You missed a 0.  BTC Guild has over 250,000 users.  Of those, about 9,000 are active on any given shift.  37,000 have logged into the site within the last week.

Since the graph was setup to remain stored past difficulties, we've had a pretty good ride.  In the long run it should level out to roughly 100% though.  I just wish it'd do it with like...90% days for a week instead of giving us the roller coaster luck.

Oh don't get me wrong, I do like bits of blockchain.info.  The problem is they load a bunch of data that can best be described as "wild ass guesses".  Unfortunately, because of the name they used, it makes people believe they are some kind of authority which actually knows these things, when in fact they're often quite wrong.

Except his poll questions are leading people towards certain responses that are wishy-washy rather than absolute.  When you have 6 answers on a poll for a yes/no poll, and 4 of the 6 are worded to be in favor of your personal opinion, and one is worded just to be an attack on Luke to lure trolls, leaving only 1 "normal" response which would be against it, that's not a very useful poll.

1M is a hard limit which will require a hardfork of the Bitcoin protocol.  Unless there is significant *real* demand for a change of that level, I have no intention of supporting any fork that attempts to change that limit without the blessing of the rest of the network as well.  I believe off-chain transactions (or sub-chain transactions) are the best solution for block size inflation.  Note that suggesting an increase to the 1MB hard limit will basically put solo miners out of business in the long run (HDD size requirements will become prohibitive for hobbyists), causing even more centralization than what already exists.

BTC Guild is still using a 500KB block size until more pools also contribute larger blocks.  Many pools still use the default 250KB.  The problem with raising block sizes is you increase the orphan rates, and pools using smaller block sizes will end up with an advantage of faster block spreading when sending blocks 1/2 the size or less.  For the most part, 250KB is "enough" for the network, except during rapid transaction spikes like during the rally yesterday.  Even then, 250KB is *normally* enough, the exception being when the network as a whole has bad luck and has 40-50 minutes worth of transactions piled up due to no recent blocks.

500KB feels like a good spot so far.  Our orphan rate has been fairly low, and we're collecting a *lot* of transaction fees when the blockchain has enough unconfirmed transactions to fill up a block.

In response to Bitcoin staying over $100 for so long, and now being quite a bit above it, the minimum payout amount has been changed from 0.01 BTC to 0.001 BTC.  HOWEVER, any payout under 0.01 will have 0.0005 deducted from the amount that is paid.

At this time BTC Guild still uses 0.0005 as the transaction fee amount per kilobyte in its payouts.  If BTC Guild drops it's transaction fee to 0.0001 per kilobyte in the future, the additional fee charged to miners will also drop to that amount.

My understanding is Deepbit pays out the full 8 decimals, but you need 0.01 before you can request it at all.  This is the case for most pools.

A batch of manual payouts failed earlier today.  Attempting to add them to the next batch ended up causing even more to fail.  Working on figuring out which individual payout is causing the problems.

If you have a payout that links to blockchain.info with the end of the URL as 'PAYMENT_FAILED', it should be fixed shortly!

Don't pay attention to blockchain.info's estimated confirmation time.  It's complete garbage (like the majority of features on blockchain.info).

Yes...ASICMINER has been impossible to communicate with lately.  I still haven't even been given a price, let alone order.

Looks like your miner stopped recently.  Did you switch to a backup pool, or did you switch to PPS?

Time on that page is the timestamp of the block, which is irrelevant when it comes to which was actually found first.

According to blockchain.info your block wasn't seen for over 20 minutes after slush's.  Don't look at block timestamps, look at the *received time*.

2013-11-16 21:11:51 for Slush
2013-11-16 21:34:25 for Eligius

Even more than that...Slush found the block after his...10 minutes before blockchain.info saw a single node relay the Eligius version of 269982.



EDIT:  Okay...maybe ignore the above.  I'm seeing some *weird* timestamps on the received time with Blockchain.info right now.  Still, you should never base "which block came first" by the block timestamp since the timestamp is not reliable.

The amazon EC2 server has ICMP blocked, so obviously your trace will die there.

This is (basically) my argument at the moment against this.  In the case of BTC Guild, the *highest* level of security an account can have is locking the wallet address.  With this, you can not change it unless you digitally sign a message using the private key, confirming ownership.  Removing the lock is a manual process, nothing on the site is capable of removing the wallet lock once it's in place (even an SQL injection would not be able to do it due to lack of permissions).

Similarly, it discourages automatic payouts, since those would use the same address every time unless changed.  The last thing I want is automatic payouts adding hassle, considering they're the best way to encourage users to not use the pool as a bank.

The only fix on this I can see would be on my end adding some kind of "wallet queue" to accounts where they can pre-make a batch of wallets to use (maybe even using the BIP32 suggestions), but my limited knowledge of BIP32 leads me to believe this would still require manual entry on the user part.  If somebody else could generate the chain of public addresses to use, it seems like it wouldn't be very anonymous (they'd actually be able to follow all your transactions forever on that wallet-chain?).

My parents have actually asked me a lot when I'm going to stop working on this and finally make my game.  So much has changed in 8 years though, especially for web-based games.  People expect a lot more than they used to.  As somebody who is NOT an artist, it's intimidating since by far the biggest draw (even in browser based) is now graphics and animation over gameplay and community.

So you're going to make it harder for people to spend coins they legitimately earned.  I have no intention on slowing down transactions on the network by forcing people to implement changes to how they receiving mining payments/accept donations due to overreaction to some Coin Validation scheme that I doubt will ever actually come into existence.  I'll react if it shows the slightest sign of ever actually being implemented, but I highly doubt it ever will be in the first place.

Started it before I had my first job.  Then I tried to work on it in my spare time.  Then I started a used video game store.  Then I started BTC Guild.  I tend to constantly move to more profitable side projects, and the old ones kinda get left by the side as a "I hope to get back to them someday" project.  On the bright side, those side projects always end up being something I love doing, so they never feel *too* much like work [even if they do tend to consume every waking hour].

A long time ago (a long time ago in internet-years, so 8 years roughly) I was trying to make a webgame MMORPG styled similar to the Pokemon franchise and commissioned the work of about 70 different creatures initially.  My avatar was one of my favorites: