What orphaned blocks?  P2Pool hasn't orphaned a block in a very long time.  Yes we are having a run of bad luck, but that's just what it is: bad luck.  It happens.

Like I wrote - way too many factors involved to provide a good estimate.  They might be worth 50% a year from now, or they might be worth 5%, or they could be worth 85%.  As an example, I bought batch 1 S3s.  I paid 0.75BTC each - which translated to about $475 at the time.  They are currently selling for around $100 give or take.

No, you thought correctly.  A confirmation means that another block was added to the chain.  It is all about how long it takes for blocks to be added.  Sometimes it's seconds.  Others it's over an hour.

Easiest way to think about ckproxy... it is a local pool.  You setup all of your miners to point to it.  The ckpool, running as proxy service points to the actual pools on which you want to mine.  So, if you want to move to a different pool, you make the change in the ckproxy.conf file, rather than on all of your miners.

The only thing I don't know is if you can setup the proxy to mine at multiple pools at once (i.e. spread your hash over multiple pools), or if the pools listed in the "proxy" array are a simple failover.  I don't see any documentation on how it works, so hopefully -ck can chime in

I agree at the end of the day, somebody's gotta pay the piper.  The offered block finder bonus from this pool was just another part of the sham this jackhole had going.  There was no accountability (i.e. he didn't publish the address of the 5 coins waiting to be claimed).  He didn't use any escrow services.  Nothing to give people the impression that he was trustworthy.

I admit, I was the first person to congratulate the OP when he started the pool.  To be fair, he was active on the forums from that point forward.  The pool he ran provided a relatively stable mining environment and he kept up his end of the bargain by offering fee-free accounts.  Unfortunately, it was all just a long-running con.  I'm glad I exposed it by finding that block.

In the end, it was just another scam like PBMining, cloudminr.io, etc.  Too bad, because it makes it that much harder for people to trust anything new.

This really belongs in Speculation...

There are way too many factors to consider to even try to present an answer here.  We don't know what the network difficulty is going to do.  We don't know what effect the reward halving will have.  We don't know what kind of new hardware is going to be introduced.

Basically, your guess is as good as anyone else's .

Percentage chance in what timeframe?  You can easily calculate how long it would expect to take for you to find a block given hash rate and network difficulty.  With 200GH/s, you're looking at (given the current difficulty) about 16,372 days (44.85 years) to find a block.

When you're mining on a pool you get your share of the block reward based upon the pool's payout mechanism.  Unless you represent the entire hash rate of the pool, you don't get the full block reward - you split it with the rest of the miners on the pool.  If you're mining solo, you get the entire reward (25BTC).

I don't think it's the 0% fee that becomes the red light, since there are a number of pools from which you can choose that have no fees.  However, the "coming out of the woodwork" newbies who have supposedly been mining for 3 years and just now decided they want to be a pool operator so created an account here... now those are the ones you need to investigate.  And yes, Con called him out, and even offered him what I thought was a very generous deal to prove himself.

As far as I know, there is currently no custom firmware for the S7.  The S5, however, does have updated firmware.  It's based on cgminer 4.8.0.  You can find it here: https://www.nicehash.com/sw/SD-S5-20150415_nicehash_perf_graphs.tar.gz.  I'm not sure, but there might be another version for the S5 around somewhere... the one I linked above is from NiceHash and provides extranonce support along with some graphs.

You can very easily calculate how long it would take you to find a block knowing the hash rate and network difficulty.  The formula (at least the simplified version) is:
6 S7s (batch gets you 28.38TH/s.  Current difficulty is 65848255179.  If you had those miners right now, we can see that it would take you:
So, 115.34 days to solve a block.  Therefore, you've got about a 26.01% chance of finding a block in 30 days with that hash rate ... assuming it was mining right now.  As soon as the difficulty changes, that value changes as well.

LOL.  Believe me... if I'm ever up for canonization, the world is in a REALLY bad place .  I enjoy far too many things that aren't exactly qualifiers (two of which I mentioned above).

As sad as it is, I think Phil had it correct earlier: the best thing that could have happened was for me to find a block and expose this as a scam.  I'm very sorry for those who put their faith, hash and coin into this misadventure, and I am very happy that I was able to put an end to it when I did, preventing people from losing even more.  I made it away pretty unscathed.  Unfortunately, a good number of people weren't as lucky.

The constant flow of bourbon and American Spirits keeps me in check

I was indeed replying to your question to kano.  Unfortunately the answer you're looking for is not as simple as the question appears to be .

Let me try another approach to see if it helps you understand the differences between the two pools.  The hash rate is really not relevant as long as it is consistent between the two pools.

Mining on Eligius, you will absolutely never have any possibility to make more than however many shares you've submitted.  You are absolutely capped at 100% of expected earnings.  Reality is you will not make 100% because of factors like orphaned blocks.

Mining on kano, you have the possibility to make more or less than expected earnings dependent upon the luck of the pool.

Let's look at some real numbers.  You are mining at 100GH/s.  This means that you would expect to submit 23.28 difficulty 1 shares every second (100,000,000,000 / 2^32).  With a network difficulty of 65,848,255,179 each of those shares is worth 0.00000000037966BTC.  There are 86,400 seconds in a day.  Therefore, your expected earnings per day are 0.000763644672BTC.

Not surprisingly, this is exactly what an online calculator would show you as well.  For the sake of your example, we're going to assume that the difficulty will not change for the entire 12 weeks.  In reality, it would change about 6 times.  So, keeping the difficulty constant, your 100GH/s mining would expect to earn 0.064146152448BTC in 12 weeks.  At current rates, that's about $20.79.

Ok... now if we go back to my original statement, with Eligius, you can never, ever make more than that 0.064146152448BTC in those 12 weeks.  On kano, you can make more than that, or you can make less.  Kano's pool has, since inception, been running about 101% luck.  That has no bearing on future luck - it is just a metric of past performance.  However, it is a metric that shows had you been mining on Eligius for the past year and on kano for the past year, given identical hash rates on each pool, you would have made more on kano.

No, you're not.  AntPool's "solo" is not in fact solo mining at all.

First, let me clarify the way Eligius works.  They are not a true PPS pool.  They cap the number of shares, and they shelve shares that cannot be paid.  Kano is a PPLNS pool.  They also cap the number of shares you get paid.  The primary difference between Eligius and kano is the following:

A share in Eligius will get paid exactly one time.
A share in Kano can potentially be paid multiple times.

So, pool luck plays a factor in how many times a share gets paid in Kano.  Pool luck plays a factor in whether or not your share will be paid in Eligius.

Right now, Eligius can pay exactly 65,848,255,179 shares per block.  It doesn't matter if it took them 1 share or 1,000,000,000,000,000 shares to find that block, the maximum they pay is equal to the difficulty.  If it took Eligius fewer than difficulty number of shares to solve the block, then they can look into the shelved shares and pay out some of those.  If it took Eligius more than difficulty number of shares to solve the block, then they shelve the shares.  Maybe you get paid for them, maybe you don't.

Does this help clarify things for you?

I've pretty much stopped tracking the coins.  They've now been spread across multiple addresses.  Not a single coin has made it into my wallet.  The scam card has been thrown down.

OK... it certainly seems to be a reality now.  This was nothing more than a scam.  I have left negative feedback for the user Nexious.  We need to alert the moderators - well, it seems that one has already changed the thread title.  Now I think some further action needs to be taken to see if anyone can track down the pool operator.  It appears some good detective work has been done in this thread and identified a potential perpetrator as William Fuller from New Zealand.  Hopefully the moderators can shed some more light on this by providing detailed information about the registered user Nexious, such as IP address, email, etc.

The 19+ coins that had been sitting have now moved: https://blockchain.info/tx/d49583e6533dd5dfa4880e360561d66b417a3bdb2f2266bb30d9fc0c785cbaca

I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that not a single miner has received anything.