We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it is hard.

We can't call it bull market until we strongly passed 250$ bands.

BTC Closing Down
BTC Guild is Closing Down
BTC Guild will be shutting down its mining servers on June 30th, 2015 at 23:59 UTC. Users will still be able to log in and retrieve their history (CSV exports on the settings page) and request withdrawals until September 30, 2015..



Why is BTC Guild Shutting Down?
This is the second time BTC Guild has announced closure, but this time the decision will not be reversed. The reasons have not changed much since the original announcement.

As mining has become more centralized, BTC Guild has continuously shrunk in proportion to the network, now being less than 3% of the network hash rate. The costs of running the pool have not changed, and the amount of funds at risk in the event of a compromise is significantly higher than what the pool could ever recover from. When the pool was 20-30% of the network, the amount of funds at risk was slightly higher, but the ability for the pool to recover from that loss was present. At 3% of the network, the pool would not be able to recover from such a loss..

Additionally, the NYDFS BitLicense regulations have now become finalized, and the final regulations have enough gray area that BTC Guild is at risk. The fact that BTC Guild is not in New York does not matter, since it would be doing business with New York residents while they are physically in New York. This fact makes it possible for New York to attempt to claim jurisdiction to enforce regulations. Whether or not BTC Guild could win in defense of such an attempt is irrelevant, since the cost of defending the pool would be greater than any income the pool is expected to generate going forward.

Finally, I have been growing concerned for some time now about attempts to defraud pools. The pool's luck has been on a decline for over a year. The luck on a few other pools has also shown a negative trend. While it is not impossible that it's a coincidence, this is something I have been constantly made aware of and am helpless against. There is no way to know whether it's just bad luck, a small bug in older miners (BTC Guild probably has the highest percentage of first/second generation ASICs) resulting in a few % of block-solving shares to disappear, or a large pool trying to hurt the competition (many of the largest pools have large private mining operations now). It would only take a fraction (1 PH/s or less could do it) to cause significant harm to a competing pool, and that activity could be masked by proxies and multiple accounts to be impossible to catch.



PPLNS Blocks and Final Withdrawals
Users will be able to keep mining up until the servers turn off at end of day June 30th. Since PPLNS is a backwards paying system, the very last shares submitted are unlikely to receive any blocks unless a block is found at the last second.

The PPLNS shift length will be steadily reduced starting June 16th. This means that more shifts will likely end with 0 blocks, but shifts that find blocks will receive a larger amount than they would have previously. It is not recommended that users wait until the last minute to change pools.

The minimum withdrawal for a manual withdrawal will be reduced to 0.0001, and will not require a transaction fee to be paid in order to request the withdrawal.



Not For Sale
In the previous closure announcement, one reason it was cancelled was due to offers to purchase/take over the pool. This never happened because of personal attachment to the project and concern over user privacy and security.

The risk of users being cheated or stolen from as a result of transferring pool ownership is not something I am willing to accept. This is part of the reason the pool is closing in the first place: Risk of users losing funds because the pool would not be able to cover losses in the event of compromise.

I will not be entertaining offers on purchasing the pool this time around. There is no (reasonable) price the pool would be sold for.



Recommended Pools
The following pools are personally recommended for users to consider moving to:
BitMinter - long standing pool with good reputation
Eligius - long standing pool with good reputation
Kano CK Pool - cgminer developers
P2Pool (decentralized pool)



Thank you to all the users and the Bitcoin community for making BTC Guild a success for the last four years. It has been hard to finally make this call a second time with the determination to not reverse the decision. You will still be able to find me around the Bitcoin Talk forums (outside of the Pools subsection for once), and on IRC in #btcguild (and probably #bitcoin once the pool winds down).

Gemini is currently available by invite only. New invitations are going out weekly, so sign up at gemini.com to get early access.

People have been getting Gemini Invites today.

This is some exciting news.  Unlike your title it doesn't say anything about next week but crypto documentation is quite significant.

Difficulty has just jumped 5%, some 14/16nm chips are being turned on?

Previous two bubbles in bitcoin are mostly caused by the several magnitudes of efficiency raise of mining: Because mining usually is the lowest possible cost to get coin, when mining technology shifts, majority of miners will lose the ability to get enough coin through mining, and decided to go to market and purchase, that made the exchange rate skyrocket

After technology shift is over and new generation mining rigs can be deployed at large scale, the cost of mining will again become the lowest cost to get coins, so coin's exchange rate will eventually get close to the cost of mining due to arbitraging

During the bubble, many people paid their fiat money to get mining rigs or bitcoin, directly or indirectly supported the miners to upgrade infrastructure. And after the upgrading, the whole network commands much higher hash rate and becomes much more secure. Because many of those infrastructure projects have been ROIed, they can be easily relocated to places with cheap electricity and maintain same hash rate as before

This means, the network hash rate will never go down long term wise, due to more and more mining rigs will be ROIed over time. At the same time the barrier of entry will become higher and higher: There is a cost for each mining rig, unless you can make rigs of magnitudes higher efficiency, it might never ROI. Even if you have much more efficient miner, it would still take quite some time to ROI because of the heavy investment in chips

So, bitcoin's value is not only guaranteed by the mathematics in the protocol, but also driven by the continuous increase in the hashing power. When the barrier of entry getting higher and higher, anyone who want to invest in bitcoin mining would have to throw in a fortune to get some meaningful return

This is quite different than gold. Depleting a gold mine will not increase the difficulty of future gold mining too much, you would have similar cost when a new gold mine is found. But in bitcoin, all the investment are accumulative, makes it more and more difficult worldwide to get bitcoin over time, even the supply is constant in a 4 years period

That's the reason after each bubble, the bitcoin exchange rate will stabilize at much higher level than last bottom, due to higher barrier of entry in mining. This barrier drives small investors to exchanges and raise the exchange rate

Yeah, it's almost as ridiculous as the jackass braying of the beartards with every $2 drop as confirmation that we're headed for double digits and labeling the subsequent correction back as a Dead Cat Bounce.

C'mon people, let's not get over-excited about every minor price movement.

i'm going all in.

Inflation in the USD value ?

Speaking to CoinTelegraph, both BTCChina as well as Huobi indicated that they believe any increase in Bitcoin's block size limit should be approached conservatively

A bit harsh.
The only real barrier in there is that they don't want to switch to Bitcoin XT, they wan't to remain with the core Bitcoin software that is tried and tested (not saying XT is buggy - I have no idea)
Gavin has already acknowledged that 20Mb was a calculation error, and is going for 8Mb (as his first card in the negotiations), and not as a hard limit (one of the objections in this article), ie with a schedule of increases
They also acknowledge the need to raise it.

All part of the 'compromise' process that is in progress IMO. Isn't that better than forced changes made by one entity/person?

Pathetic. The Bitcoin community is only ripping itself apart. Sometimes you have to do what is best for the community, but some people institutions are only interested in doing what's best for themselves.

i think its a great idea.  run it on bitcoin xt
if bitcoin core never implements it then majority can move to xt nodes if they so choose.