2 CommentsPopular scypt mining pool ScryptGuild has posted the following message late yesterday:
ScryptGuild is going to be shutting down on September 27, 2014. The mining servers will halt in 2 weeks, which is August 10th. Users will have until September 20th to withdraw their balances before the coin daemons and wallets are taken offline.
I would like to thank everybody that has joined ScryptGuild to date. The pool was a fun new project to work on, solving the problems of maintaining state within multiple coins over a single server to keep shares valid even during switches, and allow fast user switching on demand. I am very sorry that the pool ended up entering a period of non-development for so long. The rewrite was something I looked forward to, but the external factors which kept delaying the rewrite ended up pushing a different project into the front of the line. I do not want the pool to become another ArsBitcoin/Deepbit, where it just continues on with no direction and no updates, dying of atrophy, and as such have decided that shutting down is the proper action to take.
At this time, I’m trying to get another non-pool related project off the ground, which is something I’ve been putting off for a few years (before BTC Guild even started). These days, it looks like it’s time to work on that project. It is not only one that I have been wanting to do, but also one which I believe has a much brighter future than a scrypt-coin mining pool.
This is particularly upsetting for many in the mining community as we just recently reported that BTC Guild is considering shutting down in light of the recent NYFDS BitLicense proposal.
Creating a profit switching pool is extremely difficult. It’s taken us 1474 hours so far and we are still in the final stages of testing.
One would think that it’s a pretty easy task; just run lots of daemons and mine the most profitable one. The big problem that sinks many pools, I believe, is the poor quality of the existing codebase in the bitcoin community. All the supporting code, like the stratum reference client, the mining examples, and the Cryptsy API is extremely buggy and difficult to use. Some of it is so poor that developers would be better off disposing of it entirely and starting from scratch. When the necessary security testing is complete, it reveals key issues like SQL injection attacks that take a lot of time to resolve.
If anyone mines at Scrypt Guild and is interested in changing pools, we will be launching a testing period after 8 months of development around the time Scrypt Guild disables mining. This pool not only switches between 100 scrypt coins to find the most profitable, but has a number of other features that are not available on other pools. We have full-time employees with masters degrees in engineering dedicated to maintaining the system at launch.
Contact [email protected] if you are interested. I think this post is on topic, but if the last part is considered spam, then I apologize and it can be deleted. As a side note, the CSS on this page is messed up such that when the text box gets large, it’s impossible to click the “Post Comment” button.
I’ve heard that pool development especially with switching can be super tricky!
Excited to see your pool when it gets done! Be sure to let us know and we can talk about it.
Also, thanks for the headsup on the CSS issue. We will add it to our fix list for the week 🙂