Thank goodness for pools. All paid up.

[bcpokey]

So, I know that a lot of people are concerned about the centralization of bitcoin hasing into pools. And I can understand that, but from an individuals perspective, let me just say I'm glad that they're there.

I started mining about end of April, and continually expanded my hashing power from the single 6870 I had to the point where I reached the electrical limit of my house (not that impressive actually as this house is wired ridiculously stupidly. There is a 20A breaker connected to NOTHING and every other outlet is on 2 other breakers, except the kitchen which has ~100AMPs sigh).

As of the difficulty change today I have completely paid off everything, all the cases, psus, gpus, mbs, ram hds, electricity, everything. All this without finding a single block.

That's right, somehow in almost 2 months I've found zero blocks. Had solo mining been the only option and network growth had been similar, I would have had to commit seppuku or basically given up on bitcoin, despite liking the project very much. So I say again, thank goodness for pools! I'll continue happily mining away and if I find blocks for the pool great, if not, well at least I'm still contributing sorta.

[kokojie]

yep, variance is the killer. Even some smaller pools that has something like 20 GH/s, could go for weeks without finding a single block.

[true]

What is your hashrate?

I'm at around 3Gh/s now, and near the beginning of the year, I was slightly ahead of the curve. Some time in March or April, though, I just stopped finding blocks. Switched to pools in late April. Haven't found one since. Tested miners, they're working fine.

Now I'm doing some Namecoin and I have found blocks, though I'm still slightly on the unlucky side. But you aren't alone in finding nothing.

[rezin777]

I was about to say that I haven't found a block for weeks (after quite a good streak), but I checked and apparently I found one today! 

[Clavulanic]

Yeah, funny how it works. When I first started I had around 750mhash/s and found 2 blocks, I bumped up to slightly over 1ghash/s and found one more. This wall all over 2 months. Now I'm at ~2.5ghash/s and haven't found anything in quite some time  For those of us that are trying to pay off our mining rigs through mining and trying to stay in the positive pools are a great asset for us.