Yeah, pretty slow on finding those blocks lately. Over a whole freaking day just for one block.

I was tempted to switch over to another pool, but I keep coming back to this one thing:

Your payout over time should be roughly the same, whether solo-mining or in the largest pool (assuming 100% up time and your hashrate is constant) ... theoretically. But when does it become practically ineffectual to mine in a certain pool? I have a single Antminer S1 giving me an average of 205 Gh/s. Solo mining would obviously be quite futile. The average time I would solve a block over a large enough time frame, assuming constant difficulty, is about three years. That is obviously not practical at all. Slush's total hashrate says we should solve a block ever 4 hours and 41 minutes, given a large enough time frame and assuming constant difficulty. This has proven practically true until recently.

So whether in Slush's pool, somewhere else, or even solo-mining, my daily expected average BTC income from my 205 Gh/s is theoretically constant. And that amount is 0.0243 BTC. And given constant difficulty, a large enough time frame (probably like 50 years or so), the math proves that my daily BTC mined is the same no matter where I mine. Naturally, I didn't account for pool fees.

Back to practicality, how bad would Slush have to get for me to leave? Well, if a bunch of miners left the pool the hashrate would drop, but the reward I would get per block would increase. I would still be rewarded the same daily average, but I would have less frequent rewards. For me personally, I would be content with getting .0486 BTC per block but only once every other day on average. That means good rounds would give a block every day, but bad rounds could last five days. Either way, over a period of three or four months, its probably not that big of a deal.

So, for someone who hopes to make the cost of his S1 back in two to three months, I'm gonna just stick on Slush, unless there are obvious, non-mining related issues, like poor server execution or whatever, or blocks are being solved less than one per 40 hours. Why 40? Because it's a little less than two full days and there's a biblical feel to it. For 40 days we wander mt. slush, in search of holy Bitcoin.