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

[eleuthria]

Performance Charts now live.  All 3 charts (24h/72h/2wk) are now on one convenient page.

[jojo69]

Ha yeah, faulty cable. Replaced it and it's working fine. Sorry for the alarm.

best possible outcome

[dresdenreader]

Performance Charts now live.  All 3 charts (24h/72h/2wk) are now on one convenient page.

Oh man, those charts are sexy. I like = )

[keystroke]

Performance Charts now live.  All 3 charts (24h/72h/2wk) are now on one convenient page.

Beautiful stuff! Any plans to upgrade to version 2 of the blocks to be compatible with BIP 0034?

[eleuthria]

Performance Charts now live.  All 3 charts (24h/72h/2wk) are now on one convenient page.

Beautiful stuff! Any plans to upgrade to version 2 of the blocks to be compatible with BIP 0034?

All our Stratum servers produce Version 2 blocks.  Only getwork is still on v1 (and will always be v1 until they shut down at this point).  ~2/3 of our blocks are produced on Stratum now.  You may have noticed the new site emphasizes stratum over getwork as well.  I won't turn off getwork while there is still demand, but the guides on how to use BTC Guild both use native stratum miners, and give the host as a stratum server in the write-up/screenshots.

[keystroke]

Performance Charts now live.  All 3 charts (24h/72h/2wk) are now on one convenient page.

Beautiful stuff! Any plans to upgrade to version 2 of the blocks to be compatible with BIP 0034?

All our Stratum servers produce Version 2 blocks.  Only getwork is still on v1 (and will always be v1 until they shut down at this point).  ~2/3 of our blocks are produced on Stratum now.  You may have noticed the new site emphasizes stratum over getwork as well.  I won't turn off getwork while there is still demand, but the guides on how to use BTC Guild both use native stratum miners, and give the host as a stratum server in the write-up/screenshots.

Cool! Thanks for the quick reply Just curious about the network's transition to block version 2 but I guess it will still take awhile.

[maunderingcabal]

Every time I put my miners to PPLNS there is a long string of bad luck....FML. Can anyone justify this to me. On PPS i am getting xxx650 a share. the last day I've averaged around xxx500... WTF does the fate just hate me? I saw just a couple days ago some of the shifts were pulling xx1000 a share... Bad timing?

[os2sam]

Every time I put my miners to PPLNS there is a long string of bad luck....FML. Can anyone justify this to me. On PPS i am getting xxx650 a share. the last day I've averaged around xxx500... WTF does the fate just hate me? I saw just a couple days ago some of the shifts were pulling xx1000 a share... Bad timing?

When using a payout method like PPLNS or DGM you really need to mine over a longer period, like an entire difficulty period of 2016 blocks, and then compare it to the PPS.  These payout methods don't work out well if your continuously switching back and forth between PPS because they payout across several rounds of mining.

It's hard not to switch back and forth, I know, I have a hard time staying at one place through a bad luck period too.
Sam

[miner49er]

New UI PPLNS questions

this is probably redundant question, and I apologise, but "meesa soooo confuzead":

So, about PPLNS: I noticed a few day ago BTCGuild went from ~60 minute shifts down to about ~30minutes per shift. was this an intentional change on the back end by the owner, or just an automatic adjustment due to increase in pool speed? what is the shift time based on?

there is a blurb on the page that says "Open shifts continue to receive payments until 10 additional shifts have completed."

does this mean we earn 20/1 per shift? or still just 10/1? did this have anything to do with the shift times being cut in half?

TIA for helping me understand this.

[eleuthria]

New UI PPLNS questions

[snip]

PPLNS on BTC Guild uses an 'N' value of 30 million, split into 10 even chunks of 3 million shares each.  This means that once 3 million shares are found, regardless of the time involved, a shift is completed.  When any block is found, the payment is divided evenly between the last 10 completed shifts (thus paying out to the last 30 million shares).  The initial reason for using '30 million' was because it put a shift at roughly 1 hour, but it was also chosen because that was roughly 10x higher than difficulty.  This meant it was extremely unlikely for a shift to ever receive 0 BTC [this has only happened to one shift out of 3000].

The time it takes for a shift to complete is mostly irrelevant, it all comes down to the 'N' value (30 million).  As network difficulty rises, it is likely that N will be increased in March as a result of climbing network difficulty.

[eleuthria]

A new Stratum server has been added in EU (Germany).  This is the new primary Stratum server for the EU.

To directly connect to this server, you can use:  eu-stratum.btcguild.com:3333 .  Future servers in the EU will be added to the same DNS entry, similar to what was done with US based Stratum servers.  You can also directly connect by IP at 144.76.36.41:3333.

The old EU Stratum server will stay online for a while, but users are encouraged to switch.  The new server is much faster than the old one, and does not share resources with a getwork poolserver.


I have also updated some error handling on the Website<->Stratum interactions, to help reduce the chance of one server using old data (wrong payment method/wrong min-diff).  If any single server fails to respond, you will be given an error message asking you to try changing your settings again.

[mc_lovin]

1 suggestion:

redirect https://www.btcguild.com//halloffame.php to https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=rankings

no point having it just go to a 'not found' page.

[skeeterskeeter]

Can I get some info on this stratum?

So a miner in a pool asks the server for work. The old version I take it is "getwork" the new version is "stratum"?

We changed because getwork was based on http?(tcp?udp?) which was getting terribly slow as miners got terribly fast?

Who developed stratum?


Also it looks like I need to be using this. I use phoenix 2.0, can anyone tell me if stratum is used in this miner by default or if I have to turn it on?
 (I have a suspicion it is entirely not supported in phoenix, so I might be going to cgminer tonight; already went through GUI miner POSminer if you ask me.)

[eleuthria]

Can I get some info on this stratum?

So a miner in a pool asks the server for work. The old version I take it is "getwork" the new version is "stratum"?

We changed because getwork was based on http?(tcp?udp?) which was getting terribly slow as miners got terribly fast?

Who developed stratum?


Also it looks like I need to be using this. I use phoenix 2.0, can anyone tell me if stratum is used in this miner by default or if I have to turn it on?
 (I have a suspicion it is entirely not supported in phoenix, so I might be going to cgminer tonight; already went through GUI miner POSminer if you ask me.)

Getwork was an HTTP based protocol, with a pull-based method of obtaining work.  It also used longpolling, which was basically just an HTTP connection that was held open until the pool had notice of a new block.  Getwork by default could only support 4.2 billion hashes (4.2 GH/s required a new getwork every second).  There were some extensions added (nTime rolling) to increase that range a bit, but it had the side effect of completely skewing the timestamp on blocks.  At extremely high speeds, it has the potential of damaging the network if a significant number of blocks are found "in the future" due to nTime rolling.

Stratum is a persistent TCP socket based protocol, with push-based work.  The pool provides you the information to build your own work locally.  It updates the work at regular intervals so you're including more transactions in the block as time goes on.  Since it's TCP based, it eliminates the overhead of having one always-on HTTP connection paired with potentially dozens (or hundreds) of opening/closing connections each minute.  It also uses an extremely small payload, since it doesn't require HTTP headers, and doesn't require as much data as getwork.

BTC Guild put forward a version of the new protocol at the same time that slush announced his Stratum protocol.  Since slush's implementation was done in a more friendly language (python), and included an open source poolserver, BTC Guild pulled its own protocol proposal and adopted the Stratum protocol.  Today, there are three protocols in existence.  Getwork (which is now outdated), Stratum, and Getblocktemplate.  GBT is a great system for local/solo mining on high end hardware, but does not match the performance of Stratum in a miner<->pool relationship.


As for phoenix, I do not believe any version of phoenix has added Stratum support yet.  You can still use phoenix if you want to run a Stratum Proxy (which connects to a Stratum server, and then relays the work to your miner as getwork on your LAN).  Windows binaries can be found here: https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy/downloads   and that also links back to the github page for source you can use on Linux.  You would run the proxy with '-o <pool server> -p 3333'.  You would then connect your miner to the proxy as http://127.0.0.1:8332 (if it was running on the same machine as the miner).

CGMiner is highly recommended for serious miners, and has native support for Stratum.  Later versions of GUIMiner also support Stratum when using the default (poclbm) kernel.

[eleuthria]

1 suggestion:

redirect https://www.btcguild.com//halloffame.php to https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=rankings

no point having it just go to a 'not found' page.

Your wish is my command.

[eleuthria]

Congratulations to ASICMINER, the first miner to submit 1 billion shares since October 2011 (share counts from proportional were not carried into the PPS/PPLNS systems).

[organofcorti]

Congratulations to ASICMINER, the first miner to submit 1 billion shares since October 2011 (share counts from proportional were not carried into the PPS/PPLNS systems).

D1 shares? or just shares?

EDIT:  D1 shares.

[eleuthria]

Congratulations to ASICMINER, the first miner to submit 1 billion shares since October 2011 (share counts from proportional were not carried into the PPS/PPLNS systems).

D1 shares? or just shares?

EDIT:  D1 shares.

High-diff shares are counted as multiple shares, so it's Diff1 equivalent submissions .  The actual amount would be more like 1,953,125 actual submissions (estimated).

[skeeterskeeter]

*snip*

Hmm, I'll see what I can do tonight. Does CGMiner do stratum by default? Will I be working faster or just the same as usual when I switch? I figure the same speed.

So stratum supports little miners still, but had to be geared toward Gigahash miners because of their shear speed?

With stratum there is no persistent connection via HTTP, so each time a miner wants work they create a TCP packet asking for info from the server? (is that what "push-based" means?).

[averwind]

At least for me I usually get the idle warning email. I login btcguild to make sure which ones have gone idle, so I look at the dashboard. After getting the miner up I look for the idle warning enable but I have to go settings for that. I know that logically it is a setting but that setting is automatically turned off when something that can be seen in dashboard happens. So I wish idle e-mail setting was in dashboard.