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

[TheMoneyStorm]

eleuthria said he was doing some load testing and other stuff, so I
wouldn't worry to much about it. I can't log in either, But i'm not
worried, I know he's doing some work.

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[Veldy]

Heads up!  BTCMine has had trouble with VERY LARGE MINERS on the pool paying 0% [greedy bastards without respect].  BTCMine is being forced to move back to a 2% fixed rate.  I suggested that he just kick their asses out of the pool since that is clearly a conscious decision to rip off the pool in my opinion [0% makes sense only for perhaps a trial period].  I suspect they will arrive here in due course.

Just fair warning

[eleuthria]

Heads up!  BTCMine has had trouble with VERY LARGE MINERS on the pool paying 0% [greedy bastards without respect].  BTCMine is being forced to move back to a 2% fixed rate.  I suggested that he just kick their asses out of the pool since that is clearly a conscious decision to rip off the pool in my opinion [0% makes sense only for perhaps a trial period].  I suspect they will arrive here in due course.

Just fair warning

We already carry the burden of freeloaders, more of them shouldn't matter.  As I've stated in the past, BTC Guild won't be imposing a fee unless the costs to run the server(s) are exceeding the income from donations and transaction fees.  And before that, I'll probably put up some donation bars to solicit straight donations to the pool.  I'm not a charity, but I'm also firmly running this as a side business, not a primary form of income.

Adding a bunch of freeloaders would potentially increase income slightly.  Previous users at their current donation rates would be donating roughly the same per day, just split over more blocks.  Meanwhile, the freeloaders reduce variance and earn the pool more via transaction fees.  At current exchange rates, the extra transaction fees could potentially offset the additional server costs they're imposing on the pool.

[Sukrim]

Heads up!  BTCMine has had trouble with VERY LARGE MINERS on the pool paying 0% [greedy bastards without respect].

Who, the operator(s) of BTCMine?

Sorry, but donation means exactly this: Everyone is free to give, but doesn't have to!
If any 0% pool starts to up their fees, I'm off to another one and if all pools start to charge fees, I'll either look into hosting my own or going solo.

It's BTCMine's problem, if their operators can't put up a solid business plan and calculate income!

What's up with my suggestion of automated payouts - still on the radar or did you skip over it?

[Veldy]

Heads up!  BTCMine has had trouble with VERY LARGE MINERS on the pool paying 0% [greedy bastards without respect].  BTCMine is being forced to move back to a 2% fixed rate.  I suggested that he just kick their asses out of the pool since that is clearly a conscious decision to rip off the pool in my opinion [0% makes sense only for perhaps a trial period].  I suspect they will arrive here in due course.

Just fair warning

We already carry the burden of freeloaders, more of them shouldn't matter.  As I've stated in the past, BTC Guild won't be imposing a fee unless the costs to run the server(s) are exceeding the income from donations and transaction fees.  And before that, I'll probably put up some donation bars to solicit straight donations to the pool.  I'm not a charity, but I'm also firmly running this as a side business, not a primary form of income.

Adding a bunch of freeloaders would potentially increase income slightly.  Previous users at their current donation rates would be donating roughly the same per day, just split over more blocks.  Meanwhile, the freeloaders reduce variance and earn the pool more via transaction fees.  At current exchange rates, the extra transaction fees could potentially offset the additional server costs they're imposing on the pool.

Well, I think BTCMine found itself in the position where it was causing a revenue issue.  Also, with the new bitcoin client, transaction fees are going to be reduced on average.  It seems they are either suggesting 0.005 or 0.0005BTC per 1KB transaction.  The new client supports the additional decimal places.  I think 0.3.23 is imminent as there are some issues with using bitcoind in it on Windows (32-bit) systems.

Oh, BTW, you found that increased traffic has taken a lot of your time to load balance between bitcoind daemon instances and now you are setting up two additional servers to deal with load issues.  That costs you money.  If some large free loaders come you way, I don't think the transaction fees will really pay enough to make it worth your time in trouble shooting and expansion which may be solely to the benefit of free loaders [expansion costs money and will easily exceed your transaction fees I think].

It's your pool, and I don't care as long as it works and is of high quality and integrity [which it has been, excusing the current load issues which you are dealing with phenomenally].

[Veldy]

Heads up!  BTCMine has had trouble with VERY LARGE MINERS on the pool paying 0% [greedy bastards without respect].

Who, the operator(s) of BTCMine?

Sorry, but donation means exactly this: Everyone is free to give, but doesn't have to!
If any 0% pool starts to up their fees, I'm off to another one and if all pools start to charge fees, I'll either look into hosting my own or going solo.

It's BTCMine's problem, if their operators can't put up a solid business plan and calculate income!

What's up with my suggestion of automated payouts - still on the radar or did you skip over it?

Frankly, it doesn't mean that with all due respect.  In particular, it doesn't mean that with BTCMine [which is irrelavent now since registration is again closed and 2% is being imposed ... as it used to be before May 1st].

Here is what was written when the pool went to 0%:

Pool registration closed
01 May 2011 01:57:28
The Current BTC price just passed the profitable mark for black market.
Yesterday I detected and disabled the first account with botnet like activity.
I predict there will be organized attacks from black market morons, and probably some more of these attacks may or may not be sponsored by third parties.

I'm positive that all big pools have already gotten some Bot-net traffic, so massive abuses and shutdowns from hosting companies (and investigation from FBI may take place) and could happen in only a matter of time.

I understand that this will prevent natural pool growth and my current decisions are:
1) I have switched the pool to a 0% fee
2) New accounts will be only be created for trusted bitcoin members or by recommendations.
I will probably add some sort of invitation system in the future, but I prefer direct contacts.
3) All old accounts are now being heavily monitored.
4) All future pool operations will be sponsored from miner donations.
5) If there are not enough donations to cover hosting and my time, then I will close the pool.

I recommended to all miners - think twice when you signup to a pool with open registrations from this date.

[Burt]

604 Ghash/sec 

[Veldy]

604 Ghash/sec 

How are the stales, idles and communications holding up?  Clearly people continue to mine so some people must be more affected than others based on various factors I suppose.

[eleuthria]

Server may be having some more bumps over the next hour or so.  The first new server (US East) is almost ready to come online.  The pushpool and bitcoind side of things are done, it's now a matter of making sure when the master server calculates a block it properly sync's the share counts of the 3 servers together for that particular block, without losing any work along the way.

If the US East server is put online tonight, the EU server will likely be online tomorrow during the middle of the day.  Otherwise, both servers will come online tomorrow afternoon.

[CubedRoot]

eleuthria,
I am on the east coast (TN) and I'd be willing to test the new server once it comes online.

[Veldy]

Server may be having some more bumps over the next hour or so.  The first new server (US East) is almost ready to come online.  The pushpool and bitcoind side of things are done, it's now a matter of making sure when the master server calculates a block it properly sync's the share counts of the 3 servers together for that particular block, without losing any work along the way.

If the US East server is put online tonight, the EU server will likely be online tomorrow during the middle of the day.  Otherwise, both servers will come online tomorrow afternoon.

I am half way between to the North.  I think the East coast tends to have somewhat lower latency connection on average ... well into New England anyway.  Having said that, it all depends upon the site, how it is connected and with how much redundancy (i.e. Several backbone connections).

I am looking forward to it

[ace24]

Great news on the new server, thanks for all your hard work eleuthria! I'll definitely be upping my donation percentage once the new servers are online and (hopefully) the idling and disconnect problems are resolved.

Are we moving to a uswest.btcguild.com/useast.btcguild.com/eu.btcguild.com type of situation, or will connecting to btcguild.com attempt to auto-negotiate the closest server?

[Burt]

Some weird glitches going on my estimated rewards jumped to 123 lol

[eleuthria]

Great news on the new server, thanks for all your hard work eleuthria! I'll definitely be upping my donation percentage once the new servers are online and (hopefully) the idling and disconnect problems are resolved.

Are we moving to a uswest.btcguild.com/useast.btcguild.com/eu.btcguild.com type of situation, or will connecting to btcguild.com attempt to auto-negotiate the closest server?

You can manually specify a server if you want.  By default, btcguild.com will use round robin DNS assigning.  The latency between the server would not have a large impact unless you are running a significantly fast single miner.  Assigning users by proximity would likely balloon one server larger than the others, and I want it to stay relatively even between them.

Some weird glitches going on my estimated rewards jumped to 123 lol

I was testing the share counter cross-server sync for a fake end of round calculation.  It may have caused some funny looking estimated rewards for a short time.

[Allenssmart]

will the new servers be up by tomorrow? Thanks.

[mewantsbitcoins]

That's great news. I joined your pool in the past, but had problems with connectivity so had to switch. When you finally put new servers could you announce it here? I'll point my 4GH/s at you

[Burt]

Some weird glitches going on my estimated rewards jumped to 123 lol

I was testing the share counter cross-server sync for a fake end of round calculation.  It may have caused some funny looking estimated rewards for a short time.

You go my hopes up xD

[eleuthria]

US East server is now online.  You can manually point there by using the address:  useast.btcguild.com  .  If you want to force yourself to stay on the west coast server, use uswest.btcguild.com .

The servers are being balanced via DNS, so if you continue to point at btcguild.com you may be pointed at one server or the other.  This is the most effective in terms of raw load balancing, since the server you end up on is random.


uswest.btcguild.com is -currently- overcrowded, but this should even out slowly.  Jumping ship to useast.btcguild.com will only cause that node to be overloaded faster, so please have patience.


Estimated rewards, pool hash speed, and worker hash speed are currently only pulling from US West.  I'm working on making all of these functions combine stats between the two servers right now, so don't be alarmed if for the next 30 minutes your workers show 0 MH/sec even though they're submitting shares to useast.

[IlbiStarz]

Soo...does this mean idles and connection errors are fixed or do we have to wait another day or so?

I wanna come back already!!! XD

[eleuthria]

For anybody stuck in a redirect loop on the slave server, try clearing your DNS cache (on windows:  cmd.exe -> ipconfig /flushdns).

If that doesn't work, you may not be able to load the site for approximately 1 hour.