I'm surprised Slush is still using the old exponential score. He mentioned that he'd be changing to DGM nearly a month ago, and back then it was going to happen "in the next few days".You can get about 1.2 x expected on a round there, which of course comes out of the fulltime miners pockets.
To hop Slush's pool, you need to know:
1. current difficulty (easy)
2. current pool hashrate (harder, use average since start of round which is available from pool website)
3. the current 'c' constant being used.
Then the point at which you should leave the round (in terms of total submitted shares/difficulty) is approximately:
Hop point =0.0164293+1.14254/(1.8747*D/(hashrate*c)+2.71828)
More details here, including a link to code that will calculate 'c' for you:
http://howtohop.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/how-to-hop-8-determining-slush-and.htmlYou can hop btcmine the same way.
Afaik, bitcoinpool is still prop, you could try them. I can't check because they've IP banned me and I can't be bothered to fire up a proxy and check.
Using long polling with Deepbit, you used to be able to get about 1.45 x expected. If you can use kinlo's
http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/blocklist.php you might be able to narrow down block ownership and hop deepbit a bit better.
Everyone else has gone fair, even bitclockers. New pools that try prop payouts get stuck at 0.43 x D and then die, and the older pools changed to fair payouts after miners either noticed underpayment on short rounds, or lost miners to fair pay pools, or wanted to do right by their miners and actually paid attention to almost a year's worth of posting on the subject by Meni.
I also noticed that Slush's miners want him to start DGM asap, and message on the thread about it frequently. They have also noticed shorter rounds paying less, so hopefully that will give Slush a bit of a push to get DGM implemented.
Deepbit's miners don't care since a) I think lots of them are new, b) from what I've been able to determine recently, Deepbit is not being hopped nearly as much as they were a few months ago, and I'd say fulltime miners there are losing a lot less than they used to, and c) as Con mentioned, inertia.
Pool hopping will always be profitable while there are proportional payout pools. The profit might be minimal and not worth your time if you're not into fiddly management of a proxy, but it will be there.
By "have enough hash to throw at him", would ~5.75GH/s be sufficient? I'm putting together a 7x 7970 rig atm.
In order to maximise share payout at Slush, the pool's hashrate needs to have a significant increase, for example 30% (seems to be about that last I looked). But you don't have to be responsible for that alone, and the proportion provided by you will make no diffierence to your share payout. But even if you were the only one hopping Slush's pool, and only with say 350 Mhps, your submitted shares would still have an expected value greater than one as long as you leave the pool as described above.
if not you just mine the first 16.5% of each round to get max...
Sort of, Goat. 16.5% was a reasonable rule of thumb a month or two ago, but at Slush's hashrate is slowly decreasing and difficulty increasing, if c doesn't change then the hop point will start to drop. Assuming 'c' hasn't changed (
can't be bothered to calculate to check I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader), the hop point atm is about 10 - 11%.
So, anyone (in Australia) want a used 6970 or 6990? I haven't used them since November last year - pool hopping just isn't what it once was. Not really fun anymore.
Edit: I was reminded that Bitlc is still hoppable. They might be delaying stats, do you'd need to use longpoll information the way it is done for Deepbit. Also, the 6970 and 6990 have been sold.
