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

[railzand]

Well I'm nothing if not slow. Sorry you had these tiresome problems. Thanks so much

[1713861367]

1713861367

[1713861367]

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[1713861367]

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[dwbr]

Another long slump today... 

[graymatter]

anyone see the 16nm testing on the teams page?

https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=rankings&section=teams

[eleuthria]

Now that the forums are back:  There were 2 sets of rolling restarts earlier today, with each pool server going down for about 5 seconds, though there were always 6-7 pool servers still online to failover to during the restarts.  Most users probably didn't notice the restarts, and the pool's stats before and after restarts seems to confirm that most miners these days will no longer stop functioning properly/failover permanently like they had a tendency to do in the past.

These restarts updated 3 things on each mining server:
1) Updated bitcoind [BTC Guild was a few updates behind, prefering caution to fast upgrades after what happened with 0.8].
2) Updated bitcoind settings to 900,000 byte max blocksize.  BTC Guild previously had this value set at 500KB.
3) Updated to a faster version of Matt Corallo's Relay Network on all servers (some were still using a python version).

[ManeBjorn]

Excellent work.
Thanks again for the open communications.

Now that the forums are back:  There were 2 sets of rolling restarts earlier today, with each pool server going down for about 5 seconds, though there were always 6-7 pool servers still online to failover to during the restarts.  Most users probably didn't notice the restarts, and the pool's stats before and after restarts seems to confirm that most miners these days will no longer stop functioning properly/failover permanently like they had a tendency to do in the past.

These restarts updated 3 things on each mining server:
1) Updated bitcoind [BTC Guild was a few updates behind, prefering caution to fast upgrades after what happened with 0.8].
2) Updated bitcoind settings to 900,000 byte max blocksize.  BTC Guild previously had this value set at 500KB.
3) Updated to a faster version of Matt Corallo's Relay Network on all servers (some were still using a python version).

[Cheeseater]

Hi, I didn't see any mention of it in FAQ so I'll ask hear. Is there support for AMT Tubes? Thanks

[eleuthria]

Hi, I didn't see any mention of it in FAQ so I'll ask hear. Is there support for AMT Tubes? Thanks

It should work just fine?  I don't offer any support for specific devices, but there shouldn't be anything special needed.

[Cheeseater]

Thanks I'll give it a try. I know they the extranonce issue on some pools.

[Cheeseater]

Thanks, they work

[AForceNinja]

Are withdrawals not working for everyone or is it just me?

[hurricandave]

Are withdrawals not working for everyone or is it just me?

Did you wait at least 30 mins.?  Autopayments happen once an hour. My last payment was about 3 hours ago, no issue for me.

[eleuthria]

Are withdrawals not working for everyone or is it just me?

There's been no issues with payouts.  Automatic payouts happen once per hour for amounts over 0.10, twice per hour for amounts under 0.10, and twice per hour for manual withdrawal requests.

EDIT:  Unless you have a different username, your account hasn't had a balance owed in 5 months, the last bit of the balance was withdrawn in August.

[dwbr]

what a bad luck this pool is having.. Is everything ok?

[jermwerty]

what a bad luck this pool is having.. Is everything ok?

Yeah generally we don't stay "below" the luck bar for the whole week!

66.911% / 68.531% / 64.292%

2/3rds luck the past week ugh... payback for the 240% luck hits mid January?  LOL

[xhomerx10]

This is a rather long streak of poor luck: 65% over two weeks?!  Is this a block-withholding attack, are we being scammed (edit: I mean by a larger pool - I have the utmost trust and respect for eleuthria) or is this considered a normal distribution?  I was trying to weather the bad luck but I am running at a loss after electricity alone at these lower-than-normal rewards.  I'm going to have to move my miners.

[eleuthria]

Everything is running normally, there are no issues with the servers.  People like to throw around withholding attack on every pool having bad luck (plenty of people were talking about the same thing on Eligius).  There is no large scale withholding attack, unless they are doing it in a way that involves a significant number of accounts.

All of the fastest users on the pool (who make up the majority of the pool hash rate) are well within expected block solving rates.  That doesn't mean there isn't withholding, or bugged hardware out there, but it means that the only accounts exhibiting enough hash rate to have a noticeable impact are definitely not withholding blocks.



EDIT:  Just to clarify:  "well within expected block solving rates" does not mean they are functioning at +/- 5% luck, since if that was the case the entire pool would probably be at +/- 5% luck over the last month.  However, there are no accounts that are showing a blocks solved vs blocks expected rate that is severe enough to be a block withholding flag, such as the ones that were discovered last year when a large scale mining farm was discovered to have an error in their miner when dealing with shares resolving to a difficulty greater than a 32-bit value (4.2 billion).

[xhomerx10]

Everything is running normally, there are no issues with the servers.  People like to throw around withholding attack on every pool having bad luck (plenty of people were talking about the same thing on Eligius).  There is no large scale withholding attack, unless they are doing it in a way that involves a significant number of accounts.

All of the fastest users on the pool (who make up the majority of the pool hash rate) are well within expected block solving rates.  That doesn't mean there isn't withholding, or bugged hardware out there, but it means that the only accounts exhibiting enough hash rate to have a noticeable impact are definitely not withholding blocks.

 Thanks for the response.  I was hoping to get the assurance that you were aware of and watching for such things.
 

[johnyj]

Is this dropping in luck comes from more orphaned blocks?

[xhomerx10]

Is this dropping in luck comes from more orphaned blocks?

 No.  Mining is probability based so its luck (also called variance).
It doesn't really have anything to do with orphaned blocks.

[eleuthria]

Is this dropping in luck comes from more orphaned blocks?

 No.  Mining is probability based so its luck (also called variance).
It doesn't really have anything to do with orphaned blocks.

Well, BTC Guild doesn't include orphan blocks we've found in the luck calculations, which I think most other pools do, but that's not a huge impact.  BTC Guild's orphan rate has always been ~1% (you'll rarely see more than 2 out of the last 200 blocks on the pool stats page as being orphaned).