Quote from: Monkey1 on March 18, 2014, 06:11:37 PM

But flash mining isn't really flash mining! Some accounts above me have up to 450BTC outstanding. Even assuming spare hashrate was 30 THash/s (which it isn't) and that difficulty remains constant (which it wont), this 30 THash/s will produce approx 3.5 BTC per day. Therefore to flash mine 1 single account (this may be a big one, but there are bigger ones I know of), it will still take 128 days plus!

Pyramining is the only one with the right data to see what the effect would/could be, but remember he said by "deposit" not by "account", the big difference here being that those huge accounts are likely multiple deposits not necessarily performed at the same time so the "flash" mining would likely jump around a bit and would hit many people.... but things to consider in the approach taken (I'm trusting pyramining has considered most of these but tabling things I feel should be considered all the same among a minefield of considerations...):

Note: not looking for answers, just hoping these were at minimum a set of considerations

1) What are the largest deposit sizes and how quickly does it taper off to completing deposits daily in any "flash mining" scheme (1, 10, even dispursion, etc.)
2) What is the ratio of FPGA/legacy asic/new asic deposit btc amounts
3) What is the anticipated ratio of hash power for each deposit category before and after changes
4) What is the "estimated recovery time" if we stay the course versus the new plan (albeit this is hard to predict but taking into account difficulty increases continually at current rates + steady BTC rate)
5) What contingency plans/growth plans may be in the works to keep this ship sailing? (renewable "free-ish" electricity to keep difficulty monster at bay for instance, new hardware roll out plans that may be above/beyond just new deposits say perhaps pyramining reinvesting 10% of realized profits to communal mining efforts or some such, alternative uses for legacy hardware such as alt-coin mining which they *may* still prove profitable on, continued account buyback program which nullifies bought back accounts out of the ecosystem, etc.)

I'm not in the earliest investment group by any means, my personal contribution is in excess of 100BTC of which was significantly weighted to FPGA purchases, but these were across several accounts and many many more deposits (not including the pass-through funds I also operate). I'm hopeful that the changes will stimulate pyramining but it's murky water and hard to see what the outcome will be at this point and pyramining has the most direct non-speculative info of all of us so ultimately I have to have some faith that the plans being worked on are in the best interest of the system pyramining has been dedicated to for so long.