The EU pool on Eligius has been having bad luck recently.  Only two blocks solved in the past week!  Average should be about 3-4.

It's a pretty small pool, so you are going to have runs of good or bad luck like this.  When the luck is better you will make a lot, when the luck is bad, not so much.

You could switch to a larger pool (even the US Eligius pool if you have good connectivity to US) or just wait it out.


 

Sounds like you badly need NoScript.  More than most, in fact, with a netbook and limited battery capacity.


This is exactly why you need NoScript.  All that "dynamic content" is running scripts and draining your battery.  If you need it, fine, turn it on.  NoScript does not disable all scripts, only the ones you decide you don't want.


Does your A/C have an on-off switch?


Waiting for untrusted web site operators to do the right thing is going to be disappointing for you.

http://noscript.net/

There is no reason why a web site doing this is any worse than a web site doing anything else with JavaScript, Java, Flash, Silverlight, etc.  If your browser lets people run programs on your computer, they will.  If you don't like it, disable it with noscript, complain to your browser developer that they shouldn't allow unfettered scripts by untrusted web sites. 

One browser feature I'd like to see is allow untrusted web sites to run scripts for only a second or two per user interaction.  Video players would need to use HTML5 video or get permission from the user for long-running scripts.

Eligius has been really lucky today (7 blocks in 24 hours -- average should be about 4).  A few days ago it was really unlucky (no blocks in 24+ hours).  That's how it goes with these moderate-sized pools.

There could be a problem.  The issue is that difficulty would go up, but once difficulty goes up too much, it never comes back down.  Because it's not worth it to mine, and difficulty only resets after ~2000 blocks.

It might be better if the difficulty were to adjust every N days or M blocks whichever comes first, but that's not the case now (with BTC or namecoin).

There is no lower bound.  

It all depends on how useful (or alternately desirable for non-utilitarian reasons) it is.

Thought exercise:  If the sun went out, how much would BTC be worth?  Answer = zero.  

Thought exercise #2: Some strictly-better crypto currency comes along and no one cares about BTC even as a collectable.  How much is BTC worth?  Answer = zero.

No lower bound.

Anybody going to do this?  If not, please send me the time series or a script to extract it from the block chain and I will post the results.

+1 JohnDoe

Yes I do but I don't have 10K and I've been selling to my regular customers first.   Next batch you can have, okay?

How is that going to work?

Bump, price increase.  Seems like there is decent demand for these in the 375-400/BTC range.

You have to realize that any argument that follows that script is lost, right?

Especially when you are responding to someone who actually demonstrated way above average understanding of pooled mining payout methods.  Think about how it looks from the perspective of miners who don't understand these things half as well as "anon4758," and you will understand why people like proportional.

I don't know how popular PPS is.  It seems like it must have a pretty significant appeal if anyone uses it given the fees that are charged for it, and the fact that people still post saying, "I'm using PPS on such-and-such pool, how can I make more monies?"

If it weren't for the block withholding attacks, PPS might be more popular (and less expensive).

Also, given how people start freaking out every time the PPS rate "drops" because the difficulty goes up, PPS is not necessarily as "simple" as proportional.  "We work together to solve blocks and divide them up according to effort" is about as easy to understand (or so people think!) as it gets.

Okay, yes.  Thank you for the explanation. 

Not if you take other measures to disperse hashing power on the network (as I mentioned earlier by requiring them to register).  If you limited the fraction of blocks any one miner is allowed to solve over time, it doesn't matter if they are using a GPU or not.  They can run a GPU for a small amount of time per day or a CPU for the entire day. Either way they are going to have the same amount of control over the network.

No I'm afraid I'm not really following.  Can you explain your payout method more clearly, from start to finish?

It seems hard to make that argument in this context.  If people wanted to maximize expectation, they would just solo-mine and avoid pool fees, pool downtime, stale shares, etc.  In most cases the variance is extremely "large" but in absolute terms the amount of money involved for a hobby miner is small enough that it doesn't really matter.   

I will grant that many hobby-scale miners don't understand this and don't act that way in practice.


True.  But still you are ignoring mental accounting costs.  People like equal shares because they are simple and easy to understand.  If you are hoping for pool participants to understand game theoretic indifference, you're going to be disappointed.  The constant push back (even if mathematically incorrect) over score-based pools being "unfair" should be ample illustration of this.

My suggestion would be to start with what you like, and then invite people to make requests. 

If you can make a success of it at least centered around  the clothing that you are passionate about, you're going to do a lot better than trying to be everything to everyone.  That doesn't mean you never sell anything that isn't your personal style, although that can work too if you have good taste.

If you are going to run the system yourself, just do an online bank with book entry.  Cheaper and easier.

The point of mining is to distribute the transaction processing where no one controls it and therefore everyone can trust it.

I don't really understand that but it sounds like you are distributing them.  Can you clarify this:

When the pool solves a block, are you dividing up 50 BTC among the miners or are you dividing up (for example) 50 + 0.89428576 BTC among the miners?