Topic: [~1000 GH/sec] BTC Guild - 0% Fee Pool, LP, SSL, Full Precision, and More - page 99. (Read 379078 times)

This post will help people new to Bitcoins get up to speed. Everyone else can skip it (or read it for a refresher).

Bitcoins are created by "solving a block." A "Block" is just a collection of Bitcoin transactions that have been hashed and added to the official chain of Bitcoin blocks. The "confirmations" the you get when you send or receive a transaction is the result of your transaction being hashed and included in the block chain.
Since solving a block is so difficult, you get a reward for doing so... 50 Bitcoins.

How do I solve a block?
To complete a new block your computer running mining software tries to guess the hash of the new block based off the hash of the old block. You aren't really computing the answer to an equation per say. You are just making a guess.
In fact, it helps to look at this like buying lottery tickets. The chances of winning the lottery are low, but  you can increase you odds if you buy more tickets.
Your miners compute hashes against the current block and when it thinks it has a potential winner, it submits it as a share. Hashes are generally measured in number of Mhases/sec or Ghashes/sec. This would be millions of hashes per second or billions of hashes per second (respectively). For example an Average ATI 5770 video card can compute roughly 150 to 200 Mhash/sec dependly on how you configure it.
The share you submitted is sent across the entire peer-to-peer Bitcoin network. All peers must agree if a share is the winner.

It's a lottery.
The percent chance that a single hash will be the winner is currently: 0.0000000000000004104346 or about 410,000,000,000,000 to 1.
This changes about every two weeks and is expected to get even tougher.
Even though the odds are so high, there is a potential for two clients to submit a winning share at the same time. When this happens, the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network choses the definitive winner. The loser's block is then declared invalid. Invalid blocks are a rare occurrence, but it does happen.

Mining Pools
Since the probability of the average home computer to find the correct hash is so slim, people have started to "pool" their resources together--in much the same way an office might buy several lottery tickets together.
You along with all the others in the pool submit shares. When a block is solved among one of the pool members, the 50 Bitcoin reward is split among all those who submitted shares during that block. The more shares you submit, the larger your portion of the reward.
Pools are operated by groups, or individuals and are kept alive by taking a small cut of your profits (usually a fee of about 3%).

Bad Things - Stale Shares and Idles
When you belong to a pool, you are trying to solve a block that the pool has relayed to you:

• The Pool gets the current block from the Peer-to-peer Bitcoin network.
• It sends your miner that information.
• Your miner works on it.
• Your miner submits shares it thinks will be potential winners.

If a block is solved elsewhere on the Bitcoin network, the pool must tell you miner to stop what it is doing and start work on the new block.
If your miner does not get this new block information, it will continue to work on submitting shares for the previous block. When this happens, your shares are stale and do not count for anything.
If the pool does not send any block information to your miner, it will become idle and not do anything (not contributing).
The best way to fix any of these problems on the miner end is to stop--and restart the miner software. It will then submit a new request for new block information from the pool.

BTC Guild
To keep this on topic.....
The BTC Guild mining pool was created (founded?) by eleuthria. He has committed countless hours and many of his personal resources to bring the fastest growing Bitcoin mining pool in the world.
Of of this writing it is also the second largest pool in the world.
eleuthria has made numerous enhancements to the pool in the short months that it has been in existence. However, most of his time lately has been trying to keep up with the explosive growth of the pool. And when I say "explosive" I think one of his early servers has actually melted. (I may or may not be making up that last statement.)
The number one reason the pool is so popular is that this is the only pool that I know of where the fee is optional. You can choose how much or how little of a fee to pay.
That's right, you can join the pool for absolutely free if you want to. However, you get perks for paying a fee. And the more you pay, the more perks you get! 
Get all the perks for paying a fee of 2.5% or more. This is still a great value compared to other pools.

• At 0% fee (the default) you can join the pool and get paid based on the number of shares you submit. When the pool solves a block, you get paid your portion after 120 confirmations.
• At 2% you can setup Idle miner email warnings. If you miner(s) stop submitting shares for some reason, you can be notified by email.
• At 2.5% you get the above. AND you get paid immediately when a block is solved. You don't have to wait for 120 confirmations. AND you get paid even if the block later becomes invalid.

It's the best pool I have seen. The community is great and the maintainer, eleuthria, is extremely active. You can reach him right on this discussion in the forum, or on IRC chat (#btcguild on FreeNode).


If you found this helpful and feel generous, a gratuity would be appreciated at: 1JJjL5nxzBfjFjJWoviU9mzrY3fQKxJfvV

eleuthria, Man you just keep doing what your doing, Your doing a fantastic job. People have no concept of all that you've accomplished in the last week. Keep up the awesome work.

thanks for the hard work! I will continue to use BTC guild with 2.5% donation!

If the Chicago server is online by the time I get off work, it will be added to the available pool servers tonight.  The next step is getting US West (pool) separated from the web interface.  Then getting a load balancing server US side, and once that is proven to work properly, an additional load balancing server for the EU side.

any idea how long until the issue is resolved?

Quicker?  I completely changed the design of pushpool to allow a multiple server system, and put 3 new servers online in one week.  There was absolutely no way to prepare for a following spike of a 900 GH/sec GROWTH in under a week.  This pool has been around for barely over one month, and has only recently started to produce enough money to actually pay for anything.  Unlike Tycho, this pool hasn't allowed me the privilege of quitting my day job.

US Central is expected to come up soon.  A new server is also being setup to handle the web traffic and get that load off of US West.

I am also looking into getting two cheaper servers specifically for load balancing US and EU, to get the speeds split more evenly between the 4, soon to be 5 or 6 servers.

Yeah,  but I'd prefer those new servers getting online quicker.
It's annoying to see miners idle 10s out of each minute.

well i had to completely close guiminer and restart it to resolve my issue. i just have to wonder if the problem will pop
back up in an hour. just does not seem logical to me because when i stop and then restart the miner it just runs a new
copy of pocblm (whatever)...

if one has too many people joining at the moment perhaps the admin should not allow new accounts until
the capacity issue is resolved? just a suggestion.

yea, it is back to idleing for me as well. Any update from the systems manager on how long this will take to resolve? if it is going to take a few days im going to move to deepbit until it is fixed.

My miners keep having connection problems, what's going on? Will this get fixed soon or what? I'm not gonna keep donating 2,5% if I can't mine -.-'

says they are adding more servers today. had 800-900 ghs growth last week that they were not prepared for.

Connection problems persisted through the night and it still drops out constantly today

I'm on the east coast

My miners are also going idle often with BTCguild.

Fortunately, pheonix rising allows me to tell them to reconnect if idle for 10 seconds, and this keeps them chugging along pretty well even with the frequent issues.

seems to be fixed.

Yes it looks like im having issues as well, based on hash rates and last share times of my miners. Thankfully this is an excellent test of my miner restart script I got working last night, and so far it all seems to be working great

i'm having the same problem as well. 3 of my miners wont connect, 2 will. Weird.

My miners are going idle very often because of server connection problems as well.

Then there's round #493, that were solved in 55 seconds, that's near impossible too

Yep, same, "upstream RPC error".