Merged mining doesn't hurt BTC production.  The only effect it had on BTC production was the server was offline a bit longer than expected when I switched it over to Merged Mining.  You're getting a free bonus that you can sell for extra BTC on the exchange if you have no interest in NMC.

Mining NMC does not affect your BTC production, just FYI.  You're complaining about being forced to get a free bonus.

Just be careful, some exchanges expire your address after you use it once, so it would only be good for 1 payout.

I do not currently have any plans to allow an NMC -> BTC conversion.  There's nothing preventing you from setting your wallet to an exchange and having your coins paid to the exchange to sell for BTC.  As far as I'm aware, no exchange has an API to sell NMC for BTC automatically, which is a requirement before I even consider allowing people on the pool to convert between currencies.

NMC will be credited just like BTC is, PPS on valid shares.  It does not matter if you have an NMC address added or not, the rewards will be a part of your account and available for withdrawal whenever you setup an address.

The NMC side of things will start becoming visible tonight as I add it to the frontend.  It will be just as simple as setting up your BTC wallet and requesting payouts.

Pool server is back running, using the test server bitcoind remotely for sync'ing until the local bitcoind is done sync'ing with the blockchain.  Website is disabled until the local bitcoind is caught up.

Pool is down for the switch to merged mining.  bitcoind was having some issues loading the blockchain, causing it to take a bit longer than I wanted.

Test server was able to successfully mine both an NMC and BTC block, so it was taken back offline.  The merged mining code will be deployed to the live server very shortly.  Similar to what happened with slush, merged mining rewards won't initially be visible to users (still need to setup the frontend for it).  However, the backend will be logging all of your NMC shares during that time, so once the frontend is finished you will see all the merged mining rewards you earned up to that point.

Testing of the new build is going great for BTC Guild.  Took a bit of tinkering after you first launched, but the bug fixes we found definitely seem to be going smooth.  Looking hopeful for full deployment at BTC Guild this weekend!  Just waiting on a valid namecoin block to be generated before I attempt a push to live.

Test server is back online.  Share counts were added to the same worker IDs on BTC Guild primary pool, including NMC (not yet visible).  Next round of testing is up for anybody interested (remember, it must be a worker made before we moved to PPS).

Test server for mining is 188.40.44.150:8332 .

If you're experiencing high stales on the test server, please comment on which miner you're using.  You can find out your UserID by looking at your API on the BTC Guild website.

He's seeing Valid BTC (Invalid BTC), Valid NMC (Invalid NMC) on my stats page.  I'm betting cgminer as well, I'm running it and just as you said, it's ignoring longpolls for the NMC side and submitting partial-stales (valid BTC, stale NMC).


UPDATE:  Test server is going down for most of today.  A new build will deployed much later tonight.  Thank you all for helping in the first round of testing.
UPDATE 2:  I will merge over the BTC/NMC counts before turning the test server back on tonight so I can reset the test server stats for the next round.  As stated previously, NMC rewards won't be visible on the primary pool until later this weekend.

I have a test server up for merged mining for anybody interested.  It is using the old user/worker database from before the move to PPS, so new users/workers will not be recognized.

You can mine on the test server by using 188.40.44.150:8332/ as the address in your miner.  Workers made before the move to PPS will be able to access it.


This test server is not currently linked to the primary pool.  You can get a brief stats summary by going to http://188.40.44.150 .  If your User ID is listed more than once, it means either you are mining with multiple workers, or the difficulty on BTC/NMC has changed.  All valid BTC shares will be synchronized to the main server on Thursday, November 10th.  NMC shares may take slightly longer to be merged, but will be merged in once NMC mining is live on the primary pool.

This should go without saying:  Mining on the test pool should be done at your own risk.  I cannot guarantee stability.  However, if you take the risk, you'll be earning namecoins (though the ability to withdraw them will be delayed til sometime this weekend), as well as BTC at the normal PPS pool rate.

Hall of Fame will be getting a redesign soon to fix the highlights as well as add in Weekly/Monthly charts for the Top Share submissions.

Regarding hourly submitted share average, that's essentially what your performance charts are right now, but converted into MH/s.

The problem is your statement is misinformed.  True it's your observation, but your sample size is so small that the results are completely irrelevant (outside of comparing PPS to PPS, and even then there is variance on your own miner's luck at diff=1 shares).

3 hour sample size?  100% useless.  24 hour sample size?  Also useless.  2 week sample size?  Now you're getting warmer.

I will fix this later today, I wasn't aware that it was still broken (nobody ever complains about the things I'm not aware of!).  I'll also get the API up for our pool block reporting so projects like pident (well, they're gone, but others will take their place if they haven't already) can accurately grab which pools are solving which blocks.

Aside from these changes and merged mining, does anybody have some feature requests?  I have a nice weekend opened up for my birthday and the coding bug is hitting my pretty hard right now!

Nice guide, spotted one error though.  Deepbit does not pay for invalid shares, they pay for invalid blocks.

Well, I think quite a few have been waiting for this:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51226.0

The WorkMaker version of PoolServerJ has finally been released by shadders, along with a few other improvements to merged mining performance.  I will begin to testing the merged mining system on Thursday with a few users, and hopefully deploy it for all miners on Saturday.

We're back up, sorry for the downtime (always hits right as you go to bed).  There was a rogue script running major logging due to the PoolServerJ flaw we found a few days ago, just to make sure the patches were working properly.  The script didn't have a check to see if it was already running from a previous cronjob.  Looks like sometime last night the script too long and ended up running twice simultaneously, which caused it to eventually get into a death spiral and lock up.

As sadpandatech mentioned, the slowdown also managed to trigger some software based DDoS protection which is why about 75% of the pool was unable to mine.

Fixed a bug in the auto payouts.  Made a change after the first round of testing to make sure it wasn't possible to send a payment to somebody without logging it with a batch # so I could audit the results in case a batch failed.  One of those changes ended up making the payment script stop after the first payment was processed, so only 1 person would get an auto payout per hour.  That has been fixed and now the auto payouts are working as intended.

Merged mining requires extra long polls when the NMC block changes.  Everytime you have a LP, you increase the odds of users getting stales during that window where the pool is generating thousands of getworks for miners.  MM more than doubles the number of long polls.  The only way around that FACT, is if some of the other MM pools are not pushing out a longpoll when the NMC block changes.  If that's the case, they're damaging NMC production without hurting BTC much (there is always some minor overhead in generating the work for a merged block vs a regular block).

Yes, it may be a poor excuse to some, but I've not hidden the fact that I'm not a supporter of merged mining in the first place.