Quote from: w128 on May 27, 2011, 01:10:56 PM

I'm seeing the same. Multiple idles popping up once every 90 seconds or so.

Everyone.... everyone.... take a breath. It will be OK.

Let me recap the entire thread for everyone who is just joining in. IF you have read everything and now whats going on, you can skip this post.

When eleuthria set up his mining pool less than 20 days ago, he never imagined it would grow so fast. The pool basically went from 0 to 250 gH/sec. This is simply too much for the server he was testing this pool on. Eleuthria simply had no idea that having 0 fees and such an awesome interface would attract so many miners to his pool.

Facts:

You choose what percentage you would like to Donate, this means you can choose 0%
If you donate 2.5% or more, you can take a payout immediately after a block is solved. Even if the block is later found to be invalid!
If you donate 0 - 2.4% you have to wait for the Block to be confirmed before you can take a payout. A Block is confirmed when 120 additional Blocks have been solved after that. (The additional blocks include any blocks solved anywhere in the world.)
The payout is based on the number of shares your miners submit during a Round.
Eleuthria is setting up a new server. After this is complete the current "idle/rpc" errors will go away. Until then, I would suggest to setup your miner to connect to a backup pool--this way you will be constantly mining somewhere if BTC Guild goes down for a bit.
After the new server is setup, new registrations will be open again.
The new server is supposed to be set up within a week (hopefully this weekend).
Eleuthria is extremely active on this forum and on IRC chat (freenode.net #btcguild )
This is the best pool I have ever seen.

How the pool shares work:
A share is every "Accepted" hash. A Round is how long it takes for the pool to solve a block.

Example:
Lets say a round takes 90 minutes, then a block is found. During those 90 minutes all the workers and miners in the entire pool submit 300,000 "Accepted" shares. First the pool takes the 50 Bitcoins and divides them among all the shares:
50 / 300000 = 0.0002 BTC per share.
Now, lets say that during that same 90 minute Round, your workers submitted 250 of those 300,000 shares. You would get paid:
0.0002 BTC per share * 250 = .04 BTC paid for that round. Makes sense, right?

New Example:
In this round there are 275,000 shares. Right now each share is worth 0.000181818 BTC. Your workers have been mining for 120 minutes and you have 300 "Accepted" shares in the pool. If a block were to be found at that instant, your payout would be:
(50 / 275000) = 0.000181818 BTC * 300 = 0.054545 BTC
Please note: this is how the "Estimated Rewards" section of the "My Account" page on BTC Guild works.
BUT you decide to stop mining. You still have 300 shares in the pool, but the other miners keep working and keep submitting more shares. Finally after 180 minutes a block is found. In total, there are now 395,250 shares submitted during that round. This means that each share is worth 0.0001265 BTC
You still have 300 shares submitted during the round (even though you left early) so you would still get paid:
0.0001265 BTC * 300 = 0.03795 BTC

I know this is pretty basic, but I hope it helps new users to Bitcoins and Pools.

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