Quote from: VastLite on May 16, 2011, 10:40:05 PM

I've somehow found 9, "Number of blocks found by you: 9" which would have equaled 450 BTC when in actuality I've only gained 230 BTC. I know that this is a pool and that we are *pooling* our luck, and that I would have made the 230 BTC regardless of how many blocks I found, it's just interesting to know that my luck is above average. It makes me wonder how I would have fared solo-mining. However, I greatly prefer consistent payouts.

Cheers to all the BTC we've made so far!

Don't believe in luck; there is no such thing [well, I am a rationalist in that respect]. Simply statistics which are completely random. Sometimes, one person benefits, even over long periods of time, by beating the odds, but that is how statistics work. One could call that luck, but that would be putting the supernatural into something what is clearly mathematical in nature.

If allowed to run for a long enough time [without difficulty changes which affect the statistics ever so slightly due to the "quantum" nature of shares ... you can only submit an entire share, so there is always some work wasted when working on stale shares or dumping the share in progress due to a long polling notification to move on to new work], you would probably find that your payout from the pool would indeed be 3% under what you would have made solo. Again, that would be over a long period of time. Even with difficulty included, if you are using reasonable hardware, you will, over a long time, average out to that same ~97% of solo mining. There are always individuals who escape the odds over long periods of time; especially in a large population, however, the mining population is not really all that large. Probably in the several thousands if I had to guess [some of those have huge hashing power though and I bet they can report convergence on 97% over time much more quickly].