Just because you've got a pair of 750W PSUs doesn't mean you're drawing 1500 watts.  What gear are you running?  If each of those PSUs is driving an Antminer S3, you're probably only pulling 700W total from the wall for the both of them combined.

As the hash rate goes up, the expected time to block goes down.  As the hash rate goes down, the expected time to block goes up.  The chances of finding a block remains a constant - every hash has a chance to find one.

Windpath's calculation of effective hash rate is based upon the number of shares on the chain that are yours.  So, assuming you are finding an average number of shares, your effective hash rate would remain pretty constant, and close to your actual value.  When that block is found, you receive the reward based upon the number of shares you've got on the chain.  The block pays the previous 8640 shares (approximately 3 days worth).  So, if a block is found in 7 days, or in 7 seconds, your payout is determined by how many of the 8640 shares are yours.

That's kind of what I was getting at.  Assuming he's truly got 1500W currently with another 1500 on the way, he might wish to consult the electrician on the 240/30 option.  That'll give plenty of power, and on a dedicated circuit.

Also, I'm not sure if the OP is in the US... I can't remember the last time I heard someone refer to an outlet on the wall as a receptacle .  If that's the case, then knowing more about his current system would be helpful.

Spondoolies-Tech has discontinued sales of the September batch of SP30s because the chips they received from TSMC are under performing and do not reach the advertised 6TH/s speeds.  Spondoolies-Tech has stated this in their thread in the hardware forums, and are offering compensation for people who have placed orders.  They have not yet provided details on the exact cause, or released the updated specs for the SP30.  They have, however, stated that the October batch will indeed perform up to spec.  That is speculation on their part, assuming TSMC will fix the production issue and supply them with proper chips.

In any case, at this point there is no further sales of a September batch of SP30.  Until Spondoolies-Tech makes the announcement in their thread, and updates their website with new specs and pricing, this group buy is not going anywhere.

It's not recommended because the circuit will indeed trip if you're pushing more than 80% load continuously.  A circuit breaker does not trip on excess current, it trips on heat, just like the fuses of old.  If a circuit breaker is rated for 15 amps, what that usually means is that you can push non-continuous loads of 15A through it without building up enough heat trip it.  When you push 15A continuously, the heat will build up and trip it.  That's why the 80% rule is in place.  Pushing only 12A through the circuit will not cause enough heat to trip the circuit.  Here's a fun fact: take a look at your average household window air conditioner in the US.  Chances are very good you'll see 1440 watts as the power.  Why?  Because that's the 80% of your typical 15A breaker in a US residence.

It depends on where you are.  For example, in the US, your average household has 120V lines with 15/20A breakers.  You might also have 1 or 2 240V double-sized breakers at 30/40/50 amps (for things like electric stoves, central air, etc).

On your average 120V/15A circuit, you'll get 1800 watts; however, and this is important, they are only rated for 80% continuous load, which is 1440W.  If you are pulling more than that on a single breaker, you're very likely to trip it.

Your best bet, if you're consulting an electrician, is to ask if he can install a 240V/30A breaker and run the line to a nema l6 30 outlet.  Then throw a PDU on it and you've got 5.76kw available.

Good luck

Ordered 3 more

So, who else has hit the "refresh" button continuously for the past 30 minutes?

Pretty sure that answer is either never or a very long time, but how is it relevant?  He made a statement that with 1TH/s on p2pool you'd expect to earn between 0.001 and 0.003BTC a day, which is incorrect.

In point of fact, the original query of this post is flawed.  No matter how much hashing power you have, it is ALWAYS luck based.

If you're only earning between 0.001 and 0.003BTC per day on p2pool there's something wrong with your setup.  At current levels every single share is worth about 0.0017BTC.  With that 1TH/s, you should be finding between 5 and 6 shares a day, so you should have between 15 and 18 shares on the chain when a block is found, so about 0.028BTC a block, which at current network hashing rates is about every 20 hours.

You're assuming they actually have some machines to setup.  Here's cloud mining summarized in a nutshell: you give me $1 now and I'll give you back $0.75 over the course of a year.

That's very likely, but if I saw a temp reporting 248, I'd be sure to shut down that unit, pull it apart and look for any obvious signs of a problem.  Obviously something's amiss, since the unit should have shutdown by itself at 80C, unless it was changed in the configuration.  Better safe than burnt to a crisp.

248???  You might want to shut that unit down ASAP.  That is completely unsafe.  Your units should never be reporting anywhere near that high.

First, let me correct your understanding.  Your statement of:
Is absolutely incorrect.  No matter which pool you choose, your expected earnings will be pretty close.  Some pools might do marginally better than others, but simply stating that the size of the pool determines profits is wrong.  For example, assuming everything else is constant, a pool with 0% fees will be better than a pool with 3% fees.

If you're thinking that switching pools will somehow translate into a substantially larger profit margin for you, think again.  Unless the pool you're currently on is either stealing or charging outlandish fees or has some kind of bug, you're not going to move to another pool and suddenly think, "Eureka!  I'm making 100% more here!"

As for personal preference, I mine on p2pool.  I suggest you take a look at the p2pool thread to get some more info on how it works and see if it is a fit for you.  It is for me, and here's why:

1) I like to have control.  I don't want some other entity to hold my coins, or have to deal with payout thresholds, or withdrawal fees, or any of that.  When a block is found, I get newly minted coins.
2) Decentralization.  Unlike other pools where you've got everything controlled under one banner, with p2pool, anybody anywhere can fire up a node and be part of the network.
3) Payouts.  I mentioned this in my first point, and wanted to state it again.  I like the fact that as soon as a block is found, I get those nice, shiny, newly minted coins in my wallet.
4) No punishment for hopping around.  In p2pool, it doesn't matter if I mine on my node or anyone else's.  Every share I find goes onto the share chain, which every other node uses.

Hmmm... a per-block estimate.  Let's see.  First, we're going to have to make a few assumptions:

1) All shares are equally weighted
2) The pool maintains a constant 1PH/s rate
3) The share difficulty remains a constant 3.5M
4) The miner's hash rate is 1TH/s
5) The miner has been hashing for at least 3 days (so that he's got a full spread in the 8640 shares considered for payout)
6) Shares are added to the chain constantly on the p2pool network every 30 seconds
7) This miner is not the one finding blocks (i.e. he doesn't get the block finder's bonus)

Obviously as the above assumptions are changed, the results of this would also be changed.

First, let's calculate the expected time to find a share to see how many shares we can expect to have on the chain at any given time:


So, it would appear that we'll have 17 shares on the chain.  Now let's see the per-block reward:


So, with all of the given assumptions, you would expect about 0.04894385BTC per block.

Now, let's be perfectly clear here - my assumptions are NOT an accurate reflection of reality.  Specifically, shares are weighted, and share difficulty is constant fluctuating.  In other words, take the above with a grain of salt.  If you want to see how you're doing compared to how you should be doing, look at your node's efficiency rating.  If it's around 100%, you're good to go.  Above 100% you're doing a bit better than you should be.  Below 100% and you're doing a bit worse.

Thanks for the reply so far.  I think you actually cleared quite a bit of it up when you said it was an MPOS pool.  As you stated, you can easily setup whatever fee structure you want, so 25% goes to "jackpot" wallet, 0.25% goes to your own wallet and 0.75% goes to some "node maintenance" one.  Easy enough... then you just setup the pool for PPLNS and you're good to go.

I suppose I should have stated "increased variance in finding shares".  Regardless of your hash rate, the higher the difficulty, the fewer the shares you would expect to find.  Now, overall you might find your payout variance decreasing because the pool finds more blocks.

As you state, the guys with the low hash rate suffer the most, but that has always been the case here, and is what has prompted a ton of discussion throughout this thread: how to cater to the "little guys".  The definition of the "little guy" is a moving target, though .

p2pool supports the stratum protocol, so when you connect, you can either use stratum+tcp:// or http://.  As for why you're still getting coin, it's completely dependent upon how long shares remain valid on the chain.  For example, in Bitcoin, each block pays out the previous 8640 shares - which is 3 days worth of shares.

And we've come full circle on the inherent problem of p2pool - increased variance the higher the pool hashing rate becomes.  We're seeing it happening now with share difficulty between 3 and 4 million.  People are noticing not only fewer found shares, but also drops in expected payouts.

With the higher overall hash rate of the pool, each share you submit carries a lower weight.  Additionally because of the higher hash rate, the share difficultly goes up, meaning you submit fewer shares.  For example, let's assume a scenario where p2pool expects to find 1 block every 24 hours.  You have 1TH/s mining, and the pool has 500TH/s total.  If everything follows the expectations, you should earn just about 0.02902BTC every time a block is found.  Now, let's say the pool goes up to 1PH/s total.  Share difficulty adjusts to maintain the 1 share / 30 second rule.  Also share weights are adjusted.  Again, assuming everything is going to expectations, your expected payout per block drops by half because now p2pool expects to find 2 blocks a day.  So, now you'll see 0.01451BTC expected payout.  This still translates into your expected daily earnings to be right where they should at 0.02902BTC.

Hope this helps.

I don't believe I'm looking at this in a negative way, and if it came across that way, I apologize.  I am, however, looking at this in a confused way, so please bear with me.

Based on your last post, it seems that you're running a standard p2pool node and trying to add on this extra "gambling" functionality.  This is where I am confused.  Every p2pool miner, no matter on which node they mine, is still submitting shares to the share chain.  If I moved from my node to windpath's to OgNasty's to yours, it wouldn't make any difference to my earnings because the share chain remains constant on every node.

The only way you, or any other node operator, can dictate a reduction in a miner's earnings is by charging a fee.  Therefore, any income your node has to award is based solely on this fee.  You mention that a miner would earn 74% of normal, with a chance to win an extra 25%.  The remaining 1% would be kept by the node (0.25% going to you personally and the remaining 0.75% to the node for operational expenses).  In order to accomplish this, the only way I know is that you are charging a 26% fee on your node.

If that is a correct assessment, then you've got a pretty interesting concept.  You've also got a ton of work to do to maintain the gambling aspect.  You'll have to keep a database of all miners that have connected to your node, which stores the miner's address, the timestamp they started mining, the timestamp they stopped mining and all shares they submitted on your node during that timeframe.

Regardless of the technical details on how to manage the miners who have connected, whether or not they are registered to be a part of the contest, etc, I still have questions on the implementation you've outlined:

1) What is this "fair GH" formula you outline?  This is not how p2pool pays a miner.  This is more akin to a PPS pool.  So if you are running a p2pool node, then effectively what you're doing is not what I described in my initial paragraph, but rather mining 100% to the node's wallet and then manually making payouts to registered users based upon your formula.  Since there's no guarantee that p2pool will find a block a day, it's no wonder you need seed coin to make this happen.  You're asking early adopting miners to give up not 26% of their income, but virtually 100% of it until such time that there is enough coin in the node's wallet to afford paying out.  When does that period end?  What constitutes "enough" coin in the node's wallet?  For example, let's say you've started this with just 300GH/s.  Currently, in ideal conditions you'd expect to mine 0.008703BTC a day.  If in our example, that's the only miner that ever connects, how do you make a payout if p2pool goes 2 or 3 days without finding a block?  Now what happens when a miner with 3TH/s joins?  There's not enough coin to pay that miner.  Could you please explain how you intend to handle situations where the hashing power is constantly changing?

2) How do you determine a 90% mining rate?  When a user registers, is that user expected to tell you how much hashing power he is contributing?  For example, let's say that I join with 1TH/s.  I keep that hashing away on your pool for 2 days.  Halfway through the third day, I drop 500GH/s (a few of the boards on my miner died, boo!).  Now it would appear that on day 3 I am hashing at less than the required 90% rate.  What do you do in such a case?  Do I get disqualified for that day's potential winnings?  From my perspective, I'm still pointing 100% of my hashing power to your pool, unfortunately, it is 50% less than it was previously.

3) What defines a 24 hour period?  Is it from the time a miner connects, or a fixed point in the day.  You mention that a miner must join prior to 1200h EDT to be included in the following day's drawing.  So, if I happen to join at 1201h, I must wait 47 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds until I am eligible?

I apologize for the long-winded post.  As I stated, I think you've got a pretty interesting concept, but I'm struggling to understand its implementation.  Thanks in advance for your replies.