I'm not sure how sarcastic this is... But you do know that the Bitcoin client and the mining programs are open source, and you can look at it to see what they're doing? And that they do exactly what they claim - Hashing block headers to provide proof-of-work for verifying a specific Bitcoin transaction timeline?

Your payout from a pool is completely independent of the blocks found outside the pool, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Yes. Cheating depends on the time spent on each round, not on the pool at large. By the way, there are solutions, but most people don't understand the problem well enough to want to use them.

But we have already explained practically how to do it. Mine for the proportional pool until the number of shares in the current round is 43.5% of the difficulty, after that mine solo (or score-based) until the next round. You can use the time since round start as a proxy. And if you don't know when the round started you can try to estimate it.

It you submit 100 shares, the payout you get depends on the length of the round. If it's 1000 you get 10% of the block, if 10000 you get 1%. The length of the round is a random variable not known in advance. However, its conditional expectation depends on how long it's been already. If the round is fresh the expected length is equal to the difficulty. If the round has already been going on for twice the difficulty, the expected length of the round is thrice the difficulty. Thus your expected payout per share submitted will be less if the current round is old. And as Raulo explains in his paper, 43.5% of the difficulty is the point at which the expected payout per share becomes less than solo/score-based.

Actually that's just an approximation, which doesn't take into account changes in hashrate etc.

The less shares in the current round in a proportional pool, the greater the expected reward per share submitted. Consider also the examples I gave in this comment. The bad thing is that hoppers get too much reward for their contribution to the pool (and to the Bitcoin network at large), while honest miners get too little.

This means that for every proportional pool, the number of shares in its current round is more than 43.5% of the current difficulty.

Great, thanks.

Any news about this?

No, he will always mine for the pool with the least shares in the current round. If all proportional pools are >43.5% he will mine for a score-based pool.

wallet.dat

That depends on which operating system you use, but basically it's where the OS keeps application data, in the folder for the Bitcoin application. It will probably be easiest to let the OS search for the file wallet.dat

It's better than nothing. But if you have serious amounts of bitcoins you'll want to have multiple backups in several locations. The backup must be relatively recent, so you should update it every week or so (at least some of them). And you'll also want to take precautions against theft, not just loss.

You don't need to know.

AFAIK, yes.

This just means installing Bitcoin on the new computer, which will automatically create a new wallet file. It will have a receiving address to which you can send coins from the old computer.

Yes, but since this thread is for one particular topic, if you have additional questions you should probably go to http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?board=4.0 and click on "new topic" to start a new thread.

With these parameters the expected fee is 0, and for any round and it can be as low as -0.1001% (negative) or as high as 100%.
There's no way to have expected fee of 0% without a risk of losing out on a round. Note that the losses will be very small though.

I should emphasize that mid-round estimates are fairly meaningless. It is always almost certain that round end will be far enough in the future that all current shares will be worthless. In particular, calculating the expected reward for already existing shares will be close to 0, while calculating the reward if the round ended now will be much higher.

However, the numbers you write might indicate a problem with the calculation. Please post all the values involved, as well as the lscore values of the last few shares - both in general and for the particular worker.

Also, in your thread you say

If you use f=0, c=0.001 then it's not 0.001% fee, it's 0.1% fee. And it's the average - on any round it can be much higher. You can also consider using negative f to make the expected fee 0.

Those not trying to pool-hop will, in expectation, earn exactly as much as those who are, per share submitted.

Yes. The exact value used for max doesn't matter, as long as it's used consistently and it's about the right size. Its role in the calculation is just to shift the scale to a reasonable location to avoid under/over flowing the exp.

Surely you know that such redistribution plans generally destroy productivity (to the detriment of everyone, including the poor) because people prefer to enjoy the free money rather than working hard and/or innovating?

The BTC exchange rate will fluctuate less when it becomes more established.

His argument is: Someone will create BitcoinB and use billions of $$$ to promote it, offer incentives to shops to accept it, hire a development team for a full-featured client, and back it by USD. This can help it grow faster than Bitcoin, to the point where Bitcoin vs BitcoinB will be like Bitcoin2 (unsupported) vs Bitcoin.

Like I said, nothing wrong with this scenario, except I don't believe anyone will do it.

That's a list of addresses, not people. In all likelihood, the one who owns the 297K address also owns some more addresses on this list (doesn't detract much from your point though).

Yes, if a new decentralized cryptocurrency is introduced with similar nature to Bitcoin, and billions of dollars are spent kickstarting it, it could supersede Bitcoin. But this doesn't seem a likely scenario. The backer will want to profit out of it (if he did it for charitable motives, he would just support Bitcoin instead) and it will be a very difficult balance of making it attractive enough to be adopted, giving a big enough cut to the backer to be worthwhile, doing it late enough to be sure cryptocurrency has a future, doing it early enough to be able to compete with Bitcoin, while all in all being a more lucrative investment in cryptocurrency than simply buying lots of bitcoins.

You should probably read the Ponzi FAQ.

tl;dr version: Bitcoin is a revolutionary currency. Because of its rapid adoption, its value increases and some people invest in it anticipating such increase. Bitcoin has so little in common with either pyramid or ponzi that I feel silly talking about the "differences", but the main difference is that Bitcoin is sustainable even after this growth spurt.

And for the original question, as was mentioned, any Bitcoin fork is highly unlikely to be adopted because anyone wishing to adopt a decentralized cryptocurrency will just adopt the more usable Bitcoin instead (and because everyone expects others to do this, there is no reason to anticipate future adoption).

You'll need to use either periodic rescaling or logarithmic scale, as discussed in this thread.

I'll sit this one out because I haven't the slightest idea how to set it up (if I had, I probably would have done so myself a long time ago). I hope martok will be willing to compare notes with you.

PPS means payment is received for every share regardless of blocks found. If what martok implemented is different then he's wrong to call it PPS.

You didn't lose your shares. GUI Miner displays the number of shares you found since you opened it. But the pools keeps track of all the shares it received from you (and at end of round updates your balance accordingly).