And yes, I would have been better off keeping the bitcoins in my pocket...  but hindsight is 20/20, and prophecy is impossible in the world of money.

I'm sure you're thinking of a 10% return in 2 years, not 110%.  Except that 10% in 2 years is absolutely exceptional.

Most mutual funds managed by The Vanguard Group have a 10% return in 5 years.  This is some serious money in some of the hottest growth sectors, coupled with a couple of advertising tricks common to mutual funds that artificially inflate the return statistics.

https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/vanguard-mutual-funds-list

Let's take my main Pyramining account into consideration here...  http://pyramining.com/account/browse?id=6nak28t7

I've got an average completion of 3% on 1.53btc.

The day I joined, July 21st, 2013, the price was $85/btc at coindesk.

Assuming (incorrectly) that I deposited all of my bitcoins on that day, that means that I would have paid ~$130.

Today, that 1.53btc is worth ~$482.

That is a 370% increase in value over one and a half years.

However, since I deposited my money into Pyramining, this means that I have $15.75 available, from the 0.05btc that I've been paid.  (Don't worry, I re-invest it into another Pyramining account further up the chain. I'm not foolish.)

That means that over a year and a half, I've gotten 12% ROI.

That is exactly in line with the top performing mutual funds at the top performing mutual fund company... without the bullshit tricks that mutual fund managers use to make their funds looks more profitable in retrospect.

I can expect 100% ROI in 10 years, a whole 10 years shorter than billionaires typically expect their 100% ROI.

Not sure if this is a Poe or not...  If so, nice one, it's a great touch to completely fail to capitalize.

If it's not a Poe...  well...  ignore my jibe about capitalization, since that's really not part of the conversation.

The rest of my post assumes that this isn't a Poe.  (I really can't tell if it's a Poe or not, so if it is, congratulations!)

When Pyra cashes out the bitcoins so that he can pay for the mining equipment, the rent, and the electric bill, he has to convert it to fiat currency.  (He happens to convert them to US dollars).

Within days of getting your deposit, it has a set price.  Today, that price would be around $320, depending on the exchange.  2 years ago, that was $13.

Pyra also can't travel to the future to pick up equipment that hasn't been made yet.  This means that 2 years ago, Pyra was buying FPGAs.

$13 worth of FPGA equipment 2 years ago would have brought anyone about 40MHash/sec.

Today, that $13 would buy an ASIC, and would earn you about 19.2GHash/sec.

1 bitcoin 2 years ago gave Pyra the ability to buy 40MHash/sec.  Today, 1 bitcoin gives Pyra the ability to buy 480GHash/sec.

Yes, the price of bitcoins has changed over the past 2 years.  If Pyra had somehow created the mining pool without spending any BTC at the market prices that were available at the time, then perhaps it might be somewhere close to possible within some related alternate reality that we'd consider the investment purely in BTC.

However, the fact that Pyra has promised an eventual 110% return on the BTC without adjusting for fiat conversions is already well above and beyond the call of duty.

Also, I just noticed this line...

Which means that if you sell now, you can get $14.56 worth of BTC back.

You can double your investment today!  With the 0.04 you've already been paid, your $13 worth of BTC from 2 years ago can now be worth $27!

2 years ago, the price of Bitcoins was about $13.

Today, 0.04btc is roughly $13.

You made your money back in 2 years.  That is an AMAZING investment return, considering that the vast majority of (legal) investments using fiat currency don't see a 100% return for 10 to 20 years IF they see any returns at all.

And now you're boo-hooing that your $13 that you paid 2 years ago isn't performing as well as $350 would today?

Go ahead and talk to a lawyer.  I'm sure they could use a good laugh.

@Pyra:

I'm chomping at the bit for referrals to reopen, because I believe that Pyramining is back to being a good service again, one which I can recommend to friends.

My opinion on points 1 and 2:

I can see the need for the change, although in my opinion there should have been an opt-in option.

In order to reconcile the goals of the pre-change structure with the new structure, I would say to assign all of the old accounts a blanket hash/BTC rate, based on the date of the switchover.  (Take the total hashrate at the time of the switch, the total active deposit amounts, and divide the hashrate by deposit amounts to make the base hash/BTC rate.) 

Then, after the switchover, any new deposits would be considered acceptance of the new TOS, and applied the new, current scheme of hash/BTC (currently at 256Ghash/BTC) to each deposit.

Finally, apply the surplus hashrate equally on a hash/BTC rate.  (By surplus I mean any new hashrate that hasn't been applied to a deposit yet, as well as any hashrate from old equipment that is "retired" from completed deposits, but the equipment is not yet decommissioned due to being less efficient than the exchange rate/difficulty allows.) This way, small but recent deposits don't get huge rewards (they're already being rewarded simply by being recent; there's no need to reward them for being small as well) which will allow old, large deposits to clear the system more quickly (which is the point of the "last 10" scheme currently in use) which will lead to clearing out even more "retired" hashrate for use by younger and smaller deposits.

And keep a tally of the "retired" hashrate.  As equipment gets decommissioned or fails, pull it out of the surplus pool so that nothing is being over-promised.  (On the same vein, there is no reason to undersell hashing, since it's actual earnings that are divided among investors, rather than true hashrates.  The hashrates are simply there to give a general guideline about what might be expected in a non-variable system.)

On points 3 and 4:  I agree completely.  Let's not lop off the top of the trees in some idiotic attempt to potentially benefit the bushes.  Socialism works by uplifting the base; it was communism that failed by attempting to limit the top.  If there's some ceiling to investments after which they get suspended, nobody will want to invest, and we won't get the benefits of new hardware. (I'll talk more in my rebuttal of point 6.)

On point 5: YES.  We can't have multi-level-marketing without referrals.

6:  I agree that it is universally unpopular.  I also don't believe that it will allow anyone to get anything back, because all of the capital is invested in hardware.  All dividends come directly from mining.  There is nearly no liquidity.

Rather, I propose that we stay the course, because to do anything else would lead to failure.  New investments must be encouraged, yet we can't allow old investments to hit a cap before they fully mature.

As it stands right now, any mining equipment bought today is expected to bring about 75% ROI based on BTC only.  This works in fiat because BTC is a deflationary commodity; investments in mining equipment will continue to earn a real profit using more stable currencies rather than commodities. 

Tangent: Individuals are foolish to buy mining equipment directly; rather the smart option is to buy BTC directly and let the market price rise.  For instance, buying 1 BFL 5.5Ghash Jalapeno at the start of their pre-order period (which turned out to be incredibly stupid due to their delays) would have netted a person about 1BTC.  If bought in fiat, that gives a profit of about $400.  However, if you'd have bought $200 worth of BTC at the time ($13/BTC), you'd be seeing about $9,500 in profit.

Back to the point: Pyramining guarantees 110% return on BTC deposits, regardless of fiat exchange rates, with the tradeoff being that a person needs to be patient; it could take years to see your investment mature.  (Keep in mind that brick-and-mortar companies and established e-tailers don't expect 100% ROI for at least a decade, so 5 years to 110% is AWESOME, besides the point that the value of BTC will also appreciate greatly in that time.)  Because the difficulty continues to climb at exponential rates, Pyra's pool needs a constant influx of new hardware, and will continue to need new hardware until difficulty growth levels out.

That is, every deposit made today will eventually have a hashrate that is (comparatively) so low that it would take decades to see the deposit mature.  In order to keep the account active so that an account's older deposits will complete within reasonable times, new deposits must be made to that account.  Eventually, when the difficulty settles down as the market finally gets saturated with the most efficient of ASICs, accounts won't need new deposits in order to keep a reasonable earning rate, but I'm predicting that it will be years before this happens.

This isn't the fault of Pyra; it's the nature of the 110% return on BTC deposits and the fact of the difficulty climbing.  Pyra is doing a good job of managing the current storm, and of encouraging new deposits so that the entire structure doesn't fail...  however I can see room for improvement.

First, rather than the oldest 10 bonus, I would argue for a blanket, BTC-based bonus on all deposits.  This will prevent the appearance of bias, and falls more in line with what the original investors signed up for.  Second, it must be very clear that old, large deposits will not be capped, stopped, halted, paused, held, nerfed, gimped, or otherwise penalized.  The whole point of Pyramining is to bring deposits to maturity.  If anything threatens even the most exceptional and rarest deposits, then it creates doubt in the minds of everyone about the safety of their own deposits, and people will not reinvest.

And a new point, #7:

Bring back statistics.  Yes, some statistics were depressing, especially as we were waiting for the new ASICs...  however, we could have a "your estimated maturity date could become yyyy-mm-dd if you deposit XXbtc" somewhere in the statistics, that would encourage new deposits and reinvesting.

Ad-funded faucets are advertising fraud.

A quick synopsis:

bit777's sites were unfairly reviewed.
askplace dodged the accusation.
bit777 lost his temper and cussed.
askplace resorted to ad hominem attacks.

Neither bit777 nor askplace were great people in the thread.  Woop-de-doo, it's the Internet.  Take-away lesson: askplace probably isn't the most professional of people, but there's nothing saying that he'd scam anyone outright.  Participate according to your own conscience.

Payment confirmed.  It was a pleasure!

http://pastebin.com/v602h3Ha

wp2pgmail-validate.js

Lines 35 and 36 need to be edited by you, depending on how your form is set up.

These are from the "name" properties of the input tags.  An easy way to find this is, using Chrome, right click the text field, then select "Inspect element".  This will bring up a parsed source code view, and will highlight the line with the input tag.  Look for name="wp2pgpmail-asdf-1234".

The order does not matter, and if there are any other fields that need to be kept from becoming part of the encrypted message, add the names there as well.

Also, I'm not sure if you've done this already, but to have the "reply-to" in the email be set correctly so that you can just hit your Reply button, edit your form, then under Form Settings, and under Email, set the "User's Name" field to the name field in your form, and the "User's Email" field as well.  Make sure that both fields are set to "required" and that the email field has validation set to "Email".

I believe that this covers everything.  If not, please feel free to pester me again.

166XA8Kq3Dv4DVS6vnvzRotpmJovycWd7w

There is good news:  The hashrate of the pool is dropping again.  You'll get more shares more often.

However, there seems to be some bad news:  The hashrate of the pool is dropping again.  There won't be as many blocks found as often.

The p2pool server daemon itself sort-of does this already, since it connects to multiple other nodes.  Having a node in your own network is the lowest latency solution for the vast majority of people, and even if a front end existed that would find the lowest latency public p2pool node for you, it would take about as much work to set up and maintain as the actual p2pool daemon takes.

I could see a use for this, though, if you couldn't guarantee the availability of your p2pool node even within your own network and didn't want to statically assign a list of backup nodes into your miner.  Still, it's one more point of failure, unnecessary complexity, and you'd still better have a static list in case your auto-connect front end fails.

With P2Pool, yes, each share below the P2Pool difficulty is wasted.

P2Pool's definition of proof of work is when you create a P2Pool blockchain block.  While using P2Pool, you can create a block on the Bitcoin blockchain without creating a block on the P2Pool blockchain (well, the P2Pool block would be created, but it would be orphaned).

Unless you were part of a sub-pool that used a P2Pool node for its main income, then redistributed the income out to the contributors, then the shares below P2Pool's difficulty are only useful for statistical purposes.  This is NOT the same as putting your Bitcoin address as the username when connecting to a P2Pool node.

I got it from this post by astutiumRob:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.msg3244309#msg3244309

That's the formula that yurtesen was having trouble with.

That's about 71% of 180, not 30% of 180.

If you want to get technical, the best difficulty is 32,768 regardless of your local hashrate, because unless about a third of the users dropped out of the network, the difficulty per P2Pool share won't drop that low.  Every share found below the current P2Pool difficulty is useful only for local statistics.  Unless you're implementing a sub-pool that has a different share tracking method, those shares are wasted.

3 * 60 * .3 == 54
Powers of 2: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64...

64 would probably be a good idea, but you'd get slightly less variance with 32.  Then again, since you don't get a share until around 50,000, there's no point in setting the local difficulty lower than you have to, unless you want the most accurate statistics possible... but then you can just use your mining software to see what your singles are actually doing.

Short answer: 64

Withdrawals are automatic when a person's account has earned 0.1BTC, or, if the account is nearly complete and it crosses the 0.1BTC threshold, it will delay that withdrawal until the account is complete.

Warning: Wildly inaccurate numbers ahead!  Use the concept, not the numbers.

Let's say that you deposited 1BTC, and your reward is 110%.  Complete Reward time is currently listed at 56 months...  which will go down when new hardware comes online and will go up when the network difficulty changes.

But, let's assume the reward time remains constant.

This means that in 5.1 months, you'll get a payment of 0.1BTC, and will continue to get the same payment 11 times total.  If the final payment were for 0.1001BTC, then you'll have to wait the extra day for that extra 0.0001 to come in.

If you deposited 10BTC, you'll be getting a payment roughly every 14 days...  100BTC == roughly every day and a half.

The best thing for cosmicboy to do in this case is to post the JS file publicly, rather than to PM people.

That way, the person who fixes it first gets the bounty, and cosmicboy doesn't have to wait around for a slow developer who he put his (misguided) faith in.

Both parts require access to the JS file, since the PHP never sees the unencrypted values.

Also, the "free" version on the wp2pgpmail site is not the same version that was posted to Pastebin.  Your version is 2.4.1, and the free version is 1.4.  (This probably doesn't matter, but it does server as a nice FYI, no?)