[CLOSED] BTC Guild - Pays TxFees+NMC, Stratum, VarDiff, Private Servers

[eleuthria]

Merged Mining (+ mine1/mine2/mine3.btcguild.com) server is being restarted to apply the switch to PPLNS on getwork servers.  It should be back up shortly.  Additionally, I am moving mine1/mine2/mine3.btcguild.com off of the merged mining server later this evening, which should help with some of the crashes the server has been seeing every few days.

[elchorizo]

Looks like the EU and US servers are both down right now... for both of my miners at 2 diff locations.

Edit: and back up. Total downtime seemed to be about 10 minutes.

[eleuthria]

Sorry for the downtime, a pool wide restart on servers was executed.  Everything should be back to normal now.  I've been trying to fix some database bottleneck issues lately (PPLNS is very demanding compared to PPS in terms of reads/writes).

Total downtime was approx. 8 minutes.

[Jahare]

For shift ID#5986 shares appear doubled (not a bad thing) but do not believe that is intended.  Were two shifts merged together during the Downtime for the Database?

[eleuthria]

For shift ID#5986 shares appear doubled (not a bad thing) but do not believe that is intended.  Were two shifts merged together during the Downtime for the Database?

Yes.  The cause of the problem was actually due to a shift failing to close.  In that situation, all outstanding shares are merged into one shift.  The PPLNS reward allocation is designed to split based on the shares outstanding at the time the block is solved, so a shift with 2x as many shares will get twice as much per block as the other shifts.  The other shifts still average the same though, since they were receiving payments for extra time due to the longer shift.

[eleuthria]

I posted an update on the pool website, but also wanted to post it here.

Miners that were on getwork previously:  Your 24 hour earnings stat will take approximately 24 hours to be calibrated for PPLNS.  Due to how PPLNS work, shares are submitted and receive payments for approximately 6 hours after they were submitted.  As a result, the pool has a "delayed" 24 hour earnings calculation for PPLNS, where it looks at the last 24 hours worth of closed shifts to determine your 24 hour earnings.  This means you will have approximately 6 hours of earnings not showing up on your 24-hour earning statistic for the next day.

Do not be alarmed by the sharp decline in 24 hour earnings as a result.  While it looks low now, it would eventually be made up if you left the pool, since you would continue receiving payments for ~6 hours after turning off your miners.

Sorry for the confusion, this is a display issue I hadn't thought of, and a few miners have sent me emails/PMs asking why their earnings took a sharp decline after this morning's change.

[soundasleep]

I added support today to keep track of your BTC Guild wallet balances (BTC and NMC) to CryptFolio. This helps you keep track of mining pool balances over time, and generates reports (such as your overall USD net worth).

[johnyj]

Can't access main website now, mining not affected yet

[eleuthria]

Can't access main website now, mining not affected yet

Are you still having an issue?  Nothing was wrong as of about 20 minutes after your post when I woke up and checked the website on my phone.

[eleuthria]

Website is a bit slow right now (started about 10 minutes ago) due to someone doing a brute force attempt on the BTC Guild login page.  I've killed the brute force from actually getting any information out of the server, but they are still hitting the website pretty hard from many locations (or faking their source and cloudflare isn't catching it), which is causing the website to have a bit of lag.  Mining pools are doing fine at the moment.

Just a standard security notice:  Do not use the same password on BTC Guild as you do on other sites.  This brute force attack is using a list of what appears to be specific usernames/password combinations, which indicates they're using a leaked database from somewhere.  They don't come even close to matching BTC Guild usernames in most cases, so it's definitely a blind attack, but may be sourced from another Bitcoin site that was compromised at any point in the last few years.




UPDATE:  The website slowdown has been fixed with some temporary adjustments to Cloudflare's security settings.  Unfortunately this is currently causing problems with the API for some users.  I have a support request in with Cloudflare to discuss options on how to keep the API page functioning with the current security settings.

[eleuthria]

Restart happening right now on EU-Stratum.  Server completely stopped responding.  Do not believe it's an attack at this time, but should know shortly.


UPDATE:  EU-Stratum restored.  Downtime is estimated to have been about 9 minutes in total.

[eleuthria]

EU-Stratum was down again this morning, roughly the same time as yesterday.  I have temporarily moved EU-Stratum DNS to the north american servers while waiting for a new server to be provisioned in the EU with a different hosting company.  Sorry for the inconvenience, and hopefully service will be moved back to the EU within the next 24-48 hours.

Estimated downtime of EU-Stratum was once again about 7-10 minutes [I get the warning that the server is dead after 5 minutes of downtime].

[lemonys]

The US server is really slow to connect at the moment.  Hopefully its just miners from EU moving to it due to the issues with the EU server and not something more sinister...

[eleuthria]

New server in the EU has been provisioned and is in the process of being setup.  I will update this post (or make a new post if somebody replies first) when the DNS is updated to point to the new EU Stratum server, which should be in a few hours.



UPDATE:  EU-Stratum is now back in Europe and DNS has been updated.  Users will be redirected to the server the next time they try to connect to eu-stratum.btcguild.com (NOTE:  DNS caching may cause you to connect to US servers for up to 24 hours even though the DNS should be cached for 5 minutes).

[dtown]

Is there a JSON version of the block history on this page?

https://www.btcguild.com//index.php?page=pool_stats

Thanks!

[eleuthria]

The pool hot wallet will be going through maintenance tomorrow at 12:00 (noon) PST/19:00 UTC.  This maintenance should only last about two hours, during which time payouts will not be available.  Mining will continue uninterrupted, and automatic payouts will run two "catch-up" runs after it is complete.  Maintenance will mostly be based on waiting for the hot wallet transactions to receive a few confirmations, so it may be as short as 30 minutes, or as long as 4 hours depending on overall network luck and transaction confirmation time.

[wtfvanity]

Do you have a longer history of PPLNS average rate than the last 100 shifts? Or any charts?

It looks like PPLNS is 8-10% less than PPS. If I'm not mistake, that's after all the fees are taken out... Been that way for a couple of days.

[eleuthria]

Do you have a longer history of PPLNS average rate than the last 100 shifts? Or any charts?

It looks like PPLNS is 8-10% less than PPS. If I'm not mistake, that's after all the fees are taken out... Been that way for a couple of days.

PPLNS has been paying less than PPS for the last 3 weeks roughly (with a few days being exceptions).  In general, you will spend more *time* influenced by bad luck, but periods of good luck should make up for it.  Over the last 18 months since BTC Guild has been PPS (and 2 years as a pool), the pool luck is extremely close to neutral (less than 1% off, and that is influenced by orphans and software issues in the early days more than anything).

Extending the PPLNS average rate is a bit hard to do in a way that provides any meaning since different difficulties would mean different expectations for payouts.  It's already a bad number to use for comparison for a few days after difficulties change.

[eleuthria]

The website is currently having another attempt at major brute forcing on the login page.  I've re-activated the cloudflare "I'm under attack" mode.  This will likely cause issues with monitors which rely on the API since the monitors will not interact with the cloudflare intermediate page properly.

I'm working on updating the API to be served from a separate subdomain which is not subject to the same "I'm under attack" settings.

[wtfvanity]

Do you have a longer history of PPLNS average rate than the last 100 shifts? Or any charts?

It looks like PPLNS is 8-10% less than PPS. If I'm not mistake, that's after all the fees are taken out... Been that way for a couple of days.

PPLNS has been paying less than PPS for the last 3 weeks roughly (with a few days being exceptions).  In general, you will spend more *time* influenced by bad luck, but periods of good luck should make up for it.  Over the last 18 months since BTC Guild has been PPS (and 2 years as a pool), the pool luck is extremely close to neutral (less than 1% off, and that is influenced by orphans and software issues in the early days more than anything).

Extending the PPLNS average rate is a bit hard to do in a way that provides any meaning since different difficulties would mean different expectations for payouts.  It's already a bad number to use for comparison for a few days after difficulties change.

Fair enough. The only time that they are inaccurate is when the difficulty changes, correct? Or am I understanding what the difficulties would be?

You've got great miner charts on there. I think what I would love to see on a chart, would be the rolling 100 shift rate on a chart throughout history. Of course at a difficulty change it would drop by whatever percentage the difficulty would be up. When looking day after day and seeing PPS kicks your but, it would be nice to see those short spikes in a chart somewhere making up for loneliness of PPS