Welcome aboard .



Those dualminers are pretty cool little things.  I've been tempted to get a few since my old gaming rig (now mining rig) isn't exactly stable sitting in my garage, especially as temperatures heat up.  Too bad they're *WAY* overpriced due to being a dual purpose chip.

DVC and IXC are worthless junk that would just clutter up the database for a fraction of a percent.  I'm not convinced that the gains (less than 0.1%) would make up for the extra bandwidth and  slight increase in LP times as a result of that bandwidth/processing time.

Someone is just mad they failed to Catch 'Em All!




Thanks.  Some fun news should be posted tonight or tomorrow.  The last 24 hours have seen some profit algorithm improvements that put ScryptGuild, and a big boost to efficiency is expected next (preventing double-switching, without giving up the instantaneous profit switching).  I've already observed clear evidence in the logs showing that one of the changes last night has put ScryptGuild in the lead when it comes to the time of switching.  We're almost always the first to nab the newest profitable block before any other pools join the party because they're doing something wrong .

Not yet.  I personally prefer dealing with ASICMINER because they're professional when it comes to how to handle a distribution channel, whereas the majority of other ASIC manufacturers are competing with their own resellers (if they even have resellers).  But so far I have not received any word on ASICMINER's next gen chips.

Pools estimate speed based on share submission rates.  Just like the pool has variance in solving blocks, your miner has variance in solving shares.  While the two numbers should be fairly close, you will generally see 5-10% swings up or down on the pool dashboard.  If you look at the Charts page, you can see these fluctuations in your estimated speed based on share submissions.  You'll notice the 1-week chart is a much steadier line, since this uses 4-hour averages instead of 1-hour averages.

All defaults are OK.  Stale percents are almost entirely due to local miners running intensity too high, there's nothing server side that can be done (other than what I know some pools do:  Lie about stales and give people credit for them for a few seconds, which ends up not actually increasing your earnings since everybody is getting stale shares included).

no-submit-stale is NOT recommended to be changed to true, since that will cause you to lose on shares if the coin switches.  Your old work is still valid when that happens (until the other coin gets a new block).

The majority of scrypt stales are caused by running at too high of intensity. In most cases, the tradeoff is worth it.  At low intensity, ScryptGuild has less than 0.5% stales for most users.  However, increasing your miner intensity can produce gains of 5-10% of speed at a cost of 2-3% higher stales.  It's a tradeoff that is worth it.

Bitcointalk has been compromised at least 3 times since I've been here.  That's just the ones that had a visible effect and were thus publicly known.

There's some significant phishing emails going out in the last few days.  A lot of them are forging the 'From' field to show up as support@btcguild.com, which has just made my life peachy dealing with hundreds of bounce-back and emails calling me a scammer because their email providers failed to recognize that the server forwarding the email isn't included in BTC Guild's SPF records.  Decent email providers *should* market that as spam or even bounce it entirely.

We had two extremely long blocks today.  Meanwhile the last few days prior have been overwhelmingly good luck (the 24h, 3d, 1w, 2w, 1m, and 3m luck were all above 100%).  Today's luck will push the 24-hour measurement below 100% soon, but it hasn't been bad enough to come close to knocking the 3-day (and higher) luck under 100%.

Holding off on a separate forum post until automatic BTC conversion is available.

ScryptGuild is now in beta, with public registration available.  You can now convert your coins to BTC through the website.  Automated conversion settings will be coming out later this week as well for those who simply want to change their coins over immediately.

https://www.scryptguild.com



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This is the 2nd to last post advertising ScryptGuild from me in this thread.  The next post specifically advertising it will be when it leaves "Beta" status.  Support questions and suggestions for ScryptGuild should be directed to IRC or Email, and not the BTC Guild forum thread.

Teams are a "for fun" feature, something people requested long ago.  People used to form teams for things like Folding@Home and Seti@home so they could compete as groups / communities.  They offer no benefit, they're just something to view individual rankings for a team, or compete as a group against another team.


As for satoshis trickling in while your miners are offline, PPLNS is a time-delayed payment method.  This means you start out with low rewards (since you only have shares in a few shifts), and eventually those rewards grow as you have shares in more shifts (up to 10).  When you turn off, you still have shares in shifts and rewards continue to trickle in until all of those shares have expired.  This is sometimes confused for having poor rewards for part-time miners, but that is not the case.  The expected value of a share is the same whether you have shares in previous shifts or not.  A single share makes its way through the shifts and gets paid blocks.  The existence of your other shares does not have any effect on what payments that share will receive by the time it matures.

Only poorly made profit switching pools generate rejects as a result of switching.  ScryptGuild (beta) for example does not have rejects/stales caused from switching to a new coin, the old work for other chains is still validated and sent upstream if it's able to solve a block.

As for referencing a point in time, that MUST be done.  Humans are just too slow.  These days most altcoin profit is not due to the exchange rate of the coin, but the difficulty.  Many new coins coming out use a per block difficulty adjustment, meaning every 0-30 seconds or so the difficulty changes.  This means the window for maximum profit is small, because the best time to mine is not strictly price based, but how much hash rate it takes to solve blocks at any given moment.

Your idea of basing choices of potential profit months from now is foolish, the best coins to mine (best return for your $) probably won't even be traded a few months down the line.  It's a giant game, and trying to play it slow just means you're going to get passed before the game is over.

Your local miner is your raw speed.  It includes rejects and hardware errors.  The pool side is your effective speed.  BTC Guild only counts accepted shares (some pools include rejects) for measuring your speed.  You will *always* see a variance on any pool.  BTC Guild's average gets more accurate the longer you're running (up to 1 hour), but even at an hour of information your estimated speed will always be 5-10% above or below.  For ASICs, it will tend to be on the lower end of that range due to hardware errors, which normally account for 1-3% of the difference.

PPLNS has a charge-up/wind-down period, the length of which varies by pool.  Since the last 10 shifts (on Guild and BitMinter) get paid when blocks are solved, your reward starts small (since you only have shares in one shift).  Once you have shares in all shifts you'll see the average block reward similar to a non PPLNS pool.

This is NOT a penalty, and does NOT mean you are making less if you mine infrequently or change pools frequently.  This is because on PPLNS your shares continue getting paid even if you stop mining, until they leave the active shifts.  So when you turn off, you'll be receiving payments, which will gradually decline exactly the way the gradually increased at first.

As such, looking at your pool reported 24-hour rewards on a PPLNS pool is not worth doing until *more* than 24 hours has passed (~30 hours in the case of BTC Guild and ~34 in the case of BitMinter).  I'd say you could do trial runs on pools for short periods then wait for the PPLNS system to wind down, but comparing rewards in a short period of time is pointless since luck will have more influence on rewards than anything unless you're comparing large (2 week+) time frames on the largest pools, and multi-month time frames in the case of small pools.

Unless your miner is logging it, no.  BTC Guild doesn't associate the user with the specific block that was solved, just that the user solved a block.

Timestamps on blocks are not trustworthy.  The "Received Time" on blockchain.info is normally fairly good though.

Processing is such a lame term.  Reticulating Splines is much cooler.

At least based on blockchain.info's information, there haven't *been* very many orphans lately, at least until the last 24 hours or so.

Not a whole lot, other than what I've contemplated doing for months:  Dropping paid orphans and dropping the fee 1% to compensate.  It ends up being roughly the same, except it doesn't involve me having a random 24 hour period where I pay out $50,000 worth of BTC for blocks that were orphaned.


For now I can just keep watching to see if this pops up again.  It's suspicious, but the unfortunate thing is selfish mining is hard to detect with certainty, and 3 events in 24 hours, while highly unusual, is NOT enough evidence to base a reaction off of.