[~1000 GH/sec] BTC Guild - 0% Fee Pool, LP, SSL, Full Precision, and More

[Coolhwip]

You can still get payouts before 120 confirmations, and on invalid blocks.

I would expect no less since that's the perk I've been paying for.

The only delay is that you won't know you have any rewards (and therefor be unable to request them) until 1 hour after a block solves.

This is exactly what I was trying to get at. I wasn't paying 2.5% to see some numbers on a page, I was paying to be able to instantly request those rewards. By preventing me access to the rewards I've earned 'til after one hour what incentive is there for me to keep donating?

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[PC Surgeon]

If anything those who are "butt hurt" are the ones who applaud this move by Urethra. I'm not a "pool hopper" but sure enough because I don't agree with this move I'll be called one. I liked having real time stats as it was easy for me to see the progress. Now thats an impossibility. IDK how this could be seen as a good thing? Not even close to the noble move of restricting the bots. I'm sure my 1GH/s won't be missed in the grand scheme of things but me moving to another pool is my only way of protest. Enjoy your lagging stats.

[eleuthria]

You can still get payouts before 120 confirmations, and on invalid blocks.

I would expect no less since that's the perk I've been paying for.

The only delay is that you won't know you have any rewards (and therefor be unable to request them) until 1 hour after a block solves.

This is exactly what I was trying to get at. I wasn't paying 2.5% to see some numbers on a page, I was paying to be able to instantly request those rewards. By preventing me access to the rewards I've earned 'til after one hour what incentive is there for me to keep donating?

Would you prefer I turn back time and hide the fact that its a 1 hour delay?  If you were mining here continuously you would never know the delay existed in the first place.

The point of 2.5% is invalid insurance.  Quite frankly I'd prefer if people donated 2% rather than 2.5%, because I make more profit out of those donators.

[PC Surgeon]

You can still get payouts before 120 confirmations, and on invalid blocks.

I would expect no less since that's the perk I've been paying for.

The only delay is that you won't know you have any rewards (and therefor be unable to request them) until 1 hour after a block solves.

This is exactly what I was trying to get at. I wasn't paying 2.5% to see some numbers on a page, I was paying to be able to instantly request those rewards. By preventing me access to the rewards I've earned 'til after one hour what incentive is there for me to keep donating?

ZING!

[m3ta]

As much as the pool hopping subject is oh-so-interesting, i'm more worried with the foobared login.

Code:

The username/password combination you specified was invalid.

Your IP address has failed to log in too many times. You must now wait 1156 seconds since your last failed attempt.

(password reset using username)
(email received)
(new password entered)
(seems to log in correctly)

Then, any link clicked reverts to the beginning.
A really "noobishly done" feeling around all this, tbh.

[ellipsis]

Would you prefer I turn back time and hide the fact that its a 1 hour delay?  If you were mining here continuously you would never know the delay existed in the first place.

Really? Like when a miner dies and the number keeps going up? Or when all miners are restarted after an outage and the number is stagnant?

[eleuthria]

As much as the pool hopping subject is oh-so-interesting, i'm more worried with the foobared login.

Code:

The username/password combination you specified was invalid.

Your IP address has failed to log in too many times. You must now wait 1156 seconds since your last failed attempt.

(password reset using username)
(email received)
(new password entered)
(seems to log in correctly)

Then, any link clicked reverts to the beginning.
A really "noobishly done" feeling around all this, tbh.

Sounds like you're trying to log in through a TOR node where somebody has been trying to brute force passwords.

[sharky112065]

I applaud the delay to stop pool hoppers. From what I see you have only lost 14 Ghash/s so far. Seems like a lot of bitching going on because people don't like change.

It is not a problem getting delayed stats. You still can donate 2.5% and get paid for invalid blocks and do instant payouts.

2.5% is still less than Deepbit's 3% and the delayed stats there are not hurting their volume of workers/miners at all.

Eleuthria it was the correct call to make and I believe the pool will be the better for it.

BTW I'm in the process of switching over to Linuxcoin/Smartcoin and will be putting all my workers back to BTC Guild soon (with failover to Deepbit). I only diverted them to make sure uswest was stable before coming back.

[Isepick]

Having been a part of this pool since block #120, I can say that delayed stats in no way bother me whatsoever. As long as I can see when any of my miners goes offline, I really don't need to know stats for this round or how long this round is. I still mine, I still get paid. And waiting an hour to get every single last nanocoin that might be in my account doesn't bother me either. Much better than waiting 120 blocks. As stated above though, the main reason I give the full 2.5% is for the invalid insurance, and because the level of service here is awesome. Eleuthria is always on top things and does an excellent job, imho. It is why I joined in the first place and still remain here.

[Coolhwip]

Would you prefer I turn back time and hide the fact that its a 1 hour delay?  If you were mining here continuously you would never know the delay existed in the first place.

What I prefer is irrelevant since I can't stop you from making any changes you wish to make. It's your pool after all. What I expected is transparency about the effect these recent changes had on the mining experience at BTC Guild. That way people can decide if this pool is a convenient place to mine.

The point of 2.5% is invalid insurance.  Quite frankly I'd prefer if people donated 2% rather than 2.5%, because I make more profit out of those donators.

I personally valued being able to have instant access to the rewards I've earned much higher than the invalid insurance. Over the long term invalids are not that significant specially since you do such a good job reducing the possibility of them happening.
I've been mining here for a looong time, long before the pool even reached 4 digit blocks and always donated 2.5% since I can remember because it gave me instant access to my rewards.  I no longer have that so that makes the decision for me about whether or not donating is worth it anymore. Ads and smileys can be easily blocked, thanks for disclosing the information when I asked about it though.

[Druas]

Having been a part of this pool since block #120, I can say that delayed stats in no way bother me whatsoever. As long as I can see when any of my miners goes offline, I really don't need to know stats for this round or how long this round is. I still mine, I still get paid. And waiting an hour to get every single last nanocoin that might be in my account doesn't bother me either. Much better than waiting 120 blocks. As stated above though, the main reason I give the full 2.5% is for the invalid insurance, and because the level of service here is awesome. Eleuthria is always on top things and does an excellent job, imho. It is why I joined in the first place and still remain here.

I agree. One hour is no big deal. Instant payouts are still almost instant. People should stop whining.

[Coolhwip]

Any peons mining in the pool with less than 15Ghash/s should not be so quick in playing the "whining" card when all that was asked is information to make decisions. Transparency is one of the things this pool boasted about and one of the main selling points of it. I shouldn't have to interrogate and/or play the part of idiot like I just did in my recent posts to socially engineer information out of the pool owner. I already knew the answers to what I asked, I just wanted to get it out of him so it could be on record.

P.S: The donations per round my group brought in (who by the way never pool hopped) were greater than what most of you earn in a round lol and they've lost far more to pool hoppers than any of you will ever earn but they still paid the 2.5% donation for the convenience to withdraw coin rewards instantly.
Oh, and for the ass kissers who say he's not in it for the profit...

...Quite frankly I'd prefer if people donated 2% rather than 2.5%, because I make more profit out of those donators.

Yeah, let's donate 2% to get a broken non-working perk. He just finally got off his ass and fixed it after people kept asking for it.
Anyways, the people whose hardware I manage all decided to follow my recommendation and stopped their 2.5% donations (8 accounts X a little less than 2Ghash/s each) since continuing to donate that much without getting any real benefit is actually more costly than any damage pool hoppers will ever cause. They will still mine here to exploit the benefits of this pool to the fullest though. They are slightly annoyed that there is no real way to get instant payments of everything their miners earn anymore, specially now that they are in the process of dumping every coin they've made onto the market, but they can live with it.

I'm gonna let you cents per hour earners continue the bandwagon now.

[eleuthria]

Miner Idle emails are back and functioning.  Settings are visible if you're set to 2% or higher.

[eleuthria]

Added back Estimated Reward to My Account/API.  It is now calculated as follows:

Your Speed / Pool Speed * 50 BTC = Estimated Reward (per round).


Also fixed a bug in the miner idle emails (was using an old enable/disable setting so new users weren't receiving emails).  Backlog was cleared, so going forward idle emails will fire off on idle workers.

[bodhipraxis]

Thank you Eleuthria.
For all my critique earlier (and the math question is still out there),
I appreciate these latest changes. Thanks again.

[ShadesOfMarble]

eleuthria, I have a big problem with your pool. Now that Idle Warnings are back, I'm also.

BUT: I cannot connect to uswest.

2005-01-10 15:34:12: Listener for "***" started
2005-01-10 15:34:13: Listener for "***": 10/01/2005 15:34:13, Setting pool *** @ uswest.btcguild.com:8332
2005-01-10 15:34:19: Listener for "***": 10/01/2005 15:34:19, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC 0 2
2005-01-10 15:34:25: Listener for "***": 10/01/2005 15:34:25, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC 1 2
2005-01-10 15:34:31: Listener for "***": 10/01/2005 15:34:31, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC 2 2
2005-01-10 15:34:37: Listener for "***": 10/01/2005 15:34:37, Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC 3 2

I have no peerguard or any similiar or any other blocking software installed. Note that I can ping uswest.

No problem connecting to useast.... currently using that server but if you change that one to poing to the loadbalancer, too, I will be unable to mine on btcguild.

[qed]

Pool stats are now running on a 1 hour delay.  Current round stats/estimated reward have been removed to remove any way to scrape data from the website to determine when we have started a new round.

Anybody using the API should remove the following pieces from their code:
  estimate_reward, round_shares, round_stales, round_time

They will be taken out of the API in about a week.  Until then they have been filled in with dummy data to avoid breaking gadgets/parsers, as well as give me some good stats on how much speed is involved in pool hopping.

You already did, thanks. I'm thinking about removing BTCGuild from the supported pools on my application, it has been a pain trying to support it. Random failure on retrieving data, sometimes it took over 20 seconds and i had to totally rewrite the update code only for that, API changed with no warning...

[wolftaur]

BTCguild was already my favorite pool, and I've kept cards pointed at it as best as I can even during the DDoS and other problems.

Now that Eleuthria has actually done something about pool hopping, I like the pool even more. Especially since it was really clear that the decision was made carefully and not just a knee-jerk reaction to one person complaining or the like...

Everyone who's complaining? Aww, too bad, there's one less pool they can rip off the legitimate users from. Ignore them, Eleuthria! You've done the right thing for the majority of dedicated users. Let the complainers take their intermittent contributions to another pool.

[Sukrim]

Everyone who's complaining? Aww, too bad, there's one less pool they can rip off the legitimate users from. Ignore them, Eleuthria! You've done the right thing for the majority of dedicated users. Let the complainers take their intermittent contributions to another pool.

Guess what? All you now got is less transparency, a time window of 1 hour for the operator to potentially grab a block for himself and to blame it on bad luck, worse features than before (no more instant payouts) and a new challenge for pool hoppers to still hop this pool.

As long as the payment distribution system doesn't change, these are the main reasons why I switched to better paying (no luck needed, no hopping possible by design, not hindered by "features") and more transparent (live stats) pools.

This btw. comes from someone who has a user ID of below 50.

If you look at page 1 of this thread: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7760.msg113341#msg113341 I would say the strong argument against proportional is and was that it enables pool hopping and all migitations lead to less transparency and features while adding 0 value that another payout system like PPLNS wouldn't offer (PPLNS still pays out more if the pool is lucky with short rounds just like prop, it is MORE proportional to the hash rate than the proportional system and easily explained).

As however eleutheria risks loosing about ~100 GH/s * 43,5% = 43,5 GH/s from pool hopping (at least this is the amount mtRed is being hopped), his income will be reduced by this amount if he implemented proper hopping protection instead of implementing some "I am the god of this pool" measures that decrease features for everyone.

The more smaller pools switch back from the broken round proportional method to last N shares proportional, the easier it gets again to hop the pools that show wrong (=delayed) stats, especially if they are as huge as deepbit + btcguild.

[rampone]

Mmmh, 2 weeks ago, eleuthria said to me, he wont do anything against pool hopping, Congratz to changing your mind. But i think he will loose a lot of donations, but in the end it is healthier for the pool.