I will attempt to provide prompt responses to the Newbie Forum thread. This thread was started after seeing some increases in activity in #btcguild on IRC from brand new users, and I know that there are probably many other people with questions who either don't want to use IRC, or don't understand IRC.
BTC Guild - https://www.btcguild.com
Advantages- Pure PPS - We pay a fixed rate per share, period. There is no buffer, there is no limit based on good/bad luck. If your share is valid, your account is credited for the value of that share within 10 seconds.
- Merged Mining - Earn Namecoins and Bitcoins at the same time without any reduction in your BTC earnings.
- Long-polling support, reducing the number of stale shares if your miner supports it.
- SSL security - Our website forces all connections to be carried out through HTTPS.
- Automatic Payouts - Receive payouts automatically when they hit a certain threshold (full BTCs only).
- 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 0.1).
- No invalid blocks - PPS Guild is Pure PPS. You get paid a fixed rate per valid share. If a block is later invalid/orphaned, your earnings aren't affected.
BTC Guild is a Pure Pay-per-Share pool. This means that every valid share you submit is always worth a fixed amount, based on the current bitcoin difficulty. Each share is worth (1 / difficulty) * 47.5. It is multiplied by 47.5 instead of 50 because we charge a 5% fee for Pure PPS. This is because in a Pure PPS model, you assume no risk, and the only variance you will have is your luck on finding shares. We assume all the risk of block finding variance, and will purchase additional BTC to meet our liabilities if we have not found enough blocks to make payouts.
The pool has been tested on poclbm, cgminer, guiminer, and diablo miners. Detailed guides on connecting with guiminer or cgminer can be found on our How to Connect page. For command line miners, the important information is as follows:
host: btcguild.com
port: 8332
username: [username]_[worker name] (IE: Eleuthria_miner1 . The full worker name (with username at the front) can be seen on the manage workers page.
password: X (No worker passwords are used with BTC Guild. Some miners such as guiminer require a password to be added, so using a simple 'x' will work).
Visit our IRC channel on FreeNode.net to chat with other members or the pool operator: #btcguild
