Quote from: Tbone123 on April 01, 2014, 06:36:54 PM

Now I have a newbie question I solomine more AIR with my crappy, crappy 200 kh GPU than I do with the pools at this current difficlty. Is this just luck or is it because I live less than 30 miles from their servers in Chicago and have less latency?

Partially luck... Partially (did you stay long enough to have full PPLNS), (Was the pool PPLNS setup right? For correct reward?)

Also note... You do not submit "shares" to your wallet, when solo-mining, you only submit "finds". Thus, that makes it a little faster, as you are not stopping to "submit a share", every few seconds to a distant server.

Also, try setting workload to 64 not 256, you finish work faster, and thus, check it faster and submit it faster, before a "new block" resets your workload. Also, you are finishing faster, so you get reset faster, to start on new work. Longer workloads have to finish before being submitted or reset.

I have found that most polls are not setup right. Seems the "default settings" are not actually the settings that are set. (Just had that issue fixed on air.carbonshark.com where it is operating a lot better now.)

The pools that are not setup right, have blocks where only a few miners even get credit for the work. (Usually on super-fast blocks. You will see only like 4 users got credit, the finder actually gets less credit, since his SHARE was the found block. Thus, cutting that reward out from the rest of the miners who could not submit shares into that block fast enough. Essentially making other miners only get about 50%-75% of the estimated reward, while that "winner" who had the most shares in that short-block, got essentially 300% more than they should have. Which, by the way, will never average-out per user.)

The issue is in the PPLNS settings, it says one thing is default "on", but actually is not default "on", it is "off" by default. (Not 100% sure what the setting was, as I do not operate the pool where the issue was resolved. I just pointed it out, and he resolved it.)

You will have a lucky day, and three unlucky days, then a lucky day, then three unlucky days... It goes in waves like that. (Like hitting three blocks in a row in a pool, by the same users over and over. It is not actually truly random for finding blocks, just nearly impossible to predict the pseudo-random "winner" in advance, for a block.)

In steady difficulty, you will have the same average as a pool, solo-mining. However, as difficulty constantly changes, you are battling luck v.s. reward, which will never average-out, in the long-run. Diff will rise again, as it is still rising slowly day by day. (Which is better for the coin, as a whole.)