The biggest difference between coinbase and bitcoin-qt is that coinbase is an online wallet, and has all the security vulnerabilities of being something hosted on the internet. That being said, they have pretty aggressive security and I feel confident in keeping small amounts of BTC there. Bitcoin-qt is a wallet that is stored locally, and as such, lacks many of the security vulnerabilities of an internet wallet, but you are totally and entirely responsible for its managment (e.g. if you forget your passphrase for an encrypted wallet there's no way anyone can really help you).

So really it boils down to your security comfort level. If you're comfortable with someone else holding and protecting your asset than coinbase should be fine, if you're concerned about someone else holding your assets and/or you want total control and responsibility, something like bitcoin-qt maybe more for you. Additionally, there are multiple online wallets that exist, and the arguments for and against are all analogous to the coinbase case.

Not merc, but I assume the Kanye lawsuit is going to keep it off of exchanges for the forseeable future so it may never be worth anything at all, and is probably not worth merc worrying about mining it.

Under the Auto-exchange tab on the left panel is a sub-tab called "Batches" which has a table of your values.

FYI, CRC exchange minimum on Cryptsy has been changed to 1.0, change your autopayout thresholds accordingly...

Thanks! I'll take those into account. I appreciate you taking time to respond, this pool has been aces since I got started.

Thanks for the rapid response guys! I just switched over from another auto-exchanging pool and defaulted all my wallets to Cryptsy, but I think I'll take some time this weekend and set up the other exchanges so I don't have to wait 24 hours to get some of my coins. Any other repeat offenders on Cryptsy that I should move to a different exchange.

Also, I'd like to mention that this pool is fantastic and I have yet to regret switching over even though it requires a little bit more legwork on my part.

Anyone else having issues with their NET payouts not making it to Cryptsy? It's been almost 5 hours now.

I think considering the definiton of the unexchanged balance may also clarify some of this. The unexchanged balance is an estimate of the value of a portfolio of altcoins you've previously mined which have not yet been exchanged.

Now say I'm Miner 2 (I'm not) and I mined on the US server all day Friday and we were mining a coin that was not autotrading (so my unexchanged was shooting up). Now imagine we changed the coin we were mining at some point on Saturday and you started mining on the US server at some point after. So now my portfolio has all these coins I mined on Friday that have not been exchanged yet, and your portfolio has none of these coins because you were mining on the EU server on Friday (for example). Now we mine all day and our balances grow at similar rates (as your graphs suggest they do, the slopes being fairly similar all things considered), but at the close of Saturday our portfolios are drastically different because I still have all these coins I mined on Friday that you don't have. Now if H2O decides its time to sell those coins (the ones mined on Friday), well my unexchanged plummets and my balance shoots up, but yours does not because he didn't sell the coins that were in your unexchanged portfolio.

To address your point about how Miners 2,5, and 6 returned to essentially the start of day unexchanged values, well thats likely a product of the how much unexchanged they accrued over the day that wasn't whatever coin was mined on Friday, and hence these coins acted exactly the same as yours, give or take some variability for differences in the altcoin composition of everyone's portfolio based on which days you've mined what servers in the past.

Now I don't know if this is how H2O approaches everyone's share of the unexchanged balance, and this assumes no daytrading of altcoins that squeeze out every last mBTC, but it seems like a potential explanation.

This pretty much covers it, its next to impossible to get money out of Mt.Gox so the price of BTC is artificially inflated compared to the other exchanges.

Valid point, the adjustment time could be a cause for concern, but considering how high the difficulty is currently its hard to imagine a similar scenario for BTC that isn't spurred by an event other than mining, most likely an extremely drastic crash to near zero before 90% of the miners leave the scene. And if something like that happens, well its hard to see a future for BTC regardless of how many miners leave before the difficulty changes.

I think that's the idea behind the difficulty. As global hashrate increases, the difficulty increases and the profitability of mining BTC begins to decrease because you need more hashrate to earn the same amount of BTC. This obviously costs USD in both mining hardware and power consumption. At some point it becomes unprofitable and miners shut off, and the difficulty drops again. There's really no evidence to suggest that miners shutting down would affect the price of Bitcoin negatively (assuming there are suffiicient miners to continue finding blocks), nor has the price of BTC really been correlated with the global hashrate, as far as I know (I can't back this up with any data atm).