If you pay shares on every single block you have proportional payout (subject to pool hopping abuse), not PPLNS.

Daily variance does not reduce your profit. People are constantly on here talking about how pools with significant fees are "better" for small miners. That is false. In fact they reduce profit.

Even in the case of looking at mining as a "paycheck" most people getting actual paychecks get paid once a week or every two weeks. Looking at your earnings every single day and expecting them to be some nice flat number every single day is stupid and counterproductive.

Yes I've noticed a lot of complaints. I'm suggesting to those people to chill out and have fun with it, not get so upset about things that don't really matter.

I also see a lot of theorizing about how "bad" the variance is for small miners from people I suspect are not even themselves small hobby miners. They are either not miners at all or are larger miners who are making unnecessary noise saying things that don't make real sense when you dig into the practical reality of it. They should just stop.

Don't get me wrong, if there were some way to flip a switch tomorrow and reduce variance for smaller miners I would suggest we do it, but there isn't. Mining is an exercise in tradeoffs. For hobby miners I suggest making tradeoffs in favor of having fun and helping the network rather than wanting to get a "steady paycheck" of a few dollars a day.

Yes, as a fraction of expected income but ask yourself why that even matters. If you expect to get 0.003 BTC and you get 0.002 BTC (or even in one instance 0 BTC for that matter) how is your life impacted in some major way? People can stare at numbers on a screen or lines on a chart all day long but at some point you have to relate those numbers and lines to reality, and when you do that shortfalls on hobby mining do not really matter.

Again, if the pool has a dry spell you are only losing payout on one share, which is really not that much in the way of coin. Bigger miners are losing out on many shares (if the p2pool doesn't get a block in three days). They have more to lose.

But if you really can't take the variance but still want to help p2pool, split off some of your hash rate to one or more of the bigger pools where you get (tiny, tiny) earnings on every few blocks. You'll get some small steady earnings with a nice boost when p2pool has enough luck to generate payouts.

Splitting hash is a good idea if you want to reduce variance but also help decentralization using p2pool or at least smaller pools. I set up a mining farm for a friend with some hash on p2pool and some on eligius. If there were a need to further reduce variance, I would add ghash. I would avoid the pools with fees as it is not necessary to pay fees for good pools in the current market.

At 22 GH you will still have dry spells on p2pool. As I said, though, don't worry about it, you'll have big payoff days too. Look at it every week or two and you'll be happy with the results.
 

Noticed, perhaps, if you are watching the pot boil. If you expect to make 50c/day and you make 0c/day, that looks like a big deal, but in reality your actual shortfall is still only 50c. Not going to hurt anybody.

Someone with a somewhat larger rig who expects to make $1000/day and makes $0/day (certainly possible when p2pool has 4+ day rounds), that's a $1000 shortfall, and may or may not be a big deal, depending on your financial situation.

Only if everybody does that. If only a few people do it they can fraudulently run on fractional reserve.

Roy7 is a bit math challenged. The variance in absolute terms (meaning the amount of actual coins you will be above or below expectation) will be smaller the smaller your hash rate.

If you are a very small miner you will be getting very little output no matter what. If you want to help bitcoin and also have some fun with your mining, just treat your p2pool output as a fun raffle. Every once in a while (maybe once per week, possibly more or less often) you will get a nice payout. The rest of the time you will get nothing. Either way you won't make a lot. Just relax and have fun it with.

Given the lack of transparency with most if not all of these schemes you might as well (and should) assume they are fraudulent until and unless proven otherwise.

Do not send money to anyone for any reason unless trust has been demonstrated in a transparent and verifiable way. If people followed this simple rule, these so-called mining operations as currently structured would all disappear.

"Silent" fans are mostly a scam, they just spin slower and move less air. That won't keep an ant miner at the recommended temperature; they already automatically control the fan speed.

The best things you do reduce noise are:

1. Relocate the miner where you can't hear it.
2. Reduce ambient temperature.

Refund received!

Easy. Set miner url to the IP of the p2pool node followed by 9332 (example: 1.2.3.4:9332) and set your username to your bitcoin address.

Email sent 18:47 mountain time for 5 shares with all requested information. Still no refund received.

It's more than just warnings. We know for a fact^* that the very same zip file contained wallet-stealing malware. That makes the rest of the zip very suspicious as well. You are justified in being spooked.

^* Fact in the sense that someone claimed to disassemble it and posted the code. In theory that could be fake.

Correct (assuming it has been verified to be a valid zip without some hidden executable component), but he said he also opened a PDF file. That's dangerous.

Bruno your tone is sometimes to read online but if you are serious, my answer would be to never trust that computer again until after wiping it, and be extremely cautious with any "data" files stored there.

I stopped using the site last year and withdrew essentially all of my btc when they stopped paying USD and had other issues. Was a huge red flag to me.

It all depends how fast you think the difficulty is going to go up and what you think the bitcoin price is going to do. No one can answer that for you.