is there a way to see what was the last block discovered by the pool and how much i was credited?

edit:
went through my logs and it seems i have been a bit unlucky an got only 7 shares in 12 hours on 200-220 MH/s (should have been ~10, on the other hand - 0 stales. random hash is random)
is http://forre.st:9332/patron_sendmany?total=50 a good estimate of what i will get paid if a block is discovered?

there are at least 5 block chains of different crypto currencies

until a transaction is in the blockchain nothing is certain . I might to a ddos attack against the merchants node, so the transaction never gets to the network and/or show him a fake bit coin client on my side of the transaction. 1 confirmation is a bit better since it requires a block to be generated, but i am still not sure it is enough. most people now wait for 6 confirmations - i am assuming there is a reason behind it...
the thing with credit cards and USD is that the merchant or you can sue each other or report to the police about the fraud.
So although the method itself might be less secure , its enforcement is (supposed to be) strict. As long as countries do not recognize bitcoin as a valid currency you will not have this protection from the authorities in bitcoin transactions, and will have to rely on the technical difficulty of "forging" a transaction.

anyone considered that they owe you money for not delivering on time?
its not just that you didnt get the rig itself - they are actually preventing you from mining
If the chips were deliverd on time you would have had already mined quite a lot of bitcoins by now to cover the cost of the systems.
Each month of their delay in delivery of a 50GHash rig costs you 1K BTC = ~5Kusd
Each month of their delay in delivery of a 830MHash rig costs you 17BTC = ~85usd

(the 50Ghash rig looks like something that will burst into flames when you plug it in. Home electric heaters are ~1-2KWatt. this rig is 2.5Kwatt)

to prove its broken

I dont like the 0 confirmation idea - i would rather give merchants higher priorities in blocks - so a 10 minute wait will get them 2 blocks.
The slowness of the system is one of its defense mechanisms...
and mining a block is not necessarily more expensive than the trade, like when buying a tv/smartphone - you wouldn't wait for an hour to get your payment approved, which introduces risk into the transaction.
Today most people expect everything to be instantaneous.
Physical bitcoins are not a bad solution for this, since no transaction needs to be recorded for the exchange.
A more evil solution would be to have a trusted 3rd party, a role generally filled by the police/government.

thanks
i actually didnt know what exactly to search for - so i didnt find any answers
I started wondering about this because of the p2pool
It seems to me that the miners there get the transaction data from their local bitcoind and not just the hash from the pool itself
But it seems the defense mechanism  there is a bit different:
The 50BTC of a new block in that pool do not go to the pool's address , but directly to the members.
If the attacker uses the modified version which does not include payments to the other members - his shares will be rejected by the members (and the separate shares block chain)since they dont include the payments. this way he is actually mining solo - getting the full 50BTC but no shares from the pool
If the attacker wants to get the pool shares - he will have to include the payments to the members in the transactions of all tested blocks. since the real difficulty block is random - it will contain those payments as well

what prevents me from submitting only low difficulty blocks to a pool as proof of work, and submitting a real block, if i find it, through my solo miner to get the entire 50BTC for myself?

so to maximize profits large pools can do blockchain-hopping every 2 weeks?
i guess to answer this i will need a better understanding of how the difficulty is set...

an interesting idea would be to pay for the hash power - and then not use to reduce the difficulty of the next blocks

Thanks, that's what i was looking for. though some uses there assume buying hash power for USD rather than Bitcoin (which would put the service in danger of losing money if the exchange rate goes up, since he intends to pay the miners in BTC )
hmm. this service can be really useful if both sides are paid in usd

thanks
its soooo cute 

I have read the entire thread. most of it is miners saying they want to join and others alerting you about possible security issues.
I am new to the whole Bitcoin business and simply asking for an explanation about how this service can be beneficial to either side?
Basically I am asking for examples of "use cases" for the service you provide.

I am an electric engineering student and i would like to experiment with an FPGA - not specifically for mining.
what would you recommend as a cheap starter kit?
I am thinking on using it for audio/image compression/decompression and mining experiments
I am thinking specifically about fpga since so far i mostly had to deal with micro controllers and software, and now would like to experiment with hardware.
Is there a sub 100$ option?

I dont understand the point of this service
There are pools that offer PPS of 1/difficulty*50 with an optional donation percentage and no fees
So from a miners standpoint i don't see a reason to sell my hash power at a lower rate
From a buyer's stand point: paying more than 1/"difficulty"*50 per share is stupid since on average you will get 50BTC per "difficulty" shares. so on average you would be buying 50BTC for more than 50BTC
From the bitcoin system point of view: mining gets more centralized which is a security risk fir the system. Even if nobody will be able to exploit this for profit, somebody might find a way to use is to de-stabilize the p2p network
So what's the point of this service?

though this change seems to me as something that must be done, it does seems a bit rushed.
My only concern that maybe not enough testing was done and there would be a way to exploit the change after it goes live...

I wanna play as well

username on bitcoinica: costia

In the current situation the profit i can possibly make from short term trading is not enough to justify the effort - i.e. I can make more money by spending this time working , writing software, rather than betting on unknowns. In other words - i don't think I can make money just by trading in a speculative zero-sum environment.
The only investment that makes sense for me is long term. Assuming financial bubbles don't last forever i need to evaluate if the current cost of BTC is more than it's worth now, and/or if it is greater than what it will be worth in the future.

So i guess that my current decision should be to invest a small amount of time/money into BTC now for these 2 reasons:
1) BTC might be actually worth something in the future
2) In the process itself of trying to figure out how currency works i am learning a lot about economy/money/trading - and actually getting some practical experience with investments without much risk.

I think that the only logical step for me is to buy some BTC for real money as a long term investment. But currently, I will not do it since I don't feel comfortable investing any sum of money due to my lack of knowledge in trading and economics.

Is it safe to run a the client with the testnet option on the same pc as the real network?
blockchain will be overwritten? wallet?