letstalkaboutbtcguild

December 2014 – Our full review of BTC Guild is here

So the other day, I shared my experience setting up 10ghs mining on ghash.io using the CEX.io Cloud exchange, but I have been using BTCGuild.com for about 6 months now, and thought I’d share my experience with them. I have a leased mining contract for 12ghs with a private supplier, and this has been running on BTCGuild.com on and off for that time. My provider allows me to move where I point it, and this has let me experiment with different pools. So as it’s the one I’ve most experience with, and my mining is running steadily, I thought I’d write this piece to let people looking at mining on one of the smaller pools about how it works.

So first up, it is run by a (apparently) Canadian person who goes by the name of eleuthria, and he currently manages a big thread over on bitcointalk. The pool usually fluctuate between third and forth for overall market share of the known mining pools on blockchain. From my experience recently, they’ve been finding between 7 and 10 blocks per day, and the overall hash rate has been about 12,000 Ths. I’ve earned this much so far, although recently I had been moving my hashing power around, so the more recent intervals between payments are slower than if I hadn’t been.

I had paid a fixed amount back in March for a mining contract for 12 gigahashes which has been steadily submitting an average of about 10,000 shares per shift. Shifts generally in the range of 45-65 minutes, and the pool pays out on a PPLNS (pay per last N shares) basis, and has ten open shifts. Once started you will have to ramp up before getting to few earnings, and then you will see your balance increase after a block has one confirmation. The site has an autopayout minimum of 0.01, and any amount over that in 0.01 multiples, but you can make a manual withdrawal once your balance goes above 0.001, although anything between 0.001 and 0.00999999 will incur a 0.0005 transaction fee.

Payments are queued for payment once you pass your automatic threshold, and within an hour of that, the payment is sent to your bitcoin wallet. BTCGuild also merge mines Namecoin, and you can trade these on an exchange into bitcoin if you wish. Although you won’t see it in the figures below, as the pool speed adjusts, your average reward will go the other way. So if the pool drops in speed, your reward per block will increase, while if it increases, it’ll reduce your per block reward. The site owner is very active on bitcointalk, and they also have an IRC channel for chatting.

But other than that, Bitcointalk is a well designed bitcoin mining pool, that reliably sends you what it promises, and although it’s no longer as big as it was, it’s still steadily finding blocks regularly, and well worth investing some time to see if it’s rewards can beat some of the other mining pools out there.

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By BitcoinsInIreland Editorial Team

A staff writer at BitcoinsInIreland.com who covers a range of topics on the site.