You are talking to a stone wall. I tried convincing people to stop mining proportionally a year ago
& they would just give their stupid rationale of "I have my freedom of choice and I think this is the best model".

Let them lose money to scammers, or should I say 'predators'. It's the natural order in the real world, it apparently applies in bitcoin world too: Stupid people lose.

Hopping proportional pools and exploiting their resources is a natural step in the evolution process of bitcoin pools.

Large proportional pools have been on the decline for ages & will eventually die out completely once the core miners realize they are working for someone else;
They are paying out of their own pocket so that somebody else may profit.

I think Inaba on page 2, the master of Eclipse pool, has put it eloquently in the last sentence:

Of course, those 101+% pools will disappear too, but only once the proportional model disappears first. Right now, non-hopping, perpetual proportional miners are the suckers of the system, the prey. Through either lack of knowledge or sheer ignorance, they distort the balance of pools so as to create an incentive for predators.
True equality in mining rewards will exist, but only when these miners finally understand they are damaging their own earnings.

(This model relies on the rational assumption miners' main motive is profit;
It does not take in account irrational motives such as supporting a pool for ideological reasons, or wanting to give free money to pool hoppers out of generosity etc., so it is still possible there could be proportional miners 3-5 years down the road)

Beta keys are stored server-side and encrypted & are not based on an algorithm.
So it is just as possible to obtain those by keygens or illegal means as it is to obtain WoW or other Blizzard game time; Impossible.

The client is worthless without the account.

Tycho is smart and he should never lower the fee.
People behave like flock animals and will concentrate to whatever is the biggest pool "because it must be good if it's popular".

Only an imbecile would, in his position, try to be "competitive" by taking away the astronomical fees. He is profiting from the stupidity of other people's "choices".

He doesn't need to 'compete' because the pool status is a self fulfilling prophecy.
It's big so it will keep being big, because new miners want to be in a "big pool". People actually willing to pay 10% for mining.

Only extended downtime could bring it down, and I believe some have tried it (DDoS), without success. So it's not going away for a long time if ever.


Doesn't work that way, it's popularity was already established when mining became common.
Nobody or nothing can surpass it anymore (without, once again, extended downtime of the pool)

You can't make a new deepbit any more than you can make a new Microsoft or Apple.
Those market positions are already filled by the biggest player and can't be surpassed without either illegal means or misfortune.

I partially admire Luke for at least having the courage to push those pump&dump forks right where they belong.
What I don't appreciate is the execution, how many people mining on Eligius would consent to this?

(If I got paid regardless, I probably wouldn't care though)

That has nothing to do with what the OP is asking for. PPS pools pay out regardless of how many, if even any, blocks are found at all.
IMO PPS is the superior payment method compared to anything out there, you are always guaranteed your payout as long as pool operator has funds, variance, good luck, bad luck etc. does not matter.

To answer the question: http://abcpool.co has 0% fee and pure PPS, I used to mine there for months, you can also set a small donation if you appreciate the high profits.

Pool overall hash rate 500ghash/s, one of the most popular pools, just doesn't show up on bitcoincharts.com.

edit- I apparently didn't read their updated terms, these days they do seem to have a fee. However they also pay for stale shares + orphaned blocks

The only reliable correlation between any cause and BTC price I've ever seen are google trend vs price-charts posted by some older users here.
Much too big of a coincidence to be that, a coincidence. BTC price is, at least historically, strongly linked to it's popularity in mainstream media.

The news references and price increases/falls go almost hand in hand. Someone can probably post a chart, I don't have any saved.

There is every reason to suspect another exchange is trying to poach members from mtgox. Just got this pishing email:

Return email address doesn't go to a scammer, it goes directly to info@mtgox.com (not spoofed), so no motive of stealing personal information

Email info of users is from the earlier leak of emails last year.
They are trying to make it look like Mt. Gox is unreliable, under government surveillance/pressured by officials to gain personal information from it's clients.

Combine with a simultaneous DDoS & it's obvious a competitor is attempting to drive traffic to their site this way, too big of a coincidence.

A pretty basic and primitive strategy, if you ask me.
Also Mt. Gox is up now.

Their promo video does have a point though. Waiting 7 days to get money in our out of the bitcoin system is a joke.

Crypto's 24 hour scheme could definitely kill Mt. Gox were it widespread enough.

At current price & difficulty, with 10,000mhash/s you earn ~250 bitcoins per month or a bit over 500 dollars

Even if your electricity is free that's a laugh, not to mention you subject the hardware to wear & tear..
1 5970 dies and there goes almost all of your monthly profit

(Not to mention ~9500 watts of power consumption 24/7 if the rigs are all 5830's or 5970 powered is a lot, given you earn next to nothing)

They are clearing stock for Radeon 7000 series launch in 1-2 months.
It will happen across all markets where those cards are for sale (unless individual merchants refuse to)

That being said, I don't see why anyone would care, mining is dead unless you run a botnet or steal electricity

Or satisfied with extremely low profits

This makes absolutely no sense for a GTX 560 chip. The engineers must have been on peyote.

Not necessarily, but the short term risk of fan failure reaches 100% pretty fast if you run the cards 24/7 at full or very high fan speed.
So if you still have hardware in use for mining, there is a very high chance the fans will start failing one by one.

I didn't have *all* fans fail on my cards but a fair amount did.

They wont be ever laid to rest because people like you feel honoured to give up 3-10% of their earnings for no good reason.

Better pools (like 0% PPS) will show up and grow, but it will be a long time (if ever) until they surpass the big proportional dinosaurs.
It really does seem like some people want to mine for "fun" no matter how autistic that sounds.

They either don't care about their profit margins, have no electricity bills, or enjoy dedicating a proportion of their mining capacity to strangers.

They prevent the large scale evolution of mining into most efficient possible forms.
Proportional shouldn't even exist anymore at this point in time, yet it continues to draw in new suckers whom predatory pool hoppers can profit from.

One could even suspect you are advocating such inefficient mining forms because you are one of these predators,
who wants to discourage these proportional 'suckers' from working for you for free.

No, there is no luck in pure PPS. In fact if you look at the site of abcpool.co, there isn't even a round history.
You only get paid for the shares you submit, hence your risk is 0 as you earn the same amount every day.
Your earnings are not based on any blocks being found or not because all earnings come from a private wallet.

Since the site has had a 0% fee for months, it is also the best possible way to mine bitcoins.
Mining at non-0% pure PPS pools is therefore done either out of idiocy, lack of logical capability or for ideological reasons
(supporting a certain pool owner, supporting proportional models, etc.)

P.S. I do realize pool hopping prop. pools and taking advantage of gullible newbies is the most profitable option, but that's not a 'pool model'
that's just taking money from those with limited information on how mining works.

There are 0% PPS pools like abcpool.co which means you have zero risk as well as zero fees.
If you don't mine in such a pool then you either support other models for ideological reasons, or like to earn less money for some masochistic reason.

Larger pools almost guarantee income if you mine proportional. Smaller pools are a massive gamble, you may not even get paid at all
if the pool is at ~30-50ghash and fails to find a block for a month & everyone bails out of a sinking ship.

Point in case: btcpool24.com, completely died after encountering multiple 95+ percentile rounds at low speeds.
Over 5 million shares went to waste for nothing on the 'death round'. Miners bore the brunt of the losses, not the owner.

When difficulty was at it's peak a month ago, there were 4 hour blocks even at ~11,000 ghash/s network speed.

Statistically, not going to happen between now and the heat death of the universe,
the odds are mind-boggingly small for even 12 of the first characters being identical in any two addresses

I can safely bet my life on that not being the origin of your 0.07btc.
The only possible explanation is that you are somehow still mining at eligius, did you check all your active miners?

He's not a government tool, he's right. It's been illegal for decades. Payment for labor in anything except money is illegal.

If explicitly stated in the contract of employment (not likely unless you are very high-up), payment *may* be given out as stock options, futures or shares, like in the case of Steve Jobs (whose 'salary' was only one dollar a year, but earned about 10-20m annually through stocks)

Payment in gold, silver, bitcoins, McDonalds vouchers or anything else is illegal.