Makes sense. But what about the case in which I'm brute forcing a private key. And my machine is the only one working on the problem. At some point in time a million bajillion years from now I would expect to have been able to try all possible combinations. Now assuming there is only one matching private key, it would be possible to find that key on the very last sequence tried. What is the CDF? Would 50% CDF be half that time, in this case?

Thanks for your explanations. Very lucid.

What would perfectly average mining look like? In a perfectly average world we would be finding 1.x something blocks per day and the CDF would always be 50%, right? And the only thing changing that number would be a change in our pool Thps or a change in the mining difficulty.

CDF is definitely not linear. Seems you can get really close to the limits of the scale but never quite reach them. We can mine the snot out of blocks, seemingly forever, before finding one and be somewhere in the 99.x% CDF. It's close but never quite 100%. A pool (not this one:) could mine for a month before finding a block and the CDF would still only be 99.x% only a little closer to 100%.

And what about the other end of the scale? If you find the next block on the very first hash you try, would this equate to exactly 0% CDF? Thanks

Thanks. That was my mistake, forgetting there are way more than just a single solution when using vanitygen.

If I run Vanitygen to look for a unique address and I hit 50% CDF during the calculations, does this mean I have tried 1/2 of the possible hash combinations for that unique address? So, at most I will spend an equal amount of time hashing the rest of the possible combinations before finding a solution, assuming the solution is the very last hash I try.

Am I also correct in my understanding that BTC mining CDF works a little different because the block we are all trying to solve changes every 10 minutes? So if I am solo mining and hit 50% CDF, I am not guaranteed to solve a block in another increment of time equal to the first 50%. In fact I may never solve a block in which case my CDF gets closer and closer to 100% but never quite reaches it.

In the first case CDF seems like a linear function and in the second case CDF seems very non-linear.

I tried searching for the answer without much luck.

I would not mine here. I have .6 th. That's like an extra 8.333% donation (not that donations are bad or anything). But with so little hash I'll never find a block. I'm here for the 'pool' aspect of the pool.

It's like adding the Perk, 'Feeling Lucky'
Donations required - 8.333%.

I'm not feeling that lucky. But perhaps if all the people that worked a two hour shift were to pool 'their' blocks...

Now Koi has found 2/3rds of the blocks with only 1/6th of the entire pool's hash rate. Everyone here except Koi is a free loader! Period!

I will never find a block. I may be the biggest slacker there is. Should I stay and keep mining? Should I suspect my hardware? Should I do the right thing and leave? Or, even better, quit mining all together and save the electricity/planet?

I have thought a lot about it before. Maybe the work I've submitted is valuable because it allowed someone else to receive work that did find a block. This would justify everyone's existence, even Multipool's. That's the reason for pooled mining. The results may not prove it in the short term. But in the long term they would.

Or maybe he left because it IS such a toxic community. Mining is very nerve racking when so much money is at stake. And it brings out the worst in people. But you have to understand the statistics. There's always a chance someone has bad hardware/software, but there's a far greater chance that everything is normal and luck is just not on our side at the moment. People are acting more like irrational wild gamblers in Vegas than the technical, educated, hard working, (and friendly) people that i know you are.

And what about the rest of you foolios? Five blocks in five days? And Koi found most of them. Come on! He should be saying the same things about having to carry the weight of the rest of us right now.

I'll probably never find a block myself. That's why I joined a pool. I want to see the pool increase in size, not decrease. It's the decreasing pool size that will bring on more of the same periods of bad luck.