Another victory for centralized mining.
Finally, I have been growing concerned for some time now about attempts to defraud pools. The pool's luck has been on a decline for over a year. The luck on a few other pools has also shown a negative trend. While it is not impossible that it's a coincidence, this is something I have been constantly made aware of and am helpless against. There is no way to know whether it's just bad luck, a small bug in older miners (BTC Guild probably has the highest percentage of first/second generation ASICs) resulting in a few % of block-solving shares to disappear, or a large pool trying to hurt the competition (many of the largest pools have large private mining operations now). It would only take a fraction (1 PH/s or less could do it) to cause significant harm to a competing pool, and that activity could be masked by proxies and multiple accounts to be impossible to catch.
What do you mean with this?
I mean the pool's luck for the last 3 months has been 88~89% of expected block solves. Eligius' 3 month luck is almost identical to that last I checked in their thread. Slush doesn't give a 3 month luck but his 1-month luck is pretty close to that. I do not know if that is statistically bad enough (Guild + Eligius pools in aggregate) to point towards something other than variance. Both pools combined are only about 5% of the network, so 12% under expectation over 90 days might be something that could happen 1 in a hundred samples. I'm sending organofcorti a message about it since that's his area of expertise.