Topic: btc guild unlucky of late? (Read 4258 times)

I've noticed things have picked up a bit in the last week, especially now that the pool speed has gone from a low of about 8.5k back up to 12k. It took a little while to kick in, but the pool has been fairly consistently, bar a couple of very unlucky days, getting about 1 block every 1.5-2 hours on average. Some times there's been none, followed by two or three in fairly short succession.

my earnings have been going up and down, as the pool speed dropped, i was getting more per block on fewer blocks, but now i'm getting less on more blocks, and earnings are going up again for me.

Ghash has had 4 hour blocks before - that's 1/3 of the network not finding a block for 4 hours!

Last year when BTC Guild was close to 40% I think we had a 7 hour block - 40% of the network twiddling thumbs for 7 hours.

It happens - it comes under the concept of variance and Poisson distribution.

I recall January/February having some long blocks and until slush changed the calculations of average hasrates to 60 minutes and 5 minute readings, things were slow for awhile. If I would disconnect it would take 18-24 hours to build your hash rate on the pool side. It's worked great for preventing pool hopping, but the pool wasn't growing because it seems people just arnt really studying past post and knowledge bases provided so they can understand what is going on with these pools and Bitcoin in general so they didn't understand it took 24 hours for their miners to build up correct speed. But it's all good. BTC Guild is a steady payout, there is always something everyday. I use it for some of my miners and is stable for my type of mining needs(set it and forget it). It's just luck, it comes and goes.

Sorry yes I was talking about BTCGuild not bitcoins LOL. I guess they and slushes is having some crappy luck

Slushes
July 26th 12 hour round
July 27th 12 hour round (these 2 were back to back)
July 28th 12 hour round
July 29th 28 hour round
July 30th 15 hour round (We are still working on this round)

Something seems fishy to me. I have never seen luck like this on slushes except when he was getting started. Not this bad.

What do you mean by "BTC"? It's typically used as an abbreviation for "bitcoin". Do you mean "BTCG" (BTCGuild)?


Off topic but as long as I'm mentioning abbreviations...
I see people use BTT as an abbreviation for BitcoinTalk. Shouldn't that really be BCT? Drives me nuts, lol.

+1

That 28 hour round on the 29th was starting to really make me mad. Right after 3 other 12 hour rounds the previous 2 days. I came close to dropping out and leaving slushs.

I used to mine on BTC however it just seems the payout is half or less than what i get in other pools. I also see a lot of others complaining about that. I am not sure if its the shared mining or what it is, but for me its not worth the electric to mine on BTC right now

But it should be noted that anybody who tries to do that would also be harming their own income unless the pool is paying PPS.  If you're mining on PPLNS you will be hurting your own income stream.

The problem with the withholding event is very simple it now is true it can be done.

If anyone with a copy of that custom cgminer wants to attack any pool and make it hard to detect they can.  Since cex.io is so big they have the ability to toss 2ph to 4ph in the shitter on any pool they want. 

the only defense for a with holding attack is solo mining.   

As of this moment, week+ is looking a bit better.

Approximate Pool Luck* (24H / 3D / 1W / 2W / 1M / 3M / All Time):
128.912% / 117.454% / 103.558% / 96.538% / 93.610% / 93.756% / 98.189%

I was a long time user of this pool, i still like it and have as a backup.  Sadly look at the 1 week plus.  3 good days does not make up for 3 month's of bad luck - 93.414% / 93.695% / 91.498% / 93.141%.  Granted it's not horrible luck still in 90's but i still like the overall 98 percent much better then past 3 months.

Look again today. Luck is pretty great right now.

Approximate Pool Luck* (24H / 3D / 1W / 2W / 1M / 3M / All Time):
131.043% / 104.127% / 93.414% / 93.695% / 91.498% / 93.141% / 98.106%

https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=pplns


It's hard to find a recent time period where BTCGuild didn't have bad luck.

That's the point of what I was saying about load balancing.  If you spread the hashrate over multiple pools you can decrease your variance - in that example you would be mining at P2Pool, Eligius and BTC Guild all at once.

Cheers for the link, I'd not seen that thread

This link is a good comparison of BTC Guild and other pools over the last several months. (Note that they are comparing p2pool NOT p2pool.org)


https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/benchmark-p2pool-vs-btcguild-vs-eligius-416933

The solution to this is simply have CGMiner do load balancing and mine on multiple pools.  The only problem would be that your income would be spread out but for people who are into mining this should not be an issue.  You could mine on the #2-#6 pools and approach a virtual 40% pool.

With your train of thought there jjc.

Thanks jonnybravo for sharing that.... I must admit my calculations are much simpler as I've not done the homework as you have but the answers were similar so its good to see that confirmed....  As I said I'm giving ghash a good weeks trial at least, I'll only cut it short if ghash approaches 50% again.  My next trial may well be p2pool, just wish that forestv fella was a bit more engaging with the community, it would be nice to know *someone* is keeping on top of the project!

I was with bitminter for a while I swear it had the worst luck for a LONG period of time.  This was about a year ago I think.  You just keep thinking it will turn around, it has to, due to variance, but it just never seemed to get a long period of good luck to make up for it.  I was happier when I left.  That is part of the reason why you get everyone going to the BIG pools, because there should be less variance.  It is a big pool problem for part time miners.

Hmmm... a per-block estimate.  Let's see.  First, we're going to have to make a few assumptions:

1) All shares are equally weighted
2) The pool maintains a constant 1PH/s rate
3) The share difficulty remains a constant 3.5M
4) The miner's hash rate is 1TH/s
5) The miner has been hashing for at least 3 days (so that he's got a full spread in the 8640 shares considered for payout)
6) Shares are added to the chain constantly on the p2pool network every 30 seconds
7) This miner is not the one finding blocks (i.e. he doesn't get the block finder's bonus)

Obviously as the above assumptions are changed, the results of this would also be changed.

First, let's calculate the expected time to find a share to see how many shares we can expect to have on the chain at any given time:


So, it would appear that we'll have 17 shares on the chain.  Now let's see the per-block reward:


So, with all of the given assumptions, you would expect about 0.04894385BTC per block.

Now, let's be perfectly clear here - my assumptions are NOT an accurate reflection of reality.  Specifically, shares are weighted, and share difficulty is constant fluctuating.  In other words, take the above with a grain of salt.  If you want to see how you're doing compared to how you should be doing, look at your node's efficiency rating.  If it's around 100%, you're good to go.  Above 100% you're doing a bit better than you should be.  Below 100% and you're doing a bit worse.

haha I run a personal p2pool node, notice 2 have just recently been found! 

Can you give me a rough ballpark figure on what 1TH/s would get you per block?  I know it either hovers around 850TH/s or 1.2PH/s of late.  I've tried doing my sums with the data available but a 25btc payout divided by 850 yields a result which seems to high to me... looking at how many blocks p2pool solves over a typical month it looks like 1TH/s pointed there would earn almost twice what I would expect?!?