Quote from: baddw on June 25, 2014, 04:28:21 AM

Quote from: Hektur on June 25, 2014, 02:41:04 AM

Quote from: baddw on June 25, 2014, 12:58:40 AM

Quote from: cronuss on June 24, 2014, 09:25:13 PM

It is bad enough that I can't even change my account name from the original address I signed up with... (or can I?)

The rest of your questions have been answered, so here's the answer for this one:

To change the account name / address, simply change it in your mining configuration, i.e. the "username" that you are using to mine. Say you are mining with bfgminer; if you are mining to address ABCDG, i.e. your bfgminer commandline looks something like "bfgminer blahblah -O ABCDG", and you want to mine instead to address HIJKL, simply change it to "bfgminer blahblah -O HIJKL". Simple as that. ABCDG will still receive whatever payments were owed to it (after some delay, depending on how much BTC is owed and whether it has hit its threshold), but all new shares will be credited and paid out to HIJKL. You can change your mining address at any time.

With Eligius, you never "sign up" with any username. You simply submit shares under whatever address you want to be paid out to. You could theoretically change your mining address every day, or every hour. The pool doesn't keep track, nor does it care. You will still have to sign a new message with the new address if you want to set NMC payouts or the payout threshold.

But any bitcoins you have on your old account wallet address, will remain there or be merged back into the pool's resources if they are low enough. Neither you or support can transfer any remaining balance from the old account wallet address to the new one. This is per the Eligius FAQ.

1) The FAQ is somewhat outdated; 2) I can't find what you're talking about, and in no standard case will Eligius ever keep miners' funds (although I think they did withhold payouts to *known* Mt.Gox addresses when Gox shut down); 3) The FAQ also contains this: "Miners who stop mining and have zero new earnings for seven days will also enter the payout queue regardless of their balance." (I know this part to be true.) Once you stop mining with your first address, your balance will be paid out to you, entering the standard payment queue after 7 days of no mining activity.

Not being able to transfer funds from one account to another (or change payout address) is a security feature, not a bug. This is how other pools get coins stolen from their miners. (Account/Password gets hacked, hacker logs in and changes payout address.) Eligius doesn't rely on any kind of login, email, or password in order to send payouts. The settings (payout minimum threshold, NMC payout address, etc.) rely on standard (extremely strong) Bitcoin signatures to prove that the actual owner of the mining address is changing the settings. It is decentralized (in that there is no central data store to hack in order to alter payouts) , very private (Eligius never has a password or email address for any miner), and extremely secure (signing a message with a Bitcoin private key is way stronger than most passwords).

I've changed pools before and when I returned to Eligius to check my stats, I've received messages before that said something like "you need to mine to a certain amount of btc within 1 month and so many days to enter the payment queue (when my account was showing .000XXXX amount) or your reward will be returned to the pool". I saw this message when I first started out mining and was trying out various pools and again when I returned after having to have my entire house rewired (non-mining issue resulting from the previous owner who thought he was an electrician and screwed things up so bad that even I couldn't figure out what they did).

Yes, the FAQ's are a bit out of date but I have yet to see any pool that changes them to keep up with any made changes that were made.