Heh I finally finished writing what I was gonna post and it answers your last post at the last line
...
Yeah I guess you usually can't 'game' a system that mathematically provably punishes people for not having a miner that works 100% of the time.
But as I've mentioned before I'm not interested in trying to come up with a system that does that either.
For whatever reason someone leaves the pool, I really don't like the idea of saying "Ha! Your shares are less worthy now"
Block finding is random.
No one can determine in advance when they
will find a block.
No hash is more worthy of being rewarded than any other hash (unless they are the hash for a block
)
One hash, every so often, finds a block and that is distributed (being a 'pool') on the basis that each hash in the N that was trying to find it is just as worthy as the others.
What actually happened today is quite relevant to all this rambling
Today, one of our top miners went offline.
(should he be punished because of that? I'm sure he'd be pissed if the payout system did that)
A large hash rate failed over to here for a VERY short while during that also
(You'll notice the pool graph hit over 6PH for a shift)
While that was here for that short time, it found a block. Yay!
100s later our current top miner canaan, found a block. Yay!
You may also notice that canaan doesn't stay at the top all the time.
I've no idea what the reason is (
that their hash rate goes up and down), but they supply a lot of hashing power to the pool and certainly keep the total pool hash rate average up.
I don't want to be telling either of those block finders that their hash rate isn't as worthy as anyone else's ...
Edit: added that italics in case it wasn't obvious