Quote from: kidtriton on January 02, 2014, 11:20:39 PM

Is everything working OK? My stats page shows no blocks found for the last six shifts so nothing earned for a while now, just making sure this is correct.

It was a 4 hour block. Not common, but nothing wrong with it.

Quote from: CYPER on January 02, 2014, 11:15:39 PM

Quote from: eleuthria on January 02, 2014, 11:10:00 PM

Quote from: BitMinerN8 on January 02, 2014, 10:59:22 PM

Yeah that is awesome, it's great to see an entrepreneur who started several years ago getting the return on his investment. He has put in all that time and carried the risk, this is capitalism and a free market at it's best. People can mine wherever they want based off their needs for compensation. Whatever they feel is fair. If you're worried about how much he makes, you're not looking at the big picture. It takes a lot to run a pool, it's a business, it has expenses, taxes, legal retainers, all kinds of things you don't get to see behind the scenes. Plus you need to plan and save for growth, emergencies, contingencies, security. It all adds up, does he make a lot, sure, but I'm sure it's well deserved. At the end of the day I'll bet a good portion is going back into keeping things running. You want him to have a large reserve, it means he can weather the storm.

And his calculation was on one of the luckier days. If he did the same calculation today he'd see I've *lost* money since last night.

My calculation is very rough and only based on the total hash rate of the pool, which is again a rough figure. I used a general income calculator, which assumes 100% luck.
I guess I am not very far off from the actual income, which in anyone's eyes look amazing, so congrats on that Wink

May I ask again about the orphaned blocks. How is BTCGuild defining these in comparison to Bitminter? Do you have 2 categories or just 1? And you pay for all of them?

Thank you.

BTC Guild pays all orphaned blocks. There is no difference between a stale block and an orphan block. To the miner they're the same thing. In both cases, the pool was not working on the dominant blockchain. In both cases it was due to the pool not being aware of another block on the network at that same time. You could argue an orphan might be slightly different because another pool might submit one after yours and that one ends up being dominant. However, for a MINER, it shouldn't matter. In both cases the pool solved a block and the miner should have been paid. A "stale" block is just a sign of a poorly configured pool, and the pool mining a "stale" block is just as bad as an orphan in terms of lost income.

If you didn't use the pool's actual 24 hours for your numbers, you're WAY off, by nearly a factor of 2. 144 blocks * 25% = 36 blocks/day expected, which is 900 BTC. 90% of that is PPLNS and 10% is PPS (rough numbers), or 810 / 90. 810 x 2% (accounting for orphans) = 16.2 BTC. 90 x 6.5% (accounting for orphans) = 5.85. Meaning if the pool is functioning normally, at perfectly neutral luck, it's ~22 BTC. I did not include tx fees the pool collects because those are not a noticeable increase, and those are shared with miners. Additionally, the pool *pays* transaction fees for all payouts which is not included. Right now the numbers are a bit higher due to network growth. If you want to factor that in, add an extra 20% or so. Of course that assumes that the pool grows in unison with the overall network.

A percentage of that income is also required to be set aside as a buffer for bad luck (PPS), as well as the chance of a security breach, because unlike some pools *cough*50BTC*cough*, BTC Guild will actually honor its debts in the event of a compromise.