I understand this is probably not where I'm supposed to post, But I got my miners set up, I have a worker set up and my wallet key set, but I don't seem to be mining any coins or even getting payouts.. what gives? Am I missing something?
Are you getting accepted proofs of work? Shown in the client and under "my account" -> "workers" on the website. If so, then all is fine.
How payouts work:
Some payment info:
The approximate mint speed shown in BitMinter client is just that, an approximation. Bitcoin mining is like a lottery. How often we find a block, and earn bitcoins from that block, is random. Each hash you process is like a lottery ticket. Each hash has a (very low) chance of producing a block. You get paid with coins from a block whenever a block is found by someone mining in the pool. Your share of the income from a block is determined by the amount of work that you did in the most recent 10 shifts at the time the block is found.
Because of this, your daily income will vary with luck. That's often referred to as variance. There may also be some hours between two payouts if we are having bad luck and no blocks are found for a while.
In addition to that there is a delay from the time you do some work until that work is fully paid. The work you do is registered in a shift, and then that work is credited with income from new blocks we find until its shift is no longer among the 10 latest shifts. This takes a few hours. If you turn off the prepay perk then there is an additional delay having to wait for blocks to confirm, which takes about 20 hours.
So, assuming you have prepay on, if you do 24 hours of work and then look at the results, then only some of that work has been fully paid. The remaining work is still receiving pay, even if you stop mining. Needless to say that is not going to look very profitable, when you are looking at all the work you did but only part of the pay you are going to receive.
Comparing pools by how much you get paid for 24 hours of mining is pointless. The comparison becomes "which pool has the best luck today?" You can't use that data for anything. The luck a pool has today has no influence on its luck tomorrow. Believing that it does is called "gambler's fallacy" which you can ready about on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacyIf you want to know how BitMinter's payouts have been over time you can read Organofcorti's very detailed analysis here:
http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/05/131-bitminter-and-luck.html