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

[JerimiahJohnson]

Hello

I have a couple of questions:

What is the general consensus about setting your own minimum difficulty? What are the benefits of that?
in what scenarios would this be ideal?

Also Just out of curiosity what is more widely used PPS or PPLNS?

thank you for your time to answer my questions.

-JJ

[jojo69]

counterstrike

[eleuthria]

BTW Eleuthria...any updates on the stolen coin?

Only one person ever returned any coins (47 of the 1254).  A second round of emails was sent in Chinese, but did not receive a single response.  The btcguild_donate worker earned about 7 BTC, and donation address received about 14 BTC.  On the bright side, BTC Guild luck was quite good last difficulty, and a significant portion of the remaining ~1200 BTC was earned back.

Hello

I have a couple of questions:

What is the general consensus about setting your own minimum difficulty? What are the benefits of that?
in what scenarios would this be ideal?

Also Just out of curiosity what is more widely used PPS or PPLNS?

thank you for your time to answer my questions.

-JJ

Minimum difficulty is not needed for most users.  BTC Guild's vardiff is quite aggressive, so running on ASIC at diff=1 will almost immediately get bumped to a higher difficulty.  They will receive a -few- rejects due to latency during the first difficulty adjustments.  Compared to their overall throughput, it's mostly unnoticeable.  However, some users may prefer running at higher difficulties for lower bandwidth.  It's not necessary in my opinion, but the option was added for those who want it.

PPS/PPLNS are almost split 50/50 these days.  At BTC Guild's current % of the network, PPLNS is "almost" guaranteed to pay out more during a 2 week (difficulty period) span, but day-to-day variance can cause some miners to panic.

[Fiyasko]

I really dont think we should play starcraft 2, The game is really kind of a Rock Paper Siccors when it comes to Protoss/Zerg/Terran- Turtle/Rush/Steamroll

[eleuthria]

I really dont think we should play starcraft 2, The game is really kind of a Rock Paper Siccors when it comes to Protoss/Zerg/Terran- Turtle/Rush/Steamroll

Not sure about lower leagues...but it's extremely balanced at high skill levels.

[Aztec]

BF3 gets my vote. But what can I mine with while I play? What to do Marlton, what to do? 

[nbtcminer]

I vote for Dota 2

http://blog.dota2.com/

[theowalpott]

Voted BF3, but counterstrike, unreal tournament, Quake, etc would all be good too

[eleuthria]

Voted BF3, but counterstrike, unreal tournament, Quake, etc would all be good too

All good suggestions .  I'm going to be working on how to organize some of these events early April.  Some pool work to be done this week to help strengthen the Stratum servers now that botnets are starting to use Ufasoft versions with Stratum support -.-

My expectations for the Social/gaming community with BTC Guild:
  1) Formalized StarCraft 2 ladder including game times [probably split into 3 ladders based on time zones]
  2) Battlefield 3 dedicated server for BTC Guild, with designated times for larger events.
  3) Minecraft server - Looking at some options for Bukkit/plugins to make it more entertaining
  4) Mumble server - Might as well offer voice chat if we're going to have all these games!

[theowalpott]

I like the idea of larger BF3 events - some organised 32v32 (maybe a bit ambitious?) would be great. Would the server be EU or US based? - I'm in Europe, so obviously I'd prefer that, but ping doesn't have such a big effect in BF3, so not the end of the world

[Aztec]

I havent played BF3 for ages, getting the cry in early

[LazyOtto]

It might be worth starting a new thread for the 'BTC Guild Social Club' so that this one can be monitored / subscribed to purely for mining / pool information without the 'clutter' of the other stuff.

[eleuthria]

Posting this as a reminder:

User accounts can have both the email and wallet locked.  Doing these two things makes your account impossible to compromise.  If your login+email were compromised, the worse someone can do is mess with worker names and reset your password a few times, but they could not take your account from you (email lock), and cannot take your coins (wallet lock).

Since 2011, the pool has averaged 0 or 1 emails per month regarding a compromised account.  In March 2013, that number currently sits at 7.  There is no reason to expect a breach on the BTC Guild side, especially due to the sample of accounts that have been reported as compromised.  The most likely culprit at this point in time is a keylogger which has been used to sniff out pool information.  With 76,000 accounts and a price of $70/coin, it's an extremely profitable target if the account is not protected with a wallet lock.


I am currently looking into adding an optional 2-factor authentication to accounts using Google Authenticator.  This is another security option, but I don't believe it is needed. Losing your authenticator (in most cases, phone) should be significantly easier than losing your wallet.dat file.  However, 2-factor auth will allow users to keep their wallet unlocked if they want to send their pool balances to wallets they do not control (eWallets/exchanges).  I will post an update later this week once I've looked into how to implement Google Authenticators.

[theowalpott]

Quick question about PPLNS/getwork/mergedmining:

If I'm mining on a non-stratum server, what happens if I switch to PPLNS? - do I just get paid as normal in PPS?

[eleuthria]

Quick question about PPLNS/getwork/mergedmining:

If I'm mining on a non-stratum server, what happens if I switch to PPLNS? - do I just get paid as normal in PPS?

Yes.  When mining on getwork, you are paid as PPS, regardless of worker settings.

[BitMinerN8]

I am currently looking into adding an optional 2-factor authentication to accounts using Google Authenticator.  This is another security option, but I don't believe it is needed. Losing your authenticator (in most cases, phone) should be significantly easier than losing your wallet.dat file.  However, 2-factor auth will allow users to keep their wallet unlocked if they want to send their pool balances to wallets they do not control (eWallets/exchanges).  I will post an update later this week once I've looked into how to implement Google Authenticators.

Just to through them into the hat, please consider Yubikey. (OTP)
http://www.yubico.com/develop/open-source-software/
Currently using them on Mt.Gox and Blockchain Wallet, along with LastPass for everything else.

[eleuthria]

Dallas datacenter is having packet loss issues, which runs the Merged Mining server.  Should fix itself soon I hope.  Stratum and other getwork servers are not affected.

[induktor]

Dallas datacenter is having packet loss issues, which runs the Merged Mining server.  Should fix itself soon I hope.  Stratum and other getwork servers are not affected.

Hello
Yes I am having trouble connecting to the page, is taking between 10 to 30 seconds, and half the time is not loading at all, stratum works perfectly as you said
thank you

[Miner-TE]

Web site timeout - I'm unable to connect.

Edit:  Appears normal now. 

[eleuthria]

Yeah, looks like a DDoS attempt.  Working on what I can to mitigate it, but as usual it's mostly just waiting it out unless their attack is very easy for the datacenter to filter out.


UPDATE:  Stratum appears to be remaining stable, but getwork/merged mining are both down.  Merged mining may be recovering.