CSC was re-enabled after updating to the hard fork.  Since so few pools have updated it's actually worth switching to quite often.

Annnddd that's why your numbers are completely wrong.  Coin picker websites are shit.  That site is currently showing a difficulty for DGC that is almost HALF of what the current difficulty is, meaning it's inflating the expected value by double.

Not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but they're wrong.  DGC and WDC are both less profitable than LTC at this moment.  DGC and WDC are only profitable for VERY short bursts.  We *do* mine them, but generally it's only worth mining them for about 1 minute before their difficulty adjusts and they become a waste of time.

CasinoCoin was disabled from mining yesterday after I got a message from  them asking if I had updated.  Apparently their idea of hard forking is zero fucking notice.  The update wasn't released until Monday, their forum thread didn't say anything about it last week, and it looks like the fork happened on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Updating to the new version to at least get us back on the real network, but I have no idea how many coins were lost because of their incompetence on implementing a hardfork.

Pretty sure their last block was something like November.  Maybe they snuck one in the last month, but for some reason November is sticking out for me.

98% is pretty terrible for an online business.

The rate of blocks is (fairly) static.  The target is one block on the entire network every 10 minutes.  If the network is growing, that time shrinks (it's been ~8 minutes on average for the last 6 months roughly).

A pool's neutral luck rate of blocks is entirely a measure of the pool's speed compared to network difficulty.  If the pool is growing at 10%, and the network is growing at 10% per adjustment, then the number of blocks a pool is expected to receive in a given time frame does not change.

If a pool is growing at 10% per adjustment period but the network is growing at 11%+ per adjustment period, the pool will, over time, make fewer and fewer blocks per period.  If the pool is growing at 11%+ and the network is growing at 10% or less, then the pool will gradually make more and more blocks per period.

Smaller pools have a bigger "jackpot" possibility.  You might make a lot less than expected (unlucky), you might make a lot more than expected (lucky).  This is because the way blocks are generated is truly random, and the odds are very low.  You can have very large swings of luck with a smaller pool because you're basically looking at a small sample size.  

Flip a coin 100 times, check your heads vs tails percentages.  Flip it 1,000 times, you're likely going to be much closer to expectation (50%/50%).  Flip it 10,000 times, even more likely.  This is similar to comparing small pools vs large pools.  The large pool is doing more iterations per time period, meaning they're less likely to deviate as far from expectation.  A small pool's *expected* output is the same, but it can be much further from that expectation in either direction.

While you're right on luck affecting payouts, the fact remains that the *expected* payout for a share doesn't change from the moment it's submitted, and it's independent of any previous/future mining activity.

Hot/cold streaks are not possible to predict.  Basing a decision to join/leave based on past results is no different than gambling.  Since PPLNS pays shares based on future performance, it is not possible to hop in/out of luck with ANY reliability, which is why it's unhoppable.

PPLNS has a charge-up and wind-down period.  When you first start, your reward is lower than what you'd expect per shift, until you have shares in all the shifts which are receiving payments.

When you stop mining, you continue getting paid until all the shifts you had shares in have left the window that gets paid.


However, the two periods are symmetrical.  You do not gain or lose anything by continuing to mine or leaving the pool.  At any given point, the *expected value* of any share submitted is completely independent of how long you have been mining previously, or how long you continue to mine on a PPLNS pool.

Sorry to users who may have been having some problems connecting the last few days.  The pool has been getting hit on and off for the last 2-3 days.  For the most part the attacks aren't affecting the pool.

As in the past, the DDoS/attack filtering does a very good job at keeping users running stable during an attack, it just causes issues when people are starting new connections if they get disconnected for another reason or restart their miners.


One tweak that had to be added was a longer blacklist on invalid miner workernames on the eu-stratum.btcguild.com frontend.  If you're having issue with your worker being rejected on that server, a temporary workaround is trying stratum.btcguild.com instead.

Still finding it hard to believe how much it has grown in the last 3 years.  The entire network was only around 300 GH/s when BTC Guild opened.

Good luck with that argument on this forum.  I'm no fan of banks, especially after recently having my corporate account forcefully closed with no recourse or an admission of the real reason.  However, they are a needed system for a modern economy, and Bitcoin will need bank-like systems if it expects to cope with the transaction speed that people expect these days.

Bitcoin "banks" will happen.  You don't have to use them.  But if you want to be able to go to a restaurant or a store and pay with Bitcoin as quick and easy as a credit card, you're going to need a third party that will insure 0-conf transactions.  The two easiest ways to do that are a payment processor that offers vendors insured 0-conf transaction processing at the cost of a higher merchant fee (and service cancellations for high risk vendors), or a bank/banking network where the user has funds stored online in advance to be used for point of sale purchases.

Always use the closest recommendation, rounded down.  The system will automatically increase your stratum connection's difficulty if you set it to low.  It will NOT decrease it if you set it too high.

Roughly 9.05 blocks would be neutral luck.

I want this to be very clear since I seem to get at least one email a week about this:


If you are trying to sell your hash rate to somebody else through "mining contracts" or whatever imaginative term you come up with, I am not going to waste my time getting involved everytime somebody scams you by doing a chargeback.  I will not release any details on users unless required to do so by court order/warrant, or if that user is showing clear signs of illegal activity (botnet).


If you want to sell somebody hashing time, you're doing it at your own risk. Don't come to me when you inevitably get ripped off, expecting me to freeze a random user's account or spend time trying to get involved in your paypal dispute process.

LTC should resume auto trading soon.  Since we never hit LTC often, it requires manual loading onto the exchange, whereas the other coins generally have enough of a stockpile for auto-refill to keep them topped up.

Not an orphan, had a small issue on the hot wallet (which is also used to check for blocks).  Looks like it froze up and needed to be restarted.  Everything should be back in order now.

A few automatic withdrawals (3 sets) failed, and 2 batches of manual withdrawals failed due to bitcoind timing out the requests.  These stalled withdrawals will be re-issued shortly.

Scrypt mining in general is becoming less profitable.

Yeah, I didn't go to sleep as early as I wanted to last night because I wanted to see just how high that shift was going to end.  Nice to see a new high point on the charts.

ScryptGuild as it exists is being closed.  Dogecoin and Litecoin mining, with profit switching between the two, will be merged into BTC Guild.  Exact timing is not yet known, but there will be adequate warning on the website when it is finally finishing up.  Illness and a few other unexpected circumstances have pushed back the expected date of the merge of the sites.