Topic: [CLOSED] BTC Guild - Pays TxFees+NMC, Stratum, VarDiff, Private Servers - page 30. (Read 903206 times)

After many months of consideration, I have finally made the choice to announce the planned closure of BTC Guild.  Below, I've outlined the closure process/timeline and reasons that this decision was made.



Closure Timeframe and Process

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As identified in the support section and in the 2nd post on this thread, BTC Guild has had an official policy for the amount of time that will be given in the event of closure.  The official date that BTC Guild will cease all business is January 31, 2015.  This post is the start of the identified 3 months of warning.

- Effective immediately, registrations are closed to new users.
- BTC Guild mining servers will remain online until November 30, 2014.
- After the mining servers shutdown, manual withdrawals between 0.001 and 0.009 will no longer have a fee deducted.  Manual withdrawals will be available for balances as low as 0.0005, with a fee of 0.0001 deducted if it is under 0.001.
- Users will have until 11:59 PM (PST) on January 31, 2015 to withdraw any remaining balances on their account.

The above timeline may change if BTC Guild is sold prior to the planned date of closure.



Main Reasons for Closure

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1) Risk/cost of a successful attack against the pool.  As pooled mining in general is shrinking due to large manufacturers creating private farms, the potential revenue for the pool has gone down as expected.  While the pool is still very profitable, the amount of time it would take to recover from an attack has increased due to the overall share of the network shrinking.

BTC Guild has, to date, never been successfully hacked.  However, I have seen a rise in attack attempts, and things like Heartbleed/Shellshock which show that efforts are being put into compromising common Linux services if possible.  Neither of those attacks had any affect on BTC Guild, but they were both reminders that under BTC Guild's own code, there are many services which could be a doorway into the pool's servers if a vulnerability was discovered.

One successful attack could cost close to a year of pool revenue, maybe more depending on what happens in the mining landscape over that period of time.  If something else happened in that time (subsequent attack or regulation forcing closure), it would mean continuing to operate the pool beyond this point has cost me more money than it might potentially make in the rest of its lifetime.


2) US government/regulators are already taking stances against specific business types in Bitcoin, applying requirements which would be impossible for BTC Guild to operate under if they attempt to extend regulation into pooled mining, either directly or indirectly due to unclear definitions.  Nobody will mine on a pool which requires them to provide personally identifiable information when they can change a single line in their configuration to point elsewhere.

Additionally, state regulators are starting to make noise about Bitcoin.  New York is the first to publicly put anything forward, but there are 49 other states which can put their own spin on things.  Due to the ability for states to establish a nexus for businesses dealing with their state's residents, it is a scary landscape to continue operating in.

I have no intention of leaving the US myself, and given the recent history of the US when it comes to online businesses, I wouldn't feel safe simply moving the business legal entity to another country while continuing to live in the US myself.



Aquisition and Users's Privacy/Funds

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In the event that BTC Guild is acquired prior to closure, users will not have their mining history and withdrawal history transferred to the new owner.  All balances up to the date of aquisition will be retained by myself, and a separate service will be made available to claim any funds owed.  I am unwilling to compromise on this, because I refuse to do anything where it puts the users of the pool at risk of not receiving what they've earned under my watch.



Pool Recommendations

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For users looking for a new home for their miners, I highly recommend BitMinter, Eligius, and p2pool.  I do not recommend Slush over any of those 3 options, and I actively encourage users to not use Discus Fish or GHash.io.  Other smaller pools exist which are run by honest people, but due to their size, it is difficult to recommend them to the average miner.


Closing Words

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When I got into Bitcoin back in March of 2011, I never expected anything that we've seen over the last 3 and a half years.  I had never built a computer before, never run a server beyond a Gentoo PC in a spare bedroom, and never setup a website that experienced even 0.1% of the traffic BTC Guild gets on an average day.

Bitcoin and BTC Guild have both radically changed my life.  While I am closing BTC Guild, I still plan to remain a part of the Bitcoin community.  I do believe, even in the face of over-regulation, that Bitcoin will continue to grow and become more useful and usable.  I just feel that it is time to move on from BTC Guild, and take pride in the fact that BTC Guild's closure can show that not all Bitcoin businesses end with somebody stealing funds from their users, either by "getting hacked" or outright theft.

okay

thx!

I think you have overlooked just exactly what the "Graph" is charting. It represents a comparison between the estimated per share earnings of a pool which would have paid PPS minus 2% fees or the estimated average of actual per share earnings of the BTCGuild (With PPLNS, each open shift is rewarded the following:(Block Value + Transaction Fees) / 10) - Pool Fee (2%)).
As it would break down in a per (3?) shift time points for the graph and numerically calculated per shift % as determined by the position of (24H / 3D / 1W / 2W / 1M / 3M / All Time).
So what's wrongly "compared" is your idea of the graph and what the graph actually tells you.
 If you would like to figure out strickly bare Pool Luck, you can get the latest 200 block numbers and time stamp of when they were found under the "pool stats tab" sub-table "Block History". If that doesn't go far enough back for you; there are plenty of other websites that provide a full listing of the block history and who/when blocks paid too, when the receiver's name is known, as BTCGuild's has been, for a long time. Then you can divide the dates and time however you like from and to whenever.
PPLNS involves variance: If the pool is lucky, you will earn more than normal. If it's unlucky, you will earn less.

As only the last 200 blocks are listed in the pool stats (which at the time of writing means they go back to 2 October) we cannot tell, and I do not propose to try to out-guess you.  A shame you decided to dump this pool, as we have had a good day again today with 10 blocks so far, which has more than compensated for yesterday's 6.

Firefox isn't that great on Mac.  I prefer Chrome, then Safari, then Firefox, in that order.

Mozilla has been concentrating on reducing the memory footprint lately.  So it does better on RAM than it used to.  But I don't know about how it is on a Mac though.

Despite the last few days when the pool worked well I think the pool PPLNS stats, the pool luck, is wrongly calculated. As I said before I think the pool luck between September 24 and October 24 was arround 80%.

Chrome on Mac works the best, Firefox is good but can eat up ram at times.

Okay

Let me try FireFox for a while

Why don't you just try a different web browser.  It's not like safari is a premium browser anyway.  And your not browsing other web sites with the dynamic tables and graphs that BTC Guild has available, so it could very well be a browser problem that only manifests itself on the Guild.

Just a suggestion.

99% of CPU AGAIN!!!

I just don't understand why it's only THIS website.  Just makes no sense to me at all.  I can surf the web all day long with no problems to many various websites.  If I stay on The Guild's website for several hours, it will eventually start using 99% of my CPU.

If you've been mining on the Guild for the last four weeks then you have an account and access to that information as well as an expected level of familiarity in how to use the pool website to find the STATS you think are going to win your argument. If your not happy with your earnings, try discus fish, you can have a nice little tidy steady stream of PPS minus 4% all month long. The pool hasn't done you wrong in any way, there's no need to get snide or into your feelings.

Tell me how many blocks were found between September 24 and October 24? And what was the average?

BY THE WAY, I do owe you an apology from discussing my CPU usage earlier in Slush's Forum.  I was ignorant of several things.  No need for me to go into details here.  I admitted my ignorance.  I got some mean responses directed towards me because of my ignorance.  It's all good now.

Just want to apologize!

LOL

I suppose.

It seems to be working fine now after I purchased a couple of apps to clean up my Mac.

I'll delete the screenshot now to rid the forum of data use/free up space.

That box is also next to every other page you have open, including ones which have absolutely no Flash on them.  But again:  This is what you get for using Yosemite+Safari less than a month after it's released.  A buggy piece of software.

EDIT:  It's also next to things which aren't even websites (com.apple.internetaccounts).

I just edited my previous post with a screen shot

not sure if you have seen it.

ck said it could have been a Java script going haywire but I don't think so.

Slight correction:  The site "uses flash" if you're not logged in, since the front page has a YouTube embed of the We Use Coins video.  No other page has it.

Hmmmmmm

I assumed that 3 dimensional box symbol to the left of "Safari/BTCGuild" was Flash Player.  It had that same symbol next to other things in Safari using "Flash."

Just thinking out loud.

It's not doing it anymore and that's a good thing.  I can click back and forth all I want in different windows on your website now without any worries of the CPU going nuts.

Also, the moment I navigate to your website, Flash Player moves to the top of CPU in my activity monitor.

I will delete this screenshot through "edit" after you have enough time to see it.

That same little 3 dimensional box next to flash player was the same box next to Safari/BTCGuild earlier today.

Considering BTC Guild doesn't use Flash in any way, I fail to see how that could solve anything.