Here's info on Namecoin

http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

Those are protocols - there are threads which specialize in the description of them and are easy to find.

Stratum will be best for your Avalons

Do not use getwork for Avalons this is the old CPU/GPU mining protocol

GBT would be OK but Stratum is better for Avalons

Is that really necessary?  Seems a tad bit childish to me.

My pool seem to be doing pretty good.

Yes, CGMiner 3.3.1 has direct USB w/hotplug support.  It works great for me.  But people using the Anker USB 3.0 hubs have trouble with later versions of CGMiner and opt to use the older CGMiner 3.1.1 with USB to Serial drivers.

The CGMiner developers are working on the Anker USB hub issue.
Sam

Yes, what he said.

You should always 2 or 3 alternate pools in case of a failure or DDoS attack on your main pool.  Your last failover pool should always be your local Bitcoin-QT too so that if all else fails your solo mining at least, that's good for the bitcoin network too.  Just running your bitcoin client helps relay transactions.
Sam

No! When a block is solved there are also transaction fees added to it.  So the total reward is Block Plus Transaction fees, 25BTC + Fees.  Total block reward is around 25.2 or so most of the time.  The extra from the fees will be distributed to all miners with the rest of the reward.  0 fee pools usually keep the extra transaction fees as their operation fee.

Block rewards halve every 210,000?? blocks so one day transaction fees will surpass block rewards.
Hope that makes sense now,
Sam

I thought that was someone else's  tag line?

Your Avalon is using CGMiner.  The CGMiner thread top post and the readme explain the mining strategies.

----------------------Readme-------------------------------------------
MULTIPOOL

FAILOVER STRATEGIES WITH MULTIPOOL:
A number of different strategies for dealing with multipool setups are
available. Each has their advantages and disadvantages so multiple strategies
are available by user choice, as per the following list:

FAILOVER:
The default strategy is failover. This means that if you input a number of
pools, it will try to use them as a priority list, moving away from the 1st
to the 2nd, 2nd to 3rd and so on. If any of the earlier pools recover, it will
move back to the higher priority ones.

ROUND ROBIN:
This strategy only moves from one pool to the next when the current one falls
idle and makes no attempt to move otherwise.

ROTATE:
This strategy moves at user-defined intervals from one active pool to the next,
skipping pools that are idle.

LOAD BALANCE:
This strategy sends work to all the pools to maintain optimum load. The most
efficient pools will tend to get a lot more shares. If any pool falls idle, the
rest will tend to take up the slack keeping the miner busy.

BALANCE:
This strategy monitors the amount of difficulty 1 shares solved for each pool
and uses it to try to end up doing the same amount of work for all pools.
---------------------------Readme Not-------------------------------------

If you want to transfer bitcoins from one place to another, such as buying something time critical if you include a transaction fee people generating blocks will, most likely, include your transaction quicker if you offer a transaction fee.  At some point in the future transaction fees will surpass the block generation reward.

So pools that share transactions will add that to the 25 BTC block reward.
Sam

In never said, nor meant to imply it wouldn't work.  Just not well.  But basically yes I'm making an uninformed claim.


Mine is a 7200 RPM disk, but just a single drive.  I'm sure the protocol makes a huge difference in performance.
SAm

I'm a people and I don't like PPS anymore because of the negative impact on pools.  Pools can go into the negative very fast and go bankrupt very easy if they aren't careful.

But I'm most likely in the minority since many other "people" could care less if their pool goes bankrupt.
Sam

How fast of a disk do I need?  I have a 1TB SATA drive.

I think you put your finger on it for me though, your using GBT and I'm using getwork to my client so that probably makes a huge difference.
Sam

P2Pool mines against your local Bitcoind and that doesn't supply work to an Avalon fast enough.  My local Bitcoin-QT client doesn't even supply work to a Block Erupter fast enough.

I'm pretty sure all miners are given unique work items.

Well that's a bit relative.  I just recently retired my GPU's after replacing them with ASIC Miner Erupters.  Each Erupter is around 333Mhs my 5770 was around 215Mhs and my 5830 was around 305Mhs so yes they are more powerful than my GPU's but there are GPU's that are more powerful.  And you can't play games on Block Erupters so that may be a downside as they don't have a secondary use.
Sam

Just commenting on what I think I know.

Yes they are better than GPU mining.  Allot less electricity is used and allot less noise and waste heat are generated.

Yes they are easy to mine.  Just follow the instructions in CGMIner 3.3.1+ ASIC Read me file.  Here is my rewording of that for use with Win7

Per the ASIC readme
1. Unplug all Erupters
2. Run Zadig - Install WinUSB (I may have rebooted, can't remember for sure) - I could not install WinUSB while Erupters were plugged in.
3. Plug in one Erupter, verify that it is set to WinUSB.
4. Close Zadig, plug in the rest of the Erupters, run CGMiner.
Done

Yes you can still mine with a pool.
Sam

I'm sure your correct.  OS/2 Warp 4 was 32ms.  Now with the newer kernels it's adjustable and I use 8ms.

Now back to regularly scheduled programming

I don't remember Windoze having a 10ms timer?  It used to be 32ms, I thought?  But no an RTOS it is not, nor meant to be.

Ah, sarcasm, difficult concept to grasp at times.

Sorry Alatvian.
Thanks Jashwaa,
Sam