It isn't inaccurate on that one.  The block is clearly identified with slush's coinbase message in it.

The current plan is...a lot of them.  I'm not doing any Proof of Stake coins (I have no interest in modifying the pool server to support those).  But if it's traded on Cryptsy, it is *probably* going to get added, except for the ones like LOT/MEOW which have bottomed out to absolute 0 due to no bids and a wall of sells at 1 satoshi each.

Our 3-month luck is 100% the fault of the block withholding.  That effect will keep our 3-month luck down until that activity (most of May and early June) is no longer a part of the 3-month average.

The group that did the withholding is the ONLY EVER PROVEN block withholding to take place.  And what happened?  Their accounts were frozen with what few coins were not yet paid.  They were notified, and after days of communication the problem was found.  Their explanation and looking at their share history clearly pointed it was a software glitch related to a 32-bit integer overflow.  It was discarding shares with a difficulty greater than 2^32 due to the overflow.  48 hours later they resumed mining on BTC Guild and after finding multiple blocks they had their accounts unfrozen.


We are at 91.6% out of ~99% expected (orphans make 100% unlikely) for the month.  That 1-month average has varied from 91% to 97% over the last 2 weeks.  All it takes are a few long blocks to drastically change the averages.  All it takes are a few really fast blocks to drastically change them right back.

They are going to swing more drastically and more wildly as time goes on, because public pools will be gone within a year unless something changes drastically in the mining ecosystem.  All the major public pools are now under 20% of the network combined.  This excludes GHash because their private farm alone is larger than every pool except Discus Fish.  It excludes Discus Fish for similar reasons (every chinese manufacturer uses them for hardware "testing"/pre-mining). The smaller pools are, the more variance they will have over the same time frames.  BTC Guild's luck prior to the withholding in May/June rarely moved more than 1 or 2% for the 3 month period.  But prior to May/June, BTC Guild alone was larger than all public pools combined are today (in terms of network share).

When the rewrite hits, there will be a lot of coins added.  The main advantage to the rewrite is that instead of storing earnings and share data for different coins, only a single share count must be stored, and earnings are stored as a single value of BTC or LTC based on user preference.  This means new coins can be added and removed without adding any overhead to the way the server has to handle the coin.  Adding a new coin (or removing one from the list) would be transparent on both the frontend and backend, without any need for restarts or delays.

My move is still scheduled for mid month.  I have some of the rewrite done in advance, so the hope is after my move is complete it will only take a few days to push the update out.  The biggest concern/delay is that something could break while I was distracted and I wouldn't notice it for many hours, so I can't do the update until after I'm able to stay put for a few days.

That happens about 2-3 times a month.

Dragon miners were made extremely poorly and do not function well with variable difficulty.  I believe their default is 1024, and I'm assuming that's what you set it to on BTC Guild, which is why it is showing up properly.  I'm pretty certain you can do the same with BitMinter, the only question is if the BitMinter variable difficulty is decreasing it, causing the miner to effectively lose speed due to its complete lack of variable difficulty support.  Basically, the miner would continue to run at diff1024, but the pool is only crediting you for 700-800ish because that's what it told you to work at instead.

They didn't "figure it out".  There is the very real chance that one or more of their Bitcoin orphans were the result of worthless crapcoin daemons adding extra latency to their pool knowing of a new block or pushing out a new block.



That was just adding insult to injury after last night's block .  But our luck with orphans has been fairly good, that was our first orphan in the last 300 blocks.

With only about 12 blocks/day expected, it doesn't take much to swing those numbers anymore.  Yesterday's 13 hour block pretty much guaranteed the weekly average is going to stay low until that round rolls out of the average, yet it wasn't a record in terms of shares vs diff.  It wasn't even 7x.  Yet that single day had a multiple-percent impact on the 1-month average because of how small the sample size is becoming.  During our last run of luck (Jun 18 - Jun 21) the 24H - 2W numbers were all over 100% again.

You're going to see more extremes now, that's what happens when you're a smaller share of the overall network.  The bad days will be extremely low, the good days will be much higher.  Each block is ~13% of expectation, so getting 4 blocks more than expected is now huge (160%), whereas in the past it was only a minor bump (115-125%).  In the same vein, 4 blocks less than expectation is now a 40% instead of 80%.

This reminds me of some posts from 2011.  I remember one user ended up using the heat from his GPUs for a heated bathroom floor.  At least one person also used it to complement their pool heater in the winter.

If you changed your reserve, either the coins were paid to your LTC wallet if you had one, or converted to BTC.  There is a brief period during conversion where they won't show up on your dashboard anymore, but would show up under the Convert to BTC page as a Pending conversion.

blockorigin.pfoe.be already does this.  Additionally, blockchain.info does NOT use Relay IP for determining which pool mined the block these days.

Not counting uptime/security (unlikely to be affected), the real issue is extra load on the servers.  As you pointed out, DVC+IXC are virtually worthless.  I'm not even sure if they're 0.1% actually.  Adding extra coins to each pool server means each server will be wasting time accessing the SSDs/RAM for those coins, a few CPU cycles, and some bandwidth every time they get a block.  That will at least minimally impact bitcoind performance.  How much?  I can't say, and nobody else really can either.  But it is a non-0 impact, and for how worthless they are, I'm not willing to risk ANY performance for junk coins on BTC Guild.

Hmm...I can only provide the following trophy:

Common sense dictates the following:  If somebody has hash rate and is willing to lease it to you, why would they charge you less than what it could mine for themselves?

Outside of the pool you point it at being lucky during your rental period, you will always lose money renting hash power.  Otherwise nobody would ever let you rent the hash power at that price in the first place.

Good luck making more than what you paid for them.  The sunk cost for you is at minimum 3-4 times what they pay for the same hash rate.  That's the difference, you can never obtain hash rate at even close to the cost the manufacturers can.

More like over the last 11 days : https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=pool_stats

Just for the sake of fairness, I'll remind you that BTC Guild managed an 11-block streak with only ~25% of the network earlier this year.  With that said, carry-on with the ghash.io bashing.

It's a bit of a stretch.  Mining centralization has been here since 2011 in the form of pools.  It made miners feel a little better because they knew that if a pool did something, they could just leave, and in aggregate that would be enough.  GHash.io is the next step in that, where you have a "pool" that is attached to a giant private farm.  BTC Guild sort of had this in early 2013, since ASICMINER used BTC Guild exclusively for most of its early launch, and most Avalons also pointed to BTC Guild, but these were separate entities and not within my control.

There's not a huge difference in effect between having 4-6 major pools and having 4-6 private mining corporations, except for the way miners feel about the two.  In one, miners have some control, though how much is up for debate.  In the other, it is entirely out of their control.  I've been in this game for almost 4 years now, and from early on I've known this was going to happen, although I didn't expect to see it in 2014/2015.  Most of us didn't even expect to see ASICs for over a decade, but we underestimated the gullibility of people to pre-order hardware that didn't exist yet in order to fund the development of said hardware.  Then again, even without pre-order madness we would have had ASICs, since ASICMINER did the correct approach by raising investment capital honestly and openly, and they were the first ones to have wide deployment.

These days, I'm not so sure if the mining scene is even a factor in Bitcoin adoption/price/viability.  The technology itself works great even with fewer entities involved in the mining process.  The only concern comes from consolidation/cooperation of those entities to enforce new soft rules on the network.  While mining can never execute a hard fork without the market following it, they can enforce a soft fork which lies within the rules defined in the protocol.  Things like enforcing higher fees by not including transactions, or even forcing higher fees by orphaning blocks that include transactions without fees.

Only automatic payouts.  They process hourly, and your entire balance is paid out once it crosses the threshold.

All public pools are continuing to shrink in their share of the network as manufacturers of ASICs build up private farms for a fraction of the cost of individuals.  Most ASICs these days are not going to turn a profit for an end user, but the manufacturer's cost per hash is significantly lower.  In the last 2016 blocks, BTC Guild, Eligius, BitMinter, p2pool, and Slush combined aren't even 20% of the network anymore, and that has been a continuing trend for most of 2014.