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

[bulanula]

Did they wait for you to go to sleep? Seems the pool and frontends are down.

More threats coming in, nothing hitting yet.  Obviously not very involved in Bitcoin.  They seem to think pools make 10x more profit than they actually do.  Still stressing that any miners on BTC Guild should have multiple backup pools setup just in case.

haha yea, that was the first thought that came to mind. They do realize you make a whopping 2.5BTC per mined block right? So it is really the users they should be trying to ransom..

I would not be that certain.

Say 2 hours for a block then 12 blocks a day then 10 950

BTC a year so at current rates of $6 this dude pockets a NEAT $ 65 700 yearly for doing absolutely nothing except a few maintenace tasks - hosting costs and sitting on his bum all day.

Screw the DDOS government idiots but I would not be worried about eleuthria making a killing off miners ...

Should check your math against historical data. My income depends on luck. Last month was a LOSS of 672 BTC. Meaning after server costs I lost a total of over 4,500 USD at current rates.  Prior months keep it from being too bad, but this pool doesn't make anywhere near what you would think since I eat all luck.

Orphans, software glitches, and plain old luck stop the pool from being able to replace a day job. The income is random and not nearly enough to keep me from working.

Surprised you say this since Deepbit announced last year they mined like 1 000 000 BTC so with a 3% cut that is 30 000 BTC just on the low fee proportional miners so not bad at all IMHO.

[1714200059]

1714200059

[eleuthria]

Deepbit is proportional. That means he cannot lose money unless he has massive orphans. He was also running his pool much longer than Guild (May 2011) when there wasn't as much competition.

Guild has made some money, but lost a lot from last year when the pool couldn't scale. At one point we had 10 dedicated servers, in multiple countries. At the time it was 0% proportional and donations barely covered costs.

[Joshwaa]

I thank you for all you do eleuthria!!

[iCEBREAKER]

Are we being redirected and phished?  Or did eleuthria change something because of the DDOS?

I ask because the usual redirect from http://btcguild.com no longer forwards to the secure https://www.btcguild.com.

Instead, an "Authentication Required" box pops up, saying

A username and password are being requested by http://btcguild.com. The site says: "realm"

I'm not going to panic, but am also not going to put my ID/PW into that (OMG! New, therefore, Scary! FUD!  WTF is "realm" anyway!) pop-up.

Better safe than sorry!

[sadpandatech]

Are we being redirected and phished?  Or did eleuthria change something because of the DDOS?

I ask because the usual redirect from http://btcguild.com no longer forwards to the secure https://www.btcguild.com.

Instead, an "Authentication Required" box pops up, saying

A username and password are being requested by http://btcguild.com. The site says: "realm"

I'm not going to panic, but not going to put my ID/PW into that (OMG! New, therefore, Scary! FUD!  WTF is "realm" anyway!) pop-up.

Better safe than sorry!

fowards right to the https now for me. Maybe was soemthing temporary while the dns was propagating again.?

[eleuthria]

The attacks hit me while  I'm out visiting family.  My tethering app on my phone currently doesn't allow me to access HTTPS, so I removed the automatic redirection on BTC Guild so I could monitor the site remotely.

As long as you type in the address with https, it will work.  It must be the FULL address:  https://www.btcguild.com  [do not forget www] or you may receive errors.

The automatic HTTPS redirection will be restored once I am back home and not relying on a tethered connection.

Attacks may hit again tomorrow.  Make sure your mining clients have backup servers set.  If the attacks continue, I will be setting up private servers which are not linked back by DNS or even with the same datacenter.  I'll post instructions on how to request access to the private servers if the attacks continue beyond the weekend.

[eleuthria]

Added a poll to the thread regarding the addition of an option to request withdrawals be made via a direct PayPal payment.  The results of the poll do not guarantee if this feature will be added.

Likely fee for the withdrawal would be around 5%, depending on the fees that will be imposed on my end to send the payments, and the ability to cash out coins at Mt. Gox as quickly as the requests are made to avoid losing money during conversion quotes.  Exact method for determining the withdrawal rate will be reviewed (Mt.Gox last price vs Mt. Gox 24h average).

The advantage to this method would be easier transfer to your bank account if you already have a PayPal account.  The withdrawals would likely be processed every hour similar to Automatic Payouts.

[jojo69]

fuck paypal

[eleuthria]

fuck paypal

A fair point ;p.  Though Dwolla is a pain in the ass to work with, and Google Checkout doesn't have the ability to send mass payments from what I've found.  Dwolla could be an option down the road as well, though my experience with them for sending money is pretty bad.

[BkkCoins]

I don't like Paypal either but with getting money out of MtGox being more problematic now I'd say this is a good to have option. My question is whether the 5% fee is all inclusive or whether there would be the additional Paypal receiving fees as well?

eg. I regularly receive PP for other sales and lose 2-3% on each one. So would you deduct 5% and then PP another 2-3% or is there a way for you to send (personal/gift) without the PP fee (and not be shut down by the PP overlords for some quirky rule)?

[eleuthria]

I don't like Paypal either but with getting money out of MtGox being more problematic now I'd say this is a good to have option. My question is whether the 5% fee is all inclusive or whether there would be the additional Paypal receiving fees as well?

eg. I regularly receive PP for other sales and lose 2-3% on each one. So would you deduct 5% and then PP another 2-3% or is there a way for you to send (personal/gift) without the PP fee (and not be shut down by the PP overlords for some quirky rule)?

The quote given by BTC Guild at time of withdrawal would be what you receive [likely ~5% less than Mt.Gox last price].  When sending Mass Payments, the sender pays all fees [unless there is something hidden I haven't found].  This avoids the whole personal/gift BS which is what tends to get PP accounts frozen in the first place.

[eleuthria]

A new poll has been added related to a potential new service for BTC Guild miners.  Full information and examples can be found at https://www.btcguild.com/savings_faq.php.

This proposal for a new service is an interest bearing savings account.  The account would be managed by BTC Guild, as a passthrough for a savings account at Bitcoin Savings & Trust (Forum Thread).  These accounts would pay weekly interest at tiered rates based on the amount stored.  These are NOT deposit accounts.  You would only be able to put money into them by mining or transferring your available balance into the account.

Since these would be passthrough accounts, they are not fully insured by default.  The proposal and examples on https://www.btcguild.com/savings_faq.php show how a special insurance fund will be managed for BTC Guild users.  Rather than pocketing the profits each week, all profits are added to an insurance fund.  In the event of a default by Bitcoin Savings & Trust, the insurance fund would be split proportionally to all savings accounts, along with any principle returned by Bitcoin Savings & Trust.

While there is more risk involved at first, as time goes by a larger portion of the total balances will be insured by the fund.  BTC Guild will only claim a profit if the insurance fund + principle received after a default are greater than the amounts owed to all miners utilizing the service.

[Joshwaa]

Sounds good.  But clarify one thing we can only put BTC in the account from earnings made at BTCGuild. We can not add funds from our wallet?

[eleuthria]

Sounds good.  But clarify one thing we can only put BTC in the account from earnings made at BTCGuild. We can not add funds from our wallet?

Correct.  It's a decision I may revise later.  I do not want people to be able to send extra money into their BTC Guild accounts.  This is mostly because there is no way for me to guarantee that BTCST will not default in the short term, before the insurance fund has been able to build up a reasonable balance.  By limiting deposits to mining income, it means the balances will be much smaller at the start, leaving them in the 3% weekly category.  This means more "profit" is made, which will cause the insurance fund to grow much faster relative to the amount in savings accounts, at least to begin.

[eleuthria]

For clarification (received a question by email):

This proposed BTC Guild interest-bearing savings account is an OPTIONAL service.  Your coins will not be automatically placed into the account unless you elect to do so.  That is why there is a delay on receiving interest after depositing funds:  Only the accounts that have elected to use the savings account will have their coins placed in BTCST.  All other coins will remain in the hot/cold wallets, and will not be affected by any BTCST default (if one occurs).

[eleuthria]

Support for the savings accounts put it high on the priority list.  Unfortunately since my account at BTCST is relatively new, and the amount of coins BTCST is willing to hold and pay interest to is limited, this service won't be able to launch immediately.  When an earlier member puts in their deposits, if the total coins in BTCST is beyond the threshold, coins are kicked back out to members, starting with the most recent.

I will be working on the backend for the Savings accounts over the next week to have it in place for when BTCST is able to accept more coins, and the account has a little more age.

PayPal withdrawals will likely be added early July.  I'm working on setting up a business account for BTC Guild with PayPal at this time.

[Joshwaa]

Sounds awesome. Thanks again!

[Uncle Scrooge]

Keep up the good work eleuthria.

[eleuthria]

Thanks for the support, been a long time since the thread had any activity like that .

There's going to be a brief restart of mine1 in about 30 minutes (9:15 PM, PDT).  The downtime should be under 5 minutes.  The downtime will be one of the last steps completing the move of BTC Guild servers to a new physical node (faster hard drives and processors).  The only item remaining on the old server will be the database (still working out a gameplan for how to efficiently move that).


UPDATE:  mine1 maintenance was completed after a 4 minute interruption.  I was also able to do a small database optimization to speed up the connections between the mining servers, the website, and the DB server.  The website is snappy again after a little slowdown in the past few days.

[AndrewBUD]

You do run a good pool Love how the stats are laid out