BTC Guild is approximately 1/6th - 1/5th the network.  The entire network has periods with > 1 hour between blocks.  A 6 hour block is not unexpected for 1/6th - 1/5th the network.  It happens.  As a matter of fact, it happens probably more than once a month (both for the whole network and for the pool).

3 month luck is finally under 100% .  First time it's ever happened.  I did add a 6-month luck figure now that we actually have 6 months of luck history stored.  Then again, expectation states it should be above and below 100% in roughly even amounts of time (averaging out to neutral over an infinite length of time).  I suppose the bright side is we had our good luck when difficulty was lower, which puts long term earnings above expectation by a decent margin for users that were around during those times.

I had a feeling this would happen with the 1.6 dogecoin change.  It looks like ~80-90% of our time is now spent on DOGE, hopping to other coins only briefly when they either have a good block reward (MEOW/LOT), or have a difficulty drop for the KGW coins, or DOGE has a diff spike and we move off it til the next drop.

The profitability of multipools is really starting to suffer as more hash rate is being directed at them.  I'm looking to add 3 coins this week, but after that there will be a pause in new coins while I re-evaluate the pool profitability more.  I'm seeing a pretty grim future for profit switching pools given how fast coins are tanking in profitability.

At least Comcast is better than Cox...I miss my Comcast now .

Not responding to any specific question, but rather the general questions that hit while I was asleep.


Balance Updates - Your balance on PPLNS updates as soon as a block is found.  You do not have to wait until a shift is closed for the payment to hit your balance.

Current Shift - The current shift does *not* receive payments from blocks.  If this was done, people would have a slight indication for pool hopping.  People would be able to jump into the pool if the current shift found a block or two within the first few minutes.  It wouldn't be a guaranteed profit like proportional hopping, but it would be fairly likely to produce above average results.

24-Hour Earnings - Because the open shifts are not done receiving payments, they are not included in the 24-hour earnings.  Instead, the pool uses the last 24-hours of closed shifts to calculate 24-hour earnings.  This means there is a 9-10 hour lag on 24-hour earnings.

Most pools are based off proven unhoppable methods (DGM, PPLNS, PPS, CPPSRB).  Slush's payment method is hoppable, though not as reliably as the old proportional methods.  I don't think that's what most the responses refer to though.  I think the biggest thing people have against slush's pool these days is the complete absence of Slush, especially since the little quirk in his round calculations still screws up once in a while.  It supposedly always gets fixed, but that bug has been lingering around for about a year if his thread comments are any indication.

Variance swings both ways, and ends up dead even in the long run.  That's the only reason PPS was kept as long as it was on BTC Guild, when it's been under consideration for removal for the better part of a year.

Yes, how dare this pool have bad luck for once.  "Consistently" bad luck my ass.  The pool was positive for almost 7 months straight.  This is THE FIRST MONTH the 1-month period has had bad luck since it was tracked beyond difficulty boundaries back in September.

Cloudflare has been causing some major issues for the website recently, especially for users (and myself) who are connecting from the west coast (US).  I'm likely dropping their service soon.  ScryptGuild had a few delays this week with some changes at BTC Guild that required the majority of my attention.

I know Lottocoin has had a delay in payouts recently, due to a user with a very high balance enabling auto payouts instead of auto convert, but the pool didn't have enough in the local lottocoind to make the payout.  This should be resolved in a few hours.  I'm going through the coins today and adjusting how much it holds locally and how much it pre-loads onto the exchange for conversion.

As stated above, NMC is hidden by default since the majority of users don't care about it.  You can enable it on the Settings page.  It doesn't include the detail that BTC does, basically just a balance counter and a CSV export in the settings page for your payouts.

Unlike a few other pools, BTC Guild doesn't keep the NMC if you had it hidden or didn't include a wallet.  Your account, as long as it was on PPLNS, was generating NMC the entire time and has accumulated a balance.

Other pools being faster doesn't impact luck in any way except for orphans (smaller pools have a slightly higher chance of having blocks orphaned because larger pools are more likely to build off their own blocks in a race).  Since BTC Guild still pays for orphaned blocks, that doesn't actually matter for us.



For PPS to out-pay PPLNS, the luck has to be ~95% or less.  Up until this last 2 weeks, the 3-month luck was over 102%.  As a matter of fact, until this last 2 week period, BTC Guild's 3 month luck for PPLNS was paying better than what you'd get under a 0% fee PPS.

Correct, sort of.  Merged mining doesn't siphon off part of your hash rate for NMC.  Merged mining has *0* impact on how much hash you're pushing towards Bitcoin.  The pool was always merged mining whether you were PPLNS or PPS.

I'm planning a few overhauls to the support sections in the next few days, to provide slightly more information about aspects other than strictly mining.  I did update the How Am I Paid section to reflect the removal of PPS, and added a section that explains the "charge up / wind down" phases of PPLNS to help people understand why they don't make much per block when they first start, and why they keep getting paid after turning off.

You don't need a Namecoin wallet to earn them, they automatically accrue regardless.  You can set the wallet to an exchange (generally BTC-e) and trade them for BTC there.  I'm not planning on any auto conversion of NMC on BTC Guild.

That's the thing that's hard for some people to realize.  It's one of the reasons when BTC Guild became a 51% threat I tried to get people off PPS by increasing the fees.  The larger the pool, the faster PPS makes you lose money, and the faster it gains money.  It doesn't decrease the highs and the lows, it simply makes them alternate more frequently.  It becomes a roller coaster, and the amount of stress it puts on you is immeasurable.  BTC Guild, when it was pure PPS, had days where I lost over 500 BTC.  It had days where I gained over 500 BTC.  In the long run, it made a profit, but the human mind is designed to place more emphasis on negative events/emotions than positive ones, and every time it was on a losing streak it was nothing but stress over "something must be wrong" even though nothing had changed internally between the two spikes of good/bad luck.

Keeping PPS is something I've done because it made sense.  It was more profitable for me.  But these days, I'm not concerned with maximum profit but instead trying to minimize risk.  My personal goal with BTC Guild has changed in the light of the non-stop "hacks" that major Bitcoin businesses claim to have happened, putting them out of business and screwing over their users.  While I personally believe most of those "hacks" were not hacks at all, it doesn't change the fact that the people who paid for it in the end were users, not the owners, who made off with lots of profit over the years.  In light of those events, my goals with BTC Guild have changed to make sure that if/when BTC Guild is closed down, it's on my own terms, and it's on a high note.  It seems like no Bitcoin business to date has actually shut down without their users suffering some kind of loss.

PPS is in stark contrast to that goal, since it includes a risk of bankruptcy, and increased risk of loss if the pool's hot wallet ever to be compromised.

People were not jumping back and forth.  Large miners understood the concept of variance, it was only small time miners jumping between them (and doing so was basically gambling, there never was any way to jump between them to guarantee higher payout).  The hot wallet problem with PPS is the fact that during sustained bad luck, the hot wallet is not refilling itself with new blocks but people are continuing to earn money and require coins in the hot wallet to be paid, meaning the hot wallet had to be kept MUCH higher than under a non-PPS method where block solves are the only way to have your balance increase.

I'm very likely to be removing PPS entirely, very soon at this rate.  I am NOT willing to continue LOSING money while running the 2nd largest Bitcoin pool.  In the long run PPS makes me a lot more money, but there are significant risks in it, specifically it requires a much larger hot wallet because bad luck doesn't mean people stop generating income, and the risk of bankruptcy.  The only time the pool has ever had significant losses (full hot wallet drained) was due to PPS and a change in behavior with Bitcoin 0.8, where I lost over 1200 BTC, all of which ended up coming out of my own pocket.  People may bitch about bad luck affecting their earnings, but it could be a lot worse:  I am actively *losing* money for the last 10 days from bad luck, and have to keep the hot wallet significantly larger than it would otherwise be by continuing to have PPS on the pool.

If you switched to/from PPS, your 24-hour earnings will be broken for a while.  PPS is slowly being altered out on parts of the backend to make it easier to remove later on.

There is no "fix".  It's pure random chance.