Well that is far simpler calculation.


fair value for PPS = (current block reward) / (current difficulty) in BTC per share.

Current difficulty is 1,509,101.11 and current avg block reward is ~50 so full value for PPS share is 0.00003313 (or 3313 satoshis).
.  If pool is paying less than that then the difference as a % is an undisclosed fee.

I think you misunderstand how bitpays works.  If you want/need $100 you setup invoice to be $100, Bitpay charges customer in Bitcoins and you receive $100 (minus tx fees). No exchange risk.

Bitminter is 0% fee, pays out all TX fees and has merge mining.  It uses PPLNS (hop proof and same as triple mine).

Already asked and answered.  SHA2 (which SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512 are all part of) was optimized for speed.  It also can be easily accelerated in parallel (GPU cough cough).  While any strong hashing function is better than nothing (or trying to roll your own) you DON'T WANT AN ALGORITHM OPTIMIZED FOR SPEED.  You don't want an algorithm where it is possible for an attacker to brute force tens of billions of possible combinations per second.

bcrypt was designed to protect password files.  It is optimized to protect password files.

SSH? Remote Desktop? cgminer API?

Simpler or not you really shouldn't be trusted anyone else.  No 3rd party provides any SLA on the data (eventually Bitcoin will need something akin to a financial services company which provides data under contract for a fee).

If attacker learns you are using bitcoin.info then the attack becomes to hit bitcoin.info and change the data provided.

Make that 0-confirm look like a 6-confirm and rob you blind.   No matter how good your back end is you leave yourself vulnerable to third party attack.

Eventually I do imagine a contracted & bonded data provider using strong encryption and an API would provide commercial services but we aren't there yet.  Good business idea though.

If you currently are using prepaid cellphone/wireless/mobile broadband or planning to in the future would you be interested in a service which provides pin codes and RTR (real time recharge directly to phone #) paid for with Bitcoins?

Would you honestly use such a service?  
What if 1% of purchase price was donated to Bitcoin open source development team?
Prices would be slightly below retail (i.e. $50 prepaid PIN or RTR would be $48 to $49 equivalent in BTC)?

Pin codes would need block confirmation(s) but I think the risk of double spend is low enough on RTR to have them processed 0-confirm.

Interested? Comments?

Not much of a gamble.  Really hard to hop out such that you have -EV.  You might leave some profit on the table or hop too late so in effect you are mining for fair value part of the time.

It is less profitable but not less risky.  As greener pastures have dried up the hoppers have begun raping the crap out Slush pool.  Score was never really effective at preventing hoppers it just limited their profitability and when there were juicier targets Slush pool was "protected".

Thanks for doing that twmz.  Sadly that isn't what I wanted to hear.

While 80% over 90 days is plausible looking beyond 90 days the likelihood of such a low % becoming increasingly unlikely.

Since inception the pool has found 372 blocks.  Stats for the first block are unknown so we will exclude that.  

# Blocks: 371
Estimated shares in blocks:  619,152,160
Expected shares in blocks:  547,529,631
Lifetime Luck 87.9%
Shares per block relative to expected.  1.13x

I calculate
Actual # of blocks: 371
Expected # of blocks: 422

Mining is a possion distribution.
The odds of having 371 or less events when 422 are expected is 0.71%
http://www.sbrforum.com/betting-tools/poisson-calculator/

There is only a 0.71% chance we are just facing bad luck and a 99.29% chance something is resulting in less blocks found.

I am certain that "something" isn't malicious intent by developer however something is causing us to find less blocks than expected.

A number of theories:
a) some nodes are accidentally not submitting blocks.
b) something in the code is causing valid blocks to not be detected.
c) someone with ~40GH/s is intentionally withholding blocks to damage the network.
d) the stats are inaccurate and twmz observation is coincidental (I don't believe it just included it for completeness)
e) we are finding more blocks but they are being orphaned at a higher rate (>10%) and those orphans aren't being seen by p2pool.info node.
f) there is some bias in SHA-256 hash (unlikely but not impossible) such that low nonce values are less likely to find blocks that higher ones, due to LP p2pool searches more low nonce values
f) someone has found a method to "cheat" the p2pool reward algorithm

Note not all of these are equally likely I am just kinda brainstorming and putting down any possibility no matter how remote.

A couple suggestions:
a) found blocks should be forwarded to all nodes regardless of their staleness (this will aid in troubleshooting if nothing else)
b) some mechanism of recording the exact # of shares per round would be useful.

That being said I can no longer afford to take a 20% haircut on revenue so I will be temporarily leaving p2pool.

On edit:  I will leave one rig on p2pool using new address and attempt to gather detailed stats on shares vs payout.

+1

Pricing something higher in Bitcoins is dubious.  I mean it isn't like any of us ONLY have Bitcoins.  If something cost $x in dollars and  >$x equivalent in Bitcoins then it is merely a novelty not commerce.

You have no risk of fraud
You have no chargeback cost.
You have no discount rate.
Yet the cost is higher?

Dynamically adjust your prices to reflect current exchange rate and sell as you receive coins ... or have bitpay do all the work for you.

So I guess the whole song and dance about turning over a new leaf, acting more professional, and no longer trolling was just more bullshit.  How about you get your own house in order before insulting others?

Back on ignore (wow that is bright orange).

One could say the same thing about the Feb issue of your magazine.

why indeed?  You want to restrict the minimum size then someone adds liquidity but leave it unrestricted when they take it away?

As a potential user I would prefer software which uses the API.  If the rig becomes unstable having multiple components talking to the driver makes troubleshooting more difficult and honestly I would just uninstall anything I don't need.

Is there a good reason to not use the API?  I mean cgminer is already doing the polling (and won't stop even if you do it directly) why not just piggyback off of its data?  Plus for things like a hang w/ activity the drivers will still show load.  How are you going to detect that?  cgminer detects it because the GPU fails to respond to the next load.

>1 GH/s @ >5 MH/W will be interested.  The other good news is NVidia is being aggressive on performance & pricing.  AMD probably would have released it at $850-$900 had 890 flopped.  I don't think they can support that price anymore.  <$800?  Well a guy can hope.

I doubt you are going to find everything for $20.  Copper loops large enough to have any significant heat transfer aren't going to be cheap.  Still even if it was free this is the water my family drinks.   Not sure I want to be hooking up some salvage hot water heater of unknown origin or quality.

I fully concede that a flat plate exchange on the cold water inlet doesn't recovery 100% of theoretical energy but is does recover a good portion, is cheap and simple and doesn't require potentially contaminating the water supply.

If I went the storage tank w/ heat exchanger route I would look for something like this:
https://www.signalmarine.com/p-51907-atwood-eh-20-electric-water-heater-wheat-exchanger-20gal-110v.aspx

If someone made something like this without the backup electrical heat it likely would be cheaper.

Why?

Flat plate heat exchanger on the cold water line cost ~$50 and provides a massive Delta T to the cold water.  It recovers most of the energy needed and is both cheap and simple.  The payback period is measure in weeks.  While one can do more remember hot water isn't that expensive maybe $300 per year so complex projects start cutting into your ROI% pretty quickly.

While there are ways to recover more of the heat I just don't see them as viable.  Hacking up an old hot water heater of dubious quality, building your own radiator, running copper loop (not that cheap these days), jury rigging some water tight seals all to get maybe another 10% to 20% of annual energy budget?  It doesn't seem worth it.    I am going to keep it simple.

Because the govt taxes TRANSACTIONS.  Transactions are "usually" in the form of fiat but making them not in fiat doesn't erase the tax liability.

Say Joe The Plumber is flexible and you need pipe repairs worth $300 done.

Joe The Plumber could accept $300 USD (fiat)
Joe The Plumber could accept 9 years of VPS hosting worth $300.
Joe The Pulmber could accept Gold coin worth $300.
Joe The Plumber could accept 60 BTC (worth $300).
Joe The plumber could accept 100 gift cert good for one Burger King Whopper each (worth $300).

In each instance a $300 transaction has taken place.  Joe has gained $300 in taxable income and if the state charges a sale tax then sales tax is due on the $300 each.

Bitcoin doesn't make that magically go away and making it a digital commodity has absolutely no relevance (according to the IRS and state agencies).

cgminer is simply an engine for running open CL KERNELS.

With Intel OpenCL drivers you could simply use existing kernels however for optimal performance you would want an optimized kernel.

What I would like to see is some standardized method for pools to mark origination IN the block.  The only disadvantage would be that gives hoppers accurate information to hop with but honestly prop pools should just die.  Slush is finally given up on the broken score method and going to DGM.  Other than Deepbit that leaves what 1 or 2 pools > 100 GH/s still using prop.

A method of strongly signing blocks would make accurate stats simple and cheatproof.  In time I expect all prop pools to die off.