BTC Guild - https://www.btcguild.com
Server Features- Stratum Mining Protocol - Use only ~1 kbps of bandwidth regardless of how large your mining farm is! Fewer rejects, faster connection, and less overhead!
- Variable Difficulty - BTC Guild's Stratum pool adjusts your share difficulty based on your speed, reducing the chatter between your mining software and the pool.
- Minimum Difficulty - If variable difficulty isn't high enough for your taste, set your own difficulty even higher for lower bandwidth usage and less frequent share submissions.
- Merged Mining - Earn Namecoins and Bitcoins at the same time without any reduction in your BTC earnings (PPLNS only).
- Idle Warning Emails - If your workers go idle, an email will be sent (if you have set one) to notify you of the worker not submitting shares.
Community Features- Mining Teams - Compete with your group of friends, or create a group to compete with other collections of users. You don't need a garage full of ASICs to find a way to have fun competition with other users.
- IRC Chat - #btcguild on freenode.net has been around since April 2011. The pool operator is active for 12-18 hours a day, and questions are always welcome.
- Lightning fast support - Support emails to BTC Guild have an average turn around time of just a few minutes unless sent late at night/early in the morning.
Payment Methods- True PPS - We pay a fixed rate per share, period. There is no buffer, there is no limit based on good/bad luck. If your share is valid, your account is credited for the value of that share within seconds.
- PPLNS - Alternative payment method to PPS. Unhoppable rewards split similar to proportional. Offers a lower fee than PPS, for users that don't mind variance.
- Block TX Fees - Block transaction fees are split with PPLNS users, reducing the effective fee compared to some other pools.
- Orphan Blocks - Both payment methods (PPS + PPLNS) pay users for orphan blocks, something no other PPLNS offers at this time.
- Automatic Payouts - Receive payouts automatically when they hit your threshold.
- Full precision payouts - Get all 8 decimals of your balance transferred when you request a manual payout.
- On-demand payouts - Request your balance be paid to your wallet at any time by clicking the Request Payout button on the My Account page (minimum 0.1).
BTC Guild offers both "Pure" Pay-per-Share (PPS) and Pay-per-Last-N-Shares (PPLNS). With PPS, every share you submit is worth a fixed amount based on the current difficulty. With pure PPS, the pool assumes all risk of bad luck/variance and orphaned blocks. Regardless of how bad the luck is, you will make roughly the same amount every single day (only changing when difficulty changes). We assume all the risk of block finding variance, and will purchase additional BTC to meet our liabilities if we have not found enough blocks to make payouts.
With PPLNS, users have a lower fee option if they are okay with the downside (or upside) of variance. PPLNS is offered at a 3% fee, but also pays orphaned blocks and transaction fees, reducing the effective fee to ~1.5%. PPLNS is a unhoppable reward method, with payments very similar to proportional. Current settings use 30 million for "N", meaning every time a block is found, the last 30 million shares (10 completed shifts of 3 million shares each) are paid. A share can receive multiple payments before it "expires". PPLNS has variance, but is not quite as bad (on a per-round/shift basis) as what you would experience under Proportional, Score, or some DGM solutions.
To point your miner at the pool, you can use the following (examples for poclbm and Diablo):
poclbm.exe -d1 --host=btcguild.com --port=8332 --user=[username]_[workername] --pass=[anything]DiabloMiner-Linux.sh -b -o btcguild.com -r 8332 -u [username]_[workername]Detailed instructions and download links for GUIMiner and CGMIner can be found on our Support Section.
Stratum MiningStratum servers offer fewer stales, better performance, and significantly reduced bandwidth for miners.
To connect directly to a stratum server, you can connect to stratum.btcguild.com:3333 for US servers, or eu-stratum.btcguild.com:3333 for our EU server (Germany). Getwork based servers will provide X-Stratum redirects to users that continue connecting through other IP/port ranges.
PPLNSWorkers can be moved between PPS and PPLNS payment methods on the fly through the Manage Workers page. The only requirement is that your workers are connected to a Stratum server.
Visit our IRC channel on FreeNode.net to chat with other members or the pool operator (Eleuthria): #btcguild
