Bitcoin Forum

I'm running my Antminer S3 in its test environment (My living room) and hashing away happily in my miner pool. Since about 7am pst (now 12pm pst) I have amassed 2 million shares and 0.00041134  earnings.

I'm averaging stock speed of about 440GH/s and .00013 BTC per shift.

This comes out to about 7 cents per hr at the current exchange rate.

Am I doing it wrong?

Your expected earnings per day can be calculated using the following formula:
Or you could use an online calculator :)

On average, you should be getting about 0.011 BTC every 24 hours on an S3 @ 440GH/s. Since your test period is only 5 hours, there is a high level of variance. That is, you can be very lucky, or very unlucky. (Think of flipping a coin 5 times. You could get 4 heads and 1 tails. But if you flip the coin 1 million times, it'll be about 50/50).
If you let it run continuously for a week, you'll see that your return will level to around 0.011 BTC, which is approx $6.85 per day at today's exchange rate.

Yes. I am a very small fish in a large pool. You see Gigahashes and think normality should kick in almost immediately. That very large number is just a tiny fraction of a bigger number though. Makes sense. Thanks guys :)

One other small item to remember. In less than 1.5 days, the difficulty will adjust upwards, by about 4-5%. That will likely reduce your Bitcoins earnings per day by a similar amount. Sorry if I am being a wet blanket.

Take the word "likely" out of your sentence.

When the difficulty goes up your expected earnings WILL go down by the same amount the difficulty goes up.  See the formula I posted if you have any doubts about how it works.

I know about that. I was concerned with high variation from the expected result..

That is dependent upon which pool you are mining.  Pool luck, payout method, (PPS, PPLNS, etc), pool size all have a role.  Also you were only hashing for 5 hours... That's not a very large set of data from which to draw conclusions.  Wait for 24-48 hours to see how things are playing out.

BTC Guild is one of the largest public pools and it still is noticeably influenced by variance.  Look at the graph under the PPLNS section and you'll see the pool luck which is out of your control.

Also, you cannot count how much each block earns until the shift closes which is after 9 shifts close after it.  So essentially you are getting paid on a 10 hour delay.  At the end of 5 hours of mining you can make more even if you stop your miners for up to 5 hour as more block might be found for that shift.

just b patient