The weird part is that even though I bitch a bit about luck on a site like Eclipse I did the math with some spreadsheets and the payouts are right on the money for the Month of March. So it is a fine pool to use, it's just the human tendency to focus on the losses (low luck rounds) and ignore the wins (good luck rounds).

Spreadsheets and bitcoin however do not lie. Fascinating.

C

Yes. I have some from doing work for people, some from miners that I upgraded heavily myself. Doing fairly well, got a few more months before electricity eclipses at which point I will begin seriously underclocking to go for some more time.

Brain helps when mining.

What is this "ROI" thing?

C

Just spent .5 bitcoins over at Tiger Direct for a new Wii U.

Which is a bit odd since the price I paid was .4937 for a $310 item which means Bitpay is quoting 625/btc while the current price is 590 or so. Which means a really really good deal for me but odd.

We'll see if it comes over.

C

Eclipse, DGM, nice, lousy luck this week but that's fine.
Eligius: Nice bunch, takes a day to pay out with .04 payout threshold and 300gh going to it.
P2Pool: No fees, you set up.

C

What I need to do is remember to SPEND bitcoins. Spending promotes adoption, which is gooood.

C

FYI my panels are generating about 4kw per day, fed to the grid next to the shed with 225gh of hashing power.

C

Belief is irrelevant. If people contracted with a firm to produce chips, paid for development and design, then that firm does not have the right to give away/sell/whatever the resulting IP to anyone they wish. Now, I do not know the finer details of Chinese law or the appropriate terms in the agreement for these chips, however piracy of intellectual property is wrong.

You can consider it to be a moral, spiritual, what have you issue, but it is still wrong.

As for "pre sales" and the like, that is a completely separate and independent discussion from piracy. I have no interest in discussing that or confabulating the issues.

C

Strange. Are you saying that chip development should be free or be considered to have zero value because... well the chips are right there now?

Odd.

C

Technically any no fee site will have the same return in the long run. I'm bringing my systems back to 33% Eclipse, 33% Eligus, and 33% P2Pool.

The money should roll in regardless.

C

I noticed mine shut down the other day when outside temps dropped below 10f. However it's hash rate is a nice solid 36-38gh now. :-)

C

A pool where people could sell their own GH...........

That's a very interesting idea.

Can you pull all the crazy drivers and just use bfgminer? CGMiner is great and all that but it needs weird USB drivers.

C

It may end up even from a "finding blocks" point of view, but doesn't it degrade along with difficulty? IE: If I have bad luck now and good luck later they will balance out in the number of blocks found. However due to difficulty, bad luck now costs me more in absolute bitcoin than later, eventually no amount of luck will make me whole.

Or am I missing something?

Luck lasts a lifetime if you die young.

That's another good point: The problem with being in mining for me is that it's not much of a profitable venture. Actually it is explicitly impossible to make profits (long term profits) in mining because it's a perfectly elastic market or whatnot. That's a part of the reason I haven't jumped to Ants or 28nm or whatever. I'm mostly in it for the fun, learning, and to keep my house warm in the winter. :-)

There is another way to look at luck; bad luck mining could be absorbing other bad things that could be happening in my life. Losing job, kid, car, things like that are serious bad luck. If my mining is a "luck sink" for the bad joss to go to, that's oddly enough ok for me. But that is one of those woo-woo spiritual things, each roll of the dice is independent of ever other roll...

One odd thing about Eligius though: When I mined there in the beginning during the summer/fall last year they had a horrible streak of luck for the few days I was on. I think I had 50% shelved shares and I thought that sucked. So I switched to eclipse, but left eligius as my backup. And over the next few months I realized I got every one of those shares back at the value from September. Oddly enough eligius' payment system seems to transcend the concept of time coupled with difficulty. Which is very, very interesting.

C
C

Variance is fine, as long as the totals even out over a reasonable period of time. Reasonable being the 2 week block retarget period. One thought in my head though is a bad streak of luck now wouldn't be erased by an equally good stream of luck "later" because difficulty keeps creeping up. Does that skew the equations as well?

For example, if I mine a Th at Eclipse then over the past two days I have made .045btc per day due to the crap luck blocks taking 24 and 26 hours to drop. If everything was normal I would get .12btc a day, so I have .09 instead of .24. Now if everything went back to perfect normal but in two weeks I got a string of great luck to cancel out the crappy (say two days of 6 blocks a day), those six blocks would only pay .20 btc so woudl I be out of (heh heh) luck due to the underlying difficulty pop?

Never dull, thinking about this stuff. By converse though a round of good luck now is worth a lot more later. Ug....

C

Ok, I don't want to be a chump (did that with Catcoin) but I wouldn't mind throwing a few hundred gh somewhere. What's a good solid reliable p2p node I can point some stuff at while I sit down and compile the software on my NeXTStation Turbo?

I'll watch the payout for a few days.

C

Ok, I'll think about that a bit more. Hm.

Indeed. Right now I'm in just a suck pile of luck I guess, or it's a self selecting thing (if blocks drop quickly you don't notice but when a block goes long you see it for longer). We're on block 3 of the "this is taking fucking forever" but I'll give it another week before deciding that I wasted a few weeks. Which is a fallacy of course but damn it is seductive thinking.

C

I'm not sure. Technically you can't hold the answer for long; if someone else gets it you totally lose. But if you have huge hashing it might be worth it, I don't know. Then again I am probably missing something very very basic, anyone?


And that is what I am hanging my hat on right now. It's maddening, but quite true that any pool might never find a block again. Or they might find a thousand blocks in sequence. But over time everything averages out.

Even the 3%, 4%, and 70% luck I am looking at now. Everything. If not then everyone will go to one pool and that will be it for Bitcoin.

C

Not necessarily. Eclipse (no I have no connection to them really) does DGM with no fees (but they do keep the tx fees IIRC), and p2pool is no fee as well. Technically it doesn't matter if you mine with a pool or mine solo, your payout over time should be identical. However "time" can be centuries if you mine alone.

That is one question on my mind: Do large pools have any luck advantage because as they generate blocks they have a head start on the next block due to propagation delays? The advantage might be small, but if it's cumulative it could be a problem.

Also a larger pool might have a lower percentage of rejected blocks, it's small but there.

As for fees, neither eclipse or eligius charge fees, however I always seem to have 3% in my "shelved shares", and Eclipse's luck always seems to hover around 47-48%. Actually that might mean a 4-6% less payout, correct?

One of the biggest draws of Eligius for me (aside from the trust in the provider) is the stats allow me to match my system performance with what they are seeing. On Eclipse I sometimes see a bit less, and I wonder if that's due to lag, pool quality, or chance. I wish they had longer running stats so I could see what my systems were doing.

What I might do is split my 900+gh between three pools: 300 for Eclipse, 300 for Eligius, 300 for p2pool. Once Eligius comes back to a stable state, if they're having capacity problems I will point my stuff elsewhere even though it costs me a bit in that rock-solid reliability I have grown to trust.

C

C