Your earnings aren't directly affected by the pool hash rate; they're only affected by the difficulty. Of course, difficulty increases because of the overall hash rate increase, but during any difficulty round, increases in the pool (or total network) hash rate has no affect at all on your earnings.

If you're only getting 1/3 from two weeks ago, you're probably just having bad luck at the moment. Difficulty then was a bit more that half of what it is now, so your earning should be about 1/2 (actually a little bit more).

If your earnings aren't affected, why is it "as disruptive as a DDOS attack"?

Why's that? As long as you're mining (and there's no evidence that hashrate swings affect the pool), your earnings only depend on your hashrate and the current difficulty.

That's like a postmodernist view of science - "hey dude, if you believe it, it's fine, there are no absolutes!".

It's not just accountants and traders; if you ever run a business, or even get slightly involved in the running of one, you'd better know what ROI really means otherwise it's all going to end in tears... (It's no coincidence that mrb, who is certainly running a business here, knows precisely what ROI means).

That's not true. Think about it: if the network hash rate (say) halves, then all network blocks (on average) will be solved at half the rate (20 minutes instead of 10 minutes at the default rate) but any particular hash rate that somebody can throw onto the network is going to earn the same that it did before at the current difficulty (obviously, people who are not hashing because they're attacked are going to earn nothing). DDoSing affects the block rate of the entire network, it doesn't affect an individual miner who is still hashing.

Another way to think about it: if BTC Guild's rate halves (and you keep hashing because you switched to the private server), then your payment per shift will double (because there are half as many miners to share the reward between), but there will be half as many blocks to pay for them, so overall earnings are the same.

The main effect of DDoSing is that the next difficulty rise will be lower, but every miner is affected by that in the same way.

You're a software engineer (no such thing as retired in my book). I think you know what to do.

If the bitcoin network has been compromised because all the pools are down then there'll be no mining for you anyway; solo mining is the last resort that protects the network. This attack certainly never came anywhere near to downing all the pools so whatever. (Don't forget that failover strategy...)

Are you using cgminer?

Sorry, but there shouldn't have been any point during this attack when you couldn't hash (apart from the few tens of seconds taken for the rollover). My miners went from BTC Guild to 50BTC to Slush without missing a heartbeat. Now I've manually configured the private server as first in the failover chain (last is solo mining).

You need to make sure you have an effective failover strategy in place.

It's finding blocks fine at the moment. Check blockchain.info. The private server is working great.

This has happened quite a few times over the last couple of years. In the end rollover to solo mining to keep the network safe. (And this is good opportunity to install and play with pool software if you're running an ASIC, since the client, of course, won't cope).

Slush is working at the moment, but did have some website 503s a few hours ago (didn't affect mining); my miners have currently failed-over to it from BTC Guild and 50BTC. But you can probably expect it to be seriously attacked at some point. The attackers seem to be working their way through the popular pools. Make sure you have a good failover strategy.

Everybody knows that! But this is the BTC Guild thread after all and it's clear what the poster was asking about (i.e. time since the last BTC Guild block, if you need a further clue).

I haven't seen any BTC Guild blocks on blockchain.info any time that I've looked today and the pool stats indicate that the last one was nearly six hours ago. Are you saying that there was one more recently? Can you point to it in the block chain?

Edit: apart from the one that just happened, that is.

Further edit: Last two blocks in pool stats (Times are in UTC)

21248   260918   2013-09-30 03:41:46 PM   
21247   260872   2013-09-30 08:59:04 AM

This is known as "regression to the mean" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean). The next value after an extreme value is likely to be closer to the mean value. Mean block time for Slush is (about) 2.5 hours.

"Math" is American English; "Maths" is British English. It's hardly a new convention (being first and all...).

Well, you must be in an extremely lucky pool. Hash rate is close to 1000 THash/s; at 3600 BTC per day, a 100 GHash/s miner would get about 0.4 BTC per day. (And, indeed, that's close to my Avalon's current rate - 1 BTC per day hasn't been the case since last month).

My one is running at about 345 MHz and is pulling 1040 W from the wall.

Indeed it could. But as well as reading about it, you could actually try it. The last transaction I sent with zero-fee was clearing out a mtgox account  of about 1 BTC a couple of weeks ago; it took 26 hours to make it into a block. Of course 'fully processed', I presume, is six blocks which is going to happen automatically after the first block and only depends on block-solving variance (which affects everyone and should normally be complete in about an hour).

Black Arrow delivered FPGA miners in May (pretty much on schedule), so they do have a track record of delivering 'mining hardware'.