Re: [14000Th] Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB
Those numbers really reinforce my thinking that there is something in older hardware that is not submitting winning shares (either by intentional design, or due to cutting corners and screwing something up when it comes to really high difficulty). Especially when the only large pool that is right where you'd expect them to be regarding luck is the one that makes their own hardware and runs a massive private farm.
You may be right - there seems to have been a drop in profitability for a few pools, although the "pool profitability" measure also includes orphaned blocks.
If older hardware in particular were having some issue with not submitting shares where it mattered, then this would fit pretty well with the pools listed all of which would have a disproportionate amount of older hardware. Eligius's average hash rate per connection is ridiculously low... like, under 25Gh/connection in total at some times. Average hash rate per active user is about 4 Th/sec, with only the top ~15% of active users being >= 4 Th/sec.
I really wish there was a reasonable and cost effective way to verify this theory, or some better way to mitigate the issue.
Edit: Potentially related... does anyone have any block find stats for hash power that has gone through NiceHash? Doubt it, but, I was going through some stats and noticed that none of the hash power ever pointed at Eligius from there has every found a block as far back as I have user agent->share correlation data. Something like 6x blocks worth of shares submitted from there without blocks, just with the data I have on a per share basis. Correlating those with those users, those users haven't found blocks either further back than my user agent data goes, so probably more than 6x. I may ban nicehash connections if this tally rises much more.
I'm honestly not sure why anyone would buy hashes at a premium to point at Eligius anyway.