Well ... actually ... it is valid to say it affects the % luck of the pool.

There is a problem in the bitcoin world of saying what the pool's luck is.

Although you would statistically expect that over a long period of time, the pool's accepted hashes would approach the expected: 100% luck, that isn't completely true.

There are factors that reduce the number of blocks found.
Specifically orphans.
Some pools have long term bad luck because they are slow at handling block changes and lose more blocks because of that.
Eligius is an example of this

There were also pools that counted stale shares for a short period of time after the block change had occurred.
While this makes the pool look better by lowering and lying about their reject statistics, it also has the long term effect of lowering the pool luck.
Not sure which pools do this.

One pool in particular doesn't count all the hashes used to produce it's blocks and thus reports luck higher than it really is.
P2Pool

The change does have a long term affect on our % luck, but it doesn't affect what is really 'Luck' - which isn't exactly what pools report

However, it is also true to simply say that running ckpool has a long term effect on the % luck since it handles block changes very fast.

1) My last post was on July 09, 2015, 04:17:43 PM (6 days ago).
2) It was a statement not an inquiry and thus required no response.
3) My question was NOT about stickminer availability. RTMFP
4) If sidehack finds me/us annoying he can ban us post haste at his leisure.
5) You are not privy to the back channel communications sidehack/Novak and we have had pertaining to this critical (and might I add brilliant) development effort.
6) By posting in the public forumn versus a PM was complying with his request to NOT be PM'ed about trivial matters (completed product availability).

The question was posted because very recently (yesterday) Bitmain has indicated to us that there are no chips (BM1384's) and S5 hash boards available for sale as they have all been used up making complete S5's (The price of which has risen ~$100 in the last 2 weeks). They are also unwilling to sell broken hash boards. It seems they are even having (creating) issues with supplying warranty based replacements. We have 2 boards that need to be replaced under warranty and they are giving us "the run around".

The above is a "sea change" in attitude with respect to our relationship with Bitmain.
Who in the past has been more than willing to supply us with "raw" components for our immersion cooling endeavors.
I suspect that they are "cleaning out" inventory of their old designs and at the same time gouging the ecosystem due to the lack of mining H/W availability.

Anyway, back to lurking.

Any word on the chip order?

Welp, i'm sure that gets annoying!

I think the 4-chip pod is a more logical target. It should be possible to make a single board which fits both the Gridseed and U3 heatsinks; I'll have to get ahold of an RBox pod to see what it'd require but I know I can hit the other two for sure.

@ WBF1 ...  "Keep Doing"  sacrifice chickens or mining ; )  .... no for real, if i have a look at all the other pools i'm afraid where Bitcoin is going to! Just wanted to adress that i hope my feeling is still right and there is no manipulation here...

Our first payout included one ...
Yes it works.

Just coincidence, yes.  Personally, I would rather the luck/variance roll past quicker.  If bad luck must happen (and it must) I would rather get past it quickly than wait more than a week for a block.  Thus, I prefer a higher hash rate.

The only time I get nervous about high pool hash rate is when a lot of it is rented hash.  I'm going to qualify this by saying that I see no evidence of what I'm about to mention happening in the real world (our long term luck says that it isn't).  That said, rented hash does come with the possibility of reducing luck since the actual rig owner no longer has a stake in the pool payout (only the renter does).  Using the West/NiceHash as an example (only because I'm most familiar with them - not because of anything specific to them), the rig owner selling hash to West/Nice has no incentive to actually submit block solves since they are being paid PPS.  They could withhold block solving shares without penalty.  In fact, they have incentive to not submit solves since it helps keeps difficulty lower and indirectly their PPS rate higher!  The renter, who has the actual stake in the pool, has no way of knowing a block was withheld and pays for the broken hash.  It is a risk that has kept me away from renting hash every time I've considered it.

So, there is one real possible way that higher hash rate could be a bad thing, but as far as I know I've never seen it in action.

2. Bad luck lasts longer
Another reason that makes us mis-judge mining luck is that when we mine, we mostly experience bad luck. In fact if you go to the trouble of working it out, your hours of mining will be about one-quarter good luck and three quarters bad luck. Why? Bad luck takes longer, good luck rounds take much less time.

3. Assessing luck over time instead of blocks
Another mistake made by novice miners is to assume that the extremes of luck will be the same for all pool over any time frame. This is wrong for two related reasons:

    The more blocks are solved the closer luck approaches 100%
    Because the timeframe for luck to to approach 100% varies depending on number of blocks solved, comparing various pools' luck over the same time period is invalid. Instead we need to compare luck over similar number of blocks.

Is there anyone out who has not had there last get confirmed after ten hours yet or do i have a problem

Were you guys using the batch 2s? Great to know I just dropped $50 on a potential shit heap.... Thanks. I'll play around with it.

Don't use icarus timing or anu freq in your batch file as they're useless for the U3. If you want to change the frequency use --au3-freq instead, however try first without any options.

Second - the U3 is a steaming pile of shit and there is only so much software can do to work around it. The least worst you can make it work is by using a different power supply to the brick that it comes with, and get a high quality USB cable instead of the one it comes with and then try again, plugging it into a USB2 port only, not a USB 3 port. It's not uncommon these things die off once a day as ZOMBIE even under those conditions and you need to unplug them and plug them back in again to get them running again.

I have been trying to say this for days that something is wrong with the payout queue, no one seems to care. My payout queue started at 13 blocks till payout, 10 blocks later still at 11 blocks till payout.  I should be at 3 blocks till payout, starting to question if they seriously broke something during the last upgrade.

Some of my friends I recommended to this pool who have the hashing power to enter payout queue immediately 17 blocks later and 7 days still no payout.

I like the pool, I just wish they would fix the problem.

Yea, that's very impressive!  So long, Antminer U3, hello GekkoScience!

Plus how cool will it be when we're running gear built by those in our community and not some overseas corporation?!