Quote from: Jack of Diamonds on July 17, 2011, 05:06:56 AM

You never know if the workers are even working on a block. Stales go through the roof.
Multiple rounds become stacked as a huge round & you never know if an ultra-long round is even genuine or if it's just variance.
Maybe 3 rounds disappeared for all eternity as unclaimed blocks, untracked by the software. Maybe they didn't.

I check up on workers, just to see they had 'connection problems' for the last 5 hours even after patches, and the pool is not even under DDoS.
It gets solved for a day or two & begins again.

The pool has degenerated into solving less blocks than pools 5-10x smaller.
http://pident.artefact2.com/pool/Bitcoins.lc

Fact is, I don't want to quit. Seems many other people are not quitting either.
But this stuff adds up to huge losses over mining at other pools & is soon not worth the 0% fee perk.

Not everyone is casually mining with a CPU, this is starting to cost hundreds of dollars in the short term
unrecoverable even by a few lucky rounds.

Can you please be quiet with these rants? "Stales" are not going through the roof, efficiency is the same as it always has been, about 2% and markedly decreasing with a new patch that was put in. The pool is having some difficulty right now, it is probably is similar to what was basically a DDOS earlier today when someone pointed a botnet or a pool-hopper proxy at the pool and made thousands of connections for little work, which only points out that the pool should be aggressively blocking low efficiency workers and delaying stats way beyond where it gives any information about the current round. All pools have had downtime from DDOSs, fake share floods, etc, so you should have a backup miner ready to go, or run two miners per GPU so one pool's outages don't affect your earnings.

The pool is is as lucky as it should be, in fact luck since this difficulty started is +1.7%. How do I know? Because I did the actual stats using real math:

Thread-crappers are seeing patterns in random data where there is none and clinging onto it like religion even when presented with outstanding reason. Your perception of rounds being too long is skewed, as the delayed stats don't even show you short rounds. Variance is like a bicycle in the hills: You go uphill at 5mph and downhill at 25mph, so you spend 83% of your time going uphill. And then you bitch about how the roads are unfair when you get to your destination, and piss everybody off.