Question....
As I understand it this is the longest streak ever without finding a block in this pool. Is this purely because of bad luck or is it a combination of that and the recent difficultly increase?
If the latter, is this pool going to be profitable at it's current hash rate as these streaks become more prolonged and extend across additional difficulty increase events?
The difficulty and pool hash rate are the biggest impacts. When we had the 800 and 900% blocks, we temporarily had a hash rate of around 200Ph that helped us get through them in a shorter number of physical days. Obviously the rewards were less then too. Remember that we could have a streak of extreme luck where we hit 30 blocks in a week, then the profitability goes crazy through the roof. It is all in the luck of rolling our trillion sided dice trillions of times per second. Nobody can guess profitability for sure except that over the long term, it should average out to be near 100% of the difficulty. And I expect that this bitcoin dive may impact the difficulty a little bit sometime over the coming weeks. Obviously the hard core miners know this is just a blip and a time to invest more but the newcomers (including me) definitely get nervous. All I can say is Mine On!