Coin daemons use very little CPU for the majority of the time.  The issue is when a new block hits it causes a significant spike in CPU, disk, and network activity.  If multiple daemons hit blocks at the same time (which is common with merged minable coins), it means you will have other processes competing with bitcoind for CPU/disk/network resources during the block verification/relay period.

If you want to merge mine coins without impacting BTC performance, put the altcoins on a separate system, so that they are never utilizing the same CPU/disk as your bitcoin daemon.  Additionally, at least in the case of pools, you should never spend any time waiting for an altcoin daemon when a new block hits.  Assemble a new BTC block with the MM information in the coinbase and push it out.  Most of the time this will push out work with the new altcoin block as well, since most altcoins are virtually unused so there is very little time involved in verifying a new block.  If the new block for bitcoind and the altcoin chain arrived at the same time, you will almost always have the altcoin verified before bitcoind is done.  If it doesn't, you're not losing anything significant, just catch up to the newest altcoin block the next time you do a work push.

Sending money to yourself constantly is spam.  I don't care what fees you pay.  It is spam.  Period.  You are filling the network and everybody's hard drives with JUNK data that serves absolutely no purpose.  The "stress test" transactions were spam by any rational definition. 

Arguing that because a fee is paid it's not spam is simply wrong.  I get a ton of junk mail in my post office box that companies pay to have delivered to everybody.  Doesn't change the fact that it is junk mail.

Yes.  Balances are forfeit to the pool if they are not withdrawn after the 3 months of time being given for people to click a button.  This is in line with the Terms of Service, item #7, and what users who have left the pool/stopped mining have been told.  There are a couple hundred accounts (over the last few years) where users have offered to donate whatever remaining balances they had to the pool.  I have always stated that if that is what they want to do, leave the balance on their account and whenever the pool closes, that is when it will be considered donated/given back to the pool.  Up until that final moment where the servers shut off, users have every right to change their mind and pull those balances off their accounts.

Nothing is stopping them other than profit motive.  Just like miners today could all decide to only mine blocks with a coinbase transaction and nothing else.

If you cut off the network's ability to process a reasonable amount of transactions, you remove the value of that network and suddenly you're making a lot less because the value plummets to nothing.

Recipe:
1/3 tbsp. of black magic
2 lumps of superstition
a pinch of voodoo
3 tsp. of random
and a gallon of confirmation bias.

Mix vigorously.


For an extra kick, pour in gambler's fallacy until mixture thickens.

I've removed the pages which will no longer serve any function (Charts, Workers, Rankings).  The Pool Stats page has been updated to show you the pool speed history over the last 2 and a half years.


Will likely begin posting some informational posts about the pool later this week just so anybody looking to start their own pool can learn from my mistakes and growing pains, and people looking at other pools can know what things they should look for from a pool operator.

5 Minutes Remain...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jK-NcRmVcw

---

Pool servers have now been taken offline.  Miners have hopefully already begun their journey to failover pools.


R.I.P. BTC Guild: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnQ8N1KacJc

The pool has been public since May of 2011.  This announcement post is the 2nd post for the pool.  When it changed from Proportional to Pure PPS (and before PPLNS was introduced), we started a brand new thread.  BTC Guild mined *thousands* of blocks without a tag in the coinbase, because the old pushpool software we used in the early days didn't have a built in way to add coinbase tags.  We were the third oldest still running pool (second oldest if you start measuring from our first block found with the pool software during private testing, but Eligius opened up to the public a few days before BTC Guild).


EDIT:  Original forum thread for the pool: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7760.0

What a bunch of fucking morons...this isn't needed in any way.  It's not like you're going to discover anything we don't already know.

It has been a sticky topic in the Pools subforum for 3 weeks, and the switch to V3 via BIP66 has been in motion for quite a long time before that.

Just a reminder that the mining server will be offline at 23:59 UTC (or shortly after) on June 30th, which is about 20 hours after making this post.  If you plan to continue mining on BTC Guild up until the mining server goes dark, make sure your miners have failover pools in place.


For the first week after the mining pool shuts off, withdrawals may experience brief delays (up to 8 hours if it happens right after I go to sleep).  I'm expecting a significant increase in withdrawal requests once the server shuts off and people who have been mining on auto-pilot finally go to the site and read the news.  This will require moving coins from the cold storage to the payment server, which is a manual process.

If you connected by direct IP, or use extremely broken DNS caching, the old stratum.btcguild.com server was taken offline days ago. The DNS had been changed to a different IP for over 48 hours before the server was offline, even though the TTL on that subdomain was only 30 minutes.

The domain will not be sold until 2016 or later.  I will not be selling it to somebody so they can redirect stratum.btcguild.com to their own server right after the pool shuts off.

Because all of my feedback is from people that are "untrusted" in the default trust chain.  And people just don't seem to use the trust system for pool ops.

Automatic withdrawals are still 0.01 intervals.  If you want to withdraw dust you have to use the manual withdrawal button on the dashboard.

Possibly, but it would not be for sale until 2016.




I do not currently have plans to distribute the code used for the site or the backend.  The frontend relies specifically on BTC Guild's DB schema, which is not remotely close to what any other pool software uses.  The backend is almost entirely uncommented spaghetti code.  Possibly down the road I will make a pass through it to comment and clean it up and open source it.  However, I wouldn't recommend it simply because it would be unsupported, whereas other options (ckpool/eloipool) still have active developers/support.

The block size debate is something I've been expecting for years, and it's something I just can't see a great solution to.  The real problem I'm seeing is the larger blocks, once they become normal/blocks actually start using up some of that extra space, is the ability for people to run full nodes.  Similarly, solo mining/p2pool is already at a disadvantage compared to pools/farms running on datacenter quality connections, larger blocks just make it worse.

I've always fallen into the camp that felt like Bitcoin would be a settlement network more than a transactional network.  Services building on top of the chain rather than all trying to live inside of it.  I was very interested in what sidechains could accomplish.  The idea of a separate network for insignificant transactions that then get settled on the main chain as a bulk settlement rather than 10,000 transactions cluttering up the entire network.

Obviously, we haven't gotten something like that ready in time, so we *need* to increase the block size in order for Bitcoin to remain functional in the next few years.

Kano CKPool is no longer recommended because it is run by a fucking baby.  That better?

The above rebuttal was approved since I did not want to delete the original message that caused the thread to derail.  The original post included links for its accusations so anybody could read into it and make up their own mind.  Any further posts on the subject will be deleted to avoid derailing the thread again.



On the brighter side:  At least our last 2 weeks might be a bit lucky, the last few days haven't been half bad.