I was thinking about my local currency up until the mid 1980's, but China still had theirs controlled until 2005.  I'll try to find a nice/current example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fixed_exchange_rate  Hong Kong dollar isn't too obscure.  UAE might be a little less common.

Depends on your appetite for pain - if you are happy with the possibility you will never find a block, go solo.  Reading around the forum you might find the outside limit is probably at the three month mark, but that's just my impression of what I've seen other people suggest.

For contrast, I did some I0Coin mining for fun last week when the difficulty was around 400 and I was contributing about 1/4 of the hash power - made for a lot of blocks, but I pushed it through a pool because I was having rpc resolution issues that I haven't bothered to sort out yet.

Many currencies were "fixed" in the past, and more recently more are floating.  Some still are fixed or controlled, and that's helps the forex world operate.

p.s. I liked the code snipet. Could have just been something like:
10 print "Bitcoins are eight dollars"
20 goto 10

ok, difference noted.

Thought these two posts were a little at odds with each other: 8 years going broke on prostrate cancer and something else that made money. 

After catching up on this thread, I stumbled on this news story, seems fitting to post it into the discussion.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/09/19/foldit-users-solve-baffling-problem.aspx

Hi Meni,

Actually it was fairly simple, and I wouldn't even consider it code.  In fact, after I put it together I considered doing a set of deterministic equations and putting it in a table, but that wouldn't solve our respective different positions, and it's that variety that makes the discussion good (and helps break up my day while I'm doing more complicated stuff).  I may yet do the equation/table idea and send via a pm rather than cluttering up this thread as it's move a bit away from the original topic.  I'll probably also test it different distributions, but that may not have much impact either given a  reward/time metric.

I would also have to complement you on your level-headed and reasonable responses given some of the other statements I've seen around the place.  In addition, I respect that you have done a lot of work into the pool-hopping issue and have contributed a scoring algorithm to at least one pool. 

Anyway, I don't think it's any secret that I chose deepbit when I started mining and it's size was a consideration in terms of variance of block solve times, but I was never too worried about that and like the stochastic nature of the binomial trials that make up hashing.  A couple of coins a day does not actually make much difference other than a small trickle in the background somewhere (and I'm actually wasting my hash power on a different project the next few days).

they still need to make sure they pay tax on income, just like you would have to pay any payroll tax in your jurisdiction

btw - I believe there are lots of exploits available, especially with those pools that are either small or have special reward features.
I took the time yesterday to re-look at some of vladimir's work on pools and the relative performance of a pool with a decent history that was available - certainly there were some periods where reward rates suffered and that was probably a result of hopping where reward was only for the solved block, as opposed to pools that carry forward shares across blocks until one is solved - the descriptions don't make it explicitly clear, but that probably doesn't matter.

another consideration to bear in mind is saturation - if 99% of people hopped out of Slush, deepbit and BTC Guild, they would have difficulty finding other pools to hop to - just part of the fun

I suspect we are coming at this from quite different theoretical perspectives, and it's entertaining.

ok, did a nice little simulation based around a constant rate of single miner hashing.  eg 10 per unit time out of 1000 total at the beginning
It was interesting that the reward was invariant as to when miners hopped.
Reward per block was influenced by the proportion who hopped.
Miner reward per time unit was invariant - and that's the metric I'm interested in.

So, if lots of people hop on a long round, my percentage goes up (maybe to 100%), and my share of the reward increases up to 100%, but the time increases too.  At the top limit, it's solo mining, and expected reward per time is the same

it's rounding

Thanks for pointing that out - I went back and re-read the payout system stuff.

p.s. Meni - the 1% issue is a red herring

 (5.12 / (4.9 *(1+0.03))) -1 = 1.45%

current price = 5.12
buy price = 4.9 *(1+0.03) = 5.05
difference is 0.07 or 1.45%

Of course, if you are paying 3% of the sale price, then 5.12 * (1- 0.03) = 4.966 received and there is a loss of 1.6%  (4.966 / 5/05).

wouldn't you want something like  [Y / (X * (1 + fee%))] -1 = gain%

So, using your example, I do 5000 blocks for 0.25 BTC reward in round one and 35000 blocks for 0.583BTC in round two.  Neither of these has 1% of pool power.  In the first it is 0.5% and the second 1.166%.

40,000 blocks out of 4,000,000 would be 1%, but that ignores the simple fact that sum(Xi * Yi) <> avg(Xi) * avg(Yi)  Given the 1% is not constant, you can't really use that to underpin the argument.  If you could maintain 1%, then you would achieve the theoretical 1 BTC payment, irrespective of hoppers.

Might also be worth while to point out that pool size has something to do with the equation as well, as if 95% of the pool disappears gives a different result to a 5% drop.

I'm obviously not going to sway your opinion and I've done this argument elsewhere.  Of interest, I did find one of ideas behind hop-proofing actually makes hopping more attractive.  Those pay on last N share pools encourage people to jump in once N has been reached.

Still, if I do one share in a solved block that took a million shares, I simply can not know if people have jumped in early, late, 24/7'd or turned off or on, I get 1/1000000 of the reward.  (btw - I think I have about 100 mined coins over three months and 2.7 million shares.)

double lol - because of the different methods of reward, some pools give away unequal rewards and some non-hopping miners get less.  I'm not in one of those pools, so I don't suffer.

lol - I love that argument, however, it does not alter the rate at which I get coins for the work I do

If you like small pools with pplns payouts, maybe (that's what these pools look like on a quick scan).  Not sure of your reasoning against deepbit - reasonable size, proportional payout based on actual work contributed.

As for solo - if you wanted to try, test on one of the alt-coins, that would give better chances.

http://www.ripoffreport.com/electronic-manufacturers/lutec-australia-pty/lutec-australia-pty-false-dis-cwa92.htm

fools and money = parted