts less than 0.0001 will not be paid (but amounts > 0.0001 will get every last satoshi paid).

Best part is the accusation in this case is something provably false.  Look at the coinbase of slush's blocks.  They do not contain any merged mining message.  It's not possible to merged mine without embedding data into the BTC block coinbase, something which is publicly available for every block ever mined.

I've had people attempt to raise hell over amounts that were less than a quarter.