Quote from: kano on March 12, 2017, 11:55:16 PM

Quote from: CakeBatterTornado on March 12, 2017, 11:10:46 PM

Well the pool is PPLNS, like the majority of non-PPS pools, so I guess then the problem might be that people don't understand PPLNS, even including the description I give on the web site

I'll give another version and then feel free to tell me what doesn't make sense.

Every time we find a block, we pay the shares for a certain amount up to when the block was found.
That's the 'N' in PPLNS

Bitcoin has a difficulty for finding blocks called the Network Difficulty (I abbreviated it as Nd)

It's currently ~461 Billion
5Nd = 5 times Nd = ~2.3Trillion

Every share you submit to the pool has a difficulty that the pool requires - you see that in your miner and on the web site workers.
Usually around 1,000 to 20,000 - if yours are much lower then you are basically mining for fun so none of this really matters.
That's 'Diff'

So the pool adds up all those shares for the last ~2.3Trillion Diff and pays everyone their ratio of that 2.3Trillion as part of the 12.5+ BTC block.
So if you found 2.3Billion worth of shares, you'd get ~1,000th of the miner reward.

--

Now the following is the same for all pools that don't hide information

When we find a block, the pool has kept track of how much work was done (total valid Diff submitted to the pool) since the last block was found.
It's expected, on average, to be Nd, so if the work done was exactly Nd, then the block Diff% would be 100%
Block finding is random.
So it could be twice as much work as expected, so 200%, or it could be half as much work as expected, so 50% ... or any other %
Luck% is just Diff% upside down (1 / Diff%)

Thanks Kano!

Even this quick description is super helpful.
Personally, a lot of the abbreviations were tripping me up (e.g., 5Nd). So maybe just typing them out on your homepage would help?
The quick math examples were also super helpful to make things concrete and real.
Your explanation here makes it much more clear why there is "ramp up" time for me just plugging in my miner, and with this understanding, a new person may be more willing to stick around.
I know there are tons of resources and wikis, but just a suggestion to take some of what you just typed and include it on the homepage of kano.is to make it easy/clear for people to stick around.