I sent a PM, but I thought I'd post it here for everyone else's comment also along with a few other thoughts.

The two things that would make me mine continuously on HHTT are a larger value of N for PPLNS and merged mining for namecoin. In that order. I love the AWS setup, the minimalistic website, and the ability to define my difficulty. The vardiff adjustment on some other pools is too willing to change the setting every few minutes and create rejects. I would prefer to mine here, but I want to know that my effort will be counted for something in the case of pool hoppers increasing the pool's hash rate temporarily or my own miners going offline at a bad time. N should be at least large enough to cover several found blocks at bad luck. Namecoin mining doesn't do much, but it makes up for the higher fees on some other pools, and if it is done at even a high fee PPS it shows there is at least some progress being made.

I think the larger value of N would appeal to people from BTC Guild and the merged mining would appeal to people from Eligius who also like the lack of registration there. The AWS setup offers benefits that Eligius doesn't have for reporting and stats.

Merging other coins is a lot of work for not much benefit, but it would give an edge over Eligius and BTC Guild. Courting the interests of some hardware manufacturers or group buy coordinators might also be beneficial. For example, if you could figure out how to make it easy to split a group's hash power out to multiple payment addresses, maybe as a premium service, that seems to be something that a lot of group buy coordinators are spending a lot of time with.

Eligius or HHTT. Not that you know who the people are necessarily, but you can see every miner's hash rate. HHTT needs the hash power more, and I think it wins on the payout mechanism which is much more open (no unknown in shelved shares).

I did a little experiment with block erupters that is now starting its 3rd week.

As of 201312282200 (Eastern US)

BTC Guild    0.00227196   100.00%
Eligius        0.00211533   93.11%
EclipseMC   0.00205489   90.45%
Ghash.IO    0.00183122(0.03799221 GHS * 0.0482) 80.60%

The numbers may not make a lot of sense at the 333MHs rate, but blow these numbers up to be a Block Erupter blade setup at 107GHs and the rewards would play out as follows:

BTC Guild    0.72929916
Eligius        0.67902093
EclipseMC   0.65961969
Ghash.IO    0.58782162

Use the percentages to calculate at whatever hashrate you want. The difference is significant, especially when both EclipseMC and Eligius have 0% fees and BTC Guild 3%. Before anyone cries luck, I’d like to mention that this was over a 2 week time period, which is the amount of time planned for difficulty adjustments. Luck may have something, or even everything to do with it, but if your interest in bitcoin mining is to make a return more than to diversify the network, luck is an important factor.

As of 201312252035 (Eastern US)

BTC Guild: 0.00183451
Eligius: 0.00179885
EclipseMC: 0.00167789
Ghash.IO: 0.00168542 (0.03009683 GHS * 0.056)

Not a proud holder, just doing an experiment over time. Each pool has a single block erupter that has been running since the 14th. I'm reinvesting all proceeds from ghash.io directly into GHS with the instant buy function, so no fancy trading. As with any less liquid commodity, I wouldn't recommend getting yourself into a situation where you have to sell it at a low in order to make a payment on something. At the very least, it is holding its own with the other pools - it has been up and down.

Just for the fun of it I set up 4 block erupters on Dec 14, all are operating at the same speed, one on each of the following pools. One of those pools is CEX/GHash. Here is where they are at today:

As of 2013231045 (Eastern US)

BTC Guild: 0.00154781
Eligius: 0.00140232
EclipseMC: 0.00141193
Ghash.IO: 0.0015161 (0.02307720 GHS * 0.0657)

The difference between the pools is small, likely due to luck variance only. I purposefully haven't played the market with cex.io and am attempting to make this as vanilla as possible. Reinvesting proceeds with the buy now function only.

Everyone trying to "save" potential future miners thinks that the only reason anyone would ever want to get into this is to make a positive ROI in BTC on their investment into mining equipment. There are a whole slew of other reasons people want to get involved, not the least of which is a return in fiat currency.

The term Return On Investment is abused so badly in this forum. Everything you do gets an ROI, so someone telling you "it will never ROI" has no clue what they are talking about and should be summarily ignored. If I invest $100 and get back $1, my return on investment is -99%. Or, my overall return is negative $99. If I invest in model rocketry, I burn up a few dollars every time I launch a rocket. There is no financial return on investment for the money I spend there, but there is still an ROI that can be calculated. If I spend $60 on a USB Block Erupter, I may earn back a dollar or two on that hobby. In the mean time who is to say I didn't enjoy having it, playing around with pools and other alt currency, maybe mining against CEX.IO for a bit and trading some small amount there. Part of the return on investment is subjective, and not quantifiable. It was enjoyment, same as the model rocketry hobby.

The thing the big miners have forgotten is that at small amounts this is a fun hobby. It all changes when you (over) extend yourself in one way or another to buy a big quantity of mining equipment. It is no longer fun. Instead it is a race against time to make that money back.

My suggestion is this: If you see this as a hobby, invest in anything you can afford to lose and don't worry about making all your money back on it. Enjoy this for what it is. If you already invested your life savings and you saw this as your way to make it big so you don't have to work anymore: Sorry, you are screwed, and people will eventually learn to ignore their FUD about mining.

So if 333MHs is worth $89, does that mean a 100GHs X-1 is worth $26,700?
If so I have a preorder to sell too...   

Oh come on, I want to see some of this theatrical networking. Like culture for geeks.

People deeply invested in mining equipment who don't want to see any more sold because it affects the difficulty level/their profitability. They don't really care about saving us from ourselves. Even if they might be correct.

I'll buy one at 0.016 if you are sending first.

I bought one yesterday. I'll return here when I get it and post about it.

I'm pretty sure that so long as it hashes it will earn some kind of a return. @soothaa Are you claiming that this product isn't going to work?

Agreed. People claiming that it is easier to make a loss are jealous of your ability to make a profit while they can't. I appreciate your story as well as it mirrors some of my early experiences with it, although with much less capital. Don't let people bully you about referral links either. That mentality is more like: "I wish people would click mine instead of yours."

I'm running a parallel experiment with 4 block erupters all measured at the same speed running on 4 different pools. One of them is cex.io/ghash.io, and even with the recent small reduction in the price of GHS, it is still in 2nd place. Before someone jumps in and tries to point out that luck is more likely the reason it is in 2nd place instead of 4th, believe me I am aware of that possibility. I am not drawing any conclusions until this has been running for at least a month except to point out that cex.io is not a money sink and there are people making profit there all the time. Even ones who aren't making on the backs of people who make emotional trades rather than calculated ones.

1 @ 0.75

Can you imagine how boring it would be if we all thought alike. How impossible it would be to buy and sell anything if we all had exactly the same interests and desires. Profit isn't the only or the most important motivator for most people. In fact, very few people would be posting on message boards if profit was the most important motivator. Cex.IO is fun for some people, not for others. Collecting and mining with hardware is fun for some people, not for others. Making profit by buying and selling BTC is fun for some people, not for others. All of this creates a market. Most people lose money going to a casino, but that doesn't mean they are unpopular, or that some people will go with the motivation to have fun and maybe make a lot of money. Those same people will return over and over with the same motivation set. Standing outside the casino and warning people against going in because of the odds is irrelevant, and rather silly, especially when most people going in are intimately familiar with the odds. Not every play in a casino is a winner, nor is every play on Cex.IO, buy/sell of BTC, hardware preorder, stock investment, you name it. You can play armchair investment quarterback by claiming that purchasing BTC a year ago was the best investment, but if everyone had done that rather than creating the ASIC craze, then the price would not have changed as dramatically as it did.

Similar experience here. I switched to an atom based netbook to run my USB farm and saw on the order of 5% improvement in total hash rate. Side benefit is that it also runs the stratum proxy for my blades just fine as well, which the Pi was really struggling with. Stability seems to be better also. Running one of those 49-port BE hubs here.

1 @ 0.65

I could think of a few other reasons to rent mining power with BTC:

Clean coins. I'm not accusing OP of this by any means, but the first thing I thought of is wouldn't this be a good way for someone with the inputs.io stash or some other "stolen" coins to get freshly minted coins at only a slight loss. So long as transactions are being done with individuals in smallish amounts, most people willing to pull a deal like this are probably not going to spend time figuring where the coins came from. I'm sure someone is still watching that stash?

It could also be someone who just likes to play the lottery and intends to solo mine or mine a private pool.

Or, it could be someone hardware poor reselling mining contracts on eBay or similar. Contracts are way overpriced there, especially with the dips in the exchange rate, so reselling through a smarter place like here for a reasonable markup could give the reseller a profit stream without the risk of holding hardware.

Also, CEX.IO is going to keep a lot of people away for reasons of principle. That and you can't point your rented mining power at the pool of your choice. That, I think, would be the killer feature for CEX.IO, but it would probably be a very difficult thing to implement at the current hash rate granularity that they have there.

Any rate, it could be a vast number of reasons. Wish I had more hashing power.

1 @ 0.6

@anykeywhy I have gone back and read the thread and I do see where you diluted a share from 1/1200 as it was originally to 1/1560. Based on 12THs, what I'll expect at nominal is 7.69GHs/share. If you don't like the constant questions and pressure I suggest that you write more clearly and concisely the answer to the questions that are asked. I sincerely believe that the questions being asked are not unreasonable, although I can't imagine what you must be getting in PMs. It sounds like many people believe we are still getting 10GHs/share.

I don't get where I agreed to less than 10GHs/share anywhere, so I do not expect this group buy to turn a profit in BTC according to my calculation (which is based on my own assumptions and may be wrong), but with the fees associated with selling / trading shares being so high it also makes no sense to trade them. I'll remain in the group buy and cease to cause you further grief by asking simple questions.

It inspires no confidence to see you making personal attacks against people who are asking you questions. I think people do have a legitimate concern with the way this buy was handled. I see several times where you make a statement inviting questions such as, "I'm at your disposal." Yet when questions are asked you poke fun of people's math skills, accuse them of wasting your time, needing a life, needing brains, speak of having no patience, etc. Speaking of math you had to recalculate this group buy after the fact, and the mumbo jumbo in the OP now about emitting shares, bonus shares, balancing, all of that just seems like deflection against the simple truth that what we have (all of us including you) is less than what we paid for. The OP when I bought in stated clearly 10GHs/share and potentially more based on KNC delivering a superior hashrate. In no way did I read anything that led me to believe there was a chance of getting less than 10GHs per share unless KNC didn't deliver on 3THs.

As I said, I'll leave you alone as I realize you have a lot of work to do in order to make this group buy work out. While I don't like the way this group buy has gone, I do thank you for your efforts. Here's hoping we all turn some kind of profit on this. It seems like everything hangs on the hope that KNC delivers 30% more hashrate than promised.

I read the OP several times in order to be sure I understood it, at least as much as possible. It has of course been modified several times, but I clearly remember it saying that I was purchasing 10GHS per share. Now it has recently been asked several times whether or not that 10 GHS/share figure is still true and I did not see a straight answer. I do understand that it is likely these miners may ship with more hashing power than stated, and we may therefore still see 10GHS per share, but you can not guarantee that any more than KNC can.

The risks we all signed up for were the typical bitcoin risks of cost/GHS, positive ROI on increasing difficulty, exchange rates and so on. The group buy coordinator also signed up for additional risk by starting a group buy. For example, by guaranteeing full or even 99% refunds he has to have enough capital or alternative investors in order to refund everyone if that's what happens here.

I don't think anyone expected the 10GHS/share to decrease. In fact it was claimed several times in the OP and following posts that the expected total hashrate was likely to be higher than nominal and we would all get more than 10GHS/share. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. I'll eat my words and take my potential losses like everyone else if I misread.

If you want to calm people down and return some confidence to this group buy, we deserve a clear and straight answer about what our current expected nominal hashrate per share is going to be. Please cut past the overly complex explanations of bonus shares, splitting risk, standardizing cost/share and just provide a straight answer of expected GHS/share at nominal. Depending on the way we individually modeled difficulty before buying in, margins on this were already rather tight. Betting against difficulty was something I was willing to do, but betting on KNCs projected hashrate being higher than 3TH was not part of my calculation.

I'd prefer to stay in, and I believe most others here do also, but I need to have all the information in order to make an informed decision. The 1% loss now and the present value of my BTC may be worth investing elsewhere.

Thanks for your time!