Topic: [CLOSED] BTC Guild - Pays TxFees+NMC, Stratum, VarDiff, Private Servers - page 356. (Read 903150 times)

Merged mining server is being restarted to fix a small problem on the server.  Since the mergedmining.btcguild.com server was initially a testbed for Stratum, it was not configured to allow large numbers of connections.  It recently hit the file descriptor limit.  Should be back up in a few minutes.


UPDATE:  The server is back up and running.  Sorry it took longer than expected.

Working fine here ...

remember, no stratum on mergedmining ...

any problems with mergedmining.btcguild.com : 8332

my ztex boards can connect or have problems

An automatic payout that ran yesterday did not properly complete, resulting in a few payouts never hitting their destination.  I've removed this broken payout from the history and it will be reprocessed shortly.


The December 19th update is going to end up pushed back to December 22-23.  Christmas always seems to cause delays in my plans .

My miners looking good again.  Thanks.

Everything is back online.  Appears it was some internal routing issue with the datacenter.  Total downtime was ~10 minutes.

Yes, there's heavy packet loss to the server that started up about 8 minutes ago.  I'm not seeing any signs that this is an attack, but it's very unusual.  The longest outage I've ever had at the datacenter is ~5 minutes in the last year, everything else was either a DDoS or my servers acting up.

There seems to be some connectivity issues right now.  Pool speed is dropping quite a bit.

I will be pushing an update to the Stratum server on December 19th.  This change will allow you to set a minimum difficulty on any worker.  Here is how it will work:

1) Difficulty will be adjustable under a new settings page (may involve some changes to Manage Workers).
2) When authorizing a worker with the Stratum server, it will load the difficulty settings you've set.
3) If the newly authorized worker is set to a higher difficulty than your connection is currently set to, the difficulty will be increased immediately.
4) Your difficulty on that connection will never drop below the minimum difficulty of that worker.


For most configurations (native stratum miners), this will be straightforward.  This can get confusing for a Stratum Proxy, since difficulty is set per connection, not per worker.  If you authorize many workers through one Stratum proxy, your difficulty will be set to the highest authorized worker's value.


Var-diff will still adjust difficulty higher if you are submitting shares too frequently.  Recently Stratum pools were updated to a much higher Shares-per-Minute setting, meaning it doesn't adjust a worker unless they submit more than 40 shares per minute.  This reduces overall variance, at the cost of slightly higher bandwidth.  This is still drastically lower than anything you would experience using getwork, and still ends up being only ~0.1 KB/sec data transfer.



This notice is going up almost a week in advance to remind miners that they should set backup pools.  You can set a different BTC Guild server as your backup, which will keep you hashing with BTC Guild during the downtime.  Ideally, your primary would be set to either btcguild.com or de.btcguild.com, and your 1st backup would be set to the other server.

Small bug fix on the API:  24 Hour Earnings is now properly adding PPLNS earnings to the "past_24h_rewards" field.

I guess i no longer feel like trying to earn a bit more. I moved from deepbit to here again just for pps before pplns arrived. I switched back and like the predictable results. Pps for now. Which means pplns users get ready for awesome luck! I moved to pps. Heh.

With a very high percentage of the network and a long "look back" period, your daily variance here will be one of the lowest of any non-PPS pool.

oh i wasnt jealous, but actually curious (and only curious, as i know that is propriatary information for a pool). I know that supposedly mathmatically they will come ahead approximately the fee % in the long run. but it is interesting to see such huge swings in the mean time.

If the HASH/s would be constant, after long time, eleutheria would gain 5% fee of the transactions he did to cover his already done spending with servers and everything.
However, first the guild increased 300-400% in hash power and then reward halfed. So, it will take long time to stabilize.

Oh I figured you had quite a buffer saved up... This isn't the first time you reported bad luck and had to pay out to the PPS's but in the end has all your time, effort and work actually equal to the BTC that is in that buffer?  Or is it more fair to say your in the hole more then anyone knows or you would even care to admit?  Servers, bandwidth, coding, sleepless nights???  Don't get me wrong... I believe BTC Guild is the best pool out there.. your fort coming with all your information you work hard at keeping the pool going and your passionate about BTC and the pool in general ...  I wouldn't want to be putting my limited hashing power into any other pool but I personally feel you have gone above and beyond the call of duty and I am going to put my mining into your PPLNS so I don't take any more from your generosity and am able to give back.  Maybe I am talking out my ass but it is my ass and I can blow it any time I want!      Keep up the great work... Thanks for all you do!

Naelr

It was Meni's work: https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf

The relevant section is Appendix C: Safety nets for PPS pools


I did actually use his work in the "PPS pool op risk" context in someone's thread to point out the dangers of an insufficient PPS fee, but if any miners are interested in this you're better off going to the source. It has nice clear examples if you don't follow the derivation.

I don't have an unending supply, but there isn't a risk of that buffer going to 0 anytime soon.  BTC Guild is one of the longest running pools, and I've had enough fortune to be there almost at the start.  Regardless of network rate or difficulty, a PPS pool charging a proper fee and keeping a well stocked buffer before pulling money out should not go bankrupt unless there is sabotage. (see organofcorti's writeup about bankruptcy/buffer values for a given PPS fee [this may have been Meni, I'm terrible with names ).

PPLNS is a great option for miners who don't mind variance in order to maximize long term rewards.  PPS is great for miners who don't like really big swings like we've seen the last 2 days (2 shifts paying 0, followed by a few shifts almost paying double PPS, then back to low amounts).

The right play for you maybe but PPS means that BTC Guild must take the hit for the bad luck.  Sure PPS users got paid during all the bad luck but BTC Guild went in its operating wallet to pay out all those bad luck shares PPS users didn't have to worry about.  PPLNS is the only answer for the future.  Eleuthria doesn't have an unending supply of BTC to payout to the PPS miners sooner or later he is going to have 0 in his wallet and not be able to pay.  I applaud Eleuthria and all he has done and I am switching to full PPLNS luck or no luck I will not ask  Eleuthria to keep paying out of pocket, the 5% he was taking should be to run the pool not pay out when luck goes bad.  This is, of course, everyone's personal choice to make but with ASICs coming it would not surprise me if all PPS pools stopped being PPS. just my 2 bitcents

Naelr

Lets not get jealous :-)

He is losing it back right now.

And i am unsure if pplns is right for me. With very high diff, variance can be so bad, that there is a great chance of luck being bad for a long time before it evens out. Like bad luck until gpus are no longer useful. I think. Pps might be the right play with the gpu cycle of mining ending.

Dunno for sure, but maybe 3%???