Honestly, your only choice is Cryptsy for altcoin trading at any reasonable volume.  They work fine "most of the time".  Realize that my complaint is coming from somebody who was targetting > 99.99% uptime with BTC Guild (the colo itself has not even had 1 minute of downtime in the last 3.5 years).  When an exchange works 99% of the time, that's a lot of time it isn't working.

All amounts shown are your share of the block, including tx fees, minus pool fee.

Approx BTC balance != Actual BTC balance.

Right now Cryptsy is having issues with WDC deposits (last deposit recognized was about 3 days ago), so WDC coins have been unable to be converted.  My guess is WDC makes up the majority of your approx BTC balance.

The lack of a stable altcoin exchange is one of the larger reasons for this shutdown.  The only one with any reasonable volume is Cryptsy (except BTC-e for LTC).  And Cryptsy is absolute garbage (constant delays, broken API, and a trading engine which is either flat out bugged, or rigged when trying to match orders).

Going well so far.  I can definitely sympathize with your last statement though.  This is my 4th move on my own (and about 12 other moves while I was growing up).  Feeling significantly more at home even with a mostly empty (other than boxes) house than I have in quite some time.

I was joking as well.  It was a quick post written before I unplugged my workstation.  Almost done moving into the new house...well at least getting everything physically located in it.  The unpacking process is probably going to last a few years.

I like how the witch hunt is already starting.  Just to add some facts to this:

561818 is a user account that is extremely new overall, they started mining around July 9th.  Which means they started mining on BTC Guild when the network difficulty was over 16 billion.

Yes, they are 7th on shares submitted and not in the top 25 block solves.  This shouldn't require a degree to understand, since the difficulty is orders of magnitude higher than when the block counting started for the rankings.  

Assuming every one of those shares was submitted *in the first difficulty they mined in*, they would only have an expected solve count of 19.  How many have they solved?  22.  They are currently *above expectation* on their block solves vs shares submitted.  You can now direct your ire at the next witch hunt target.



EDIT:  Obviously this is insider information, since I'm able to see block solve counts for any user, but only the Top 25 are given in the rankings.  However, you should have been able to use some logic to realize that it was a newer account (very high UID number), meaning they started mining at a very high difficulty, which means 317b shares is likely not enough to solve 35 blocks.

Congratulations.



Just an FYI (had an email ask about it), shifts were reduced from 11b shares to 10b shares after the pool speed declined sharply.  This is why that run of 13 blocks earlier is almost as high on the luck chart as the previous run which included 15 block shifts, and why the per share rate is a little higher per block (fewer shares splitting the reward from each block).

The minimum is 0.001, so 1/10th the amount you thought.  After the mining servers are shut down on August 10th it will be reduced to 0.000x (though a fee will be deducted for anything under 0.001).

Slush is up to 115,748,910,176 and counting in their current round.  Won't be much longer to pass the amounts mentioned in this thread for EMC and Discus Fish.

Why?  I've answered this many times.  ScryptGuild auto payouts are already your full balance, and execute hourly unless they're extremely small (then its every 24 hours).  Adding the button wouldn't change the fact that it would just be batch processed with automatic payouts (even BTC Guild's manual payouts only execute twice an hour).





This is pretty much the reasoning in a nutshell.  I'd much rather end the pool than let somebody else take over or slowly die off.  There are problems with the current system which would require rewrites.  Operating a pool is a pretty new phenomenon, and the only way you have experience is if you're already running one.  Then there's the problem of ScryptGuild (and BTC Guild) being fully custom systems.  Every line is from scratch.  There are no frameworks for the backend or the frontend, outside of a little CSS/JS for the website.  All the actual work is done from scratch.  There are no comments, and they're written far from any kind of standard.  My code looks like 1990/1991 Diku MUD code, whether its C, C++ or PHP.  Actually, even worse, since I learned programming from ROT/ROM derivatives of Diku, which are like 3 forks away from Diku, each one deviating further from from the original code formatting.

I just don't have confidence that I could find somebody who could take over and keep the pool up to the standards I tried to set for myself.  While I'm sure there are many out there that could, there's no way to tell who could pull it off and who could completely screw it up.

I find it hard to believe somebody with over 60 posts has absolutely no clue how mining works and thinks somebody is feeding work into it, or especially that Satoshi is somehow involved in the creation of new blocks/work.  You should probably spend some time reading up on it: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide


TL;DR:  The work is random.  You are not accomplishing anything other than taking randomish data, increasing a counter, and producing a random result, hoping it's good enough.  The input data is "randomish" because it's part random and part network activity, which is not knowable in advance (so somewhat random), though it does carry meaning (so not complete random garbage).

Uhmm...you should probably do some research before making foolish statements like the above.  Nobody "feeds work" into Bitcoin.  It is not "ordered" by anybody.

Payouts under 0.001 will not be available until the mining servers shut down on August 10th since user balances can still go up until that time.  There will be a fee attached to withdrawal amounts under 0.001.

It's unlikely, but I won't rule it completely out.  My biggest factor for closing down is that I know ScryptGuild is currently not running as well as it could, and I know that I don't have the time in the near future to correct that.



EDIT:  And as if on queue, last night the pool ran out of disk space on the partition with the coin daemons causing them to crash, just great...

Yeah, but then I might have to register EleuCoins with NYDFS!

I'll definitely make a mention of it on the BTC Guild thread once it's ready.  I still have over 1,000 games in stock from when I stopped the business last time.  For most titles, I was the best price assuming equal condition.  I also always had multiple angles and high resolution pictures of the individual cartridges so you knew the exact condition before biting the bullet.  BTC will definitely be accepted as well, fully integrated into the shopping cart rather than just a BitPay/Coinbase plugin.

I'm going to be working out a way to handle BTC amounts under 0.001 for a final payout.  This doesn't apply to any other coin, since not a single other one is even worth a penny if you're talking in 0.000x amounts.  Please keep an eye on the thread/website, the 0.000x BTC withdrawal process will probably end up formalized next weekend.

I just didn't want to continue running the pool knowing it was running suboptimally.  I don't have the time to complete the rewrite, nor do I have the time to try to plug in more coins to the current system, which is not sustainable (the rewrite was needed for many reasons, one of which is the rate of database growth).  Had I known that the rewrite would have been delayed this long, I probably would've given this notice earlier.



Prior to getting involved in Bitcoin I was starting up a used video game (cartridge era) store with a mixture of eBay and a custom built ecommerce site.  It was actually on track to earn more than my day job as an accountant, but then I got involved in Bitcoin and that business was quickly put on hold.  I'm now trying to restart that business from the ground up, and also involving my parents to help support them going forward.

At this point, I feel that project needs to take a priority over ScryptGuild.  It not only has a better economic outlook, but it also helps my parents.

If you have trouble with withdrawals not executing, please post.  It will take some time to get the proper balance on the exchanges vs on the pool wallets as users begin to withdraw their balances.  I will be checking in multiple times per day to try to catch when one side runs out of coins.

Posting this a second time since it creates a new page on the thread.


ScryptGuild Closing Down

ScryptGuild is going to be shutting down on September 27, 2014.  The mining servers will halt in 2 weeks, which is August 10th.  Users will have until September 20th to withdraw their balances before the coin daemons and wallets are taken offline.

I would like to thank everybody that has joined ScryptGuild to date.  The pool was a fun new project to work on, solving the problems of maintaining state within multiple coins over a single server to keep shares valid even during switches, and allow fast user switching on demand.  I am very sorry that the pool ended up entering a period of non-development for so long.  The rewrite was something I looked forward to, but the external factors which kept delaying the rewrite ended up pushing a different project into the front of the line.  I do not want the pool to become another ArsBitcoin/Deepbit, where it just continues on with no direction and no updates, dying of atrophy, and as such have decided that shutting down is the proper action to take.

At this time, I'm trying to get another non-pool related project off the ground, which is something I've been putting off for a few years (before BTC Guild even started).  These days, it looks like it's time to work on that project.  It is not only one that I have been wanting to do, but also one which I believe has a much brighter future than a scrypt-coin mining pool.