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

[eleuthria]

I noticed that block 269054 paid out about 70% more than the blocks surrounding it, and I'm curious how that's possible.

This was a few hours ago.

I assume it's because the transaction fees on that particular block were particularly high. But, the block only shows some 200 transactions. Was it a stunningly large transaction or a stunningly large transaction fee? If there's some way to determine this from all the reports that our out there, feel free to teach me how to fish, rather than giving me the fish.

On the Pool Stats page, there's a list of blocks at the bottom, which includes how many BTC were mined with the block.  Everything over 25 = Transaction fees.

[1714060008]

1714060008

[1714060008]

1714060008

[BrandonMcPherson]

Thanks, Tigggger and eleuthria!

Edit: One might think that a cap on total transaction fees is reasonable. ~US$6,392 for processing a transaction of ~$179,860 seems excessive. Not that I am complaining about my tiny share of that—because, you know, hoorah!—but my gut reaction is that this is detrimental to the long-term health of the BTC ecosystem. A percentage with a cap would encourage more transactions.

At the same time, I assume that people who are much smarter than me have put a lot of thought into the subject. Can anyone shed some light?

[Tigggger]

Thanks, Tigggger and eleuthria!

No problem, I edited with a bit more info as you were asking how to find it.

[BrandonMcPherson]

I edited with another question.

And a big thanks for the how-to-find-it info.

[eleuthria]

Thanks, Tigggger and eleuthria!

Edit: One might think that a cap on total transaction fees is reasonable. ~US$6,392 for processing a transaction of ~$179,860 seems excessive. Not that I am complaining about my tiny share of that—because, you know, hoorah!—but my gut reaction is that this is detrimental to the long-term health of the BTC ecosystem. A percentage with a cap would encourage more transactions.

At the same time, I assume that people who are much smarter than me have put a lot of thought into the subject. Can anyone shed some light?

A transaction with a fee like that is not created by any standard Bitcoin client.  It's somebody writing a transaction in raw format and screwing up.

[BrandonMcPherson]

Fascinating. Thanks, Eleuthria.

His pain, our gain...

[eleuthria]

Fascinating. Thanks, Eleuthria.

His pain, our gain...

It's unfortunate because now you have these pools that share txfees with miners (in the old days that was extremely rare).  Before, they could contact the pool and most upstanding pools would refund the tx fees.  Now that is only an option if your pool makes miners wait for 120 confirmations (and then it's still only a ~16 hour window to try to ask for the error back) before they can claim funds from a block.  In the case of BTC Guild, we do instant crediting of block rewards.  There's no way to refund those fees since the miners already got paid (and in many cases already withdrew).

Of course, the real argument:  Why the hell weren't they using testnet to mess with raw transactions first?  It's just stupid to be playing with thousands of dollars on the live network if you aren't positive you've done it right.

[BrandonMcPherson]

Good points, and now that I understand more of the issues, I retract my hope that more such blocks come our way. The short term gain is not worth the detrimental impact incidents like this have on the broader ecosystem.

Again, thanks for the insight.

[neutralist]

Transaction Fees   18.82943281 BTC

That's nothing. A while ago someone mined a block with 106 BTC and he is with BTC Guild so everyone who use PPLNS get benefited.

[Zelek Uther]

I can't really help with the above, other than suggesting you add eu-stratum.btcguild.com as your 2nd pool.  The US server is online and running solid (as noted by the unchanged pool speed), which means the connection issue is local, not on the server side.

Thanks for the helpful advice, I'll do that.  (FYI the issue resolved itself after about 30 mins.)

How much hashrate does one need to qualify for the private server?

 BTW congrats on the pool, it is a superb service!

[eleuthria]

I can't really help with the above, other than suggesting you add eu-stratum.btcguild.com as your 2nd pool.  The US server is online and running solid (as noted by the unchanged pool speed), which means the connection issue is local, not on the server side.

Thanks for the helpful advice, I'll do that.  (FYI the issue resolved itself after about 30 mins.)

How much hashrate does one need to qualify for the private server?

 BTW congrats on the pool, it is a superb service!

The "real" private server "required speed" is variable.  It mostly requires that you have a "fairly significant" investment in mining.  As new mining hardware has become available at lower prices, this threshold has been raised over time (otherwise anybody with a Saturn would have it).

However, whenever a persistent attack appears, there are semi-private servers that are quickly distributed to miners with a reasonable history with BTC Guild to help get them back online in the event that the baseline defenses aren't adequate.

[BrandonMcPherson]

The price of Block Erupters has skyrocketed with the jump in BTC price. 10 days ago they were briefly down to US$7.95 on Amazon. Today, Prime customers can get them for US$23.97.  The blades have edged up a little, while used Jalapenos and Singles have increased maybe 30-40%.

I'm having a hard time doing the math on relative value, especially with the volatility of BTC itself, and especially especially with KNC and BFL promising new deliveries in November.  Shit, that's this month.

[eleuthria]

The price of Block Erupters has skyrocketed with the jump in BTC price. 10 days ago they were briefly down to US$7.95 on Amazon. Today, Prime customers can get them for US$23.97.  The blades have edged up a little, while used Jalapenos and Singles have increased maybe 30-40%.

I'm having a hard time doing the math on relative value, especially with the volatility of BTC itself, and especially especially with KNC and BFL promising new deliveries in November.  Shit, that's this month.

BFL promising deliveries in November, that's cute.  Obviously 2014

[BrandonMcPherson]

It's a fair point...

[jojo69]

BFL promising deliveries in November, that's cute.  Obviously 2014

guffaw

You guys hear about BFL hiring a call center to run their customer list trying to drum up monarch orders with 20% off vouchers?  There were at least 3 threads and about 95% of posters reported indicating, shall we say, disinterest.

[BrandonMcPherson]

One would think that one of the larger outfits would learn from their collective mistakes and:

1.) Pre-announce no more than two weeks in advance of shipping, a month if they want to

2.) Sell inventory-on-hand only.

I realize that pre-orders have been used to finance the whole shebang so far, but proof-of-concept has been established. There is VC money available for companies that want to do it right. The pre-order model is clearly a failure.

[murraypaul]

One would think that one of the larger outfits would learn from their collective mistakes and:

1.) Pre-announce no more than two weeks in advance of shipping, a month if they want to

2.) Sell inventory-on-hand only.

I realize that pre-orders have been used to finance the whole shebang so far, but proof-of-concept has been established. There is VC money available for companies that want to do it right. The pre-order model is clearly a failure.

From whose point of view?
Certainly a failure from the point of view of the customers who are putting up all the money, but it seems to be very successful for the ASIC companies, who take all the money up front through non-chargeback methods and then have no pressure to actually deliver a working product on time.
If people are still willing to pre-order, companies will continue to take their money.

[AussieHash]

How do we tell if orphaned blocks have been paid by the pool ?

A few days ago I looked through the past 100 blocks on the pool stats page, and there were no orphans or stales listed

On blockchain the block below was an orphan, but it is absent from the pool stats page

https://blockchain.info/block-height/269202
https://blockchain.info/block-index/439404/000000000000000190c34f75db3c57ecdef861f8da265b398256eb2b1fd39a10

[eleuthria]

How do we tell if orphaned blocks have been paid by the pool ?

A few days ago I looked through the past 100 blocks on the pool stats page, and there were no orphans or stales listed

On blockchain the block below was an orphan, but it is absent from the pool stats page

https://blockchain.info/block-height/269202
https://blockchain.info/block-index/439404/000000000000000190c34f75db3c57ecdef861f8da265b398256eb2b1fd39a10

Orphans are paid as long as the primary payment server sees the block.  *Most* of BTC Guild's hash power is in the US, which is where that payment server is located.  There are the occasional very rare orphans found by the EU servers which do not get seen because the window between the two competign blocks was close enough to trump the latency between the US payment server and the EU server.  It's extremely rare for this to happen since every node is either directly connected, or has 1 hop between them (bitcoind doesn't have an addnode method that aggressively keeps connections open between the two servers, so instead BTC Guild had a few dummy servers which can only connect to the pool servers to attempt to circumvent that limitation).

That block can be shown as an EU-block due to a small token in the coinbase (03921b04040002b96505 is the start of the coinbase message.  05 at the end is the server identifier token.  04 and 05 are EU).

[AussieHash]

Block 269066 is listed in the pool stats, and was orphaned.
Given it was listed by the pool, I presume it was paid out by the pool ?
Clicking in the transaction link gives an unconfirmed transaction
http://www.blockchain.info/tx-index/84665c8fc3ef8e40c349c85880e677f6d748c41e97c13a2b584abd227c9dace6
Is that normal ?