Topic: [~1000 GH/sec] BTC Guild - 0% Fee Pool, LP, SSL, Full Precision, and More - page 116. (Read 379078 times)

You are the man!

Sweet velvet! 

US East and EU servers are now both accessible by me.  I have begun setting up the US East server already (it came up first), and will be able to quickly duplicate that work on the EU server.  Current ETA on the new servers being up and running is Wednesday night (PDT) or Thursday night (PDT), depending on how quickly I can modify pushpool and the master server frontend to communicate with the slave servers for combining round data for calculations.

I've been running simulated load tests on the US East server, and it looks like between the 3 servers, the pool will be able to grow to 1.5-1.7 TH/sec before any new pushpool tweaks/additional servers will be needed.

Seems everybody is having bad luck.  Not surprising since all pools work on the same blocks which are larger than average for this difficulty.  The luck is whether the pool gets a larger share than their hashing rate would otherwise suggest   Not sure which pool(s) that would be.  BTCMine is running on a five hour round, with three invalid blocks in a very recent time frame ... wouldn't want to be on that pool in the last 24 (the past does not reflect the future  as far as statistics go of course, so don't judge the pool).

It is in part because BTCMine stopped its JSON service while doing server maintenance which made the pie charge look different.  They are back up and the chart should look more normal soon I expect.

Maybe its just my luck then, every time I try switching over I get lots of idles or disconnects, and the rounds go on for 2-3+ hours, every time so far, including the last round.
Ok I'm giving it another go, just watch the round take forever.

I kinda disagree bitlackey. Have you seen the block stats:   http://btcguild.com/blocks.php   keep in mind the pools hash speed has only been around 500 MHash/sec and those numbers look damn good!  I earned 2.9 BTC in 24 hour period from 4pm to 4am yesterday with my 1.0 Gigahash setup.

As soon as btcguild is stable again, and if its bad luck runs out I'll be switching back, but so far that hasn't been the case at least since the 2.... difficulty level

We almost have our biggest block ever (by hashes!)

woot 6 hour round


Round Duration

6:04:36

Also, if you look at the pie chart, btcguild has significantly decreased and other has increased dramatically
Damned pool hoppers

There is a little pie chart that you should review over at bitcoin watch.  Deepbit is nowhere near 50% little enough over it.  To pull off such an attack [which Tycho wouldn't do, but a third party may attempt] the attacker would have to have control of more significantly more than 50% of the hashing power and that can be multiple pools and solo miners [to make the risk / reward payoff for the attacker, they would need to score fairly big I think, and that would mean getting in and back out before it is detected and to do that with today's market cap would mean doing this for either a long time at just over 50% or a much shorter time if up to say 75%].  To be effective and get significant reward for the criminal risk, you can see there is no single pool that is risking anything right now.  If the market cap gets into the high hundreds of millions or even exceeds a billion USD (assuming the USD doesn't unravel), then a moderate percentage attack to steal a for just a little while becomes more of a possibility.

I left Deepbit because [Tycho] doesn't seem to care whether he goes over 50% and puts the network at risk. I should have done it much sooner; I'm making more bitcoins now on other pools.

You are correct, I have only found out about bitcoin and mining today, I am a noob. But in my point of view if bitcoin is trying to establish itself as a legitimate currency then at no point should it ever be at risk of something like deepbit that can threaten the security of the whole system.

Do you really think that deepbit is too big?  Just curious since you are new to the forum (under this moniker anyway ... no, I don't suspect that you are a sock puppet).  Since you are new posting here I an curious how you came to this conclusion.  Did you read it in these forums our draw an educated conclusion of your own?  The reason that I ask is that I personally no longer feel deepbit is too big relative to the rest of the network, in particular because they have a smaller percentage than before, but even more importantly pools like this one have grown to compete which greatly reduces the risk that I and others were originally anxious about.  I don't know how many of the other people from the days when it seemed a real risk that a single pool could take a significant majority of the network hashing power and be used for the theoretical double spending attack.  I an sure it could still happen, but I suspect such an attack would have to be much more complex now with the number and quality of pools available.  I just want to be sure that you made an educated decision.  I certainly am not trying to dissuade you however.

Having said that, you have chosen a great pool and good luck with your mining

Hi im joining this mining pool as I think deepbit is too big Hope my 570 can help

Hey guys... my best friend whipped up a neat signature .png that shows your stats as well as BTCGuilds stats.  I have it in my sig below.

If you want your own copy, all you need to do is this, just replace YOURAPIKEY with your API key from BTCguild.  Just remember the .png will need to be at the end.

http://gigahype.net/btc/s/YOURAPIKEY.png

If you like it, send him a donataion at this addy: 147mtvWJCWKGgwj4BMJAxBCGT3Ry9wQJe2
He has his GPU's on the way and should be mining within the week, and I'm sure he would like some BTC's regardless of the amount

Oh, BTW, I bet the Chinese, Russian and U.S. government agencies have already taken notice and already have a plan or are working on a plan of action to completely halt bitcoin at virtually a moments notice should they decide it is a risk to their strategic interests or security.

I don't know that there was a backlash at Tycho; I don't believe he lost any share.  There was some discussion and passionate debate, including by me, but at no point did I have negative feelings towards him [other than frustration which probably everybody involved felt].  I did feel he was profit motivated beyond the point of bitcoin network security [rather, blind to it as a possibility]. At the time, it was apparent that stopping slush pool drove everybody to deepbit and thus a two pronged attack, one to disable slush and the other via cracking and hacking deepbit (the more difficult of the two) was proven viable.  Deepbit never hit the size it really needed to be used that way as the market cap MUCH smaller than today and the profit motive versus criminal risks probably weren't there.  To execute it, the faster you can get in and out, the better, which could mean significantly over 50% of the total network hashing rate.  However, I was frustrated and did blast a few messages out on Twitter which drew some attention.  I think several people got the attention of many more people and some of the smaller mines got some migrants and some new people or some users simply added their new hardware to other pools thus mining multiple pools.  Six weeks or so later and and we have four major pools and several more small pools that are known about and I am guessing several private pools.  It would be much more difficult to do now and would take a lot more work for the double spending attack to occur and succeed.  Having said all that; I like and respect Tycho and think he has built a great product and recently told him so.  Your pool is in no small way influenced by his work.


... and if you have access, to those pools which you just said you would [and obviously, they are all working together on a single round] and you wrote the code, then I don't see that strategy really doing anything other than hindering your development and/or maintenance of the pool.  Even if you don't personally do such a thing, the fact that one person can means a good enough cracker probably can get that very same information and a good enough hacker push modified code to all the installations.  BTW, the double spending attack would occur with the payout mechanism and of course the block shares pushed to the miners.  To have all work from all these pools in one round (which is what a pool's purpose is), that would have to be handled centrally, just as payouts are.  So, one point of attack really.  Constructive?

You could open an account on other pools and get a few thousand "getworks" from there...! ;-)

If they are 0% fee pools this won't even cost you a lot (it might cost you a bit, as you won't get transaction fees...)

Oooor... you could pool hop in other proportional pools with the entire pool, netting you even more profit than mining yourself!

Obviously I want the users happy, and after seeing the occasional backlash at Tycho for his pool size (through no fault of his own!), I'm working on a way to keep the pool large, but to negate the POTENTIAL for abuse.  My proposed solution is keep the large single pool, but split the work load among multiple pool operators' servers.

My goal, assuming I can make it technically possible without opening it up to fraudulent pool operators, is to create a franchise-type pool.  BTC Guild would remain the front-end for all users, handling payouts, reward calculations, and account maintenance.  However, their miners will be balanced over a network of servers.  Some servers would still be mine, while others would be controlled by third parties.

There would be an authorization process, so I can inspect the hardware their server is running on to ensure that they can handle a reasonable work load.  When rewards are calculated by the main pool, the sub-pools would receive a percentage of the donations generated that round, based on their server's share of the load, less a percent-based franchise fee.

With this setup, the pool could surpass the 50% mark of overall network strength, but it would be split among multiple individuals, rather than a single entity.  It would be equivalent to the risk we have today of multiple pool operators colluding together.