I hear that.  I was only half joking about my boat... if we didn't have company coming over, I'd put it in the water.  I'd probably be the only idiot tooling around Brigantine, but just to say that I did it on Christmas Eve would be worth it

Enjoy the walk with your wife!

Can you believe how absurdly warm it is here, Phil?  I'm on the porch having a coffee and a smoke in shorts and a t-shirt.  If it wasn't so much rain, I'd probably even pull the boat out of storage and put her in the water

Sorry about the confusion Rozo.  Let's see if I can explain this without even using Bitcoin. 

Assume you have an empty glass in front of you.  Now, you start pouring water into the glass.  Every now and then I'm going to come by and take a look at that glass and measure how much water you've got in it.  The first time I come by, you've got the glass only 1/5th of the way full.  I mark that down and pay you for 1/5th of a glass of water.  I come by a while later and you've got the glass 2/5 full.  OK, I mark it down and pay you for 2/5 of a glass of water.  This continues until the glass is full of water.  Once your glass is full I pay you for a full glass of water, but I also now open a valve at the bottom of the glass so that water drains out as fast as you're pouring it in.  In this fashion, your glass will always be full of water and every time I stop by, I see you've got a full glass and pay you for it.

Eventually, you stop pouring water into the glass.  However, that valve is still open, so the water is draining at the same rate you were pouring.  When I stop by the next time, I see you've only got 4/5 of a glass, so I pay you for that much.  The time after that, the glass is only 3/5 full, so I pay you for that.  This continues until the glass is empty.

In my story above, every time I stopped by is equivalent to the finding of a block.  I see how much water you have in the glass and pay you for however much is there.  My story assumed I stopped by at even intervals of time, so you'd always know when to expect me.

So, how does luck play into it?  Well, every time I stopped by, I made sure to calibrate that valve on the bottom of the glass.  If I stopped by more often than expected, I'd mark you down and pay you.  If I stopped by less than expected, the valve would clog up and the water you were pouring in would slosh over the edge of the glass and be wasted.  When I finally did stop by, I would notice you had a full glass, and pay you for it, then fix the valve so that the pour rate equaled the drain rate.

OK... maybe I shouldn't try explaining things after I've been drinking

As Kano mentioned, that miner is not me.  My account on Kano's pool is the same as my username here: jonnybravo0311.  All of my gear, save 2 s3s is pointed to my pool.  Those last two will be directed here on Friday after they wrap up my year-long test on OgNasty's hybrid p2pool solution.

Somebody's got some coin to burn... infinite hash orders on both NH and WH for 0.0059 and 0.0058 respectively.  Wonder how long those will last...

EDIT: make that 0.0065.  Some new sha256 alt coin just launch? .... Andddd...gone.

That's because the vast majority of "hobby" miners earn exactly that: pennies worth of BTC a day.  Taking the S3 mentioned earlier as an example, if you had it mining right now, it would expect to make about 0.002373BTC daily.  Given the current exchange rate, that translates into about $1.05.  An S5 expects to make about 0.006216BTC daily ($2.74).  These values change.  The expected bitcoin mined changes every 2016 blocks.  The value of that coin is obviously influenced by the exchange rate and changes constantly.

That was precisely what he was joking about.  We were all assuming the OP would never return and that he didn't have the funds he claimed - because we all assumed he meant $250,000.  Tertius993 simply pointed out the OP never actually stated he had dollars.  That was the joke - he might have only had 250,000 satoshi to invest.

Depends on your power costs mostly.  Yes, ASIC is the only way to go.  The r-box is very likely not going to be profitable in any way for you.

The couple I've seen go up were for infinite hash at 0.0053.  They lasted seconds to a couple minutes max.  0.0051 has been pretty consistent... only getting bumped off when those crazy infinite hash orders come online.

LOL... somebody just put up an infinite hash rate overpriced order on NH... looks like they'll be consuming all the available hash rate for a while

EDIT: and it's gone... that was quick

You can go to the pool's website and see the current hash rate... I don't have any special monitoring apps or anything written (like ZACHM did for kano's pool).

Wow!  It certainly appears the promo is drawing some decent sized players to the pool!  We're just shy of 1 PH now.

Best of luck to everyone!

Agreed... I was just pointing out that as an option in addition to just letting cgminer do its default failover behavior

You can use the "failover-only" arg:

Excellent!  Good luck, Phil .

LOL... find the block and I absolutely will give that coin to you

Let's see if I can help clarify things.  The pool pays out using PPLNS.  That means shares have a shelf life.  Currently, it's set to 5N, where N is calculated dynamically based upon the shares of the previous 5 rounds.  All things being equal, that translates into about 5 blocks worth of payments per share.  In other words, if the pool finds blocks at exactly 100% luck, then your share would be paid 5 times.

As with all PPLNS pools, there's the concept of "ramping", where you build up to your theoretical expected payout per share.  For the sake of this explanation, let's assume the pool finds one block per day.  Also, let's assume you mine for 10 days.  Here's how it would break down:

Day 1 - 1/5 expected
Day 2 - 2/5 expected
Day 3 - 3/5 expected
Day 4 - 4/5 expected
Day 5 - 5/5 expected
Day 6 - 5/5 expected
Day 7 - 5/5 expected
Day 8 - 5/5 expected
Day 9 - 5/5 expected
Day 10 - 5/5 expected
Day 11 - 4/5 expected
Day 12 - 3/5 expected
Day 13 - 2/5 expected
Day 14 - 1/5 expected
Day 15 - 0

As you can see, it all adds up.  You mine for 10 days, and you get 10 days of expected payouts... they're just spread out over 15 days

Good luck with your rental!!!  I really want to give that BTC to somebody for Christmas!

The KoP mall... been there a few times .  I stayed in Conshohocken.  There's a great pub called Baggataway I frequented quite a bit.

Now I'm spending my work weeks in Jacksonville.  I might end up moving down to FL, too.  Getting a bit tired of the winters up north... of course, so far this year has been unreal... it's going to be 75 degrees tomorrow.

Oh... and I joined the pool party with a couple hundred TH for the next couple days.  We're up to about 450TH!

Outside Philadelphia on the PA side or NJ?  I've worked in King of Prussia.

Also, the pool is up to around 150TH!  Good luck to everyone!  Let's pop that block

Near New York City.

I, too, enjoy it quite a bit.  Haven't been to the brewery but might take a road trip