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

[eleuthria]

BTC Guild - https://www.btcguild.com

POOL IS CLOSING DOWN ON JUNE 30th





Server Features

• Stratum Mining Protocol - Use only 1~2 kbps of bandwidth regardless of how large your mining farm is!  Fewer rejects, faster connection, and less overhead!
• Variable Difficulty - BTC Guild's Stratum pool adjusts your share difficulty based on your speed, reducing the chatter between your mining software and the pool.
• Minimum Difficulty - If variable difficulty isn't high enough for your taste, set your own difficulty even higher for lower bandwidth usage and less frequent share submissions.
• Idle Notification - Get an email if your miners stop working.  Configurations available to different time frames before workers are considered idle.
• Automatic Payouts - Receive payouts automatically when they hit your threshold.
• Full precision payouts - Get all 8 decimals of your balance transferred when you request a manual payout.
• On-demand payouts - Request your balance be paid to your wallet at any time by clicking the Request Payout button on the My Account page (minimum 0.01 without fee, 0.001 with fee).
• Faster credited rewards - No waiting for 100-120 confirmations, BTC Guild credits you for a block once it has one additional confirmation.

Payment Methods

• PPLNS - Unhoppable payment method with rewards split similar to proportional. Uses very high 'N' value to reduce per share variance.
• Block TX Fees - Block transaction fees are split with PPLNS users, reducing the effective fee compared to some other pools.
• Namecoin Merged Mining - PPLNS users are rewarded with Namecoins automatically, increasing your return over pools which do not.

PPLNS is offered at a 2% fee, but also pays transaction fees [0.5-1%], and Namecoins [~0.5] reducing the effective fee to ~0.5-1% per block on average.  PPLNS is a unhoppable reward method, with payments very similar to proportional.  PPLNS has variance, but is not quite as bad (on a per-round/shift basis) as what you would experience under Proportional, Score, or some DGM solutions.  BTC Guild uses a very high 'N' value for PPLNS, which helps reduce the per-share variance associated with non-PPS payment methods.  Even if the pool is having extremely poor luck, your shares will likely be earning at least 50-70% of what you would normally get under PPS.  On the other side, you will get 30-50% more than PPS when the pool is having very good luck.


Stratum Mining
Stratum servers offer fewer stales, better performance, and significantly reduced bandwidth for miners.

To connect directly to a stratum server, you can connect to stratum.btcguild.com:3333 for US servers, or eu-stratum.btcguild.com:3333 for our EU server (Germany).


Private Servers
BTC Guild recognizes that some users have significant capital invested in their operations, and that downtime is costly.  BTC Guild regularly provides high end members with details for private servers which are designed to keep those users online even when the pool is under attack.  If you have a large mining farm and would like to mine with a great interface and low variance, but don't want to be troubled with DDoS related downtime, you can contact Eleuthria to request trial access to the private servers.  Trial access utilizes an external proxy to the private server, to keep the server protected before the IP is released to a new user.


Visit our IRC channel on FreeNode.net to chat with other members or the pool operator (Eleuthria): #btcguild[/list]

[eleuthria]

Pool Block Policy

• Blockmaxsize is currently set to 900 KB on our Stratum servers.
• Blockprioritysize is currently set to 10 KB.
• Min TX Fee is left at the default of 0.0001/KB.
• No special rules have been put into place for transaction prioritization or blocking.

Pool Policies

• 1) BTC Guild users are tracked psuedo-anonymously.  IP logs are not kept of users, and no contact information is required as part of registration.
• 2) As a result of #1, restoration of lost accounts when no email is attached for password recovery is extremely rare, and done on a case by case basis.
• 3) Users opening large numbers of connections to the pool may be banned without warning due to botnet detection scripts.
• 4) If strong evidence is provided that identifies a user as a botnet, the account may be frozen without warning.
• 5) Team names containing racial slurs, foul language, etc., may be deleted/renamed.  Repeated offenders may have their accounts closed.

PPLNS Common Misunderstandings

Balance Updates - Your balance on PPLNS updates as soon as a block is found.  You do not have to wait until a shift is closed for the payment to hit your balance.

Current Shift - The current shift does *not* receive payments from blocks.  If this was done, people would have a slight indication for pool hopping.  People would be able to jump into the pool if the current shift found a block or two within the first few minutes.  It wouldn't be a guaranteed profit like proportional hopping, but it would be fairly likely to produce above average results.

24-Hour Earnings - Because the open shifts are not done receiving payments, they are not included in the 24-hour earnings.  Instead, the pool uses the last 24-hours of closed shifts to calculate 24-hour earnings.  This means there is a 9-10 hour lag on 24-hour earnings.



Pool Shutdown/Closure Process

When the day comes that BTC Guild will be shutting down, the following is an outline of the process.  Deviation from this process may be required if the shutdown is due to external factors (changes in law/regulations requiring immediate shutdown for example).

Pool Halt Notification - Notice that the pool will be halting will be provided 2 weeks prior to any servers shutting down.  Automatic payouts will likely be stopped, so that users can use manual withdrawals in order to claim their full balance once they stop mining without the risk of fractional amounts being left behind after an auto withdrawal.  This notice will be provided via forum post and news post on the website.  It will not be announced via a mass email to avoid phishing attempts mirroring an official email with a compromised link.

Withdrawal Process - After halting pool services, the website will remain online so users can use the manual withdrawal request to claim any unpaid balances.  This will follow the same policy of 0.01 or great amounts being done free of charge.  Amounts less than 0.01 will still have to pay the network transaction fee, but the minimum withdrawal amount will be adjusted to allow any amount greater than the transaction fee to be claimed.

Withdrawal Window - The website will remain online for at least 10 weeks after the pool has halted mining, meaning 3 months after the initial intent to shutdown had been announced.

If the shutdown is due to a pool wallet compromise - In this situation, the process will not change much.  During the 2 week notice prior to shutdown the pool fee will be reduced to 0%.  The withdrawal process will be first come first served.  It is expected that the amounts in "abandoned" accounts will cover all withdrawal requests even if the pool loses coins from a compromise.  The pool generally has more than 85% of all funds owed in cold storage.

[bitlane]

Any chance of an ACCEPTED % in the Accepted totals cell at the bottom of the stats ?
(since there are officially stats for 3 different types of 'bad' shares and a single GOOD # is easier...)

[eleuthria]

I have manually set all blocks on the old pool to 120 confirmations to allow immediate withdrawal at old.btcguild.com for proportional rewards.  As stated in the previous thread, any unclaimed rewards on old.btcguild.com will be moved to the main PPS pool in a few days.

[eleuthria]

Any chance of an ACCEPTED % in the Accepted totals cell at the bottom of the stats ?
(since there are officially stats for 3 different types of 'bad' shares and a single GOOD # is easier...)

I'll add a Valid % column to the end of the table for each worker/total in just a few minutes.

[bitlane]

Any chance of an ACCEPTED % in the Accepted totals cell at the bottom of the stats ?
(since there are officially stats for 3 different types of 'bad' shares and a single GOOD # is easier...)

I'll add a Valid % column to the end of the table for each worker/total in just a few minutes.

Awesome....
Last but definately not least..LOL..... New Pool seems to be missing the 24hr counter, or will that appear only after the first 24 hours is complete ?

[eleuthria]

Any chance of an ACCEPTED % in the Accepted totals cell at the bottom of the stats ?
(since there are officially stats for 3 different types of 'bad' shares and a single GOOD # is easier...)

I'll add a Valid % column to the end of the table for each worker/total in just a few minutes.

Awesome....
Last but definately not least..LOL..... New Pool seems to be missing the 24hr counter, or will that appear only after the first 24 hours is complete ?

24 hour rewards (and more historical rewards) will be coming back soon.  I'm working on adding a much more sophisticated logging of historical earnings so you can get more useful graphs.  I wanted to finish those before switching, but the stability at the old servers forced me to push the move forward before those changes were ready.

Valid % has been added to the table.

[bitlane]

Valid % has been added to the table.

That looks awesome...much better than a seperate column.

The performance of the new PPS pool is unbelieveable. I have generated a whole 1 stale in over 2,000 shares and it came from a laggy-Wifi-connected machine using 1 worker account that has 4 actual worker threads....so basically my own fault.

Keep up the good work.

[dmcurser]

ok well i have tried all my passswords many times and to no avail is there a way you can reset my password and such on the old.btcguild.com bc if i use the reset link it resets it on the new website not the old one it seems

[kjj]

So, I read the last few pages of the other thread, and now this one, and one thing wasn't clear.  At least not clear to me, maybe I'm just feeling dense today.  Also, I wanted to subscribe to this thread so I don't have to go looking for news and updates.

My workers appear to be using the new PPS system without any action from me.  Will this just keep working, or do I need to change anything?

While we are at it, are you down to a single server?  My failover proxy has like 4 different (old) hosts set up for BTC Guild.  Should I drop them all down to just a single entry for btcguild.com?

[sharky112065]

Damn  old topic locked. I feel like I just lost an old friend.

[eleuthria]

So, I read the last few pages of the other thread, and now this one, and one thing wasn't clear.  At least not clear to me, maybe I'm just feeling dense today.  Also, I wanted to subscribe to this thread so I don't have to go looking for news and updates.

My workers appear to be using the new PPS system without any action from me.  Will this just keep working, or do I need to change anything?

While we are at it, are you down to a single server?  My failover proxy has like 4 different (old) hosts set up for BTC Guild.  Should I drop them all down to just a single entry for btcguild.com?

Everything switched over seamlessly in terms of workers/users (except for the old PPS Guild only accounts).  If your miners are active, they are currently working on the main pool (PPS).  You can remove ALL failover hosts for btcguild.com on your miners.  We have one URL (its been this way for a few months): btcguild.com

The old ones still point to the server, but they are not separate servers.

[eleuthria]

Damn   old topic locked. I feel like I just lost an old friend.

Yeah, I thought about it last night and decided it would probably be best to start a brand new thread.  This current incarnation of BTC Guild is quite a bit different than the original one, and a significant amount of the information in that thread was completely irrelevant to begin with from when we were first starting out.

--- Update ---
There was a recent batch of restarts which means you may have received a number of "Unknown" shares in your stats.  There are no more restarts expected until Merged Mining is ready for the primary pool.

[Tim the Magician]

Everything switched over seamlessly in terms of workers/users (except for the old PPS Guild only accounts).  If your miners are active, they are currently working on the main pool (PPS).

Thanks for making everything so easy for us..   

[dmcurser]

id like to opt in for testing on merged mining

[Tim the Magician]

id like to opt in for testing on merged mining

I'm interested too.. what do we need to do?

[eleuthria]

Instructions for merged mining will be posted as soon as its available.  I'm eager to get this into testing, just waiting on shadders to do a few more tweaks to improve PoolServerJ's efficiency with merged mining.

[Olly_K]

cant seem to create a password for my workers.

Im also a bit confused as to what you've done with the PPS pool. woke up Saturday and all mu miners were down - have you moved it away from beta ? I can't seem to connect anymore

[Olly_K]

I've gone back to deepbit too.....but only because I can get their PPS working

[dmcurser]

yes he did switch the beta pool to the main pool but he should be on later and fix the problems as he always does