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

[eleuthria]

Small bug on the dashboard, showing worker speeds much higher than they should be.  Should be fixed shortly.


EDIT:  The bug caused a PPLNS shift to not close properly.  I'm running the script and have disabled the website temporarily to reduce database load while the shift is manually closed.

[420]

What was BTC Guild's current percentage of total network rate when stratum just went down?

[eleuthria]

Everything is back up, but it looks like the Load Balancer detected health problems with the instances due to the temporary DB locking.  Everything should be back to normal now.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

[bit_NINj4]

Of course it goes all wonky and eats a tonne of shares... Just as I made the switch to PPLNS.. 

[AndyRossy]

all back up?

[eleuthria]

Of course it goes all wonky and eats a tonne of shares... Just as I made the switch to PPLNS..  

No shares should have been lost, though the pool did have some brief downtime when the shift was being corrected due to a partial DB lockup during the transaction..  All that happened was a shift failed to close, causing a huge backlog of shares.  You'll notice Shift #5487 (https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=pplns&shift=5487) has over 50 million shares being paid.  The way the payout for PPLNS works is it will distribute the block reward evenly among the last 10 shifts of SHARES, so this shift will receive ~3.5x more of the block rewards until it is closed.  It ends up being what you would expect if it was split over 3 separate shifts.


No pool can gurantee 24/7 uptime, and while I try to get as close to that as possible, it is always recommended you set backup pools just in case!  Since the pools did disconnect users when the DB locked up, miners with backup pools *should* have been routed to their backup pool without issue, resulting in very minimal lost mining time.

[bit_NINj4]

Everything is updated now and as it should be. Patience can be a virtue 

[eleuthria]

Social Engineering Notice

The last ~36 hours, somebody has been working to get into BTC Guild colocation by pretending to be me over the phone.  A similar event has also been revealed as happening with doublec's bitparking pool.  I've been on the phone with all the hosting companies over the last two days, making sure they are aware of the issue, and that extra steps are in place to confirm "my" identity before they take any action or reveal any information about my account.  I've also talked with Amazon's EC2 support, and am confident in their security/callback to authorized phone # requirements, as well as changed my Security Questions (which were set over a year ago) to complete random gibberish, so no amount of reserach can reveal the answers.


This notice is to users:  If you receive an email claiming to be from BTC Guild asking you for account information, DO NOT REPLY.  The only time I will ask for any information about your account is if you email me asking for support first and I need more information to locate/identify your account.  NEVER send your password (some users have done this in the past even when it was not asked for).  BTC Guild only sends the following emails:

1) Wallet Change Notification/Confirmation
2) Email Change Notification/Confirmation
3) Idle Miner Alerts


While I highly doubt this will happen (there has been no actual access to the servers, so no database/email leak), it is very possible.  There have been many security breaches of external bitcoin services over the last two years that BTC Guild has existed, and if somebody sent emails to the people in those database leaks, they are probably going to see anywhere from 10-20% of those emails are of users that at one point or another setup a BTC Guild account.

[eleuthria]

Getwork server (mergedmining/btcguild.com:8332) locked up after namecoind had a segmentation fault (what a surprise, an altcoin that has no active development gets a random segfault).  Restarting and should be back to normal within a few minutes.


UPDATE:  Getwork still suffering, trying to get it back online.  At this point I will reiterate what I've said on IRC for months:  If you refuse to update to Stratum, I recommend moving to a different pool.  I do not have any plans of throwing more hardware at the problem.

[Amph]

who is the guy with 13 tera? damn him, he will rise the difficulty too much in this way

[os2sam]

who is the guy with 13 tera? damn him, he will rise the difficulty too much in this way

That's a sign of things to come.

It's not a guy its a consortium.
Sam

[eleuthria]

Port 80 getwork is still offline due to a hard drive failure.  I'm hoping to have a new server ready and available within the next 24 hours.

[SilentSonicBoom]

who is the guy with 13 tera? damn him, he will rise the difficulty too much in this way

Asicminer.

[eleuthria]

PPS Fee Increase - Next 24-36 Hours

As posted previously in the 51% Mitigation Plans, BTC Guild will increase its PPS fee if it reaches 40% of the last 2016 blocks.  Right now BTC Guild is at 39%, and with many pools having issues this last week, it is very likely BTC Guild is going to hit 40% within the next 24-36 hours.  There is a modification to the plan to make this a more urgent issue.  The fee increase will affect ALL PPS users immediately.  PPLNS is not affected.  Originally the plan was only targetting new users, and then old users after a difficulty change.  Unfortunately this is hitting almost immediately after a difficulty change.  Waiting until the following difficulty is simply not an option at this point.


Feel free to vent your anger/frustration, just remember the entire point of this is to make people look for alternative pools.  It is not healthy for the network to have so many users pointed at a single pool.  There is the side effect of also trying to make users move from PPS to PPLNS, and from Getwork to Stratum (so they can use PPLNS).


I had hoped more notice would be available, but the last week has seen a large surge as other pools had issues.  ASICMINER has also added more hash power, but that only accounts for about half of the new speed we've been seeing.  As a result, the % of the last 2016 blocks is increasing much more rapidly than I expected.

[fatpan]

Please , do something,

the guy 13T hash, is terrible..

It may crash BTC..

Dam It

[GoldenWings91]

ASICMINER are planning on going solo so hopefully the Guild will get some relief soon.

[BitMinerN8]

PPS Fee Increase - Next 24-36 Hours

As posted previously in the 51% Mitigation Plans, BTC Guild will increase its PPS fee if it reaches 40% of the last 2016 blocks.  Right now BTC Guild is at 39%, and with many pools having issues this last week, it is very likely BTC Guild is going to hit 40% within the next 24-36 hours.  There is a modification to the plan to make this a more urgent issue.  The fee increase will affect ALL PPS users immediately.  PPLNS is not affected.  Originally the plan was only targetting new users, and then old users after a difficulty change.  Unfortunately this is hitting almost immediately after a difficulty change.  Waiting until the following difficulty is simply not an option at this point.
...

Say ASICMINER moves and BTCGuild goes below 40%, will things go back to "normal" until the next wave of hash is added? (like when ASICs really start shipping in mass)

[eleuthria]

PPS Fee Increase - Next 24-36 Hours

As posted previously in the 51% Mitigation Plans, BTC Guild will increase its PPS fee if it reaches 40% of the last 2016 blocks.  Right now BTC Guild is at 39%, and with many pools having issues this last week, it is very likely BTC Guild is going to hit 40% within the next 24-36 hours.  There is a modification to the plan to make this a more urgent issue.  The fee increase will affect ALL PPS users immediately.  PPLNS is not affected.  Originally the plan was only targetting new users, and then old users after a difficulty change.  Unfortunately this is hitting almost immediately after a difficulty change.  Waiting until the following difficulty is simply not an option at this point.
...

Say ASICMINER moves and BTCGuild goes below 40%, will things go back to "normal" until the next wave of hash is added? (like when ASICs really start shipping in mass)

The current plan is that the PPS fee will remain increased until a large buffer has been created to keep this situation from happening again.  At this time it will either be 30% or 35% of the last 2016 blocks, depending on how fast it drops, and what happens when more ASICs launch.  The last thing we need is the fee to bounce up/down every month.

PPS is something I've been growing a bit concerned with as prices rose.  Those who have read Meni's paper on bankruptcy at PPS fees and the buffers required know that even at 5%, a very large buffer of coins is required to reduce the odds of bankruptcy to near-0.  It's quite frankly very intimidating to need to keep so many coins in reserve at $100+/coin, when only a few months ago it was less than 1/5th the USD$ value.

[doublec]

PPS is something I've been growing a bit concerned with as prices rose.  Those who have read Meni's paper on bankruptcy at PPS fees and the buffers required know that even at 5%, a very large buffer of coins is required to reduce the odds of bankruptcy to near-0.  It's quite frankly very intimidating to need to keep so many coins in reserve at $100+/coin, when only a few months ago it was less than 1/5th the USD$ value.

For the curious you can use Wolfram Alpha to compute the buffer from Meni's paper. At 5% PPS, with a 1 in 1000 risk of ruin, you need 1,726 BTC in reserve. Replace the '1000' and the '0.05' in that URL to change the risk of ruin and percentage fee respectively.

[LazyOtto]

Frankly, I would just as soon see PPS eliminated completely.

If any individual miner cannot accept his personal risk/variance, then, IMO, he is playing the wrong game. I see no reason any pool operator should accept that risk of variance.