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

[mdopro1]

Yup! I just realized that I never put in my NMC wallet address... So is that all gone or if I put in the address now will it somehow magically reappear?

[eleuthria]

Yup! I just realized that I never put in my NMC wallet address... So is that all gone or if I put in the address now will it somehow magically reappear?

NMC accumulates whether you have a wallet set or not.  It's an option in your settings to have it display on the dashboard.  The NMC stats are pretty basic (earned vs paid).  NMC will be added to the CSV export on PPLNS soon, but no plans to add much detail for it on the site (too much clutter for something that is worth very little).

Rough math:  You make ~1.6 NMC per BTC you make.  1 NMC is worth 0.0043 BTC at the moment, so roughly 0.006 extra BTC from NMC.  So you're making ~0.6% extra income with merged mining at the moment.


EDIT/UPDATE:  The above math is wrong.  You get 3.2 NMC per BTC you make because NMC is 50 per block.  So the extra income is ~1.25%, not 0.6%.

[PatMan]

Yup! I just realized that I never put in my NMC wallet address... So is that all gone or if I put in the address now will it somehow magically reappear?

NMC accumulates whether you have a wallet set or not.  It's an option in your settings to have it display on the dashboard.  The NMC stats are pretty basic (earned vs paid).  NMC will be added to the CSV export on PPLNS soon, but no plans to add much detail for it on the site (too much clutter for something that is worth very little).

Rough math:  You make ~1.6 NMC per BTC you make.  1 NMC is worth 0.0043 BTC at the moment, so roughly 0.006 extra BTC from NMC.  So you're making ~0.6% extra income with merged mining at the moment.

Any plans to add extra merged mined coins to the pool?

[eleuthria]

Any plans to add extra merged mined coins to the pool?

No plans for that.  The other coins that allow merged mining aren't even worth a 0.1% bonus.

[Trongersoll]

There's something unclear in the auto payout: you can set a 0.00 minimum but it seems to actually be 0.01.

BTC Guild was my backup pool, and so I only have 0.001 BTC there. Obviously it won't affect my life to lose that, but anyway it should be clearer to users.

so do a manual payout. 

[eleuthria]

More or less, the sum of them is about 0.2%.
It used to be better.

If BTC Guild merged mined those coins, it would be worth less than 0.02%.  Basically the only reason those are adding 0.2% is because you get *so* many of them per Bitcoin mined, due to no pool giving a damn about them.  The same thing happened with NMC.  It *used* to be worth a decent amount.  Hell, Namecoin basically died as a result of it and had to implement a hard fork (merged mining) in order to revive the currency to stop Bitcoin miners from hopping onto it when profitable and leaving after the diff change when it became massively unprofitable.

You'll also note that the extra % gained from NMC took a massive dive recently, because at it's peak it was ~5-6% (not counting the first month or two of merged mining).  Then BTC Guild added merged mining to Stratum.  Then ASICMINER did.  Then GHash.io did.  Now the NMC difficulty is > 50% of the BTC difficulty, but the price is still roughly the same.


EDIT:  Thank you however for reminding me that NMC is still 50 coins per block.  So my 0.6% figure was half of what the actual extra income is since I was calculating it without factoring in the 50/block reward.

[eleuthria]

There's something unclear in the auto payout: you can set a 0.00 minimum but it seems to actually be 0.01.

BTC Guild was my backup pool, and so I only have 0.001 BTC there. Obviously it won't affect my life to lose that, but anyway it should be clearer to users.

0.00 Auto Payout = Disabled.  0.01 is the minimum payout in all forms on BTC Guild and that is not expected to change unless there is a *massive* increase in the value of BTC.  Manual payouts will include all the extra satoshis as well to allow a complete balance clear, as long as it's at least 0.01.

[TomKeddie]

Website seems off air to me, DDOS I guess?

Weird seems like someone is killing your DNS.


cuba:git tom$ host -a btcguild.com
Trying "btcguild.com"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 32979
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 11, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;btcguild.com.         IN   ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
btcguild.com.      86400   IN   SOA   gina.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2013101116 10000 2400 604800 3600
btcguild.com.      300   IN   TXT   "v=spf1 ip4:198.245.61.57 ip6:2607:5300:60:139::1 include:_spf.google.com ~all"
btcguild.com.      300   IN   MX   1 aspmx.l.google.com.
btcguild.com.      300   IN   MX   5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
btcguild.com.      300   IN   MX   5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
btcguild.com.      300   IN   MX   10 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
btcguild.com.      300   IN   MX   10 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
btcguild.com.      300   IN   A   108.162.203.93
btcguild.com.      300   IN   A   108.162.204.93
btcguild.com.      86400   IN   NS   josh.ns.cloudflare.com.
btcguild.com.      86400   IN   NS   gina.ns.cloudflare.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
btcguild.com.      86400   IN   NS   josh.ns.cloudflare.com.
btcguild.com.      86400   IN   NS   gina.ns.cloudflare.com.

Received 402 bytes from 192.168.0.254#53 in 82 ms
cuba:git tom$ host -a www.btcguild.com
Trying "www.btcguild.com"
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
cuba:git tom$

[eleuthria]

Website isn't down, and it isn't under attack.  Cloudflare appears to be fucking up BIGTIME lately with ISP DNS providers.  People using Google DNS or OpenDNS for the DNS servers have no issues resolving the 'www.btcguild.com' subdomain, but a lot of ISPs are screwing it up.  I'm migrating off of Cloudflare tonight because they refuse to admit this is a problem on their end.  Going to miss the protection they offered the website, but their support is completely unacceptable when this issue is absolutely on their end given the number of users reporting it in the last few days.

[bobitza]

A couple of times I had to restart my router and I couldn't reconnect back to the pool.

I'm running bfgminer on a Lubuntu and the message that kept popping up was something like "Stratum is requesting work update ..." or something like that. And it went on and on. After several tries I managed to get work accepted but after the latest router reset I had to temporarily switch to another pool as I couldn't make it connect again. I'll try to reconnect tomorrow morning ...

Is it me or the pool thinks I'm a bot or what? lol.

[eleuthria]

DNS issues should be over now, I have moved the DNS off of Cloudflare due to their withholding the records for 'www.btcguild.com' from many DNS requests, effectively removing the site from the internet for random people using their ISP as the DNS resolver.  It may take a little longer for the nameserver change to propagate.

The site is moving a little bit slower as a result, mostly on the *first* page load, since you're now retrieving all the JS/CSS/images from the site instead of the cloudflare CDN.  Subsequent page loads aren't quite as quick as it was for me on Cloudflare, but are not too bad, at least coming from California (which is one of the slowest locations to access it from within the US).  I'll be working on tweaking things with the site this weekend to help speed it up.  Most of the slowdown is that I'm forced to proxy the site through another server in order to protect it from direct DDoS attacks.

[ma_bit]

DNS issues should be over now, I have moved the DNS off of Cloudflare due to their withholding the records for 'www.btcguild.com' from many DNS requests, effectively removing the site from the internet for random people using their ISP as the DNS resolver.  It may take a little longer for the nameserver change to propagate.

The site is moving a little bit slower as a result, mostly on the *first* page load, since you're now retrieving all the JS/CSS/images from the site instead of the cloudflare CDN.  Subsequent page loads aren't quite as quick as it was for me on Cloudflare, but are not too bad, at least coming from California (which is one of the slowest locations to access it from within the US).  I'll be working on tweaking things with the site this weekend to help speed it up.  Most of the slowdown is that I'm forced to proxy the site through another server in order to protect it from direct DDoS attacks.

Is it related with that? I got it from my Firefox today:

This Connection is Untrusted

You have asked Firefox to connect securely to www.btcguild.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.

Technical Details:
www.btcguild.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for the following names: ssl2493.cloudflare.com , *.motorcycleinsurance.com , lifehighlights.com , *.rawissue.com , *.landsalesco.com , clickindia.in , bobsbets.com.au , premiermaldives.com , *.efesti.com , bitaccel.com , *.tisaddis.com , *.clickindia.in , *.hhclone.com , *.onlc.eu , rawissue.com , *.onlc.fr , *.lifehighlights.com , efesti.com , *.bobsbets.com.au , yoledoy.com , onlc.eu , *.premiermaldives.com , tisaddis.com , *.dutchshopbrighton.com.au , *.bitaccel.com , dutchshopbrighton.com.au , landsalesco.com , *.yoledoy.com , motorcycleinsurance.com , hhclone.com , mijntasenik.nl , *.mijntasenik.nl , onlc.fr (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

[OleOle]

DNS issues should be over now, I have moved the DNS off of Cloudflare due to their withholding the records for 'www.btcguild.com' from many DNS requests, effectively removing the site from the internet for random people using their ISP as the DNS resolver.  It may take a little longer for the nameserver change to propagate.

The site is moving a little bit slower as a result, mostly on the *first* page load, since you're now retrieving all the JS/CSS/images from the site instead of the cloudflare CDN.  Subsequent page loads aren't quite as quick as it was for me on Cloudflare, but are not too bad, at least coming from California (which is one of the slowest locations to access it from within the US).  I'll be working on tweaking things with the site this weekend to help speed it up.  Most of the slowdown is that I'm forced to proxy the site through another server in order to protect it from direct DDoS attacks.

Is it related with that? I got it from my Firefox today:

This Connection is Untrusted

You have asked Firefox to connect securely to www.btcguild.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.

Technical Details:
www.btcguild.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for the following names: ssl2493.cloudflare.com , *.motorcycleinsurance.com , lifehighlights.com , *.rawissue.com , *.landsalesco.com , clickindia.in , bobsbets.com.au , premiermaldives.com , *.efesti.com , bitaccel.com , *.tisaddis.com , *.clickindia.in , *.hhclone.com , *.onlc.eu , rawissue.com , *.onlc.fr , *.lifehighlights.com , efesti.com , *.bobsbets.com.au , yoledoy.com , onlc.eu , *.premiermaldives.com , tisaddis.com , *.dutchshopbrighton.com.au , *.bitaccel.com , dutchshopbrighton.com.au , landsalesco.com , *.yoledoy.com , motorcycleinsurance.com , hhclone.com , mijntasenik.nl , *.mijntasenik.nl , onlc.fr (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

Just confirming I also get the "This Connection is Untrusted" message in Firefox too.

I wasn't sure if it was just me as I'm the process of setting up a new laptop with all the updates and annoyance that entails, but I tried www.btcguild.com from another fully operational pc a few minutes ago and unfortunately still get the untrusted connection message:




Thanks for you help.

[ehoffman]

Got that too...  But if you changed server, that's normal :-)  You may have to fiddle with the certificates again  

Thanks for the update.  I wanted to make sure here that the site was still legit... and not hacked!

[OleOle]

My mining rig was offline while I messed around with the new laptop and reconfiguring the miner for a different operating system. Now that I'm mining again and connected to the pool, there doesn't appear to be any issues with the 'untrusted connection'. Not really sure what is happening, maybe some defense mechanism regarding the DDoS attacks perhaps, but either way, things seem to be normal again and I can log into my BTC Guild online account without any certificate issues.

So... thanks I guess

[DPoS]

thanks for the updates!

[eleuthria]

Invalid certificate errors are expected for people who use DNS resolvers which are still using the cloudflare nameservers.  It's been about 18 hours since moving to a new nameserver, ideally you would be updated already.  It only took about 4 hours to update on my PC using Google's DNS servers.  There's absolutely nothing I can do on my end to fix the cloudflare certificates, it's just a waiting game for your DNS resolvers to use the proper nameservers.

[ma_bit]

Invalid certificate errors are expected for people who use DNS resolvers which are still using the cloudflare nameservers.  It's been about 18 hours since moving to a new nameserver, ideally you would be updated already.  It only took about 4 hours to update on my PC using Google's DNS servers.  There's absolutely nothing I can do on my end to fix the cloudflare certificates, it's just a waiting game for your DNS resolvers to use the proper nameservers.

I think you can ... not now, but for next time, you can set shorter validity (or shorter refresh) of DNS records ... but you can have good reason to keep it the same as today

@   IN  SOA     nameserver.place.dom.  postmaster.place.dom. (
                               1            ; serial number
                               3600         ; refresh   [1h]
                               600          ; retry     [10m]
                               86400        ; expire    [1d]
                               3600 )       ; min TTL   [1h]

[eleuthria]

Invalid certificate errors are expected for people who use DNS resolvers which are still using the cloudflare nameservers.  It's been about 18 hours since moving to a new nameserver, ideally you would be updated already.  It only took about 4 hours to update on my PC using Google's DNS servers.  There's absolutely nothing I can do on my end to fix the cloudflare certificates, it's just a waiting game for your DNS resolvers to use the proper nameservers.

I think you can ... not now, but for next time, you can set shorter validity (or shorter refresh) of DNS records ... but you can have good reason to keep it the same as today

@   IN  SOA     nameserver.place.dom.  postmaster.place.dom. (
                               1            ; serial number
                               3600         ; refresh   [1h]
                               600          ; retry     [10m]
                               86400        ; expire    [1d]
                               3600 )       ; min TTL   [1h]

The problem is a significant number of those settings are completely ignored by ISP level DNS caching/resolvers.

[eleuthria]

Well, it was bound to happen.  After months of an attacker proxying through MILLIONS of bots to get around IP bans, trying to find a collission of BTC Guild usernames/passwords from who knows how many database leaks from other websites, the attacker recently started trying a new vector.  In the last 12 hours, a significant number of password reset attempts were made, because the attacker is now trying to use the password reset function as a way to narrow their brute force attack down to only valid usernames.

New attack detection systems have been added now which have stopped the attacker from successfully determining if their attempts are valid usernames or not.  If you received an email about a password reset, this was likely because you either use a very common username, your username is publicly known (forum username for example), or your username is part of a database leak from another website.  However, knowing the username is valid does not mean they know your email, or your password.  Without being able to access your email, the password reset cannot be completed.

If you DID receive a password reset email, make sure your password is not reused from another website which may have had a compromised password list due to plaintext or poor salting.  If you received a reset email, your username was in a database that somebody has compiled which has passwords that your username has used on other websites in the past.