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

[mitchel]

I would like to hear from the Pool Admin...
I understand that this may be some erroneous issue that is only affecting me and one other person but this should not diminish the need to look into/resolve an issue...especially when the people experiencing the issue contribute to the pool through donations. 

I understand that this issue is not affecting other pools or at least i didn't notice an issue when i moved temporarily.  I have obviously moved back as I enjoy using BTCGuild so I will wait for a response from the pool admin patiently.

Thank you.

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[Druas]

The golden rule of debugging things. If one or two people complain of a problem more then likely the problem is much more wide
spread then you think. I am going to guess 100s of miners have already left and are probably never going to come back. Thus why
the pool speed, before the price of BTC hit such lows, kept shrinking to "about" what you see today.

I have already had two people private message me complaining of the same thing but they did not want to post about it in the
open and perhaps cause more of a problem for the admin. (As in drive away traffic. They think the admin is a nice guy).

If the admin feels the pool is working well enough for most people... I am just waiting for him to say it. Thus I will know this
pool is probably never going to work for me and some others. I am going to guess many other miners have very little idea this
is happening to them as much as they realize. I am going to guess there is a problem on the servers where they cannot handle
all the requests they are getting for a few moments in time which happens repeatedly over the day.

But hey.. i am trying to give constructive criticism here. It is up to the owner to decide what to do with it. I know I appreciate
when my customers tell me when something is wrong. Quite often they are right and it was NOT them.

There could be many reasons why the pool keeps shrinking. People seem to leave every time we get DDoS'd. Also, the network hashrate is not what it used to be.

I am pretty sure now that I have confused you for someone else (so I am sorry for that) who posted here a couple of months back insisting the problem was not on his end. I remember the solution was to go somewhere else. I even think it was eleuthria who responded to him. I understand why you want to hear a response from the pool operator. However, I don't think me responding to you would stop eleuthria from saying what he wants. In fact, he would probably just ignore me (b/c of my inaccuracies/irrelevancy) and say what needs to be said.

Maybe try the IRC channel?

[mitchel]

The pool has dropped to 350GH....maintenance...?..i hope...or is it a DDOS?

[os2sam]

The pool has dropped to 350GH....maintenance...?..i hope...or is it a DDOS?

It's been up and down like a toilet seat for me today.
Sam

[eleuthria]

It looks like the DDoS last week is causing lasting problems at BTC Guild.  I've been forwarded 3 different executables by different individuals this week who found trojans on their network, which all point at our pool.  The accounts have been banned, but that only stops them for a few hours.  It looks lik the downtime @ deepbit/slush forced them to move to us, as if we didn't have enough problems with bots already.

I'm working on a dynamic IP/worker correlation that will hard-limit the number of unique IPs a single worker can use.  It will have some allowances so dynamic IP users don't get auto-banned.

If this fix doesn't get them to leave the pool alone, the only option left is imposing a fee.  BTC Guild has been a magnet for botnets since we were the largest 0% fee pool by a large margin for the last 6 months.  A pool cannot scale to tens/hundreds of thousands of CPU miners.  It is simply not possible to maintain enough servers to support them at the current BTC rates, and they are hurting legit users.

In the meantime, I've loaded up some of the old VPS servers we have, and have the loadbalancing split across those servers as well as the PoolServerJ servers.  My personal miners (using cgminer) only had one communication failure overnight, and it's very possible that was a problem on my end.

[BookLover]

Just food for thought;  You might want to add certain account exemptions for people who can prove they are not a bot-net, or else you may lose all you TOR users.

[sadpandatech]

Just food for thought;  You might want to add certain account exemptions for people who can prove they are not a bot-net, or else you may lose all you TOR users.

   Aye, maybe something on the site where we could manually generate a short token that would then be appended to our worker names or some such.  Its a solution that would be only a slight inconvience for us to go add it to our workers but would be near impossible for a bot net to get it done for all their zombies..

[eleuthria]

Small outage just now was completely unrelated to the pool servers, something happened at the ISP (couldn't get into the shell of the pool servers either).

On a non-technical side:  Yes, the updates from me in the forum have been delayed a bit.  Work is taking up far more time, and the pool itself is becoming a drain on time and resources.  For miners, the drop in price is a reduction in profitability, but you don't have to do much work for a miner.  For running this pool, it went from rivaling my day job's income, to now making about 1 day of my day job salary per month.  That's how drastic the difficulty/price ratio has affected large pool operations.  Risking an extra 3-4 hours of time at my day job to work on the pool is simply not an option anymore.

EDIT:  Yes, this is a long round.  It is not broken.

[eleuthria]

Testing of merged mining is expected to begin on the PPS pool later this week/weekend.

[os2sam]

On a non-technical side:  Yes, the updates from me in the forum have been delayed a bit.  Work is taking up far more time, and the pool itself is becoming a drain on time and resources.  For miners, the drop in price is a reduction in profitability, but you don't have to do much work for a miner.  For running this pool, it went from rivaling my day job's income, to now making about 1 day of my day job salary per month.  That's how drastic the difficulty/price ratio has affected large pool operations.  Risking an extra 3-4 hours of time at my day job to work on the pool is simply not an option anymore.

And that is completely understandable.  Good thing you didn't give up that day job .

I appreciate the work you do.  I had increased my donation after that big DDOS attack and have just increased it again, just to say thanks for your work.
Take Care,
Sam

[phorensic]

I get idles here and there all the time.  My cgminer says "Pool is not providing work fast enough".  It doesn't bother me because it is such a small percentage of the good work that is getting pulled/submitted.  All the other features of the pool outweigh the issue.

[eleuthria]

I get idles here and there all the time.  My cgminer says "Pool is not providing work fast enough".  It doesn't bother me because it is such a small percentage of the good work that is getting pulled/submitted.  All the other features of the pool outweigh the issue.

Unfortunately I don't feel the same way about the issue.  About 3 weeks ago the pool was cut down to just 2 servers with PoolServerJ, with stale rates averaging 0.2% and no idles in sight.  Then last week everything started to have hiccups, and as the DDoS happened the pool began breaking down, even when I added back 5 pushpool VPS nodes to help last night.  It's a problem that is making me wonder if this is all worth it anymore.

I'm looking at some major shifts with the pool in the next 1-2 weeks.  PPS merged mining tests are a big part of it.  Odds are I will be closing down the primary pool and bringing up a "new pool" in its place so I can implement a much better frontend (6 months of updates/added features have not been kind to the pool) with a fresh database.

I'll be putting up a poll this week on the BTC Guild website to see what the users want:  

A) Payout Change
  1) Proportional
  2) SMPPS
  3) PPLNS
  4) Straight PPS [will require a much larger fee due to risk]

B) Fee Change
  1) 0% Fee - I'll deal with the pool randomly failing/idling
  2) 1.5% Fee - Still cheapest of the "Big 3", with all current perks [120 block wait for confirmations (no invalid protection)]
  3) 2% Fee - Tied for lowest of the "Big 3", with all current perks [with no waiting on block confirmations (includes invalids)]


Right now, it looks like SMPPS or PPLNS and a 2% fee without 120 block confirmation waiting.  The SMPPS will start with a couple hundred BTC as a buffer.   Either way, merged mining will be a part of the new BTC Guild when its done.

[bitlane]

Can you clarify something ?

Is the PPS Pool currently doing Merged Mining in the background ?

[TheMalon]

A) Payout Change
  1) Proportional
  2) SMPPS
  3) PPLNS
  4) Straight PPS [will require a much larger fee due to risk]

B) Fee Change
  1) 0% Fee - I'll deal with the pool randomly failing/idling
  2) 1.5% Fee - Still cheapest of the "Big 3", with all current perks [120 block wait for confirmations (no invalid protection)]
  3) 2% Fee - Tied for lowest of the "Big 3", with all current perks [with no waiting on block confirmations (includes invalids)]


Right now, it looks like SMPPS or PPLNS and a 2% fee without 120 block confirmation waiting.  The SMPPS will start with a couple hundred BTC as a buffer.   Either way, merged mining will be a part of the new BTC Guild when its done.

I'll say:
A.2 -> SMPPS (i'm mining on ARS now ... and its the best payout method i've seen till now)
B... -> I'll say NO 0% fee. Minim 0.5%(no api, no stats ... only mining) and give something for 1%, 1.5% and 2%.

PS
Don't forget to open 80 and/or 8080 ports for mining

[eleuthria]

Can you clarify something ?

Is the PPS Pool currently doing Merged Mining in the background ?

No.  I'm hoping to get it on the PPS pool this week/weekend.

[kano]

...
B) Fee Change
  1) 0% Fee - I'll deal with the pool randomly failing/idling
  2) 1.5% Fee - Still cheapest of the "Big 3", with all current perks [120 block wait for confirmations (no invalid protection)]
  3) 2% Fee - Tied for lowest of the "Big 3", with all current perks [with no waiting on block confirmations (includes invalids)]
...

Aside: I LOL at the "Invalid Protection" 'issue'

[os2sam]

I'll be putting up a poll this week on the BTC Guild website to see what the users want:  

A) Payout Change
  1) Proportional
  2) SMPPS
  3) PPLNS
  4) Straight PPS [will require a much larger fee due to risk]

I say use the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid).  Straight Proportional w/2% fee and PPS.

These other payment methods seem to try to reduce flexibility of the miner and are hard to verify.  But of course I haven't seen a good explanation of them either.
Sam

[DeathAndTaxes]

I'll be putting up a poll this week on the BTC Guild website to see what the users want:  

A) Payout Change
  1) Proportional
  2) SMPPS
  3) PPLNS
  4) Straight PPS [will require a much larger fee due to risk]

I say use the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid).  Straight Proportional w/2% fee and PPS.

These other payment methods seem to try to reduce flexibility of the miner and are hard to verify.  But of course I haven't seen a good explanation of them either.
Sam

They make the pool less attractive to pool hoppers and trust me people are hopping the living shit out of BTC-Guild.  You short blocks get split many way and your long blocks get split few ways.  If you tallied your total shares contributed and total earnings you will find you made significantly less than "expected value".

[sadpandatech]

I'll be putting up a poll this week on the BTC Guild website to see what the users want:  

A) Payout Change
  1) Proportional
  2) SMPPS
  3) PPLNS
  4) Straight PPS [will require a much larger fee due to risk]

I say use the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid).  Straight Proportional w/2% fee and PPS.

These other payment methods seem to try to reduce flexibility of the miner and are hard to verify.  But of course I haven't seen a good explanation of them either.
Sam

They make the pool less attractive to pool hoppers and trust me people are hopping the living shit out of BTC-Guild.  You short blocks get split many way and your long blocks get split few ways.  If you tallied your total shares contributed and total earnings you will find you made significantly less than "expected value".

   Aye, I can verify about a 20% loss in expected earnings on days I stay solely at Prop pools.....   SMPPS variant ftw..

[os2sam]

I'll be putting up a poll this week on the BTC Guild website to see what the users want:  

A) Payout Change
  1) Proportional
  2) SMPPS
  3) PPLNS
  4) Straight PPS [will require a much larger fee due to risk]

I say use the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid).  Straight Proportional w/2% fee and PPS.

These other payment methods seem to try to reduce flexibility of the miner and are hard to verify.  But of course I haven't seen a good explanation of them either.
Sam

They make the pool less attractive to pool hoppers and trust me people are hopping the living shit out of BTC-Guild.  You short blocks get split many way and your long blocks get split few ways.  If you tallied your total shares contributed and total earnings you will find you made significantly less than "expected value".

That's all well and good.  But what is the exact explanation as to what these payment methods are?  All I ever hear anyone saying is the N stands for the amount of time you are in that round.  How is that variable measured?

I have a non dedicated machine with a low end GPU mining 24/7 and the pools often say the miner is not active because it may not submit a share for 2 or 3 minutes, just now it took 10 minutes to submit shares but it is still churning away at 34.5Mhs.  So do I get dinged for that? do I get banned for pool hopping?

I think we needlessly over complicate things sometimes.  I'll just wait to see what Eleuthria's explanation is when he posts his poll, I guess.
Sam