There have been no changes to US tax law, there has simply been an official interpretation of existing laws.  The currently published interpretations don't address virtual currency conversion.  But the problem is if they later interpret another law as being applicable to virtual currencies, it's retroactive since there was no CHANGE in the law.  The bright side is generally penalties can be fought in a retroactive applications.

This is the primary reason BTC Guild removed PPS & orphaned block payments.  Those two activities were grey areas, since the pool was providing miners with payments that weren't reflective of what the miners (in aggregate) were producing.  In those cases, you can say the pool paid miners, whereas for normal mining, the pool is not paying miners, simply providing the service of allocating/distributing their aggregate production.

I may add other scrypt coins if some appear that have: A) Been around for a while   B) Have a strong community effect   and C) Are worth mining.

So far the only two coins that fit that for scrypt are LTC and DOGE (and DOGE only because I feel the community around it won't disappear).




It may get added in after the integration, but at this time it's not on the road map.  It's a very grey area, and I've recently been debating removing it from ScryptGuild.  Since I've made the decision to merge the pools together, getting rid of the autoconvert seems to be the best move during that integration.

After going over the options and looking at the effective profitability, I've finally come to a conclusion on the future of ScryptGuild.  As it currently exists, ScryptGuild will still be around for likely 1-2 more months.  Over that time period, I'm going to be working on BTC Guild and adding in Scrypt mining directly to BTC Guild instead of running them as two separate sites.

However, this eventual merger will NOT be a multicoin switching pool like ScryptGuild.  The sheer number of crappy coins out there, with hardforks every other week for one of them, and extremely slim (if any) profit margins over just straight LTC/DOGE mining is not worth it, and it's only getting worse as time goes on.


Once merged, BTC Guild's scrypt mining platform will only include DOGE and LTC.  Profit switching will be available between the two, but there will not be an auto-convert feature.  The one benefit to merging it directly into BTC Guild is significantly more awareness of the existence of a BTC Guild based scrypt pool.  I would expect the total scrypt hash rate to probably end up higher on BTC Guild than ScryptGuild has achieved, making LTC more reasonable to mine.

ScryptGuild was a project I put off for over a year, and unfortunately by the time I acted on it (mostly for a personal pet project), the profitability in multicoin switching was already sliding down drastically.  At this point it is not worth the time it would require to keep up with every shitcoin that launches/becomes profitable.  There are much better options for where to focus my efforts than a dying niche.



With all that said, I will say again:  ScryptGuild itself will still be around for at least 1-2 more months, with all features continuing to function normally.  Once I have the interface rigged up for BTC Guild to support the altcoins I will post additional news about the timeframe for ScryptGuild's closing.

blockchain.info has lots of graphs.  Most of them have incomplete/inaccurate information.  They have no interested in showing precise figures because the data they're generally showing is just noise, it's not meaningful.  Their distribution graphs for example only go to *at most* 4 days.  That's an extremely small time frame, and due to the random nature of solving blocks, those graphs move drastically even though the actual hash rate distribution is fairly static.

Most pools sign their blocks in the coinbase.  Blockchain.info doesn't seem to reliably use that information, contributing to lots of unknown.  Some private companies always mine to the same address which is publicly known, but blockchain.info doesn't care.

Previous attempts by pool owners to get them to correct their information have always been met with silence.  Some pools (BitMinter is a common one) constantly have blockchain.info showing that pool mining a block they didn't actually mine, causing miners to think the pool is cheating them.

organofcorti's weekly posts include a graph of actual hashrate distribution.  Don't use blockchain.info for your  source, they're lazy and inaccurate.  The actual unknown % of the network is only ~10%.

If they had graphs of luck like we do per shift, you'd see a LOT spikier luck because their N value is stupidly low.  They frequently have shares go entirely unpaid since they're only eligible for payment for about 35 minutes.

Writing off the cost of equipment doesn't change the ROI.  If your equipment+expenses to mine $4,500 in BTC was $5,000, you still lost money.  Writing off expenses doesn't put money back in your pocket.

I know a lot of it is KNC.  organofcorti's weekly posts include an *actual* breakdown of mining capacity.  I think the "unknown" amount for his reports is down to something like 5-7%.


As for luck:  All I can say is "that's luck for you".  You had about 6 months in a row paying above 100% by a few % each month, and now the last month and a half has been quite a bit below 100% (enough below to nuke the 3m/6m figures, if you shifted those figures back one month they'd still be above 100%).

SMC was disabled due to a hardfork that was poorly implemented/announced.  It's not removed from the site entirely (yet), I'm looking at possible ways to revert out the huge number of orphaned blocks mined on the wrong fork.  You'll notice we haven't touched it in almost 3 days now.

As for the roadmap for the site, expect more news after April 15th.  The last week has been nothing but traveling and meeting with accountants and lawyers to make sure everything is being properly taken care of on tax & legal fronts.  ScryptGuild is something I moved forward on which was in a significantly more grey area due to the auto conversion aspects.

Yes, quite a few Eligius users have BTC Guild for their failover.  I know they've been under attack a lot recently, though for the last few weeks it hasn't affected the mining pool itself.  Not quite sure exactly where this 1-1.3 PH/s came from other than a huge growth from Team "Arendelle".

The reason ScryptGuild is fixed time and BTC Guild is share count based is due to variance and also time delay effects on a pool that is essentially a hopper in itself (ScryptGuild).

The biggest complaint against traditional PPLNS systems is that if the pool has very bad luck, your work can go *completely* unpaid.  BTC Guild uses the highest 'N value' of any PPLNS pool, generally 10-15x the current network difficulty (and when we were a huge part of the network it was ~20x network difficulty).  This extremely high N value means that an individual share is more likely to get it's expected value by the time it is moved out of the open shifts.

Obviously, very bad luck will strike at times, and similarly a huge spike in blocks can also happen.  But with a huge N value, it *generally* falls close to neutral.  Even with BTC Guild's bad luck the last month, your average *per share* variation was almost always +/- 25% of neutral.  In a round based system, your per share variation will generally be much further from neutral (in the end it still averages out of course) on a per share basis.  With the PPLNS on BitMinter and GHash.io, it is possible, and does happen, for a share to go completely unpaid because no block is found before it's shift is closed.  Again, in the long run they all average out, but it's nice to not have a period of mining go *completely* unpaid if the pool finds no blocks.


So BTC Guild is focused on variance, and it's manually adjusted via share count to keep it in the sweet spot of maturation time (time before a share gets completely paid) and share variance.  ScryptGuild on the other hand isn't really capable of focusing on share variance due to the nature of multicoin hopping, so it uses a consistent shift time in order to keep maturation of shares relatively short (5 hours).

Again...you are NOT affected by shifts getting shorter.  Your shares per shift goes down.  That means *nothing* because you are completing more shifts in the same time frame.  The expected blocks per shift is the same whether the shifts complete in 5 minutes or 5 hours (as long as they're based on share count).  The per shift variance is the same in BOTH cases.

This would be the same as complaining that a pool grew too much and now it finds blocks too fast.  Yes, you get a lower reward per block (in this case, per shift).  But you complete more blocks (shifts) in a larger time frame (24 hours for example), and the net effect is less variance overall with the same expected reward.

Shifts are based on # of shares submitted, not a length of time.  So it will always fluctuate (and always has).  The number of shares per shift is also routinely increased as pool speed increases, to keep the length of shifts in the 50-60 minute range while maintaining an 'N value' of at least 10x the current difficulty.  It was actually increased recently (from 5.5b to 6b) due to the rise from 6000-6500 TH/s to 7100-7200.  But there seems to have been a huge spike the hash rate in the last few hours.  If the hash rate remains high the shares per shift will be increased again.

The time a shift lasts is irrelevant.  The expected block solves per shift is entirely based on the # of shares per shift, which is why BTC Guild uses a Share Count instead of a Time Frame for closing shifts, in order to keep the expected block solves per shift high (which reduces per-shift variance).

That's because Slush's pool luck stat is only updated when a block is solved, so it always shows a completely inaccurate luck figure before a long round finishes.

Pool mining and the bitcoind's were not affected since they do not use SSL.  The website was not affected because it is served via Cloudflare, which patched this vulnerability a week before it was announced (they were one of the companies which were notified before it was disclosed publicly).

If you want to turn off automatic conversion for a certain coin, set an extremely high reserve for it and set your wallet to a local wallet or an exchange.  Manual conversion was only available as a means to test a high volume of trades on Cryptsy to identify all of their (MANY) API failure/errors/inconsistencies before automating the process.

Thanks for the report, I'll take a look.  I've never caught it showing 'Orphaned' instead of "Waiting for confirmation" so the window of time that it shows that is pretty small.  Will look into why it might be doing that.


EDIT:  Found it, looks like there's a 1 minute window where it would show Orphaned.  When it inserts the found block into the database it doesn't insert as 1 confirmation, but 0.  Then the next minute when it checks for confirmations it updates it to 1.  Fixed it so it starts at 1 as it should.

At current network difficulties, a block can easily take 35-45 billion shares without even being a "record breaking" bad luck block.  It's uncommon, but not extremely rare, for a block to take > 5x difficulty worth of shares.  Most large pools that have been around for a while have all had a few blocks that have taken 7-9x difficulty before.  The record, as far as I know, was between 10 and 11x.

They have the home field advantage when it comes to ASICs, since the majority of ASICs that are actually shipping are all made in China.  Additionally, it's difficult for miners in China to actually mine on pools, generally requiring proxy/VPN services in order to get past the Great Firewall of China, so Discus Fish makes it much easier for them to mine on a pool.

Just remember that PPLNS means when you turn off you continue getting payments for the next 4-5 hours.  Meaning you don't have 13 hours of mining time paid, you have 8 hours of data that is fully paid and 5 hours that is not.


However, I'm going to say this again because I continue seeing people post it:

PPLNS, does not, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, penalize you for idle time, disconnects, turning your miners off, etc.  If you have someone tell you this, they do not know what they are talking about.  The slow rewards at the start of mining under PPLNS are the inverse to the rewards you receive when you stop mining later.  It's a symmetrical process.  The expected value of a share submitted under PPLNS does not change regardless of what you did before submitting that share or what you do after submitting that share.