Low end ASIC would be okay.  The problem comes with trying to solo mine against Bitcoin-QT with a a lot of hash rate.  It doesn't keep up with high speeds (unless bfgminer has been updated to do its own extranonce-rolling when solo mining against Bitcoin-QT).

Bitcoin-QT is a terrible pool if you have ASICs

Then it sounds like a local problem.  All the US servers are still running solid.

EU-Stratum?  It looks like the DC out there is having some packet loss at the moment (doesn't seem to be related to any kind of attack).

12 blocks is very slightly under neutral luck.  13 blocks is a few % above neutral luck.  Based on pool growth, this may be altered slightly before the end of the difficulty (shift 'N' value may be increased due to the speed shifts are completing at).

History has shown #215613 doesn't always stick around forever.  Maybe this time will be different ?

But the pool will have absolutely no problems handling it.  The stratum protocol doesn't care about miner speed, it only cares about # of connections the server has to handle.  The only thing more speed adds is more database load, however, BTC Guild uses a very scalable database schema which scales nearly as infinitely as the stratum protocol when it comes to faster miners.  In short, the pool could care less about how much speed you toss at it, only how many unique miners it has to provide and log work for.

Shoot, looks like the news didn't mention Ufasoft (GUIMiner was the first reported incompatibility).   I doubt I will update anything for Ufasoft at this point.  If things settle down long enough I may have a direct stratum server available like in the past, but the risk of continued attacks are forcing me to keep the current filtering in place.  There just is no justifiable use for CPU miners anymore.  There is no such thing as free electricity, somebody is taking that bill.  Heck, even GPU mining is completely pointless for BTC at this point which is why a fix for GUIMiner is not high on the priority list.  There is no scenario where a GPU will outpace the electricity cost, and SOMEBODY has to pay for it even if it isn't you.

As posted in the news during the attacks, Ufasoft is not supported by BTC Guild stratum at this time.  The same goes for GUIMiner but I'm working on a fix for that one.

Same guy that was doing 105 TH/s last week at one point.  My guess is it's either part of one of the large private pools (ghash/100TH/KNC) that has BTC Guild as a failover, or an ASIC manufacturer that is using BTC Guild to test.

This is expected behavior.  The domain is still btcguild.com, and as such is still safe.  This is one of the many things that have been put into place to keep miners online during DDoS attacks.  If 'stratum.btcguild.com' goes down, miners who have been redirected should remain online.

True, but you enter more rounds, so it ends up being the same relative payout.  It's been stated before in this thread and many others:  Your expected payout is not related to the pool speed.  Your expected payout is purely related to your speed vs network DIFFICULTY. 

Higher pool speeds reduce your variance, hopefully keeping you close to your expected payouts.  You'll get smaller payouts much more frequently.  Lower pool speeds increase your variance (but still lower it compared to solo mining), providing larger payouts with less frequency.

Just to clarify:  When difficulty goes up 41%, your income does NOT go down 41%.  That's quite obvious when you factor in difficulty doubling is a 100% increase, but you'd only lose half your income not 100% of it.

1 - (1 / (1 + % increase)) = Drop in revenue.  In this case:  1 - (1 / 1.41) = 0.2907, or a 29.07% drop in revenue.  Still hurts, but not as much as a 41% drop would.

Your shares are going down per shift because the pool had a decent spurt of growth in the last 12 hours.  We were 530-550 TH/s most of yesterday, and this morning we're at 590-595 THs.  That's close to a 10% gain in pool size while I was asleep.  This would mean your shares per shift will be ~10% lower than they would have been roughly 12 hours ago.

Your shares per shift represent how much of the pool speed you make up.  If the pool speed goes up, your shares per shift go down, but the shifts complete that much faster, making it end up in balance.

Website should be back up under Cloudflare again within a few minutes.  Currently got a new wave of attacks hitting.  Public stratum address is moving back to the proxy/filtering servers.  As with the last attack, once you start mining you should be safe/reliably connected.

Small note for the upcoming difficulty change:  The luck graphs will stop updating when the difficulty changes.  I haven't automated the luck graphs for the period where difficulty changes (since the shifts will include blocks/shares from both difficulties).  So for a few hours (if it happens before I wake up), the graphs will not update.  It's not perfect, but it's better than the old method where if I went to sleep without turning it off the luck would show something like 180% for every shift until I fixed it.

256 should lock it into place.  BTC Guild only supports difficulties in power of 2.  500 GH/s *shouldn't* cross the shares per minute threshold at 256.  The alternative is just going up to 512.  Either one is going to end up making you the same in the long run (SLIGHTLY more hourly variance, virtually unchanged 24 hour variance).

Note:  Any attempt to listen to my statements and predict the market from them may result in disappointment, headaches, and possibly bankruptcy if taken to the extremes.  If you have a heart condition, consult with your doctor.


But this is a somewhat serious issue.  If we do have a decent rally and/or bubble, the last thing anyone wants is to have their coins stuck for up to a few hours because a bunch of people carrying 10+ BTC balances all withdrew at the same time and emptied the hot wallet as a result.

As we enter what looks like another Bitcoin rally, please remember that pools are not banks, and in the event of large simultaneous withdrawals, your coins may not be immediately available due to a depletion of the hot wallet storage.  BTC Guild, along with any major bitcoin service which keeps balances for users to withdraw on demand, uses a hot/cold storage system to minimize the amount of funds at risk in the event of server compromise/server failure.

Make sure you set your auto payouts or run manual payouts regularly.  It not only makes sure you have complete control over the majority of your coins, it makes sure that others will still be able to receive their payouts on demand without any delay to move funds from cold wallets to hot wallets.

Which browser?  Try doing a forced page refresh (Ctrl+F5).  The SSL cert from Cloudflare is valid if you're hitting Cloudflare, the SSL cert from BTC Guild is valid if you're hitting BTC Guild.

Still getting it?  Moved the site to Cloudflare as a temporary measure.  The regular website reverse proxy was having problems.