I did go read the your web page.  I think that the plan disturbs uninvolved people, and is partially untruthful;  this will sure spray you with backspatter, and ultimately harm the moral high ground position that they occupy.

However, the ultimate concept of causing a bolus of communications from the large number of customers involved intrigues me, and is an approach that I have envisioned many times in the past, but have never carried out.

What do you think of this course of action, where no one crosses over a line misrepresenting their identity or denying service to innocent bystanders:  each BFL customer, perhaps 20,000 or more, sends a small number of paper letters, for a total cost of under $5.

• Directly to the court
  
• To the attorney representing the plaintiff
  
• To BFL itself.
  
• Sonny's parole office
  
• BFL's attorney
  

I think this could be one letter to BFL with CC to the other parties.

I further think the letter should be very polite.  It should mention facts and ask for an action.  Each letter should be written so that it reflects well on you under the most hostile reading environment, whether in court, on TV, or in the BFL boardroom.  There should be absolutely no threats, exaggerations, or excesses in the letter.  The letter should be minimal.  It is the 20,000 quantity all from upstanding victims that is the excess, but that excess does not reflect back on any of the customers.  Each piece of that mail is sent to people who are involved in this particular piece of business, are not innocent bystanders, and is a proper use of a paid government service, the USPS.

You want the court and probation people to think that you are squeaky clean, and never, ever to get the idea that any one of you is a problem of any kind.  While my background story here is not that important, I can say that I have been a victim/witness in a murder trial, and that I got much better service from the prosecutors that did the people who acted like they would bring guns into the courtroom and, although victims, become criminals themself.   Avoid any suggestion of vigilantism.

Specimen:

The Minnesota problem gambling hotline is 1-800-333-HOPE.

There may be a hotline in the jurisdiction where you live.

I suspect it will be easier if you have others to talk to who have been where you are.

I never understood the pool-hopping business.  Would you (anyone) mind working up an example with a 10% oldest / 90% recent?  Perhaps use the actual Eligius block data for a new 1 THs miner starting at block 308,729?

You can split your power into multiple pools.  I ran an Avalon with 2 payout addresses on Eligius to simplify some accounting. 
You have to use load balancing.  There are also some commands to specify the % load each receives, but I never did grok how to do that.

One way would be to put the summary of the court proceedings, above, on a Google doc and add keywords for BFL, Monarch, and so on.  Perhaps even make a web page with a Google adwords link.

Those are multi-sig addresses.  I think they are a good idea for a payout address for a consortium.
At this point, I would add a 3rd address to a 1prefix, and I would run the miner as load balanced.  I would point it to the same address as the 2nd miner.  I don't recognize the 1st http address, so naturally I suspect it.

After it has run a while, I would check all payout addresses.  If the 1address shows statistics and the 3address does not I would send a message in to wizkid and Luke to see if that is intentional behavior.

From my mathematics training, I tend to speculate about changing rules, and what outcomes are likely.

This weekend, I wondered what would happen if the "recent backpay" was changed to "oldest backpay."

One effect is that the very old backpay would be paid out.  In the current system, there is some doubt whether it will ever be paid.
Another effect is that new miners would see a drop in their revenue, because initially they would not receive any backpay.
Possibly a blended system, 50% recent and 50% oldest would balance these two concerns.

I assume wizkid & Luke evaluated this question in the past.  I wonder what their reasoning was.

I think that suspending the domain was a bad move.

I'm always curious about how other people view things.

What is different between what you expect and how the pool actually works?
What kind of behavior do you want to see that you do not see?
Do you think it operates differently than it says it will?

Did anyone cache the IP address?

Does the new wallet have the current OpenSSL library?

I'm always curious.  What is it that you don't like about Eligius?

He tried to run a pool with 0% fee, but also without going broke, and in a way that no one could steal funds from a central wallet.  He came up with something that does all that, and is unique.

Some of us don't think the queue is obtuse.  He pays from oldest to newest, to everyone who is over threshold, and on lucky rounds he pays out back pay.  The rules are very simple, and they work.

It's great to hear that you have made breakeven.  I looked at some Avalon modules today, and they are selling for almost 2X the expected return.  I don't know a way to buy more mining hardware and make money today.  I turned my Avalons off the first week in June.

Oh, and Garrett Hardin was from Dallas, as am I.  This makes us saturated our entire life in Mercantile philosophy.

Oddly enough, I think the Tragedy of the Commons is the rebuttal that explains why Ayn Rand is wrong.  I bet Dr. Hardin would have agreed.

It's called The Tragedy of the Commons.  A seminal paper was written in Science in 1968 by Garrett Hardin.  It happens with fishing, timber, open range grazing, and now bitcoin mining.

You are a peer to all the other miners.  To everyone else, you are one of the greedy others who is stealing their profits.

I don't know of anyone who has purchased mining equipment after the Batch #2 Avalons who has achieved breakeven, even though everyone has made ROI, whatever their own ROI number is.

Actually, it does pay out.  It pays all 25 BTC to miners every block that the pool finds.  What is hard to predict is who it pays.

For example, if a block is orphaned, suddenly those people were not actually paid, so they go back into the queue.  Since they were at the top of the queue before, they are at the top of the queue again, and everybody else is farther down.

Someone with a small mining rig, such as a Batch #2 Avalon  , might earn enough to cross their pay threshold but be 7 days since they were last paid.  The queue is paid out by oldest first, so they might jump to the top of the queue suddenly, and push a large mining rig into a later block.

Usually, your miner has a BTC address for the account name.  The shares are credited to this account, and you can view them on the web.  They pay out at a default threshold.  It is all automatic, and the default are reasonable.  The threshold is something like 0.04 BTC at the moment.

If you publish your payout address, anyone can look at the statistics and see if anything seems odd.

I have very mixed feelings about bitcoin at this time. 

During the bubble in Feb. through March 2013 Avalons were being offered for $30,000 on eBay.  It gave me a flush of hope at a very difficult time, and something new to talk about with my wife the last year that she was alive.  It was very difficult for her to form new memories, so every day we had a discussion of "what is bitcoin" and "what is that thing making all that noise." 

At the time, I felt fortunate that I was able to make a bid on a batch #2 machine, and I felt that I was doing a good thing to run the auction and allow others to participate.

The community realization that Avalon would not make their shipping targets ran in parallel my wife's decline.  As she sank into her dementia she increasingly trusted me to take care of her, and to run our household affairs.  This was a major turnaround from most of our marriage, when she was the smarter, stronger, and more organized person.  The more that she needed and trusted me, the more it was apparent that I could not have a professional job and also take care of her, and that the initial euphoria about the Avalon would remain unfulfilled.

Each night she would ask questions, a review of things she knew, as she worked with all her will to hold her mind together.  As the Avalon moved into the region of only paying for electricity, she sometimes asked questions that were deeply disturbing, such as "who are you" and "how many kids do I have."

I tried to build on this consortium experience and my sense that many of you respect me to form a bidders' group for the US Marshals Service auction, which happens to have ended today.  In a time when there is not very much good news from mining, it looked like a very safe effort to raise $200,000 or more, wire it to the Marshals, and bid perhaps $200 to $300 / BTC depending on the amount of money raised. 

It now appears that there are no new consortiums working in bitcoin.  The suits and the money have moved in.  I am crowded out.  I feel like "Harmonica" at the end of Serge Leone's "Once upon a time in the West" and it is time to move on.  This week, even Tuco is dead.

I am very thankful that my group have been publicly supportive of my administration.  You guys are the best in bitcoin land.  I wish there were more of us.