I have a KNC Saturn myself and my Dad also has a KNC Saturn himself. Then we have three other friends that all bought Saturn's. None of did any mining before, this was all new to us. My friends received their miners that first week KNC shipped out and I received mine two weeks later along with my Dad. Thankfully they all were performing very well with great hash rates and low error rates. BTC was $150/US at this time and was $69 way back in July for a low. So not much action going on.

Since we weren't expert miners, this adventure was hit or miss. You basically get your miner, make sure it works good mechanically and set yourself up with a pool. We all didn't want to use the same pool because we couldn't figure out what pool to use. We had no idea. I liked BTC Guild instantly because of the refined web pages, information easily accessible and manual payout process. So me and my dad went with BTC Guild, while the others agreed to use different pools. The other pools were Bitminter, Eligius, and Slush. So we have 5 Saturn's all operating great using 5 different pools. We were going to decide after 30 days which pool we would all stick with.

Right away my earnings at BTC Guild was around .5 bitcoin a day. The first couple of weeks we all practically had the same results. While it took Eligius and Slush to payout FOREVER, they still eventually got paid. Another couple of weeks, bitcoin rising but not much change except we all were getting a little lower earnings. We kept at it. Making sure our hardware was tip top, things running good, low error rates, whatever we could do. Then the bitcoin increase started moving much more quickly. This is when we all started to expereince issues with all of the pools we were on, except Slush's pool. Me and my Dad at the Guild, our earnings just dropped through the floor. We were making %90 less then what we were 3 weeks ago. Eligius connection issues werer rampid and payouts were barely nothing and took forever. Bitminter stats dropped in two weeks more then in one month. The only person still in the game and even making more money was our friend on the Slush's pool. We were all thinking if the bitcoin pricing is rising so quickly we'll make more money, but for some reason that was not true on BTC Guild, Eligius, and Bitminter. I have asked in the forum pool threads about this but the responses I received back were pretty vague and a little hard to understand. The BTC Guild operator was nice and did engage in some conversation but all I wanted to know was why out of the 4 pools we used only one of them was actually making more money due to the bitcoin price rise? I tried the Slush's pool myself and hated the interface so much I just couldn't mine there. I just settled and stayed with BTC Guild since that's where I started.

I can't speak for other pools but why was Eligius, Guild and Bitminter having such a hard time making miners any coin at this point in time? Seriously, are there programming techniques embedded into the programming to stop giving more bitcoin at a certain level or bitcoin price? We were all confused on why this happened since we all thought it was a universal thing that if bitcoin price rose up you would make more. A lot of people will drop the "difficulty" word out, but that only happened once during all this and it was only %2, not like %5 or more.

I'm not luring in people for arguments or such technical speak no one understands, but more of a conventional laymans talk about why such events could have happened. And of course if you don't have anything nice to say, please hold your tongue and move on to the newbie section and scare the kids or something. We are just trying to extract as much layman information out of this so it doesn't get to technical that no one understands it. Of course this is the whole reason why I think pool operators have the upper hand on everything anyway. No one really understands what's going unless they are top contenders on that pool....and you don't bite the hand that feeds you.

Really, thanks for reading and having the patience. This is a small adventure a group of guys took and we are learning as we go and I just happen to be the one that speaks the most...so here I am. And by no means am I affiliated in anyway with Slush's pool at all.