Pools are service providers for miners, not the other way around.  Miners can mine on their own, or they can shop around for the pool service that fits their needs.  Pools provide miners with reporting and notification tools, while also allowing miners to create an arrangement where if any miner of a pool finds a block they are agreeing it will be spread between all miners, with the pool doing the job of accounting for it and making sure everybody gets their cut.


As a miner, you are paying the pool for its service in most cases, either as direct fees, or optional "donations" (which would still be classified as fees for tax purposes).  It is far more logical for the miner to be the one sending a 1099 to the pool for the services they paid for.  Of course, with the average pool fee being 0-2%, you'd have to have mined approximately $30,000 worth of BTC per year for that to be the case.  And lucky for BTC Guild miners, the pool service is part of a corporation, and you don't have to file 1099s for money paid to a corporation for services (except for certain exceptions such as lawyers and accountants, architects, engineers, and a few others).

Sure you have BITCOIN set to 0.01?  Sure it's 0.01 and not 0.10?  Positive it says 'Confirmed' next to your BITCOIN wallet?  The pool triggers payouts *every hour* for automatic payouts, and BTC has been triggering exactly as expected every hour without delay.

Considering the network difficulty is 5 billion right now....finding a block in 1.3 billion shares would be considered extremely lucky.  Even at the difficulty from a month ago, 1.3 billion shares to find a block would have been faster than expected.

Are you suggesting that I should be paying you a bonus as well?  Because the only fee on the pool at the moment is the 1% trading fee, which is optional.

Yes, there are coins that update that fast.  It's generally when a coin like Smartcoin has a diff adjustment that pushes diff down making it highly profitable for a very brief time.  The profit switcher takes expected stale share rates into account before switching to a coin where we can burst through blocks that quickly.

Miners that don't mine enough to equal 0.00001 BTC worth of a coin when the normal conversion process happens.

A small update to the timing of certain events was made now that sub 0.01 payouts are available:

If you are a very slow miner, you already only had your coins exchanged once per day in order to minimize the effects of rounding of the fees.  The timing of this once per day exchange has been moved to just before the daily payout for sub-0.01 thresholds.

Fixed.  Looks like that little piece of code was broken when the coins were removed.

I wouldn't get your hopes up.  Mining hardware has been pre-ordered already which will probably trickle in all the way to 2015.  The odds of the network hash rate going down are pretty low unless the price is low enough that newer ASICs can't even beat the costs of electricity.  You can't factor in device RoI for network growth when it's already been paid for and the companies have terrible track records of providing refunds.

You don't.  Payouts go out every hour.  You only get credited every hour, so there's little point in a manual payout.

IIRC, Eligius' GBT based servers send a blank block template when a new block is found on the network, then later sends a "complete" template that includes transactions.  This is due to bandwidth needed to push out a full GBT block, so in order to make sure miners aren't wasting work on old blocks, they push out a very quick one then fill it in later.

If a miner doesn't move to the newer block template, or if they find a solution before a filled in template is provided, a coinbase-only block would be the result.


I know a few other pools have done similar things in order to speed up long polls as much as possible, though I don't know how many still do this.  It's extremely rare for a pools memory pool to be completely empty when a new block hits the network.

Eastern Time.  I did put EST (though it's EDT right now...god do I hate daylight savings).

ScryptGuild Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=457016.0

Updates:

1) Automatic payouts for coins can now be set to 0.001.  Payouts under 0.01 are processed once per day at 00:35 server time (EST).

No plans to merge the two.




I have no idea.  The problem isn't on the pool, and it isn't related to coin switching as the other poster said.  Unlike other multipools, ScryptGuild doesn't involve any brief disconnects when switching coins, nor does it invalidate work for the previous coin which could cause a miner to switch pools due to heavy rejects.  ScryptGuild's coin switching is identical to a new block notification, because that's all it is.

You have no idea how true that is for the last few months.

It took ~17 minutes for the block after 293508 to get solved.  Within a minute of 293509 getting solved (by Eligius), 293508 was paid to everybody and appeared on the PPLNS Stats and Dashboard pages.

The block was listed on the Pool Stats page within 1 minute of the block being found.  Just like how 293511 is currently on the pool stats page but not yet paid/listed on the PPLNS Stats or Dashboard pages (because 293512 has not been solved on the network giving our block a confirmation).

NOBL/FRY/KDC/MOON are now gone.  Small bug in the way the site displays stats is currently causing coin balances/shares this shift to show up as 0.  It should be resolved in the next 15-20 minutes.  The system designed to allow easy addition of new coins wasn't designed for coins to be removed, and there's a few pieces I missed which are causing it to screw up when it encounters a CoinID that no longer exists.


UPDATE:  Everything looks to be working properly again!

Wouldn't have made a big difference.  I don't leave the house without a laptop and 4G personal hotspot.

Speed estimates should be taken with a grain of salt after any kind of outage.  It can cause....weird things to show up.