Not that I've found. The closest I can get is the "latest 25 blocks" page, but that doesn't show how much you got from each block. Once you're paid you can see payments, so you can see how much you're getting paid per 24 hours (or per payment), but it's not the same.

To be honest, I think all pools are much the same - what you're looking for (and what I can't really help with...) is knowing that the pool operator will respond quickly to problems. Slush seems to; dbitcoin (the btcmine op) may well - but I've never noticed any issues with btcmine so I can't really comment! (Maybe that's a selling point!)

Btcmine has an API, if that would help - I've not used it, but I'd imagine it's the much the same as Slush's. The website seems fairly basic, compared to Slush, but I've noticed it developing over time so dbitcoin is clearly working on improving it. It doesn't have graphs, but that doesn't me too much - it may be an issue for you, though.

There's a neat pie-chart at bitcoinwatch.com that gives a good idea of sizes. For what it's worth, I've used Slush's pool and btcmine most of all: both are medium-sized, and I've had no real trouble with either. Slush's pool had an issue recently, which caused many people to drop out and that caused the pool size to go from massive to medium - and deepbit to go from medium to scarily big! That's the only real issue I've ever seen with Slush's pool - any other issue has been with the website, rather than mining. Btcmine I'm using right now, and have used on and off for a while - never had any issues with it. It lacks some of the fancy GUI stuff (graphs, etc) that Slush has, but I can live with that. The fee is voluntary, as well - you can select anything from 0% to 5%, IIRC.

There are a couple of new, smaller, pools that have started recently - I'm conservative, and haven't tried either yet, but they might be worth checking out.

I can't really answer for proportional or pay-per-share - I've never really used pay-per-share - it tends to be more expensive in terms of fees.

This is the "lastminer" scammer, back to its old tricks. Ignore it, and whatever you do - don't send it any BTC!

If it helps, I'm happy to bow out.  It probably (well, definitely...!) makes more sense for me to try and source GPUs nearer to me. Garrett's price was very reasonable, I thought, but the delivery costs to the UK mean I can't really go any higher than my bid.

Arrived safely, and in receipt of full 100,000 BTC, but laptop confiscated at customs and I am aware that email and other comms channels are being monitored. Without the laptop I no longer have my wallet or your bitcoin address. Send me 0.1 BTC at [MyBitcoin or MtGox bitcoin address here] to confirm the address and I'll send the 100,000 BTC to the address the transaction originated from. Be quick: I need to exit the country ASAP.

Don't use any names, make it look like an email sent to the wrong address by a really inept spy or dodgy courier. Spam it far and wide in as short a time frame as possible. Hopefully enough people will think "OK, so it's clearly not intended for me, but hey! If I reply I get 100,000 BTC!"

I'm not a professional scammer (well, I would say that, wouldn't I!) so I may have made some glaring error that would prevent this working. Hopefully.

There's a list on the wiki. There have been some complaints about its up-to-dateness recently, I think, but it should be a good starting point.

Again, no. I'm not wasting my time considering things on your behalf. You have a theory? Then come up with data to support it, and bring it all here together. Otherwise you're just wasting our time. Your latest theory, by the way, is not exactly new. It's been debated ad nauseum elsewhere on this forum.

No. You're the one coming up with wild theories. You need to back them up with hard data, not ask people who disagree with you to do your research for you. It's time for you to "put up or shut up". Let's see your data, the data you used to arrive at your hypothesis.

I'd read that as you didn't have time to implement your suggestion - not that you didn't have time to edit a wiki page. I suspect error did the same as me.

OK, Citiz3n, thanks for the heads-up! Appreciated!

What bitcoinBull said. The supply of new bitcoins is relatively static - roughly 50 every ten minutes. Expecting exponential growth of bitcoin supply is just wrong. A "SEVERE MISTAKE!", even.

Incidentally, afterburner229, could you knock it off with the ALL-CAPS? You can use *stars* for emphasis, or use the formatting tools or format your text manually, like this:
-> This is bold
-> This is italicised
Better yet, allow the quality of your arguments to persuade, rather than the CAPITALS or formatting.

I think this is more of an education issue than a practical issue. Mining is easy enough, and there are plenty of people right here who will help new miners get started. More importantly, perhaps, buying and selling bitcoins is easy - but people get hung up on MtGox. bitcoin-otc and Ubitex are both relatively straightforward (I've used bitcoin-otc, haven't used Ubitex so I may be wrong here...) and the exchange I use the most these days, britcoin, is very easy to use - no Liberty Reserve, Dwolla or anything else, I simply use my existing bank account. I appreciate not every country/currency has a britcoin, but everyone, anywhere, can use bitcoin-otc. If you live in a country with a lot of people you're bound to find someone wanting to trade sooner or later.

No, I would say that I simply don't believe it's possible for the network growth to have come from "upgrades". When I started mining - in October 2010 - everyone used their CPU. GPU mining was just beginning to be discussed - it was semi-mythical. Check the forum posts from around that time, there was an idea GPU mining was do-able but if anyone was doing it they were in a tiny minority. Now consider everyone online at that time trading in their CPU miner for, lets say, 4 5970s. Let's take a conservative estimate for CPU mining, say 1 Mhash/s. 4 x 5970 would give us 2800 Mhash/s. So, if the number of miners stayed constant we'd see network hashrate increase 2800 times. Now look at the graph. Now consider that many miners simply haven't got 4 x 5970s. I haven't. I have 1 x 5870. You can see many posts here from people with 5850s etc. Some people may even still be using CPU miners.

OK...

Possibly not, but I have no idea how you've arrived at this 10,000 figure. I could probably roughly determine the number of miners online, but I can't think of any way to count the number of traders.

Why not? Difficulty has been growing exponentially since I started mining, and I'm pretty certain that that hasn't been solely due to miners trading in CPUs for multi-GPU set-ups. Just from the number of posters on this forum I can see that new miners are starting constantly. Just a few weeks ago posters here were arguing that "now" (i.e. a few weeks ago) was the ideal time to invets in mining hardware, and profits were all but guaranteed (I was arguing that they should exercise caution).

MtGox is not the only exchange. I used to use MtGox a lot; I haven't used it nearly as much recently because (a) I now have a local exchange which is far more convenient, and (b) even prior to that I'd started using bitcoin-otc because it was more convenient for me to work in my local currency. (Incidentally, can someone point me to the raw data that supports this constant trade volume claim? Thanks!)

Agreed. I think your 10,000 figure is a wild guess, and I dispute your theory that it is roughly static.

Maybe. If the research backs up your theories then we could start thinking about solutions at that point.

I'm having great difficulty understanding you, but if I understand you correctly you're suggesting that the number of miners and traders is static, and that network hashrate is increasing only because miners are trading in their CPUs for GPUs, and then buying more and more GPUs. Is that correct?

This graph should give you a clearer idea as to what the current network hashrate really is. 19 blocks might be enough for you or me, but bitcoinwatch always loses the plot after a difficulty change. This is well documented here on this forum - every time the difficulty changes someone posts to ask why the network hashrate has apparently skyrocketed, and someone patiently explains that this is what always happens, and in a few blocks time the difficulty estimate will settle down.

That's not two currency codes simultaneously, though - that's one code replacing another as one currency (old złotych) was replaced by another (new złotych), like Deutsch Marks replacing Reich Marks, which in turn replaced old Marks.

The only example I can find is actually the US Dollar: USD, USS, and USN.

I'm familiar with how difficulty has increased over time, thanks (I generated my first block on a 4-core CPU over 5 days, when difficulty was something like 8000). I'm looking for a quick summary explaining where this "10,000 frozen" concept comes from: if the price of that knowledge is having to read the entire thread then I'll pass.

To spare me having to wade through this entire thread (I've been reading it piecemeal since it started, so I've probably missed a lot of it) could someone explain this "10,000 frozen" idea?

No worries! 9 BTC actually seems fairly reasonable - how about I kick off the bidding with 31 BTC (plus 9 BTC to ship to the UK, for a total of 40 BTC - other bidders would need to bid 32 BTC or higher, since they're not concerned with UK shipping costs).