Quote from: smurph on February 18, 2014, 12:48:25 PM

COR you said "Your own rewards can be *calculated* from the network hash rate and your own hashing rate, that is the fraction of each block that
you should get, for example if your hash rate is 1/50,000 of network hash rate then you should get an average 2 coins for every block, so 4 coins per minute. (100k coins reward and 1/2 minute block time)."

Isn't that a bit of an over simplification as some blocks are found quickly while others take a long time so the no. of pool shares and pool shares taken into account (depending how the pool works out how many shares to use) varies quite a lot.
It could take a while for any variance to average out.

Yep, it is a gross simplification, but this is how it should work when blocks are found at the designed rate (2 per minute).
Of course I have seen hours (on a small pool) until the next block was found and then the reward that was (almost) randomly given to that block is low, so you get almost nothing for many hours of work (electricity). Then it may happen that also the very next block is found in the same minute and if you were lucky to submit a few shares for that block and the reward is high, the payout is thoudands of coins for only a few seconds of work (electricity), but now we are talking about single occurrences and luck.
In the long run you do not get lucky, you get averages.
So, after a couple days mining on a pool that regularly finds blocks the statistics over a hundred or even thousands of blocks will get very close to the average, so you can calculate with the average as the coin is designed, the aveage network hash rate and your own hash rate.
The only reason that I have been so open with my hash rate and payouts is to give everyone a yardstick of performance over time - if they also were mining from the release of this coin, they should get comparable payouts (multiplied by their hash rate of course).
Especially when I noticed that no matter how slow or how busy SteadyMining was doing (going from a pool hash rate of around 10Mh/s in the beginning, then for a day it was only 2 Mh/s and now they are up to 65Mh/s (earlier yesterday evening even higher).
My payouts are now 135k BEE after 3 days and 3 hours of mining = 75 hours. I have 210kh/s so my payouts have been average 8.6 BEE per hour per kh/s. 135,000 / (75 x 210)
This means that the payouts has risen slightly - the last time it was closer to 8. Probably the network hash rate is a little lower now, so I get a slightly bigger part of the total block reward.
As I said - when I saw that my rewards with SteadyMining were very consistent for my fixed hashing rate, I started posting them and also the rate that I am getting on average - it slowly climbed from 7 to 8 BEE per hour per kh/s. Many other miners switched pool as a result, because the only way that they are not getting their payments in the long term is if the pool is not honest with their payouts. You can calculate how much you are getting, so even while you cannot prove that a pool is cheating, you can look at earnings over a longer time (more than a few lucky blocks) and then judge if their payouts are correct or you want to switch.
You are voting with your hashing power to dedicate it to the best (most honest) pool, that way.