Quote from: nottm28 on March 19, 2014, 09:17:16 PM

Quote from: fredsbend on March 19, 2014, 09:11:06 PM

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.

+1

I have mined here for over a year and have briefly dabbled with other pools. My gut feeling always tells me this pool is the 'luckiest' in the long run. Plus if everyone switches to ghashio or btcguild - what do we end up with? One massive pool and centralised bitcoin mining. I'll always mine on 'not the biggest pool'.

Last time I hopped to BTCGuild, luck was down hard in Slushes pool...Slushs (in the long run) would have made me .12 to the .07 I pulled from BTC. I'm not leaving....