We were down about 15 minutes (shouldn't have been 20).  One of my backend servers had to be taken down temporarily due to some issues with the ISP and a spam list reporting the IP as a Botnet C&C server.  Everything should be running as normal for now.

Actually, they don't do it because the botnets that have hit us in the past will crash any proxy you point them at.  A small botnet can proxy connections, and they do.  Those are the ones I can easily ban [they have HORRIBLE efficiency].  Big botnets simply can't be handled by a single server, or even a small cluster.  As I stated back in July and again in November, there are at least two MASSIVE botnets out there working with bitcoins, and one of them had more than a million different IP addresses logged in a 24 hour period.

The real problem is that there are a lot of "security groups" out there that are clueless.  I've had IPs blacklisted in the past, and the reason given was "Botnet C&C Server".  IE:  They assume that because a botnet connects to one of my IPs, I must be in some way controlling them, even though the only reason they're connecting is to attempt to mine.

I would've thought by now that these groups and/or ISPs would at least know enough about Bitcoin to know the difference between a botnet controller and a pool server, but obviously that difference eludes their techs who aren't used to dealing with anything outside of general apache/linux configuration.

Now that everything is back up and running, I'm going to announce a few changes coming to BTC Guild in the coming weeks:

1) BTC Guild will be moving servers again, to a datacenter than can offer more redundancy to the network for higher uptime.  It will be in Illinois, directly on nLayer's network (not a sublease of a sublease of a leased datacenter).

2) This move should be seamless compared to previous moves.  The new server will be sync'ing with the current database before any DNS changes are made.  Ideally, you will see 1 longpoll disconnect, and 1-3 rejects (depending on how big of a work queue your miner stores up), once your DNS has grabbed the new IP address.

3) The pool software will be receiving a few tweaks to be more aggressively aware of botnets which have seen a resurgence since bitcoin went back above $3.  This change will automatically enforce bans for inefficient workers.  While there is some luck involved in finding a share from a getwork, efficiency should never be below 50% after a few dozen getworks have been processed, unless the miner is grabbing significantly more work than it can use.

4) Mining teams will become available.  Similar to what is seen on Deepbit, a Mining Team is not a way to alter your rewards, but instead a way to group up with friends or colleagues.  Teams will have a stats page visible showing the most efficient members, the fastest members, and the luckiest members.


Along with these changes, the site will see a few minor improvements to page load times.  There will also be some work done on the backend to prepare for allowing users to choose between PPS with a 5% fee and PPLNS with a 2% fee, giving users a choice between two fair payout systems, neither of which can be pool hopped.

While I think Inaba may need to back off a -little- bit [IE:  Start a separate thread instead of starting the fight in a pool announcement thread], I can't help but laugh at this.  Thanks for starting my day off with a healthy dose of drama and comedy.

Anybody mining here is advised to check out the history of TNTMining, since it is OBVIOUS that this pool is the same person.  I would certainly recommend all future scam artists take the time to change the following when they run off with coins and start a new pool:

1) Change the format of your first post
2) Either use a standard mining port or at least not the same non-standard one
3) Use a proxy registration for your domain
4) Change more than 2 of the sentences between your two pool postings
5) Mask your scam by using a more fair model (Maybe SMPPS while hiding blocks?) to draw less attention

All these tips and more can be yours for the price of 5 BTC with your purchase of Bitcoin Scamming for Dummies!  What are you waiting for, buy this book so YOU can be the next MyBitcoin.com!
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EDIT:  Sorry if my sarcasm went through the roof, been dealing with an ISP/network administration staff that has no understanding of Bitcoin and has been threatening to drop one of my IPs due to the resurgence of botnets after the latest price increases.

Everything is back online.  I've disabled a few of the non-essential scripts [Hall of Fame, Pool Graph Logs] while everything settles back down.  Full functionality should be back within the hour.

Pool server crashed [well, I put it out of its misery, it was going to on its own].  Hasn't had a proper reboot in over a month.  Everything should be back online shortly.

BTC Guild in an I0C attack? All I ever did was throw up a pool when I0C launched.  I0C had no attack, the coin itself was FUBAR'd at launch due to bad design in its time-based diff adjustment.

BTC Guild found quite a large number of accounts that had been inactive for over 2 months suddenly withdraw coins [and in some cases fire back up the miners].  We'll see over the next few weeks if any new blood is joining the ranks of miners, or if it's mostly people who had their cards turned off when it became unprofitable to mine in some areas.

Just checked your pool stats, and we're within about 5% on getwork/s vs hash rate now.  Before these bans I was receiving over 600 getwork/s for roughly the same hash rate as your pool.

EDIT [since this post started a new page and not everybody goes back to catch up]:

The idles in the last 12-24 hours should be resolved at this time.  The recent rally brought back a lot of old time miners/new miners, some of which were either using broken setups or malicious setups, causing a nearly 50% increase in pool server load.  We haven't had this problem since changing from pushpool to poolserverj, so it was not caught before it became a problem.

As of this morning, pool load is back to normal levels, meaning the idles should be resolved.

I know cgminer is a bit aggressive, but the extra load it causes at an LP isn't nearly as bad as the load caused by either broken or malicious miners.  I've only banned 8 workers so far, and have dropped the amount of getworks the pool is responding to by close to 20%.  I used to have this process automated back with pushpool, but wasn't comfortable enough with Java to implement it into PoolServerJ until recently.

Everything should be going smooth again.  Any idle issues should be clearing up, I've added more detailed getwork/share submissions to the logs [something I used to do back with pushpool, not with poolserverj].  I've already temporarily banned a few workers who were operating under 10% efficiency while requesting multiple getworks per second.

I will not ban inefficient workers when they're only requesting a piece of work infrequently, so CPU miners don't need to worry.  These bans are targetting workers which are asking for abnormal amounts of work while returning very few valids.

Pushing a few updates to the pool today to help with the growth we're seeing due to the rally.  This will cause a few brief periods of idles, but should solve any other idles being caused by malicious/broken miners.

No inside information here, but I'm pretty sure it's related to security features of keeping most of the pool coins in offline wallets.

With the recent rally, at least in my observations with BTC Guild, the daily withdrawals are more than 3x as large as what they were a week ago.  There are users that haven't logged onto BTC Guild in over 2 months who suddenly popped in and withdrew their coins once the price cracked $5.

Interesting that you dont' show BTC Guild [which is about a third of the "Unknown" slice].  If you're having problems with our API, make sure you're using HTTPS [the site forces HTTPS on all connections].

Advertise your real fee, don't throw around made up numbers.  You don't pay for all stales, only stales while your pool software pushes long polls, so latency still will cause stales on your pool.  Not to mention stale rates vary drastically by person to person due to system configuration, software, and location.

Even worse, you throw around this 2.1% number and then compare it to Deepbit, which offers the protection against invalid blocks, but you use 10% for them.

You take 4% off every valid submission, that is your fee.

Hall of Fame is currently frozen, expecting to put up a new version in the next day or two.

I don't recall ever saying I'd consider dropping it to No Fee again.  I've said it in the IRC room many times:  You can't run a sufficiently large and reliable pool based on donations.  People are not charitable enough to keep you afloat, especially in PPS where I absorb ALL the risk.  Over time, donations shrink and shrink, and you end up operating at loss when BTC is worth so little compared to what we saw over the summer.

A few weeks ago, I was considering a drop to 4%.  Not a big drop at first glance.   Then for the last three weeks (excluding Monday/Tuesday this week), luck was signifcantly negative, to the point that over 1,500 BTC of my buffer evaporated.  A good chunk was restored Monday/Tuesday, but its back negative the last two days.  I'm not willing to run the risk of PPS only with even lower fees when miners are owed ~950 BTC/day, regardless of how many blocks are generated.

There is actually a small bug in the hall of fame blocks found stat.  Hoping to fix it when I update the HoF to give some short term Top Miner stats (since some miners could quit and still maintain a top 25 spot for a LONG time).

It's pretty obvious that blocks are occasionally being counted twice.  When you look at the top 3 miners and notice all 3 of them have found ~2-2.5x as many blocks as that many shares should have found.

Hall of Fame is BTC only.

I would recommend you perfect time travel so you can go back to retrieve them before they were donated to /dev/null.  The i0coin protocol literally broke a week after its launch.  The exchanges were no more, there was no mining.  It was only a while after that fact that anybody came back to try to revive them.  The pool was completely shut down, the wallet is no more.  If you're only coming back 4 months after that fact, obviously you didn't have very much invested into it.

Please give more information with actual numbers, and your miner/settings.  Your description is impossible.  Your earnings are calculated live based on share counts per difficulty.  There is literally no way for earnings to increase without a corresponding increase to share count.  Your earnings will not rise while your share counts remain stable.

The best I can come up with is you're mining on a worker thats hidden, or submitting shares to a backup pool.  Your share counts wouldn't visibly rise if mining on a hidden worker (since the worker stats are hidden), but the earnings would rise since they're shown regardless of hidden workers.

The only mismatch in share counts vs miner counts should be limited to the 10 second window between shares being submitted vs being logged [10 seconds being the maximum window, assuming your share was submitted instantly after a batch was logged].  This is of course assuming your miner isn't broken and counting multiple share submissions if there was a communication error.