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?!?

Being a bigger pool means the variance is far less noticeable.  Sure, GHash.io might have a block take 2 hours, but then find 4 in 20 minutes, and so on... overall, to you the miner it makes little difference because things balance out.  On smaller pools, that bad luck becomes very quickly noticed.  I mine on p2pool, where the average block time is just about a day.  (Well, right now it is 16.5 hours since the pool is at about 1.25PH/s), but we haven't found a block in just under 2 days.  It's painful.  At 16 hours a block, we should be close to finding our third... but haven't found 1 yet.  But, then again, just the other day we found 4 blocks.

As it stands BTCg has one block for today when they usually have at least 10... guess thats luck down by 90% then huh  

:edit

Actually I've just added this to the post as it looks totally sarcastic... I get the variance, I see it in larger pools like ghash... they typically have a block every 20-30 mins yet some hours they have many more and other rounds take an hour or so... guess being a bigger pool the variance plays out quicker making it easier to observe in a short time-frame.

Funny how that variance stuff works, huh?

It's just the nature of the beast.  People see the words "expected earnings" and "time to block" and think, "that's what is supposed to happen."  The reality of it is that folks are far more likely to come up with conspiracy theories, than to accept reality.  Pool luck up 10%?  Somebody's cheating.  Pool luck down 10%?  Somebody's attacking.  As DrG pointed out, there indeed WAS something that happened and was discovered.  The problem now is that everyone automatically assumes that same thing is constantly happening if the pool luck so much as quivers below the expected luck.  The topic has been discussed on virtually every pool's thread, and people read it and say, "Well, that explains it then" and then start spreading the misinformation.  It's precisely why I posted that silly statement about 5 Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Actually I take it back.... btc guild has only found one block today at 10:30am UK time.  Amazing, yesterday they'd found 8 blocks by now.... thats some swinging variance

I've got to admit I've gone native and have been mining at ghash for a couple of days, but only out of curiosity as I've not mined there before.  One thing that hits me is everything at ghash seems opaque compared to btc guild....

For instance if you own ghash cloud hashing and also mine with your own kit sure they give you the number of hashes the ghash kit produced but its presented in such a non-intuitive way... I find myself switching between ghash and cex screens trying to marry up data...  I wrote a very simple php tallying script to produce some figures from the CSV you can download, but the CSV lacks some of the data you get on the screen.....

Once I've had my "fun" I think I'll be switching back to btc guild anyway... worth it for the figures and hassle-free mining.

Well the pool was running close to 105.9% luck if I recall for their 3 month average before the sh*t hit the fan in May (when the withholding attack started supposedly).  At that time nobody complained that the pool might be cheating, although people did allege that in the past back in 2011.

So when it's up almost 7% (106-99) nobody complains.  When it's down 7% something is wrong.

The withholding attack is not hearsay BTW, the person was identified.  But he states his custom version of CGMiner was at fault.  The thing is it could have happened at any pool, and some pools don't even bother with the nice stats. Too bad the withholding didn't go on at ghash.io lol.  The same "attack" also occurred on Eligius and the guy is asking for payment which Eligius held once they discovered the problem.  You can check the pools subforum for this info.

Eleuthria might not be eligible for sainthood but he's one of the best pool ops around.

variance!! do I win a prize? 

Ah... regarding this hearsay about a large hasher withholding blocks, I was not aware of that but as I said at the beginning of this thread I was starting to wonder if it was something like that going on.

Don't get me wrong, I love the pool's site, best interface around and very clear, plus the operators at least appear to be very transparent.  It was just that terrible luck they had a few days ago that left me thinking WTF??

People love to talk without understanding the basics of mining.

It's a 7% drop, expected earnings on any pool should be roughly 99% since 1% will be lost due to lost orphan races.  BTC Guild actually lost none last week, while Ghash.io lost 1.5%.

Their 3 month rating is pretty bad - and it is known that they had a large hasher who was supposedly doing an unintentional block withholding attack.  Those stats won't clear out until August.

Looking at the past 24 hours I see their luck is at 200%.  Last week was horrible, this week has been excellent.  If only we had a name for this variable luck.....hmmmmm 

Best thing I ever did was leave BTCGUILD.

As reported by btc guild their luck seems to be riding around 92.08% over the last 3 months.... another way to look at it is thats an 8% drop in your earnings if you mined for them over the last three months I guess.

What happen to btc guild luck? How many of you are affected?

Sorry about that stryker.  Just to give an example, the next time we're going to see a month with 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays is May, 2015.  After that it's January, 2016.

Me, I accepted it on face value because I'm a trusting type of bloke 

Yes I know that is not true... Lol.  I purposefully wrote a common misconception that is accepted as truth.  It is relevant here because people are constantly posting block withholding attacks as the definitive answer for what is far more likely normal swings in luck.

You know that this is not true, right?

Every month with 31 days has 3 days of the week that repeat 5 times. It's not big deal.

Happens in average once a year to have a month with 5 entire weekends.

Best regards,
ilpirata79

I moved away fro BTC Guild awhile ago, I noticed the luck was getting worse and worse and my payouts were dwindling (aside from factored difficulty), so I left, went to ghash.io and my payouts went back up.  At that time, BTC claimed someone had manipulated with pool with block holding, but I didn't really believe them.

This new york thing is being blown out of proportion by btc guild. BTC guild is in las vegas, so even less of a concern.... "waiting on legal counsel", oh brother, give me a break.    If you're making money hand-over-fist, you would do anything to remain in business. The fact they are so eager to close their doors, is well, odd and suspect. IMHO, they could easily move to a datacenter in canada with not much ado if they were that concerned.   

No not at present but some idiot in NYC is trying to ruin everything, for ALL pools in the US :

Taken from BTC Guild:


This news update is being made to remind all users that BTC Guild is not a bank. Leaving BTC anywhere that is not your own wallet is always a risk that is outside of your control. Automatic withdrawals should always be set to trigger at least once a week, if not more frequently for large users, limiting your exposure.

The above is also important as news comes out of the New York Department of Financial Services, with proposed regulations which are extremely broad. Under the current proposals (subject to public comment and revision), operating a pool within the US will be impossible to do legally without obtaining significant personal information on ALL users, not just those in the US. There would also be significant financial costs which would exceed the amount of money the pool has generated since inception. Since there is no way anybody will mine on a pool with those requirements, it means that any pool in the US will be forced to shut down, or operate illegally and hope they're ignored.

If the regulations are finalized (this is unlikely to happen for at least 3-4 months if not more) in a form that still applies to pools, the pool will be forced to shutdown. This news post is being made as notice that this is an exception to the stated 3-month closure window identified in our FAQ and the forum thread. If the regulations pass, the 3-month window will be reduced to 45 days due to legal requirement to cease operations prior to the regulations taking effect.

This warning is pre-emptive. Nothing has changed as of this news post, and I am still waiting on feedback from legal counsel regarding whether or not it is possible for New York to extend its reach into another state if the pool has users in it from New York. The applicability of long-arm statutes for internet-based business activity is extremely messy.

What happen to BTC guild? Is it true they are closing?

I agree I think its very good at what BTC Guild has come out and be honest, if anything it gives them more credibility in my eyes.

Lets just hope this silly ass law does not go through !

I read that notice on their site.... they are just being cautious because of their 3 month shutdown policy... I'd rather they be open about it.

Its just in case those ridiculous new york bitcoin license/policy become a reality.

BTC Guild looks like it has a possibilty of shuting down

I was starting to wonder if valid block shares were being withheld by a powerful miner or something.

Hopefully it is just luck and not some hacker submitting fake share.

Could you make such a comment about Slush's pool? Maybe your "inverse luck" will push out a bunch of blocks there! 

Yes nice explanation, I think it will always be near on impossible for us to grasp such big numbers.  As if to prove me wrong BTC Guild has pumped out a shed load of blocks this evening, more than it should for the given hashing power.... all to make me look an ass  

There are a number of threads discussing this very topic.  I know you don't want to hear it, but variance does indeed play a very significant factor in the statistics, especially as BTCGuild's total hash rate becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total network.  As of me writing this post, BTCGuild is reporting a speed of 9.4PH/s.  GHash.io, on the other hand, is reporting 42.47PH/s.  The total network is showing 143.2PH/s.

Here... let me throw some random piece of information at you and you can use that as justification for the bad luck:

This August there will be 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays.  This only happens once every 800+ years.

Is it me or has btc guild been real slow with scoring blocks of late?  Please noone say variance, I'm just wondering what else it could be.... maybe uranus is inline with jupiter or something... I just know it don't feel right.

Meanwhile ghash.io are scoring four in a row!!  We should rename it the ghash & discuss fish chain.