Yes, that was part of why I wanted to make a guide.  BFGMiner now has a way to run an internal getwork server so you can run your blades on bfgminer with other hardware.  It would probably be easier to setup than a stratum proxy for some users, but I was going to do both methods.

I ordered a new PSU and a molex splitter after looking at some of the guides out there for getting these up and running.  They should get here Monday or Tuesday.  Once I get a response from ASICMINER, I will likely start selling the blades I currently have, with some warning that I offer absolutely no technical support and that they require power supplies, fans, and cutting up wires in order to actually use.

Well shoot...I was getting excited about finally writing a guide for running a BE Blade on BTC Guild...then I found out I have to cut up 12v wires from a power supply and buy fans if I ever plan to use one.  Was really hoping the new models were at least remotely plug & play.

A mysterious shipment of ASICMINER blades arrived at my door today.  My assumption is this is ASICMINER's way of pushing me into selling them .  Will post an update later today once I find out what the terms of this shipment are supposed to be.

BTC Guild has now deployed a workaround for the reverse auth/subscribe order in slush's Stratum Mining Proxy to prevent it from spamming low difficulty shares when a worker has a pre-set starting difficulty.

Sorry to those on one of the two EU Stratum servers.  A workaround/fix is being tested for the Slush Stratum Mining Proxy and minimum difficulty settings.  Two restarts later, and the fix seems to be working.

Other servers will have restarts over the next few minutes as the fix is applied to each stratum server.

The problem is, fixing the error in the proxy would require slush to actually still care about mining.  He hasn't been seen on bitcointalk in months.  Additionally, it'd require every user to upgrade to a forked proxy that fixes the problem.  It's much easier to just make the pool workaround the broken proxy rather than hope everybody else upgrades.

The error is only related to minimum difficulty though.  If you have your minimum difficulty set to 1, it will work just fine, and vardiff will adjust your difficulty as needed.

The website has had no issues on my side, but there have been issues changing workers, related to one specific server not acknowledging the requests.  That should be over now.  Mining software should have redirected to the alive servers fairly effectively (based on pool speed, that did happen successfully).


Just an update, there is a flaw in the Slush stratum mining proxy that was found recently.  The first method a client is supposed to send with stratum is a mining.subscribe method.  This tells the server to start sending you work at each update, and sends you the default server difficulty (1).  Later on, slush added the ability for the proxy itself to authorize as a worker, rather than passing worker authorization from the software pointed at the proxy.  This authorization happens BEFORE the mining.subscribe method is sent, and causes a conflict.  When you auth the worker, it sends you the worker minimum difficulty and work to start on.  THEN the proxy sent the subscribe, which by default sends server difficulty (1).  This is confusing the mining proxy and causing significant lowdifficulty rejects.

A fix is being pushed out today to work around this flaw in the stratum proxy.  A temporary workaround for users is to leave your minimum difficulty at 1, or simple don't run the proxy with '-cu and -cp' arguments.

There's a protocol implementation error in the official Stratum proxy.  The original spec always stated the first message a pool should be receiving is a mining.subscribe method.  However, if you try to make the Stratum Proxy do the authorization (-cu -cp args), it sends those *before* the subscribe method.  As a result, you're getting your difficulty set to 2/4/8/etc before the "default subscribe response" is sent.  A workaround is being added to the BTC Guild stratum code today to hopefully prevent this mixup.

"To get your IP unbanned just send an email to webmaster@btcguild.com with you IP address, which you can find out from http://www.myipaddress.com/show-my-ip-address/ and wait for someone to reply."

That isn't part of the error, seems like ylame added that, but just didn't make it obvious this was advice on how to resolve the issue.

It probably hasn't been scanned in yet.  It sometimes takes a day or so before it shows up in the tracking system.  If your order was packed after ~3 PM yesterday, it wouldn't have been scanned in yet.  Yesterday's pickup was a bit early, and today's pickup hasn't shown up yet.

Latency has a very little impact on earnings, and it's easily outweighed by the uptime at the Chicago colo.

The new server for the database has been delivered to the colo this morning.  The new server is planned to go online at 5 PM (PST) on Friday.  This will require a brief restart on all pool servers in order to redirect them to the new database.

The website may have a few lag spikes during the next 24-48 hours as parts of the database are copied over to the new server.  Once everything is moved, this should drastically reduce the current lag spikes that happen about twice per hour, and the minor lag spikes that happen about four times per hour as a result of all the scripts that are needed to keep the statistics updated.

Yeah, it's been a depressing 2 days, especially after pretty decent luck for most of the current difficulty.  We were in the 105-107% range until Sept 1.

You need to stop relying on blockchain.info for identifying blocks.  They have -never- had Deepbit's blocks correctly identified since the day they made that pie chart.

ASICMINER Coupon units are now distributed to all remaining 1.05 BTC orders who did not get one previously.  The new coupons are 0.15 BTC/unit, and there is a 0.05 BTC shipping+handling fee per order (whether it's 1 unit or 50).  If you have coupons, a notice shows up as a small red text bubble above the store icon.  You can use them by starting an order.  One of the line items will be COUPON: 0.15 BTC Block Erupter.

The problem is I did not write the getwork pool software.  It is extremely dated, and took a lot of tweaks to get it to continue running.  It's just too expensive to keep going.  The 5 TH/s of the pool using getwork uses more bandwidth than the other 225 TH/s combined, and more CPU resources.

The getwork server is still running, but that won't be the case for much longer.  If you use the later versions of bfgminer, supposedly Luke-Jr has gotten it to work with the Blades.  Essentially he created a getwork server inside bfgminer to communicate with blades.  I don't think the Windows binaries support it yet, but Linux should if you compile it.

Sorry for the lack of a presence in the thread the last two days.  I snuck in a vacation to visit family for the holiday weekend, but didn't want to announce it in advance due to fears of attacks while I was on the road (even though I do have a mobile emergency laptop & notification system these days ).

If you've sent me any emails over the last few days and I have not responded, you should be seeing a response over the next few hours as I catch up to any unanswered questions.

I would like to request that debates about hardware RoI be made in the proper forums (Custom Hardware).  Questions related to hardware are fine if it's also related to the pool, but everybody has already had the same arguments over and over when it comes to the currently readily available ASIC hardware.

Block Erupter coupons will be distributed tomorrow morning for the other 70% of orders made at 1.05 BTC/unit.  The new coupons will not expire since there is no longer a limited supply.  These units are in hand and should have a 24-48 hour turnaround for the first day or so, then a 24-hour turnaround once the initial bulk of orders are filled.

It's been said many times in the #btcguild chatroom.  If you want to buy mining hardware that is actually shipping, you will not RoI, unless it's due to USD fluctuations.  The only time it is valid to compare that way is if you are never going to hold BTC, you'll either sell at at today's rates, or buy something with it.  In that case, your RoI target would be equal to the opportunity cost (Current USD Rate).

You just have to think logically.  Any company that is making a chip that has the sole purpose of printing money would be stupid to sell it for less than how much it will make, assuming the product is already developed and in production.  The only time you would expect major RoI is if it is a pre-order in a product that is not yet developed.  In that case, the company needs the capital to develop and produce the chips, and will gladly sell it for under the RoI value because without the pre-order money it will never get made.

I've seen nothing on yet another price drop since I dropped mine last week.  There will be an extension of the coupon program to the remaining 70% of 1BTC/unit orders that didn't receive a coupon previously.  These coupon units have been received, but the coupons will not show up on the BTC Guild store until Tuesday due to the holiday weekend.

Currently working remotely today and part of tomorrow to take my first "vacation" (hard to call it that with 3 phones, 2 laptops, and a tablet), so I decided to delay distributing the coupon promotion until I'm able to give it my full promotion.  They can't be shipped due to the weekend anyways.