You don't want to have the same pool in all three slots... you pick a primary (which I'm guessing you're going to use Eligius ), then you pick a backup and another backup.  That way in case Eligius is unreachable, your miner isn't sitting there doing nothing.

Actually, I did read your reply about remaining BTC.  I personally don't find it to be a confusing stat, but if you're going to remove it, then so be it.

To be honest, I haven't looked at the source code for the bot, I was just speculating with kano.  However, now that you've pointed it out, I'll take a look.  Thanks for that .

I don't see where the problem is.  I see the user 15CCAo25iKBHDwx6PNGiXM8X8g3C9CSeZC found a share with difficulty 138,652,424,600.44.  Looking at the blockchain for that address, I see that address received the block reward for 353625.

Looks like everything is working as expected to me.

My guess is the bot programmer wasn't thinking of scenarios like this.  Likely the bot just says, "give me a min/max range and I'll make sure that I maintain orders for you within that range".  It'd need to have a bit of intelligence to be able to say, "ok... somebody just outbid me, but that bid is going to burn through very quickly because he didn't put a whole lot of coin behind it, so I'll not bother getting into a bidding war with him and just let my current order ride it out."

Of course even then the bot would have to have some kind of parameter to limit that behavior, otherwise it could be that it would never move ahead if a number of small coin orders keep flowing in that are just above your rate...

Example:

You have 10BTC in an order and put a range of 0.0097 - 0.0101.
A bunch of people throw in 0.1BTC orders at 0.0100.

Wow... I'm way off topic

Congrats to the latest block finder!  Phil - I sent you a PM re: ck solo club episode 3.

I read it as he found a diff 200G share... such a share would indeed find a block and he'd get the reward unless the block was orphaned.

Best share updates when you find a share better than one you've previously submitted - or it resets when somebody finds a block.  If you happen to find a share of 200G, that will solve a block.  This does not mean the next person must find a share greater than 200G... he only needs to find a share that satisfies the network difficulty, which is currently 47G.

Are you intending to create an entirely new algorithm or just use one of the existing ones like SHA-256, Scrypt, X11, etc?  If you want to create a new algorithm, then understanding cryptography in detail is an absolute must.  Honestly, while learning C++ will certainly help you to understand code that's already written, it won't help you to know how to create your own coin.  You need to understand peer to peer concepts, networking, threading, hashing, GUI, memory management, pointers, ... the list goes on.

If your intention is to simply mimic an existing coin by changing a few things here and there like block generation time, reward, etc, then that's a far easier task.  As was mentioned, there are already coin generators out there that do all the work for you.

By the way, there are wallets that aren't written in C++.  While the core software of the coin typically is, and the default wallet UIs of the coins are, there are other lightweight wallets written in other languages.  For example MultiBit is written in Java.

One week's worth of testing is way too soon to attempt to make conclusions, especially the first one you state.  There will be weeks where you get far over 100% of expected payouts on every one of your pools except for Discus Fish.  For your test on nicehash, are you just mining their pool, or are you including earnings you received from people renting your gear?  The reason I'm asking is because nicehash is a 3% fee PPS by itself.  It should be virtually identical (1% less) in earnings to f2pool... unless your gear is rented for more than what PPS would pay.

If you want, you can check out my long-running thread comparing OgNasty's NastyPoP payout to standard p2pool payouts here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=891298.0.  I've had S3s running the test since November of last year, and I update it every Friday.  You're welcome to use the data there and include it in your graphs and stats.

This is incorrect.  The pool's luck has no bearing whatsoever on your ability to find blocks with your gear.  You might get unlucky and blocks you find are orphaned because of the pool, but the pool's luck is irrelevant.

LOL... looks like the guy I was going to have you contact has already replied .

If you're looking to buy new, your choices are exceptionally limited... you can only get the S5.  If you've got 205V+ power, you can also purchase an S4+.  If you're willing to purchased used gear, then your options open up a bit.  You can take a look at the SP3X series by SP-Tech.

S5 and SP20 require external power supplies, so that needs to be factored into your purchase decision.  Also... a storage unit?  You've got reliable internet connection and electrical service in a storage unit?  I must be thinking of something different than you are here, because I keep envisioning that show "Storage Wars"...

Some pay daily.  Some pay weekly.  Some pay every time a block is found.

I earn BTC every day.  I have my own hardware mining that I rent out.  I have multiple cloud mining contracts.  All told I have about 10TH/s mining.  I have a signature campaign that pays me every week.  I also have a few alt-coins that I play around with, trading on exchanges.  I'm relatively diversified, I guess .

A bit better than that... assuming 500TH/s for 24 hours, it's about 1:4.7

There are certainly variables that come into play in the real world.  Pool rejecting shares, pool down, hardware failure, software failure, malicious code that prevents block finds being submitted, stratum redirect attacks, DDoS attacks, etc.  All of which will have an effect on your hash rate and the blocks you do/do not find.

Heck, we all see the real-world statistics... in fact the vast majority of us have at one point or another talked about a pool's luck... complaining when it's bad and rejoicing when it's good.

If we look at the pure statistics, your 100TH/s rental for 7 days didn't stand a chance, since at the current difficulty, that 100TH/s would expect to find a block only after 23.6 days.  Yet, I jumped onboard that ship and hoped it might hit pay dirt.  We might have gotten lucky.  We saw a miner do exactly that... hitting 5 blocks in a timeframe in which he should have maybe hit 1.

Speculation over rental prices, pool luck, etc really has no bearing on the question.  Generating 10PH/s in 24 hours, or that same 10PH/s over 240 hours ends up giving you the same number of hashes, and therefore the same number of chances of finding a block.

At the current difficulty, you'd expect to find a block every 5.684 hours with 10PH/s.
At the current difficulty, you'd expect to find a block every 56.84 hours with 1PH/s.

Whichever way you slice it, at the end of the hashing period, you'd expect to find 4.22 blocks, given the difficulty remains the same.

The ratings on a PSU are just about efficiency of conversion.  The better the rating (bronze, silver, gold, platinum), the more efficient the PSU is in converting the AC power from the wall to DC power to provide to your gear.  You can have a gold rated PSU with crap components, just as you can have a bronze rated PSU with stellar ones.

Rosewill PSUs are newegg's house brand and are generally pretty decent.

My experience thus far with Mintsy has been twofold: a purchased SHA256 mining contract (1TH/s for 90 days) and pointing my own hardware here.

First, here is the good news.  The mining contract which I purchased was given a boost to 2.5TH/s and extended.  This was an unexpected surprise and I'm very thankful for it.  I've actually got a relatively decent chance to come out positive now.

The UI is easy to navigate and you can switch coins at will.  If you've got a cryptsy account, you can hook it up directly using your trade key.  Any alt coins you mine get paid out to your cryptsy wallets automatically.  Bitcoin mining payouts are a manual process.  Stats are plentiful, too.  You can look at your average hash rate, see found blocks, pool hash rate, expected time to block, etc.

On the hardware side, I've had issues aplenty.  Since the pool is also listed in the alt coin service announcements, that's where I first reported my problems.  You can see my posts at this link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=786492.msg11256333#msg11256333.

My main concern is that when my gear is pointed to this pool via MRR, it fails.  Even though I've got the latest version of cgminer with the nicehash #xnonce patch as required, it simply does not connect from MRR.  Workers are constantly restarting or refusing to hash and fall back to secondary pools.  When I connect my gear directly to the pool, things work as expected.

I have not attempted to connect to and mine external pools with either my contracted hash or my own gear, so I don't have any comment on others' experiences doing so.

Huh... I wonder if I could setup an infinite loop.  Here's the scenario:

I setup an external pool here for MRR.  On MRR, I setup my primary pool to point back here.  So, I'd be telling Mintsy to mine on MRR and MRR would say to mine on Mintsy.  I might try that for fun after my gear's current rental ends (assuming it's not immediately rented again).

That makes me think of another scenario.  If a purchased contract can be pointed to an external pool, could that pool be MRR?  I'd be able to rent my contract out on MRR.  Another thing I might try.

Yes, anybody who is going to dedicate themselves to mining is going to wire up service exclusively for it... and anybody with half a brain is not going to wire up 120V for the purpose .  My point, which has remained consistent, is that the S4+ is not a "home" miner, like every other Bitmain product has been - at least for homes using 100V to 120V power (like the US, Canada, Japan, etc).

Just like Neo found out in the Matrix... there is no spoon.

The network has no concept of hash rate.  All it knows is that at timestamp A, block X was solved and at timestamp B, block Y was solved.  It calculates the hash rate based on that timespan and network difficulty.  Every 2016 blocks, the network evaluates how it did.  The way it does this is again independent of hash rate.  It simply says, "What would the network difficulty have needed to be to make the previous 2016 blocks take 14 days?  Adjust network difficulty to that value."

The key point to this is that the network hash rate is interpolated based upon how long it takes to solve blocks and the target difficulty for those block solutions.

To keep it on topic, the S4+ won't even power up on 110V, so the entire discussion is pretty much rendered useless .  You need to throw these onto a 240V circuit, which as I mentioned earlier in the thread pretty much eliminates the vast majority of typical US households... unless you convince your better half to allow you to throw out the electric dryer and range in lieu of mining equipment

Because they don't understand the way the scoring system works, newbies spam in hopes of getting their rating up and/or they've joined some newbie signature campaign and think they can earn a fortune by blasting the boards.

What the system really boils down to is this: at some point your post count MUST be equal to or greater than your time score to earn the highest possible forum rank.

Examples:

User 1 posts 1 post every 2 weeks.  He joined 2 years ago.  He has a potential activity score of 728.  His actual score is 52.
User 2 posts 14 posts every 2 weeks.  He joined 2 years ago.  He has a potential activity score of 728.  His actual score is also 728.
User 3 posts 100 posts every 2 weeks.  He joined 2 years ago.  He has a potential activity score of 728.  His actual score is also 728.
User 4 makes 1 post today.  He joined 2 years ago.  He has a potential activity score of 14.  His actual score is 1.

LOL... I bet your wife and kids are happy there's still a place left for them.  Sorry kids, but daddy bought some new miners... you're just going to have to tough it out up here.