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

[Zelek Uther]

I've been mining on BTC Guild for two years. Sad to see it close. Thanks Eleuthria for the excellent service, best wishes for your future endeavours.

[navigator]

Yeah, I didn't think luke-jr was involved with eliguis anymore, right?

I would like to use a pool that allows me to enter a different payout address when needed. Usually every 1 btc I use a different address.

I never really liked slush's site but see that's been updated. If he did DoS btcguild that's not cool.

I also would like a pool that has some kind of dashboard/stats. I like kano and all the work he has done but the pool is a little too simple for me.

Fact is, there is no other btcguild out there

[defcon23]

this is the end of a great story..  i feel sad about it..

[akashamar]

Anyone decided on where they are moving to yet?

I'm running a small scale Bitcoin Pool Payouts experiment ... see here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1059040.0 ... antpool, nicehash and kano are doing very very well, NiceHash.com service is interesting as it gives above direct Bitcoin mining payouts in particular intervals.

[-ck]

Luke-jr has not been the operator of Eligius for quite some time. And Wizkid is about as straight up as they come.

LJ is still an advisor to wizkid for the pool and they use his custom bitcoin transaction filtering/blacklist as discussed previously.

[p3yot33at3r]

The one pool that I wouldn't put on that list is Eligius Mining Pool the owner has a reputation see below.

Luke-Jr used the pools hashing power to 51% attack an alt with out the permission or authorization of the people hashing for the pool.
Luke-Jr also injected his personal Bitcoin address black list into Gentoo Linux code base. for religious reasons multiple times.
Luke-Jr also threatened to 51% attack an independent Bitcoin protocol build as a core developer.  (read the whole thread to get a feel for his personality)
Luke-Jr also ripped off CGMiner code without giving credit,  

so no i wouldn't group Eligius with the others on that list, there is a history of abuse of power there.

All valid points, & exactly the reasons I won't use Eligius or anything else even slightly connected with Luke-Jr.

After reading up some, I chose p2pool - it's decentralised nature really appealed to me. The Bitcoin mining scene will be worse off without the Guild - thank you eleuthria for being an upstanding & trustworthy member of the mining community - in these times of badly coded scam pools - you will be sorely missed.

[BCwinning]

The one pool that I wouldn't put on that list is Eligius Mining Pool the owner has a reputation see below.

Luke-Jr used the pools hashing power to 51% attack an alt with out the permission or authorization of the people hashing for the pool.
Luke-Jr also injected his personal Bitcoin address black list into Gentoo Linux code base. for religious reasons multiple times.
Luke-Jr also threatened to 51% attack an independent Bitcoin protocol build as a core developer.  (read the whole thread to get a feel for his personality)
Luke-Jr also ripped off CGMiner code without giving credit,  

so no i wouldn't group Eligius with the others on that list, there is a history of abuse of power there.

All valid points, & exactly the reasons I won't use Eligius or anything else even slightly connected with Luke-Jr.

After reading up some, I chose p2pool - it's decentralised nature really appealed to me. The Bitcoin mining scene will be worse off without the Guild - thank you eleuthria for being an upstanding & trustworthy member of the mining community - in these times of badly coded scam pools - you will be sorely missed.

I agree and am looking for a new pool myself. Might just be a good time to bow completely out of bitcoin too.
I really don't like the direction it is heading.
I gave slush a chance years ago, tried him again at beginning of last year and nothing changed.
I saw they updated the site but he doesn't offer anything special. If anything I recall them removing merged mining and now they are "redeveloping" it. seriously I'll give a mining fee to someone else kthx.
I won't join a pool that avg's a block every 24 hrs or worst. There needs to be a few to make it worth my time.

[eleuthria]

Had a small hiccup in the manual withdraw request.  I had been debating between 0.0005 and 0.0001 as the new minimum withdrawal amount during closing.  I had set the code to enforce 0.0005, but changed my mind and went all the way to 0.0001 while writing the post about closing, and updated it so that the button became enabled for any balance of 0.0001 or greater.  However, it wouldn't actually let you request amounts under 0.0005 because I forgot to lower that number.

So now it's working properly and allowing withdrawals of any amount equal to or greater than 0.0001 (and will pay out all the satoshis at the same time on a manual request).

[Mikestang]

So sad to see BTC go, this was the first place I tried mining when I got into it many months ago.

My miners will point to Kano's ckpool after summer is over, hopefully more will follow that direction.  That pool is run too well to only have 1-2PH/s pointed to it.

[navigator]

I might give kano's pool a try. Does it have good uptime?

Everyone is making good points about each pool. I may also consider quitting soon. I believe in the not so distant future my 8c/kwh rate will be considered too high to mine. I may give antpool a shot. Bitmain has too much at stake in bitcoin for them to do something bad with their pool. And I should get consistent payouts there.

I just logged into a few older btcguild accounts. One has some btc dust 0.0002x, you can just keep that. I also found logins for sc.btcguild io.btcguild and pps.btcguild lol good times

[Minor Miner]

best of luck to you in the future.

[eleuthria]

Just a reminder:  If you're going to make a manual withdrawal to finish off your account, wait until your shares have fully matured (no shares left in open shifts).  Otherwise your account might generate slightly more BTC, and it may not be enough to actually request another withdrawal (I will not reduce it further than 0.0001 BTC).

[djeZo]

Yeah, Eligius and Ghash are the only pools without fees as of now. Besides eligius doing all that, ghash also 51%'d bitcoin. What's worst, who is to say these (or any other pool) isn't sometimes stealing some hashrate? In a very small scale that would be unnoticeable and nearly impossible to find/track. I just started mining and I found it sad it is SO centralized. I tried p2pool but unfortunately most hardware dont work very well there, my s5 included.
Unfortunately I will have to stay with eligius (and ghash as backup) for now. Just hope they don't get hashrate or do anything bad, but "having to trust" is really fucking bad!

NiceHash or WestHash all the way. PPS, 3% fee and past week paying 7% more than ideal bitcoin mining, which means effective 4% more than ideal bitcoin mining. No stealing of mining, you are paid for each share.

[DrHaribo]

Eleuthria, thanks for running an honest pool. And thank you for the endorsement. Good luck with your new projects. A game with bitcoin integration would be awesome!

BTC Guild shutting down makes me feel old. But at least I don't have to listen to you talk about plans to shut down anymore.

Sadly this also feels like another nail in the coffin for decentralization. Of the pools that grew too big in the past, only Eleuthria handled the situation properly. Consider that before you move your miners to the biggest pool and assume that decentralization isn't important for bitcoin. All miners and pool operators have a responsibility to keep mining from getting too centralized.

[mdude77]

BTC Guild is Closing Down
BTC Guild will be shutting down its mining servers on June 30th, 2015 at 23:59 UTC. Users will still be able to log in and retrieve their history (CSV exports on the settings page) and request withdrawals until September 30, 2015..

Thanks for everything.

Peace.

M

[portice]

Thank you

[dogie]

Sadly this also feels like another nail in the coffin for decentralization. Of the pools that grew too big in the past, only Eleuthria handled the situation properly. Consider that before you move your miners to the biggest pool and assume that decentralization isn't important for bitcoin. All miners and pool operators have a responsibility to keep mining from getting too centralized.

If anyone is interested in starting their own substantial pool, the open sourced AntPool code base should do a pretty good job of that. Unfortunately getting set up is such a small hurdle compared to actually running a pool that only a handful of people could actually run one properly.

I might give kano's pool a try. Does it have good uptime?

I started a side project of tracking all the major pools and they all managed ~99.95%+ so its a safe bet most will work. There may be temporary blips which kicks people off due to DDOS mitigation etc but all in all performance is good and equal.

[smokem]

The antpool code, like their firmware & p2pool code, is a complete mess & should be avoided at all costs. Ask any experienced pool dev/coder.

Only a Bitmain employee would say such a thing 

[p3yot33at3r]

The antpool code, like their firmware & p2pool code, is a complete mess & should be avoided at all costs. Ask any experienced pool dev/coder.

Only a Bitmain employee would say such a thing 

Yes, their track record in the coding department is appalling I'm afraid, as are many of their claims, as I & others have touched upon elsewhere:

Thank you -ck & kano for chiming in, your experience & knowledge is greatly appreciated    I've read a lot about this subject throughout the thread, it seems to me that bitmain are actually working against p2pool, despite their claims in their pool thread that they actively support it:

We support p2pool protocol

.....and has been significantly developed during the development of Antpool.

This is simply not true. Shouldn't forum rules/admins require them to change this statement? Doing so would also save a lot of confusion for new users of p2pool who wonder why they can't get the most out of their bitmain hardware while using p2pool. They seem to be trying to transfer p2pools unique decentralised nature for their own marketing needs - despite being an obviously centralised pool.

As bitmain refuse to fix their firmware (or more likely - they're unable/don't know how to), I'd be more than willing to chip in towards a bounty for a revised & fully functional S5 firmware for p2pool - if kano/-ck would be willing? The S5's are still being sold, & will remain workable for a while yet I think, so it would certainly boost p2pools attractiveness to new users if they could simply connect & mine like any other pool.  What do you think?

Tak.

I've posted quite a few times in their thread asking them to remove the references to p2pool.  They don't.  Thankfully one of the mods (I believe it was -ck) changed their thread title to get rid of the bogus "supporting decentralization" claim it spouted.  I completely disagree with dogie's statements about it being a "lost in translation" thing.  Bitmain took forrest's code and added some database stuff to it.  They didn't create their own implementation, or attempt to fix any of the variance problems.  Whatever they did was certainly not the $100,000s effort claimed, and they abandoned it since they realized they didn't know what they were doing.

$100,000's..........

I'd hazard a guess that this is one of the reasons why eleuthria didn't recommend them, & rightly so.

[-ck]

I've posted quite a few times in their thread asking them to remove the references to p2pool.  They don't.  Thankfully one of the mods (I believe it was -ck) changed their thread title to get rid of the bogus "supporting decentralization" claim it spouted.  I completely disagree with dogie's statements about it being a "lost in translation" thing.  Bitmain took forrest's code and added some database stuff to it.  They didn't create their own implementation, or attempt to fix any of the variance problems.  Whatever they did was certainly not the $100,000s effort claimed, and they abandoned it since they realized they didn't know what they were doing.

$100,000's..........

I'd hazard a guess that this is one of the reasons why eleuthria didn't recommend them, & rightly so.

Third post on the antpool thread, by me:

If this is a totally separate p2pool like network but miners connect to Bitmain's servers only to mine on it, then they get the worst of all worlds: They get the increased work loss of frequent restarts, they get the high diff shares that will prevent them getting paid consistently unless they have very large hashrates, and there is no actual decentralisation since they'll be mining at a centralised pool created by bitmain that just happens to use the p2pool code for its backend but isn't really p2peer.

If all of the above is true, then bitmain has tried to cash in on the decentralisation concept by paying homage to the idea using p2pool without actually understanding it.

Fail.

and later on...

I have finally had a skype text chat with the main Chinese Bitmain software engineers and unfortunately it's precisely as I predicted. In principle they wanted to help decentralise and saw p2pool as the obvious way to get involved and would be good publicity for them. Unfortunately they spent a lot of time fixing their regular pool first and just left this announcement up almost as a "preorder for a better p2pool". However they misunderstood the issues with p2pool and thought that all it needed was more coding expertise and manpower contributed to development to fix it and have only just started investigating it now.  While they can clearly improve on the existing code - and probably will unless the project gets canned - after I queried them about what solutions they had for the intrinsic p2pool protocol limitations/problems, they had precisely zero valid solutions for them.

And the rest is history...