Besides the price difference between the two batches, you'll also notice that batch 2 is rated at 4.66TH/s while batch 3 is 4.86TH/s.  Bitmain is probably running into the same kinds of issues it had with the S3... original specs had it at 504GH/s, which were later reduced to 478GH/s, but when batch 1 was launched, it was 441GH/s.  The S3+ was 453GH/s.  Those problems were directly related to DC2DC converter parts.  I haven't read the speculation threads on the S7 to know if it's a similar issue.  Thanks for pointing out the thread, Steve .

What are you talking about now?  There are no bug attacks from the bitcoin core, nor has bitcoin ever been a centralized currency as you imply by making the statement that it needs to be re-centralized.

Are you using some kind of bot that just spews random thoughts on a page based on commonly used words and themes around a concept?

At $0.15 per kWh, there isn't much gear out there that will be profitable for you.  The S7 (if you had one mining right now) would expect to earn you about $9.46 a day.  At 1.2kW power usage, it would cost you $4.32 a day, meaning you'd make about $5.14 in profit a day.  So, if the network difficulty and exchange rates remained static (which they will not), it would take you nearly a year to pay off your initial investment in the hardware.

How about an S3?  Well, one of those currently expects to earn about $0.86 a day.  At 340W, it'll cost you $1.22 a day to run.  Oops... that's not gonna work.

Ok, how about an S5?  1155GH/s expects to make you $2.25 a day.  590W will cost you $2.12 a day.  OK, you're making about $0.13 a day.

So, in a nutshell, you can take your chances with the S7 - and it's taking a hell of a chance - or look at other options like hosting.

Unfortunately, if you try to get a bunch of people together to rent hash, you'll all be competing with each other on the rental site.  It would be better if you could get a trusted member to run a group rental for you.

Of course, you need to realize that even if you do manage to get five people interested in supporting this pool by throwing 200TH/s at it for 24 hours, you're still not guaranteed a block.  In fact, with 1PH/s, your expected time to block is just over 3 days at current difficulty.  That's a pretty significant risk for most - a cost of about 1.6BTC to get a 1 in 3 chance of finding a block where your maximum possible payout would be 5BTC.

Please don't misunderstand me, I wish OP the best of luck with the pool and hope it finds a block.  Once the pool starts finding blocks, it will start to attract more users (especially if the current users are happy with the pool).

You threw up a half-baked NOMP pool that you admitted hadn't been tested and you gave it all of 3 days... and you're wondering why there wasn't any interest 

Not really sure about the questions as posed.  If OP means the spam attacks that flood the network with transactions, then I guess one could speculate on it.

As far as I know kano didn't write a shiny new set of code for the S5 like he did for the S3.  Also as far as I know, the latest version of cgminer for the S5 is indeed the one listed on page 627 of this thread.

I never implied that you should .

To be clear, I only showed the data from pools who have in fact submitted an empty block to the chain.  There are plenty of other pools out there who have never submitted empty blocks - they just are not part of the picture above.  For example, kano's pool has never submitted an empty block.  Neither have BitFury or 21 Inc or ghash.io.

As of block 376918 AntPool has added 561 empty blocks to the blockchain of the 8094 total blocks it has solved.  That's 6.93% of all the blocks they've ever solved.

Edit:

Here is the list of the offenders.  Worst on top.  I have purposefully left out any unknowns and have just reported the pools that have submitted empty blocks.

That's actually old data... it hasn't gotten any better at all.

LOL... you're just noticing that now?  Here's a bit of friendly advice: take your miners off the pool.  The longer you keep them there, the more you're going to lose.

Hey windpath, 376738 was not a p2pool orphan.  P2Pool beat out whatever other pool also submitted that block (payout address was 16EW6Rv9P9AxFDBrZV816dD4sj1EAYUX3f).  Your front end shows it as an orphan.

Woot!  Back to back blocks for p2pool

You launched a pool without having any knowledge of whether it even works?  Did you not even bother to rent some hash and point it to your pool to see if things are working as expected? Why would anyone bother to point any of their own gear to a pool you haven't even bothered to spend time testing yourself?

Yikes.

You're spot on jtoomin.  The fact is that the code is single threaded, so even with a blazing fast CPU, you're going to see huge spikes in CPU load when you've got significant traffic (either because of transaction spamming of the network, or from a large number of connected miners).  While not an ideal solution, if you've got a large number of miners on your node, you might want to setup multiple nodes and spread the traffic load across them.  Not sure if that's an option for you, though... it's just a suggestion.

Ahh!  Now we know what you meant .

All of the block explorers determine the "block owner" as you call it through a series of checks against known parameters.  For example, the coinbase signature might have some string in it identifying the pool (like I showed in my earlier post).  Another way to check is by the BTC address in the coinbase transaction.  You can find a JSON file that blockchain.info uses here on github: https://github.com/blockchain/Blockchain-Known-Pools/blob/master/pools.json

The thing that really needs to be pointed out here is that there is no "owner" concept as you are implying.  AntPool doesn't own block 374990.  It just happens that a miner connected to AntPool happened to find a share that satisfied the network difficulty and the transaction set he solved was added as the newest block on the chain.  As part of the block creation, the generation transaction (the one that describes how to distribute the current block reward) has instead of a typical "scriptsig" a "coinbase".  In there you can pretty much put whatever you want - which is what pools sometimes do to identify themselves.  So, in the case of block 374990, the coinbase transaction puts the following:

Using a hex decoder, you end up with this:

So... finally what this means to you.  If you want the block explorers to recognize "Pool Murdoch" you must provide them some way to identify blocks found by you.  Then, they have to agree to add your pool to whatever algorithms they use to figure out who mined the block (for blockchain.info, it's that pools.json file I linked to earlier).  Then, you just need to find a block .

If you point the rented hash at ck.'s pool, if you happen to be the lucky block finder, the coinbase signature will indeed state the block was found by ck.'s pool:

I know that when he first started the solo pool thing, he spun up some instances for private entities.  Not sure if he's still willing to do so, or if he'd be willing to alter the coinbase sig to mention Pool Murdoch (or whatever you want).  You'd have to get it straight from his mouth (or keyboard as the case may be ).

I edited my post... not sure if you got the link, so here it is again: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1110394.0

Basically you need to install developer tools so you have the proper utilities to compile and build the vanitygen tool.

I've posted a pretty detailed writeup on how to get vanitygen up and running on a Mac.  Let me find that for you and I'll post the link here...

Here it is: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1110394.0