Quote from: whiskers75 on April 17, 2013, 08:01:20 AM

Quote from: rainwater on April 17, 2013, 06:49:03 AM

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That depends on the rules of the pool, but as far as I know most of the popular pools don't offer any sort of bonus to anyone lucky enough to have been the one that found the necessary nonce.

yeah, you almost don't want to know, because it's sort of like "hey, I COULD have had 25BTC" Sad

Actually, you couldn't: the rest of the pool is contributing by finding incorrect solutions - thus increasing your chance of finding a correct solution. Tongue

*sighs* can't mine...

If I roll a 20 sided die, the change that I'll roll a 1 is 5% (one divided by twenty).

If 10 more people roll a 20 sided die at the same time as me, do they improve my changes of rolling a 1 because they are contributing numbers other than 1?

No. My chances are still 5%.

If everyone in the entire world rolls a 20 sided die simultaneously, my personal chances of being one of the people lucky enough to roll a 1 are still 5%.

Mining is the same. For a given difficulty, it doesn't matter if I'm solo mining, mining in a pool, or mining along with the entire network. My personal chances of being the one who finds the next block are the same.