Bitminter has recently had some very bad luck with blocks and they mined for over 34 hours on a single block yesterday. maybe that was the reason you did not get any returns from Bitminter because nobody got any for over a day.
Ok guys thanks for your help, it really put my mind at ease. I received an excellent Email from the BitMinter Operator during the night while I was asleep (Australian Time), which explained everything in detail. It reads:
"There should be coins in your account now if your mining is working
properly. We had an unlucky round, taking a very long time to find a
block. This bad luck evens out with good luck over time.
Here is some info on the payouts:
The approximate mint speed shown in BitMinter client is just that, an
approximation. Bitcoin mining is like a lottery. How often we find a
block, and earn bitcoins from that block, is random. Each hash you
process is like a lottery ticket. Each hash has a (very low) chance of
producing a block. You get paid with coins from a block whenever a block
is found by someone mining in the pool. Your share of the income from a
block is determined by the amount of work that you did in the most
recent 10 shifts at the time the block is found.
Because of this, your daily income will vary with luck. That's often
referred to as variance. There may also be some hours between two
payouts if we are having bad luck and no blocks are found for a while.
In addition to that there is a delay from the time you do some work
until that work is fully paid. The work you do is registered in a shift,
and then that work is credited with income from new blocks we find until
its shift is no longer among the 10 latest shifts. This takes a few
hours. If you turn off the prepay perk then there is an additional delay
having to wait for blocks to confirm, which takes about 20 hours.
So, assuming you have prepay on, if you do 24 hours of work and then
look at the results, then only some of that work has been fully paid.
The remaining work is still receiving pay, even if you stop mining.
Needless to say that is not going to look very profitable, when you are
looking at all the work you did but only part of the pay you are going
to receive.
Comparing pools by how much you get paid for 24 hours of mining is
pointless. The comparison becomes "which pool has the best luck today?"
You can't use that data for anything. The luck a pool has today has no
influence on its luck tomorrow. Believing that it does is called
"gambler's fallacy" which you can ready about on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacyIf you want to know how BitMinter's payouts have been over time you can
read Organofcorti's very detailed analysis here:
http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/05/131-bitminter-and-luck.htmlRegards,
Geir H. Hansen, Bitminter"
