For those interested, BTC Guild has prepared a fork of the frontend and backend for i0coin.  You can sign up and prepare to mine at:  i0.btcguild.com

Proportional, ~2.08% fee (1 coin if it goes 48 coins/5 minute block, 2 coins if it goes 96 coins/10 minute block).  Full BTC Guild interface and round statistics.

You can setup now and make sure your miners work.  I'll be swapping i0coind for the official release version as soon as it becomes available.

For those interested, BTC Guild has prepared a fork of the frontend and backend for i0coin.  You can sign up and prepare to mine at:  i0.btcguild.com

Proportional, ~2.08% fee (1 coin if it goes 48 coins/5 minute block, 2 coins if it goes 96 coins/10 minute block).  Full BTC Guild interface and round statistics.

You can setup now and make sure your miners work.  I'll be swapping i0coind for the official release version as soon as it becomes available.

Our block numbers aren't pulled from the client, but rather we wait and pull them from Block Explorer, so we know for certain that the number shown on the website is the one that it represents in the chain.

Are you forgetting to put www. on the URL?  The DDoS only took us down for a few hours.  Site and API have been working fine ever since.

The effects of the DDoS should have been limited to Rounds 2315, 2316, and 2317.  Most miners were unable to communicate with the server between 2315 and 2316, meaning they could not submit shares.  One server was stuck on 2316 for about 15 minutes while the other was on 2317 as the DDoS was dying down and the servers were able to come back up.  So the people on that server had more shares counted during 2316, and fewer on 2317.

Outside of those rounds, no data has been lost, though the servers have still had some residual attacks hitting it, which caused higher levels of idles and stales.  These issues have since gone away, and thanks to the attack I was able to implement the better load balancer on US West while the servers recovered.  For the last few hours, the servers have been functioning better than ever.

Still some residual attacks going on, been working with the ISP to continue filtering out bad traffic.  Just added a large blacklist to the perimeter of the ISP's network which should help.

The block you linked is the one when the servers were going up/down.  The DDoS caused the servers to de-sync so one server was still working on an old round.  Not that many people could access the servers at all during the DDoS.

Stats issue for US West miners fixed (new load balancer = new port/address for the website to communicate with the scripts on US West).  Miner speed estimates for US West will take 15 minutes to correct.  You didn't suddenly stop mining, I just wiped the temporary table used to calculate your speeds.

Contacted our ISP for the website.  Looks like the website triggered a DDoS filter so that it will allow valid HTTP traffic in, but blocks off the other ports that were getting hit.  So people can talk with the website just fine, but when the site tries to use a non-standard HTTP port its getting filtered, thus stopping the site from communicating with some of the external database servers.

Should be resolved shortly.  Until then, the pools are definitely working, we've already found a block since they came back up.


EDIT::  Everything is back up and running.  And now US West should be able to handle traffic better as well thanks to switching to a better load balancing solution.

Pools are up and running again.  The website is having some issues communicating with the other databases, so the stats aren't updating at this time.  Trying to get it fixed ASAP.

Using this as an excuse to change the load balancer on US West to the setup on US Central, significantly more reliable way to route workers.  Still hoping everything is back up and running by 10 AM (PST).  The DDoS is mostly over.

Remove botnet of ~139,000 ips, get DDoS'd be even more, never ceases to amaze me how these people can't just solo mine and push all their rewards to a central wallet.

Everything should be coming back online in the next 15-30 minutes hopefully.  There's no breach in security, they've just been slamming us offline, so everything you mined up until the site went offline is safe.

Yet another attempt by the larger botnet to get back onto US Central and West.  94,000 new IPs connected to the pool in the last 3 hours.  Just sent a list of the known bot IPs to our colo provider to get them filtered at the edge of the network.

UPDATE:  Final count before the new filters kicked in was 139,000 new IP addresses.  Anyone with experience with servers knows that trying to hold open 139,000 persistent connections while dealing with 150k opening/closing connections on top of it is going to cause...issues.

Estimated Rewards are calculated by your current mining speed (15 minute average) vs total pool speed, rather than shares in the round vs total, to stop pool hopping.

The round you were mining in is still going if it was that recent, so your estimated has dropped to 0 since your speed is currently 0.  Since the round hasn't ended [or it hasn't been announced due to the 1 hour delay], your unconfirmed hasn't gone up yet.

As much as I hate to hurt my own side:  The difficulty has only been that high for a small portion of the time frame you posted for the average, so it doesn't mean that much .  Page 2 still has the best math for our current situation, it shows the probability of our luck over the past 4 difficulties (which is about 7 weeks give or take).

It's being worked on.  The current testing code takes far too long to run, and I'm worried that the long run time could cause a double payout if somebody tried to get a payout during the script.  I'm working on optimizing how user rewards are stored/accessed so it runs almost instantaneously, that way I can simply lock payouts while the script runs and turn it back on when it exits without inconveniencing too many people.

Alright, I'm done stating just hard data.  Now for facts.  You're either:  1)A troll, 2) a moron, 3) mentally handicapped, or a combination of the 3.  Let's find out:

1) After being banned from the channel you start saying I might be the same person as Tom Williams of MyBitcoin in #bitcoin-police.  So the troll part is definitely there.  
2) You think that the "estimated amount of bitcoins stolen could go to 0 if more positive luck days are added", which certainly qualifies you as a moron.
3) You seem to think I can just "create" luck/blocks to hide theft, which definitely makes you mentally handicapped.

I took the time to get the total share counts for the difficulties BTC Guild has kept track of.  Over the recorded difficulties at BTC Guild, the chance of having our overall luck is about 1 in 5.  It sucks, its bad, but it could be worse, and certainly isn't some 0.6% chance.  Like JoelKatz said, you're cherry picking a set of blocks that were already known to have been bad luck.

For your "creating" blocks comment:  Want some proof its impossible?  Our blocks are claimed by block number.  It is easy to audit that we truly mined the blocks we're claiming.  Go to the block explorer link.  Look at the generation amount/wallet.  Every 24 hours our pool servers move the funds to 1MbSn15MZWNbkNWF72KopyQenCV2zdcWvr before they become available for payouts.  It is impossible for us to claim a block we didn't actually mine, meaning it is impossible to fake positive luck.  The audit trail is there for anybody who wants to look.


EDIT:  To everyone other than Mad7Scientist, sorry you had to read the rant, but after the crap he was spouting in our IRC channel I couldn't pass up the chance to put him in his place.

Banned a brand new botnet that decided to give our pool a test that was hogging resources for long poll connections on US Central.  Also banned a user who was operating between 15 and 20 GH/s but running at 2-3% efficiency.  I'm not fond of somebody requesting 5+ million getworks in a 24 hour period but only sending in ~100k shares, which means he was putting nearly 1 TH/sec worth of load on bitcoind.


Regarding invalid rounds:  Most pools roll them into a new round because they don't offer ANY payment on them.  We do for quite a few users (average payouts on invalid rounds at ~15 BTC).  In a proportional pool, whether the shares are rolled forward has negligible impact on the end reward.  If people were leaving during the invalid round/next round, you get MORE due to the share reset.  If people were joining during the invalid round/next round, get get less due to the share reset.  We're talking about a very short time frame [a few hours if we're unlucky, a few minutes if we're lucky], where the pool speed is not likely to fluctuate much in either direction during that short time span.

This has been possible from the beginning.  Miners know if they have the winning share, and the pool reports who found a block.  Unfortunately it's the only way I know of to truly audit a pool you suspect of withholding blocks, and it would require a large number of users to provide reasonable assurance one way or another.

Since Vladmir likes his Poisson distribution, here's the hard data for the completed difficulties that have been tracked by the pool:


It's worth noting that there were _MANY_ restarts of pushpool instances/server moves during 867k - 1.56m difficulties.  Some of them were definitely duplicating work during that time meaning the share counts were inflated on some rounds due to the same work being issued twice.  However, I would expect the combined duplication of work was less than 1%, which is immaterial given the numbers we're working with.

I'll leave interpretation up to Vladmir, I don't want to start ranting interpretations of these numbers that may not be accurate.