It seems that one of the earlier large Bitcoin mining pools that was trusted by many home miners over the last few years is going to be closing down at the end of this month. BTC Guild will be shutting down its mining servers on June 30th, 2015 at 23:59 UTC. Users will still be able to log in and retrieve their history and request withdrawals until September 30, 2015. According to Eleuthria, the pool operator, the main reason for making this decision was one one side the high costs for operating the pool as well as the recently finalized NYDFS BitLicense regulations that can put BTC Guild at risk. The pool will be closing down for sure and it is not going to be available for sale to another operator due to concern over user privacy and security.
This is sad new for many people that have used BTC Guild over the years and still continue to mine at their favorite and trustworthy pool. Unfortunately with more and more mining power getting focused in large industrial mining farms mostly in Asia things are not going to get better for other pools such as BTC Guild where mostly small home-based miners gather. This is also the reason while the percentage of the Bitcoin network total hashrate in pools like BTC Guild (only about 3% currently) has been steadily decreasing. In its prime time BTC Guild has managed to reach about 40% of the total network hashrate back in 2013, but now things are looking quite different and unfortunately not much in faour for the small home miners.
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