mtgox has an API. You can use https://mtgox.com/code/withdraw.php?name=blah&pass=blah&group1=BTC&btca=bitcoin_address_to_send_to&amount=# to send bitcoins (I haven't used it this way myself). Write a scheduled script on your end that accesses this page every day.

Those calculations, as I explained, were specifically for the case that the miner is very small. In this case the variance is completely caused by the variance in the number and position of the shares submitted and are not affected at all by the size of the pool. These calculations do not work when the miner is substantial in relation to the pool, for this you need different calculations. The summary is that the greater the percentage of the miner in the pool, the greater the variance, so bigger pool = smaller portion = less variance.

That's true. But shares are pretty easy to find. Unless you're mining on a CPU or something, you'll very rarely go through an entire round without finding any share.

For participants which are very small in relation to the pool, the variance is caused by the variance in the number of shares and position they find.

For participants which are not too small in relation to the pool, the variance is caused by the variance in the number of blocks the pool finds.

Maybe it was on bitcoinpool. Their operators are an obnoxious bunch spreading FUD to promote themselves.

In the language of this post, a larger pool gives you less variance, but it doesn't affect your expectation.

slush's pool resists the pool-hopping cheat by using a score-based reward system. Each share submitted increases your score by a certain amount which is based on how old the round is. The displayed stat is the total score obtained by this worker in this round.

This, by the way, is what started the myth that if you disconnect from slush's pool, the magical tooth fairy comes and steals your moneys.

This is wrong. It's refreshing to hear this myth said in favor of slush's pool this time. But your expected payout is exactly proportional to the amount of time spent mining.

That's completely wrong. You can appreciate the endless list of things Bitcoin has to offer without having any opinion whatsoever about politics.

I tried to do guest checkout to test this, but couldn't find any Bitcoin option. Also, it's not listed at http://www.memorydealers.com/payment-methods.html.

mtgox offers eWallet merchant services which may be comparable to MyBitcoin. If you want just an eWallet without merchant services, Instawallet is all the rage now. I'm sure there are many people here willing and able to help you set up Bitcoin payments for your site (for free up to a point, or for payment). You can try contacting mndrix (http://www.ndrix.com/) who has a lot of experience with this.

That's true. But there are people who stand to gain a huge profit if Bitcoin succeeds, namely those who got in early and hoarded a nice sum of bitcoins when they were cheap. This fact might reinforce the impression that Bitcoin is some sort of Ponzi/Pyramid. I think the OP should address this point and explain why this is ok.

Of course, I'll send you a PM immediately.
Welcome to Bitcoin.

Some (all?) of Sapphire's high-end video cards come with a bonus copy of the game "Dirt 2", in the form of an activation code for Steam. Having bought 2 such cards for mining and used one copy, I have one spare. I offer to give the activation code for free to the first person to post he wants it on this thread.

I encourage others with spare activation codes for games to offer them in this thread as well.

Update: Given to IDFinners.

It's the other way around. For tiny miners it makes absolutely no difference what is the size of their pool. It's the bigger miners that are better off in a bigger pool.

Let's say a miner submits a share at a random point in time. Let A be the event the the share was submitted for a given round, and X the eventual number of shares in this round. Then $P(X=x) \propto p(1-p)^{x-1}$ (exponential distribution) and $P(A|X=x) \propto x$ (the more shares in a round, the higher its chance to include a given share). By Bayes' formula, $P(X=x|A) \propto P(X=x)P(A|X=x) = p(1-p)^{x-1}x$. Summing for x>=1 gives $P(X=x|A) = p^2(1-p)^{x-1}x$.
The payout received for this share, in units of block reward, is 1/x. So the expected payout is $\sum_{x=1}^{\infty}p^2(1-p)^{x-1}x/x=p$, as expected (pun unintended). The expectation of the squared payout is $\sum_{x=1}^{\infty}p^2(1-p)^{x-1}x/x^2=p^2\log p/(p-1)$, so the variance is $p^2(1-p+\log p)/(p-1)$.
As you can see, this does not depend on any additional factors such as the size of the pool. When several shares are submitted, if the miner is tiny then they will be uncorrelated and their variance is additive. As the pool becomes smaller the variance for the miner increases.

If you're not convinced this accurately models the situation (well, it doesn't, but it doesn't deviate in ways that are relevant for this discussion), you can write a simple computer simulation of the dynamics and see that the variance is smaller in a larger pool.


It is. There are threads for discussing this problem.

I've spent a lot of time pondering variance of pool payouts. I don't think I'm wrong. All my calculations work on the share level and I definitely did not disregard share granularity. I can bring out the heavy-duty math if you'd like, but the calculations involved are very easy to understand (if you know a bit about Poisson processes) yet very cumbersome to communicate, so I don't think this is worth the trouble.

Let's say a small miner mined for an hour and got 1 share. It doesn't matter if the pool got one block or two in that time, he still has 1 share in a single block. Since we know nothing else about this block, the amount of shares in it is distributed exponentially and the participant's payout will have a given mean and variance, which are the same in both scenarios.

If the miner has a significant portion of the pool it becomes more complicated, but it's complicated in the direction of further favoring larger pools.

For a proportional pool, in the limit where the miner has a negligible portion of the pool, his variance per share submitted is p^2(1-p+ln(p))/(p-1), and this is additive in the number of shares (p = 1/difficulty). It does not depend on any other factors. When the miner has a larger share of the pool his shares become correlated and his variance increases, so it's better to be in a larger pool.

Of course, it is my opinion that people should start using hopping-proof scoring methods instead of proportional (and I'll once again debunk the myth that they are in some ways disadvantageous for small miners).

The willingness of transactioneers to pay fees. When you include transactions with low fees in a block, you consume this resource.

We are talking about how to design the Bitcoin protocol to ensure it achieves a healthy free market equilibrium. The same way Satoshi designed some other pieces of the protocol.

Tragedy of the commons again. Wal-mart also has incentive to sit it out while others subsidize the mining. The only way I see to make Wal-mart pay its share is with some sort of union which will defeat Bitcoin's aspirations of being decentralized.

The Bitcoin community is fairly large, there's no reason some participants shouldn't debate one problem while others debate another. Also, having a plan for what will happen 10 years forward will encourage people to join now.

That's false. You'll have (proportionally) more variance per block but this is more than offset by the reduced variance in the number of blocks per time unit.

I think that under some simplifying assumptions, the best way to reduce variance is to put all your mining in the largest pool, even if it is as high as 100% of the network. I'll need to do some calculations to verify this part.

You don't want a PSU to run 24/7 on anything near full capacity. A 650W PSU for a 450W system is more reasonable.

I'm fairly sure that's false. You still should consider an AMD CPU because they're cheaper.

For efficiency the most important thing is to get an 80+ Gold one. Once you do that increasing the power rating will have almost no effect.

Yes. (I was quoted $45 for transferring $1000 from Israel to US by MoneyGram). WU is the polar opposite of CoinCard (which was about instant, cheap, easy cashout for small to medium amounts). BitcoinExchange offers cashing out bitcoins for WU.

A union excluding transactions profitable at the time in the hopes of keeping transaction fees from dropping, is not an equilibrium, given that the barrier of entry is low.

It is not trivial that the barrier of entry to mining will be low in the future, and mechanisms should be put in place to make sure that it is.

The real problems begin when the mining union not only excludes transactions they don't like, but also rejects blocks they don't like. They can prevent entrance of new miners by rejecting their blocks.

You don't need a 900W PSU. You need a high-quality PSU such as Seasonic X-series, 750W tops but 650W should do fine too. Anything which is not from a known brand is utter junk, and even within a brand some products are good and others not so much.