There's 2^256 possible hashes.  That number is much bigger than a human mind can actually comprehend.  There are a *LOT* of solutions.  There's also nothing to prevent a duplicate hash (other than the statistical near-impossibility), since hashing involves changing a single bit to get a completely different result hash.  There really is *nothing* that resembles progress when mining.  Every hash is independent.  This is why the rest of the network has no impact on your luck/variance (outside of influencing how quickly the next difficulty adjustment happens).

Oh, and work is updated every 30 seconds, meaning more transactions are included, different merkle root.  This means a whole new set of hash data even if you repeated the same time, nonce, and extranonce as before for some reason.

All the public entry points are back online.  At some point the attacker must have started saving all of the different IPs the pool was rotating between and eventually hit them simultaneously.

Luckily, as stated before, this has *no* impact on miner stability once you've started mining, it only affected new users from connecting or miners from reconnecting.  My test miners (batch of USB Erupters set to all the different servers) did not have a single disconnect the entire night, so the filtering is still working flawlessly once you've connected.

Those are megabigpower/100TH.  The message is in their coinbase.  They've been solo mining for a few weeks now, but it looks like they only recently got their coinbase message to work.

Update on Getwork:  It will shut down on Friday, October 11th.  Exact time is not known, so best to assume anytime after midnight it may go down.

If you're using an ASICMINER Blade, you can use the slush stratum proxy to connect to BTC Guild via Stratum.  This is the most common method to use ASICMINER Blades on modern pools (getwork support is being less supported by pools every month).  Simply run the proxy with the argument '-o stratum.btcguild.com' to point it at our servers.  You can also use newer versions of bfgminer.  Instructions on how to do so are in the 'README.ASIC' file.

Posting this as a reminder for those who haven't read the latest news on the BTC Guild website: 

The Getwork server will be shut down in less than one week.  The old protocol is finally being taken out back to be put down.

Better than what most can say about themselves!

Correct.  Nothing else on the network impacts your expected rate of block solving at a given difficulty.  The only minor impact is that when the network is going faster, the odds of an orphaned block are higher (higher block rate = more chance of two blocks at the same time), but those are still a very rare case, and on BTC Guild you're paid for orphans so they wouldn't show any reduction in luck.

This is incorrect.  At a current network difficulty, a certain number of shares are expected to find a certain number of blocks.  That is how the luck is calculated, and that is the correct way to do it.  Pool speed/network speed is irrelevant, it is entirely about Blocks Found after X Shares vs Network Difficulty.

Pool luck at the start of a difficulty is always going to be at one extreme or the other most likely.  It's only been about 24 hours.  In that 18 hours worth of closed shifts at the new difficulty, average luck is 82%.  That is pretty insignificant overall.  If you kept a watch on last difficulties' luck graph, you should recognize how much it can move when measured in short periods of time.  But in the end, the luck almost always ends up +/- a few % for the entire difficulty period.  Last difficulty ended ~5% positive.  That's actually a fairly significant deviation given the pool's size.  The larger the pool, the less they're expected to deviate from neutral as time goes on.

DDoS Attack Updates

The pool has been under attack for over a week straight.  The attacks hit in short bursts, moving as DNS changes, and generally lasting 6-12 hours at a time.  As many users know by now, these continued attacks have given the pool time to radically adapt it's DDoS defenses in order to create more effective methods to filter out good and bad traffic and prioritize already connected traffic.  Once you have started mining successfully, you should not have instability, and that is well reflected by the pool speed over the last few days.  Even as the attacks are repeatedly knocking servers down, the speed has been steadily increasing even above it's pre-attack all time high.

There is one major exception at the moment on the filtering, and that is GUI Miner.  GUI Miner is currently being caught by the filters that separate good miners from bad miners/bad traffic.  I'm trying to find a way to get it separate out, but due to it's very outdated implementation of Stratum (it's using the initial poclbm stratum release without any updates), there isn't any good type of fingerprint that can be used to identify GUIMiner at this time.

Send an email to webmaster@btcguild.com with your IP.  IP bans are issued when your IP fails too many login attempts in a certain time frame.  Do note that IP bans only affect website access, not mining.

The private DNS information will remain valid indefinitely.  It's actually recommended you continue to use those as your primary pool if you want to mine on BTC Guild.  In the event of future attacks, the semi-private servers will be back online before the public servers, and ideally they will remain online as attacks continue, while the public servers may go up/down during the process.

That's a generic cloudflare-based error, probably already fixed by the time I woke up.

There's a little motive, especially for large mining entities, but nothing that points to any culprit.  Innocent until proven guilty, and it's impossible to establish guilt from a DDoS when nobody is trying to take credit/gloating.  Knocking off the largest pool for 24 hours really has minimal impact on difficulty though due to failover pools, so the real motive would be someone that actually *gains* something out of it (another pool).  But in all likelihood, it was neither.

Were they?  They were solving a *ton* of blocks during the attacks.  My understanding is their website went down when all of Cloudflare had a major outage, but the website is just a frontend.

Which wasn't even 12 hours ago ;p

Difficulty went up.  It only takes 16 to be above neutral at this difficulty+value of N.

Luck hasn't been that bad.  We had 25 consecutive shifts at 100% or higher earlier (#10648 - 10672).  Only the last 11 shifts have been under expectation, hardly "luck sucks".

If you're still having issues getting connected, please let me know by PM or email.  Every testing machine I have has been working quite well for about 12 hours.  The only hiccups should've been when some old proxies were closed and the new EU servers brought up.

Just to clarify a common question:  If you have been given the semi-private DNS information, you do not need to switch back at any time.  The semi-private servers will *not* go down once the attacks are completely over. Staying on the semi-private DNS may end up keeping you online next time an attack hits.  It's not a guarantee, but it has worked quiet well for most users so far.