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

[eleuthria]

BtcGuild now auto-adjust minimum share difficulty regardless manual input?

BTC Guild was the first pool to deploy variable difficulty, and if you do not adequately set your minimum difficulty, the pool will adjust it for you.  That is why the setting is labelled "MINIMUM difficulty".  BTC Guild uses a 20-40 Shares Per Minute range (it doubles your difficulty any time you hit 40 SPM for a 5 minute duration).

I "adequately" set minimum difficulty to reduce discarded shares. Maybe server needs more bandwidth? You are after all pushing 300'000 GH atm.

Discarded shares are meaningless for stratum.  The statistic means absolutely nothing to you unless you're on getwork.  Just ignore it.

Higher difficulty means higher stales/discarded, how is that meaningless?

No, higher difficulty does not mean higher stales.  Stales are not the same as discarded work.  Discarded is a USELESS, 100% MEANINGLESS statistic when mining on Stratum.

[juhakall]

I renamed a worker over 30 minutes ago, but the change still hasn't taken effect. I can only connect using the old name. I'm using the EU server.

EDIT: Funny, the rename finally took effect after I posted

[eleuthria]

I renamed a worker over 30 minutes ago, but the change still hasn't taken effect. I can only connect using the old name. I'm using the EU server.

EDIT: Funny, the rename finally took effect after I posted

Renaming workers is normally instant, unless you try to connect to the pool with the new name prior to the rename.  The pool caches a list of bad worker credentials so it doesn't bother connecting to the database to validate constant bad attempts.

[jarhed]

BtcGuild now auto-adjust minimum share difficulty regardless manual input?

BTC Guild was the first pool to deploy variable difficulty, and if you do not adequately set your minimum difficulty, the pool will adjust it for you.  That is why the setting is labelled "MINIMUM difficulty".  BTC Guild uses a 20-40 Shares Per Minute range (it doubles your difficulty any time you hit 40 SPM for a 5 minute duration).

I "adequately" set minimum difficulty to reduce discarded shares. Maybe server needs more bandwidth? You are after all pushing 300'000 GH atm.

Discarded shares are meaningless for stratum.  The statistic means absolutely nothing to you unless you're on getwork.  Just ignore it.

Higher difficulty means higher stales/discarded, how is that meaningless?

No, higher difficulty does not mean higher stales.  Stales are not the same as discarded work.  Discarded is a USELESS, 100% MEANINGLESS statistic when mining on Stratum.

Whatever. I'm getting another cup of coffee.
I'll post when I have a valid question.

[demonmaestro]

I wonder. What is your total network usage in and out eleuthria on the servers? and or say the miner server?   

Also who in the HELL is mining 39,856.07 GH/s 

[eleuthria]

I wonder. What is your total network usage in and out eleuthria on the servers? and or say the miner server?   

Also who in the HELL is mining 39,856.07 GH/s 

Average bandwidth for the last 30 days [US Stratum+Website]:  14.2 mbps in, 16.3 mbps out.

[demonmaestro]

Not as bad as i thought it would be. 

[eleuthria]

Not as bad as i thought it would be.  

Yeah, average bandwidth is quite low.  The server has a large burst roughly ever 30 seconds [push out updated work], but it's so brief it barely impacts the overall average.  This also includes a total of 6 bitcoind nodes between the various servers.

[demonmaestro]

6..... you need that many wallets?

I guess so to keep up with all that money you making!   

[-Redacted-]

Heh - that's not why they're used.   Where do you think the pool gets the work that it hands out to miners?

[eleuthria]

6..... you need that many wallets?

I guess so to keep up with all that money you making!  

Each Stratum server has a local bitcoind to keep them from having a central point of failure.  Additionally there is a hot wallet for payouts that is separate from those and a store wallet.

[WhitePhantom]

I looked at the last few days of posts and didn't see anything on this, but I might've missed it, so I apologize if that's the case.

My friend and I have both noticed that E-Mail notifications for idle workers stopped functioning a few days ago.  We tried disabling and re-enabling the notifications, but that had no effect.  Anybody else experiencing this?

[eleuthria]

I looked at the last few days of posts and didn't see anything on this, but I might've missed it, so I apologize if that's the case.

My friend and I have both noticed that E-Mail notifications for idle workers stopped functioning a few days ago.  We tried disabling and re-enabling the notifications, but that had no effect.  Anybody else experiencing this?

Thank you for that.  I forgot to re-enable idle miner scripts once all the time zone issues were fixed.

[Trongersoll]

6..... you need that many wallets?

I guess so to keep up with all that money you making!  

Each Stratum server has a local bitcoind to keep them from having a central point of failure.  Additionally there is a hot wallet for payouts that is separate from those and a store wallet.

So there is a chance that more than one of your servers might be working on the, how do i say this without having to look things up, working on the same input to the hashing algorithm?

[eleuthria]

6..... you need that many wallets?

I guess so to keep up with all that money you making!  

Each Stratum server has a local bitcoind to keep them from having a central point of failure.  Additionally there is a hot wallet for payouts that is separate from those and a store wallet.

So there is a chance that more than one of your servers might be working on the, how do i say this without having to look things up, working on the same input to the hashing algorithm?

Each server has a slightly different coinbase message, so there is no chance of duplicated work.

[-Redacted-]

Coinbase being where you plug in a transaction with your bitcoind address to receive the 25 BTC if you solve the block, correct?   So basically each stratum server is functioning as a separate pool but solved blocks pay out to the entire group of miners working across all of the servers?

[Trongersoll]

6..... you need that many wallets?

I guess so to keep up with all that money you making!  

Each Stratum server has a local bitcoind to keep them from having a central point of failure.  Additionally there is a hot wallet for payouts that is separate from those and a store wallet.

So there is a chance that more than one of your servers might be working on the, how do i say this without having to look things up, working on the same input to the hashing algorithm?

Each server has a slightly different coinbase message, so there is no chance of duplicated work.

Oh, cool. you Pool Operaters got it all down pat. I'm just curious about how things work and have always had a tendency to look for things that can go wrong in the name of preventing them from happening. Murphy and i go way back.

[eleuthria]

Coinbase being where you plug in a transaction with your bitcoind address to receive the 25 BTC if you solve the block, correct?  

When you make your own block, the transaction which pays yourself the coins is a transaction without an input.  Part of that input space is used to create what is called the "coinbase" for the block.  It includes the current block number, and is also where things like ExtraNonce go (part of how Stratum works is letting miners adjust part of the ExtraNonce).  On BTC Guild's blocks, the coinbase also includes "Mined by BTC Guild" in the message (it's in hex, but sites like blockchain will show you the converted message).  The coinbase is also where merged mining information is added, which is why you can externally audit if a pool is merged mining.

In the case of BTC Guild, one of the components of the coinbase message is a unique 2-digit server ID.  This makes it impossible for two servers to ever end up generating the same work.  It's a precaution, though it's EXTREMELY unlikely to ever happen even without the unique ID (there's a lot of pieces that would need to randomly end up identical).

[-Redacted-]

Thank you!  Got it.  Appreciate you taking the time to explain.

[Trongersoll]

Thank you!  Got it.  Appreciate you taking the time to explain.

yeah, i found that interesting too. You explain things well.