to simplify "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades "

Nothing beats a Block in the morning with a nice warm cup of Colombian Coffee. The aroma tantalizes the pallet and rejuvenates the spirit. Mine On WIth Kano-San, the best Bitcoin Mining Pool on Earth.  BTC

They work flawlessly.  Just getting used to them being combined as one miner, since I'm not buying another Raspberry Pi just for this.  But really stable and run about 11.5 T/H or so.   

what is the recommended power off procedure for the AvalonMiners? I had to recently move some and I just pulled the Ethernet, wait until it spooled down and unplugged them.

Also Canaan released new firmware and controller software today for the 821.

Yes Canaan numbers go up and down.

However, I've certainly no complaint to make about that - they consistently point a lot of hash rate at the pool!

You CAN count on them reliably pointing a lot of hash rate at the pool for a long period of time!
Just not exactly how much

It's not the competion if we steal something and sell it for less.

Yes, but the "All else being equal" also includes pool hash rate to some extent.
If the pool gets too small - as I've been trying to avoid over the last couple of months and will hopefully have some more hash rate here soon again - the diff changes also can affect your reward dramatically.

This is why I mention on occasion "as long as we are expected to find a number of blocks each diff change"
The issue is that if you're mining for multiple diff changes per block, then your reward loses around half the diff change from start to finish.

A simple example is that since 13-Jan difficulty has increased by 55.73% (yeah that's a scary number)
So if you were mining from say 10-Jan to now and then found a block, you'd actually lose over 25% of your expected reward!
All your shares from then to now have different PPS values, but your reward is based on 'now', the much worse PPS value.

This also affects us here to a lesser extent due to the fact we don't expect to find many blocks per diff change.
Thus why I'm trying to get that hash rate back up again.

Small pools like to pretend this doesn't happen

If yer looking to win the contest he has said he learns best with a visual representation.

Lol if my wife runs off with anything it won’t be my miners. In fact those would probably the only thing left. I found out our internet is out. There is a line down and the service provider is trying to get it back up. Guess I have to wait.

k lets give this padrinogtr  thing another try . let start by taking all the luck and unnecessary stuff out of the equation.  so lets start by saying there are 5 pools in the world mining the blockchain. it spits out 1 block per day.
day 1 pool 1 gets block day 2 pool 2 on down the line till pool 5 we will call that our pool . most (the other 4 pool) using the similar pay system payout WHEN they get a block with the blocks reward they do this buy looking at how much each member worked during the day and turning that into a % that compares with the rest of the workers in the pool. they are payed a % of the block = to their %. in the kano pool its the same accept we look back 5 days instead of 1 to find each workers % again u get the % according to your %. after 5 days u will get the same block payout as all the other pools (accept they have higher fees generally which makes the block smaller). the difference is it takes a whole 5 days instead of 1 to get your full % the up side if u quit or are down for 5 days u are still getting though a diminishing return as the days go by.
  so bottom line kano pool pays bests over the long term due to lower fees. this system is good because if u have break downs or gaps they wont be noticed as much but the real purpose is to stop those who pool hop (try to only work for the pool that is paying on a specific day)  there goal being to get payed everyday instead of once per five days. now there is no point in pool hoppers showing up here because they wont be able to take there money and run to the next pool cause we dont pay them jst for punching in on payday.
  howd i do padrinogtr i dont think i qualify for the contest anyway but id like to know if i helped though i haven't seen yer name here in awhile:D.

Been away for a bit, happy to see we have some more blocks!  Thanks canaan x 2 and biffa!

I was crunching some numbers, and I joined this pool after we found block 504409 (our block # 2202).   

Looking at the 44 days I have been mining in the pool, I have been a party to 7 blocks, with a cumulative difficulty of 1,453.543%, or roughly 207.649% per block.

If I am correct, statistically speaking, we were expecting to find about 14 blocks in that same time frame, but due to bad luck we found half of that.

So my question is, is that correct?  Am I reading and understanding the numbers properly?   

Thanks in advance!

My take on a post from Kano a long while back:

The 5Nd "ramp" means it takes that long to reward your shares.  It's not a punishment and The ramp isn't missing rewards, it's delaying them to reduce variance.  Each share is rewarded in all the blocks found in the 5Nd after the share.  That's simply how it reduces variance. Each share's reward is averaged out over the 5Nd after it.

How do the PPLNS payments work?

The 5Nd means the pool rewards 5 times the expected number of shares each time a block is found.  So each share will be paid approximately 1/5 of it's expected value in each block it gets a reward, but each share is also expected, on average, to be rewarded 5 times in blocks found after the share is submitted to the pool.

So, on the 1st block the pool hits when you start on Kano you get rewarded 1/5 of the value of the shares you submitted for that block.  On the 2nd block the pool hits you get 1/5 of the value of the shares you submitted for the 2nd block plus 1/5 of the value of the shares you submitted for the 1st block.  On the 3rd block the pool hits you get 1/5 of the value of the shares you submitted for the 3rd block plus 1/5 of the value of the shares you submitted for the 2nd block plus 1/5 of the value of the shares you submitted for the 1st block and on and on like that until all of the value of the shares are paid.  That's also how you would continue to get payouts for the 5Nd ramp down period after you leave this pool.

This is a simplistic view of 5Nd because it is also affected by luck.  If pool luck was always 100% then each share is expected to be rewarded 5 times.
If pool luck is better than 100%, then the average share reward will be better than 5 times. (Love it when it hits 10-12 times!)
If pool luck is worse than 100%, then the average share reward will be less than 5 times.

The 5Nd really helps you out if your miners go down for a couple of hours or are down for a day.  You would continue to be rewarded if the pool hit a block while you were down.  I've seen pools where you would get nothing out of a block if you were down for just an hour or so when the block was hit.