I'm in some agreement that I would like a payout in less than the 10 days I have been waiting, still waiting. I am just trying this pool right now, and the delay is a bit strange.
Is there a post that explains in simple yet complete terms why it works this way? I don't completely get it from reading the faq. -maybe a better answer is available.
Overall I'm happy with the pool but what I am saying is that apparently the coins are there so why are we waiting for them?
It stops me from bringing my other miners here, for now.
Someone's probably explained the delay issue very well, a good business reason for the delay, but searching didn't seem to pinpoint that post.
The whole point of Eligius is that it does hold the coins itself. The miners are payed directly from the generation transaction when the block is mined. Since the pool never holds the coin, then it can't steal them from you, nor can they be stolen if the pool is hacked.
That does come with a few constraints though. First, it can only pay out when it does find a block, contrarely to other pools. Secondly, coins from the generation transaction must mature for 120 blocks before they can be used.
Occasionnally, the pool encounters a situation when it cannot accurately determine who gets to be payed by the next block. (For example, a blocks gets orphaned). In those situations, the pool prefers to default sending the coins to an offline wallet controled by the pool operstor, instead of stopping mining altogether. Essentially, in those cases, the pool "reverts" to a "regular" pool, where you must trust the operater it'll send the money to you.
When the pool is in failsafe mode, the users still earn reward though. But they are not getting payed by the generation transaction as they should. So the payout queue builds up. When the pool leaves failsafe, it will resume payout with that queue, which is now huge. So a delay is to be expected, since it always pays those who have not been payed for the longest first, whatever is the "owed" amount.
Now, at that point, all the coins earned while the failsafe have not been sent to the user. The pool operator must manually initiate that payment, since the wallet is offline.
Now we were unlucky last week because failsafe was triggered 3 times, one of which lasted for a whole day. So a lot of money is due to be sent when wizkid will get to it. He likes to check the payment first before sending them to be sure there is no mistake.
When will he do it? I really don't know. He usually does manual payments once a week. It nothing urgent; the pool does work presently, and waiting for 3 days for some money will not kill anybody. But I fully trust he will eventually get to it: two months ago, the pool had a major failure in which the website was down for a whole week. During that time tens of thousands of BTC were sent to the offline wallet, and nobody was getting payed. He could have run with a shitload of money and nobody could have done anything about it. Yet, the website came back online, and everybody got payed in full. So a delay of a few days does not worry me at all.