Not the same thing. You have LTC presumably because you think it is a good investment (going to go up). If you turn it into bitcoins (perhaps because you want to buy mining hardware) you are giving up your position in LTC. If you borrow against your LTC you can keep your position and still buy the miner.

I've been saying that for a year

(The altcoin forum is that way.)

I don't really follow scrypt coins; is there such a thing as merged mining? If not then they're just running a loss leader promoting another product or brand.

Neither a loss leader nor promoting another product or brand means they are doing something intelligent. Might be an ineffective strategy.

They might be skimming (harder in the case of p2pool but not impossible if they are running the node, though they probably get caught at some point, if they're not gone first), but really this could be true of pools with a fee too. Greed is greed.

I don't think they've denied it. In fact I think they've been open about it. "Spoondoodles" denies it.

No that's backwards. My original post was correct, as explained in my previous post.

This does not (at all) guarantee that you make more in p2pool. Expected value doesn't mean that.

First, let's ignore orphans, they affect both more or less equally, though how exactly they affect eligius is complex. It doesn't help refute the argument though.

The expected value of every share on p2pool (PPLNS) is exactly B/D (for some suitable scaling of B and D). This can be derived, and is likely is derived in one of Meni's posts.

The expected value of a share on eligius is (the product of an equivalent B/D and) the sum of an infinite series adding the probabilities that it is paid on this round plus the probability that it is paid on each future round. This series never goes to zero, so the terms beyond any finite time horizon always have a positive sum.

Not formal, but good enough?

Spoondoodles or whatever their name is has said they don't plan to mine, other than 24 hours of burn in testing which they donate to charity.

Any manufacturer that mines has an inherent conflict of interest with its customers especially when it can delay shipment (and keep mining for itself) without any real consequences.

How much doge do you want and why trade here vs. say cryptsy?

"The data on this page is cached and updated periodically, generally about 30 seconds for the short-timeframe hashrate numbers, balances, and rejected shares data; and about 675 seconds for the graphs, longer-timeframe hashrate numbers, and other datas."

BTW, Wiz, its data not datas.

I'd like to get the p2pool entry in organofcorti's pool list corrected to indicate that p2pool does support merged mining. 

Here's what is now:

PPLNS mining pool

Pool : p2Pool
Fee :0%
Pay Tx Reward: Yes
Variable Difficulty: p2Pool
Local Work : Stratum
Pay Orphans: No
Min Withdrawal : Unknown
Merged Mining: No

Here's what I propose to submit (changes in bold). If someone can be more specific about the min payout, or has other suggestions, that might be helpful.

Pool : p2pool
Fee :0%
Pay Tx Reward: Yes
Variable Difficulty: p2pool
Local Work : Stratum
Pay Orphans: No
Min Withdrawal : Unknown
Merged Mining: Yes

Will do

You're not bounced out of the queue. What is a bit misleading is that everyone is effectively in the queue, based on their oldest share since they were paid. When they cross their payment threshold, they become visible in the queue.

That's what happened, there are people who haven't been paid since before your last payment, so they are ahead of you in the queue. As you say, you will get paid, but the displayed estimates of how far you are from being paid are usually too optimistic.

No information available yet.

If you want to buy an ant miner you can have the same deal I gave to ClutchThese right here. You pay a down payment, I finance the rest, I hold the miner as collateral until the miner is paid off, you pay a reasonable fee (approximately equal to electricity) for hosting. Mining starts immediately.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=521862.msg5849367#msg5849367

If you want a miner and don't have any other collateral this is the way to get it. If not you are wasting your time.

I use Corsair AX1200s. I paid around $200 for most of mine, but if you can find them at all now they're usually more expensive than that. 3 ants per PSU, not overclocked.

Yes they are more expensive than server PSUs, but easier to deploy. I've found them to be very reliable. I have one workhorse AX1200 that has been mining for me for three years (started in a BTC GPU rig).

Also, I don't think there is anything wrong with buying S1s rather than pre-order unicorn miners. I've mostly avoided pre-orders and in hindsight been glad I did. On those few occasions I fell for he pre-order scam I regretted it.

Most so called 0% pools are actually taking some of the mining returns, be it transaction fees, merged mining or both.

The rest are doing some kind of loss leader, either to promote another product, to build their brand, or to build a the personal brand of the operator.

0% fee does not necessarily mean a pool is a good pool to use or that it is a bad pool to use. Don't be hypnotized by that number. It is powerful.

Nobody can answer that, since it depends so much on luck and other factors. With the luck taking a very long time to average out, so the other factors a are really hard to measure. Over the past few months p2pool has had fairly bad luck. Very recently luck has been a little better. The future, nobody knows.

However, I will say that the expected value of the p2pool payout method (if set to zero fees) is higher than the expected value of the eligius payout method for finite time. Maybe that is important to you.

Server lists:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66182.0
http://p2pool-nodes.info/

EDIT: http://p2pools.org/ (thank you CartmanSPC)

I haven't found an actual CFM spec on the fans but since they are 38mm fans with a max speed of 3600 it is probably around 200 cfm. Quiet fans won't be close to that. Might still work if the ambient is cool, but then again if the ambient is cool the stock fans slow down and are pretty quiet.

You probably need to relocate the miners, sad to say.

How did you account for the change in difficulty?