Hi, I am sorry if this has been already asked but a naive search couldn't find anything.
Can someone tell me how the fees are distributed and what is the "Eligius Payout Change Aggregation" address?
I am trying to understand how the fees work and how it is possible that the payout qeue has grown from 1 block to 8 in less than 3 days.
As different addresses reach the payout threshold, they enter the payout queue. A small amount of mining that is spread among many addresses can bring all of them across the threshold, and thus make the payout queue large, both in the number of addresses, and the amount of payout.
Even taking that into account that it should stabilize soon after the manual payout process. At every block 25BTC + fees? are awarded for every block and 25BTC+fees are paid, some people with previous pending balances can reach the threshold but after the manual payout a lot of users pending balance will be 0 (indeed the majority, right now with 8 blocks there are over a thousand address in the qeue and just 5500 hashing accounts, this weekend with 60 blocks in the qeue, almost everyone should have been in the qeue).
The question is, what does "stable" look like. Large numbers of addresses enter the queue from relatively small recent earnings. Many of these have had a long time elapse since their last payout, and they get put at the top of the queue.
One of my accounts has almost 2 BTC in the unpaid shares (I forget their name for these). A few lucky blocks will pay those unpaid shares to me. There are several things going on. It would be interesting to write a program to model "steady state" using realistic account data. That data is pretty available from Eligius.