Wow... I just barely made enough to cover electricity in the last 24 hrs and I'm running FPGAs and a Raspberry Pi.  I need to get solar power or something.

I swear this topic comes up every now and then because... well like you said, it sucks to be punished (e.g. kicked when you're down).

I want to elaborate a bit and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong.  The key to all this is really variance.  The way scoring is done on Slush's pool is subject to variance and it's much more evident on slower miners and less so (but still present) on faster/more powerful ones.  So what does variance have to do with being punished???... a lot.

Take for example if you're disconnected in the beginning of one of those crazy 7 hour rounds and 1 hour later you manage to fix your router, USB hub, whatever... At the end of that round you're actually not penalized that hard because what's 1 hour worth of shares compared to 6 hours of shares (and plus your score is isn't hit badly because you've been continuously mining for the last 6 hours of the round).

Now take the counter example.  You disconnect for 1 hour (same amount of time as before) but instead 4 rounds go by (a 5 min, 30 min, 15 min, and 10 min).  You just missed out on 4 different payouts.  Remember, on Slush you're paid based on the rate you contribute, so you usually get the same pay for large rounds as you do for short ones (again with some variance).

Contrast the two examples and what you get is HUGE variance in punishment.  You can get punished a little bit  or a lot.  While it's true that it averages out in the long run, the "long run" is a really really long time.  For someone who isn't down that often... say only once a month at most... you catch one bad break and you'll need at least 2, 3, or 4 lucky breaks to "even out".  I figure that most people don't catch as many lucky breaks as they do bad lucks as they haven't really been mining all that long (I speak from experience as both of the above scenarios have happened to me, plus I'm a low hash rate miner and I haven't mined that long).  You really can't compare this to something like PPS because they're two different scoring mechanism.  It's like comparing apples and oranges.  PPS just doesn't punish you the way Slush's scoring does.

So.... Why stay on Slush?  The reason is the same. While you get heavily punished for disconnections during short rounds, you can also get highly rewarded in short rounds (if you're always connected and mining).  As a slower/weaker hashing miner you get paid the same in short rounds as you do in long rounds (again with a little variance) and with lots of short rounds, you get paid more on Slush than if you're being paid PPS in the same period (partially due to the high pool fees associated with PPS pools). 

Really all that's left now if for someone to do some really hard number crunching.  Basically someone needs to look at the current difficulty, the percentage of Slush's pool hashing power as compared to the rest of the pools (and remaining hashing power not attributed to a pool) and generate a standard deviation curve for round duration.  Using the round duration curve against someone's hashing power, one can calculate their payout probability curve (per a given duration, say 24hours).  You can take that curve and mark that against what other pool's PPS rates are and then determine if the probability of earning a greater amount on Slush's pool vs other pool's PPS rate is statistically worth staying on Slush.

On long rounds like the 3+ hour ones disconnecting for a few minutes won't matter as long as it's at the beginning of the round.  Now if it's a short round or you disconnect near the end of the round then you lose out big time!  But... that's how Slush's anti-pool hopping rewards system works.

I'm also running around 1.6Gh and here's what I've been getting:

18958   2013-07-05 15:50:22   3:10:51   56002768   4102   0.00180373   244940   25.33712441    60 confirmations left
18957   2013-07-05 12:39:31   0:04:38   1348242   103   0.00185563   244919   25.00910000    39 confirmations left
18956   2013-07-05 12:34:53   1:19:39   23519214   1678   0.00153073   244916   25.06413957    36 confirmations left
18955   2013-07-05 11:15:14   0:09:40   2823303   210   0.00190709   244905   25.08810000    25 confirmations left
18954   2013-07-05 11:05:34   1:27:29   25736694   1858   0.00181915   244903   25.28290685    23 confirmations left
18953   2013-07-05 09:38:05   3:03:50   53744650   4067   0.00187024   244896   25.21930000    16 confirmations left

Those 3 hr plus rounds aren't exactly helping anyone's rewards  

With the long rounds the PPS reward system might give you better results but overall I find that I earn more on Slush.  I'm too lazy to do the hard math right now, but in general Slush's reward system is ratio based (with aging to prevent pool hopping) so you can see that my results between round #18958 (0.00180 BTC) which was 3+ hours and #18957 (0.00185) which was 4+ minutes was about the same.  Now with PPS (on BTCGuild for example) you would get ~ 0.00444 BTC for round #18958 based on what their PPS rate is, but for #18957 you would have received 0.00011 which gives you about 0.00455 BTC versus Slush which gave 0.00365 BTC.  Not that great if you look at it.  However, if the rounds start getting shorter then you would start making more because a couple of short rounds like #18957 and  #18955 would earn you significantly more (e.g. 0.00185 vs. 0.00011 per round which is an order of magnitude more).  Since this is all still luck based, there is no set time to wait until rates are more representative.  I can only say wait and see.  Well, at least that's how I understand it.  I'm sure the more knowledgeable folks on here will do a better job explaining the results and correct me where I'm wrong.  There's probably a duration someone can calculate statistically with 95% certainty that you'll see more "representative results", but I'm guessing that's probably a large number.

It seems that payments from confirmations have stopped as well.  Damn.

Well, funny that you mention it....
The stratum address should work except the pool is experiencing some issues right now (i.e. it went down for a lot of people not too long ago).  I'd wait until slush fixes things before giving the stratum address another go.  Also you can use direct IP if there's some name resolution issues going on.

Same here... switched failover pool for now.

Why don't you use:

stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333

so your command line would be like the following:

./cgminer -o http://stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 -u username.workername -p password -I 12 --temp-cutoff 80

16TH? It's now at 18.4TH... so crazy.

I feel the same way.  With the pace at which the Hash rates are increasing, I just don't have enough funds to acquire the hardware to keep mining with a reasonable profit margin.  I'm guessing I'll have to shutdown buy the end of the year since I probably won't make enough to offset the cost of electricity and I'm running FPGAs.  I wonder how hard this is hurting the GPU miners. This is pretty depressing   and in the long run, such a huge jump might actually be detrimental to the bitcoin economy.  I know many people compare this to the switch from CPU mining to GPU mining, but that's somewhat different.  In the case of going from CPUs to GPUs, GPUs are readily available at any computer store.  ASICS on the other hand are hard to acquire.  Look at the questionable bidding wars over the erupter blades and USBs.  GPU prices never got that out of hand.  This huge jump could in fact alienate many newcomers and result in the dissolution of the bitcoin network.

I got the Lancelot FPGA(s) from BlackArrow @ www.cardreaderfactory.com

Each FPGA does ~ 400 MH and sells for $350 USD.  Unfortunately, they ship from Hong Kong so the shipping is a bit steep @ $70 USD.  Of course, you'd want to get the most out of your shipping so you'd get multiple items at once.  As for the power, they sell a power brick that can power 4 FPGA(s) for $20 USD.  Each FPGA is supposed to only use ~ 28 W which is pretty good compared to GPUs @ ~100W but not as good as the USB ASICs.  Now from a value comparison, it's about $1 per MH which is on par with the USB ASICs.  However, I'd argue that if Bitcoins ever disappears, you can always resale or repurpose FPGA(s).  You can't do that with ASICs.  Note that you can't do LTC with these FPGA(s) because LTC is memory intensive (that's more for GPUs).  Anyhow, I think a batch is set to go out by June 27th so you should hit them up fast if you want some.  I've had mine for about 2 weeks now and the quality is actually quite impressive (although they could improve the fans a bit).

Damn, BlackArrow should give me a referral bonus or something

The found blocks (the blocks you found) will show up on the "My account" page near the bottom.  Then you can go to the "Statistics" page to find out the round details for the given block.

It's combined.

1 Laptop (AMD A4 APU) - 25 MH
2 FPGAs (Lancelot) - 400 MH x 2 = 800 MH

I was surprised by my luck so I've used the last of my "hobby" funds to get 2 more FPGAs.  By the end of the month, I should get another 2 Lancelot boards which should put me at ~ 1.625 GH.  I don't think I'll ever get my J from BFL   so I'm not counting that into my future Hashing increase.

Hah... you can thank me for 240790 

I'm surprised I found a block at only ~825MH and in about 4 min too.  Ain't luck a fickle mistress.

Anyone else getting some funny results with 18481 as well?

18481   2013-06-09 07:27:23   1:55:53   21128042   1295   0.00000289   0.00001035   240547   25.03220000    98 confirmations left

for comparison

18467   2013-06-08 07:46:53   1:51:32   22029843   1276   0.00133798   none   240367   25.11510000    confirmed
18455   2013-06-07 15:19:28   1:54:51   22203035   1386   0.00160477   none   240244   25.15792127    confirmed


I don't think I lost connectivity but I can't say for sure since I don't log/monitor 24/7.  It seems like the pool has been acting kinda weird with the scoring.  I wonder what's up.

Here's some more food for thought...

Assuming the difficulty doesn't increase too much (it's already climbing pretty fast) and that you're part of a fairly lucky pool (a lot of ifs), at ~300 MH you should see something like 0.01 BTC a day.

That fastest way to get pizza is to use a service that takes BTC (and charges a fee) to buy pizza because you'll have to wait a long time to hit minimum amounts to do money conversion at most exchanges.  Now let's say the pizza costs $10 and the fee is $2 @ a rate of $100 per BTC (for simplicity), you'll need 0.12 BTC.  That's 12 days at the previous rate to be able to get pizza, so 2 pizzas a month which is not bad.

However, considering that you spent 2 BTC on the hardware you could just buy yourself 16 pizzas to begin with.  That's 2 pizzas for the next 8 months.

Granted the question is GPU vs. Eruptor USB, but has anyone considered how fpga(s) stack against the Eruptor USB.  I'm actually using fpga(s) because:

1) They're similar to the Eruptor USB at ~ $1 per MH
2) They use more electricity than the Eruptor USB, but not that much compared to GPUs  (my Lancelots use 28W compared with GPUs at 100W)
3) And this is the key point for me... fpga(s) can be repurposed (assuming you know how to edit bitstreams) and have more resale value compared to the Eruptor USB.

Unless the Eruptor USB comes down more in price... it's not worth it from my viewpoint because it has no resale value and the amount of time to recover costs is not significantly better than fpga(s).

Anyhow my 2 bitcents...

It seems most people here are running GPU rigs.  That's cool if you use your GPUs to game and mine as hobby, but the profit margin is slimmer due to the high power consumption of the GPUs (unless of course, you have free electricity - solar, wind, etc.)

My hashing comes mostly from fpga(s)

1 AMD A4 Laptop - AMD Radeon 6480G - set at 25 MH @ ~ 65 W
2 Lancelot FPGAs boards - 2 Spartan 6(s) per board - 400 MH x 2 @ ~56 W combined

currently hashing at 825 MH

I've got 2 more Lancelot boards planned for the end of the month to bring me up to 1625 MH

I purchased an ASIC from BFL a month or two ago which I'll probably never see, but if by some miracle it gets to me it'll be 5 GH so.... 6625 MH

Did you also have 4 hours of online time in addition to the 5 posts?

So does the 4 hour ticker start after the 5th post or is it concurrent with account creation?  I appologize if this has already been answered.