They don't get "penalized" - They have no value at all until the pool solves the block.  The estimated value means just that, an estimate of what you'd get if the pool solved the block immediately afterward.

Without knowing exactly when the pool will next hit, you can't know an accurate value-per-share.  And you can't know exactly when the pool will next hit, sooo...

I see that the forums have covered the lost coin issue in general - Basically, it doesn't matter how many outright abandoned bitcoins we have - But the specific post to which I responded brings up an entirely different problem.

Consider a real-world analogy... I buy a newspaper for one dollar; To accomplish this, I tip the paperboy a nickel (a 5% "transaction fee") for the service.

He, however, wants a 10% tip, and rejects the transaction.

In the real world, the transaction doesn't happen and I still have my $1.05.  If I understand correctly, in the BTC world, the publisher doesn't gain anything, the paperboy doesn't gain anything, I don't gain anything, but I still lose my dollar?

I don't think we can just hand-wave that away as "not a problem" by talking about backups.

theymos : The network forgets about transactions if they haven't made it into a block within a few days. You could resubmit it then.  Bitcoin doesn't currently allow you to "unsend" a transaction, though, so you'd have to restore from a wallet backup to get the "stuck" coins back.

And if you don't have a backup (or only one over 100PKs ago, so you would lose other coins as a result)?

Call me crazy, but does anyone else see it as a problem that the BTC economy can and will "lose" coins over time?  From casual experimenters getting bored and abandoning their wallets, to exhausting the PKs in your wallet and then restoring from a backup, to this point you just brought up.

I don't have a problem with a fundamentally deflationary currency, but it seems like we should address this sooner rather than later - Something like revocation lists for "sufficiently idle" coins (which, as a bonus side-effect, would discourage hoarders - If you don't use it within say a decade, you lose it).

Consider, for example, the current influx of Slashdotters to the community (of which I count as one - Hey, gotta learn about everything from somewhere  ).  By all accounts, we've basically doubled the generating capacity of the network in the past week; Of the new users who have received coins (even if just from the "spigot"), how many will get bored within a year, effectively removing their assets from the economy forever?

Heya... First, thanks for a great set of RPC miners!

I have a question about the CUDA miner... I have a crappy GeForce 8400GS, which pushes about 1500kh/s.  Using it, however, brings my system to a complete crawl (almost no CPU load, but it spends 100% of its time trying to redraw windows really really slowly).

So, any way I can throttle the CUDA miner to make my system useable?  If I could have a functional system at 90% performance, I could keep it running all day rather than just at night.  I tried setting the "aggression" lower, but to no effect.

Not complaining - Thanks again for writing this - Just wondering if I might have missed a combination of settings that would help tame it just a bit.  

Thanks!

Hey all... new BitCoin fan, and I want to thank Slush for making it possible for lower-rate miners such as myself to get at least something.  (After a week of generating solo and seeing nothing, I found the online calculator and realized that I had no shot at ever seriously solving a block on my own).  

I have a question about the accounts page at mining.bitcoin.cz, though...

When I log in from my work machine, I see the correct wallet address (matching what I see in the official BitCoin GUI).  When I log in from home, I see something totally different.

Context - I first ran BitCoin from my work machine, and set up my mining account from there as well.  I keep my wallet on a thumbdrive, and last night tried setting up a miner on my home machine (that part seemed to work just fine).  But when I went to register a new worker, I saw the wrong wallet on my account page.  Wondering if I'd accidentally pasted garbage into that field at some point (or worse, if someone had hacked my account in under a day), I put my correct address back in and saved.  I then reloaded the page, and saw the "wrong" address still there, so figured it must only show a hashed value or something like that as a security measure.  But then this morning, I log in and see my "correct" wallet address.

So... Why do I see different addresses depending on where I log in from?

Oh, one more question (possibly miner-specific, but I think this actually comes from the pool server) - Most of the time, on finding a share, it tells me Server sent: {"result": true, "id": "1", "error": null}.  Every now and then it tells me Server sent: {"result": false, "id": "1", "error": null}.  Does that "false" in the JSON data actually mean anything?

Thanks!