Haven't posted any updates about the store in a while on the forum, just wanted to repeat the latest news on pricing:

Single USB Erupters are now 0.11 BTC/unit.
10+ Erupters are now 0.09 BTC/unit.
100+ Erupters are now 0.08 BTC/unit.

The above prices include free shipping within the United States.  Inventory is limited as ASICMINER at this time stated they will not be producing additional units.

Pools are only able to remain large as long as people trust them.  We are at the mercy of our members in order to maintain our hash rates.  A double-spend can be detected if anybody is looking at the work the pool serves (it wouldn't be working on the main blockchain, prevblockhash would be different).  It can be *proven* quite shortly after (blockchain.info orphaned blocks page would show the pool doing this), at which point that pool is going to be dead shortly.

As a result, here's a little more to consider:  There is nothing available for easy purchase with Bitcoin that is valuable enough to even remotely tempt a pool operator to do this.  Anything that valuable would be a private deal, and you can be damn sure the person doing that deal wouldn't complete the sale til FAR more than 6 confirmations.  The only method to generate the value that this could be worth it is via an exchange.  Exchanges do not execute withdrawals in the $100k+ range automatically, so by the time this massive withdrawal is even considered, news would be out of the double spend and they'd manually block it from actually going through.


So for a pool to do a double spend...it's virtually impossible to do in a way where the payoff is worth killing off a viable business.  The same is somewhat true of private mining companies:  The attack would be publicly known and odds are would be blocked by the person they're trying to trade with in some way.  The only difference there is the private mining company wouldn't also instantly lose their share of the network since they don't rely on the public to keep their hash rate strong.

Yeah, my Avalon had some major luck streaks early on.  Found 6 blocks in a week for the pool, even though I should've only averaged 1 block in that time.

Quickly, everybody overclock your hardware 25% so we can claim the 1 Petahash/sec crown*!


*BTC Guild is not responsible for any hardware failures, lockups, or possible destruction of hardware/fires caused by overclocking beyond safe levels.  But you know you want to.

You should know this by now, we've been around the same length of time .  Website down == OMG SKY IS FALLING/POOL IS DEAD/POOL OPERATOR IS RUNNING WITH OUR MONEYS NOOOOOO!!!!111one!

Yeah, that was...fun.  6 blocks in 10 minutes!  Going to be some nice shifts ending over the next few hours

BTC Guild's PPS is 4.5% higher fee than 50BTC.  I did not enjoy the gambling aspect of PPS, and when the pool was getting too large (51% threat), I increased the PPS fee to force miners to either change pools or change payment methods.  Basically PPS is only there because some people demand it, and the fee was raised to a level where I'm comfortable that variance will never be significant enough for me to lose money over a 1 month period on PPS.

Instead, we offer PPLNS with enough perks to reduce the effective fee to 1% (3% but pays orphan blocks, txfees, and namecoins).

Technically all hashes are the same difficulty to calculate/time to generate.  The difference is, each one is a completely separate 256 bit output, and a 'share' is only a certain subset of them.  The traditional difficulty 1 share is approximately a 1 in 4.2 billion chance (or 4.2 Gigahashes).  So if you do 4.2 GH/s, you will on average get one per second.  Then it falls into the analogy above .

Don't all of GHash.IO's blocks pay out to 1CjPR7Z5ZSyWk6WtXvSFgkptmpoi4UM9BC ?  Seems like a decent alternative to checking the coinbase.  I'm also curious if anybody knows if KNC's mining pool is simply a proxy to another pool, part of ghash.io, or separate and has some way to identify their blocks if so.

I've mentioned in #btcguild this morning.  Any responsible pool, especially a large one (50BTC was the largest for quite a long period), should have 3 things:

1) Hot wallet that doesn't exceed expected daily withdrawal volume (+ 10% or so during price rallies since withdrawals normally exceed newly minted coins during a rally).
2) Cold wallet
3) A buffer of coins that is larger than the hot wallet balance

That setup means the pool always has enough funds to cover any loss.  Yes, it comes from the pool owner's pocket.  BECAUSE IT SHOULD!  The pool owner is the one responsible for securing their pool, the miner's have no way to know how secure/insecure a pool is until it is too late.  But there should always bee a buffer in place that means in the event of a hack (which empties the entire hot wallet), the pool can be fixed/secured again, and the loss is taken from that buffer.  The owner doesn't have to purchase coins to make up the difference, they just have to hold off on selling coins until the buffer is replenished.



BTC Guild is only ~25-27% of the network ever since ghash.io claimed a 20-25% piece of the network hashrate.

That is completely backwards.  Miners should NOT take a hit when the pool loses money due to their own mistakes.  ANY responsible pool owner should be absorbing whatever loss they take.  The only time the reverse should even be an option is if the pool is forced to shutdown entirely.  If the pool remains online, miners shouldn't see a single bitcent removed from their real balances.  Too bad in this case the majority of miners won't have a clue what their real balance should be since the problem still hasn't been resolved.

To be fair, running multiple instances of mining software is pretty rare.  Most people don't waste their time.  For the vast majority, BFGMiner is superior.  For fringe cases that for some reason decide they want to split it over multiple instances, cgminer is better (possibly).

The whole network is growing quite rapidly lately.  BTC Guild historically has *slightly* outpaced network growth ever since ASICs started coming online, slightly increasing our share of the network as each round of new hardware comes online (then losing a giant chunk whenever a new private mining company arrives).

Woohoo!  I love when my ESP works properly .  I guess after seeing the situation enough times (but explained differently each time), eventually I can link up the proper answer on the first try.

Leaving difficulty at default won't hurt outside of the first minute or two of mining.  Variable difficulty will rapidly take effect, but that means you'll have a few shares rejected early on as a result.  Not a significant waste, and if you aren't tinkering with it much, virtually unnoticeable in the grand scheme of things since it only happens when you reconnect.

Setting it at 256 or 512 both work, 256 will be slightly less variance (<1% difference in 24 hours, and that can be + or -).

PPLNS will always pay better in the long run.  PPLNS is a 3% fee that pays orphans, transaction fees, and namecoins, reducing the effective fee to ~1%.  You'll have good luck and bad luck along the way, but over time you will always end up ahead on PPLNS.

Pointing a new rig would take ~1 hour to visible under the PPLNS open shifts.  The next shift to complete (top of open shifts) would only be slightly higher (since the extra hash power was only present for part of the period).  The following one (added to the top of open shifts) would reflect the extra shares since that shift you had the extra power running the entire time.

Considering there is 740 TH/s mining successfully, if you're seeing a problem, you need to be more specific on what you've done.  Mining software versions, actually hash rates used, same/different worker, etc.


My suspicion:  If you truly doubled your hash rate for a period, you either didn't setup the second miner correctly (wrong pool/worker), or you had it running on PPS.  PPS Shares do not get listed under PPLNS stats.

The shifts were about to drop under 30 minutes per shift, so the N value was increased by ~30% to bring it back to the 45-50 minute spot.  This means it takes more blocks to equal PPS, but you have more time to get them, meaning shifts will on average end closer to neutral (lows won't be as low, highs won't be as high).  This has absolutely zero impact on your variance in a 24 hour period, it only affects per-shift variance (decreasing it).

You may be right.  My rough math shows my worst round this diff in the 1.6-1.7b range.  Definitely not rough enough math to be off by an extra 250m shares.

I'll take a look, but 7x diff doesn't sound that uncommon.  Given how bad my pool's luck was at the start of the diff I'm expecting to find a 9-10x (harder to tell since I don't track individual block rounds).

How are you measuring it as "longest round in the known history of pools"?  Doesn't sound like the longest in terms of hours, shares, or diff multiplier.