Quote from: Junkbarman on July 21, 2014, 08:36:44 PM

Quote from: baddw on July 21, 2014, 08:11:58 PM

Quote from: Junkbarman on July 21, 2014, 06:50:04 PM

So what you're saying is 25/173366316979 *(round time in weighted shares + shelved shares from previous round)= payout for that block. As long as those shares in the entire pool don't out weigh the total amount of shares for the current round.

No, the payout for the block is always 25 BTC. They are paid out to the topmost 173366316979 shares in the stack ("shelf"). If this is an unlucky round (greater than 17.3 Billion shares accepted) then these will all be from the current round, and some shares from the current round will be shelved to hopefully be paid out later. If it is a lucky round, all shares from that round will be paid, and whatever shares are on the top of the stack will be paid out until a total of 17.3 Billions shares are paid out. These shares may be from the last unlucky round, or if there has been a run of good luck, you may have to go back several unlucky blocks.

I guess I should have been more specific to what I was asking here. I'm trying to figure out what a payout would be for an individual miner, not the whole pool. There's no way for the user to see what his shares on the shelf are from unlucky round, but going by what their weighted averages are, you can guess as a payout.

So is that formula how it's figured out correct? What I'm asking is, are the payouts calculated 25/173366316979(100000+50000)=0.0000216305 , where 100,000 is the current round shares and the 50,000 is from a previous unlucky round that made it? So 150,000 is just something for an example.

Yes. I was reading your formula incorrectly before. I see now that you mean (25/173366316979)*(100000+50000) while I was interpreting the latter part to still be part of the denominator.

Just to be super clear here, your earnings will be (25/173366316979)*(A+S) where

A = Accepted shares for this round, subject to a maximum roughly equal to (Your Hashrate) * (Expected Time to Find a Block, i.e. the time that would constitute 100.000% Luck). In other words, when the current round drops below 100% luck, the oldest shares from this round will start being shelved, and A will max out, and be less than the actual number of shares that you submit in this round.
S = Previously shelved shares (will be 0 if round drops below 100% luck)

To make it even simpler, A+S = "any of your shelved shares within the most recent 173366316979 shares on the shelf". Instead of thinking of it as a 2-queue system ("current round shares" versus "shelved shares"), think of it as a unified system (which it actually is). Every share that you submit immediately goes to the shelf, period. The share that you submitted 5 minutes ago is higher priority than the one that you submitted 10 minutes ago. And all the shares submitted by other users between 5 and 10 minutes ago, lie in between those shares.

While you can't necessarily know how many shares you have shelved for any given block, if you have been mining continuously and consistently, you can get an estimated idea of your earnings for any block by just gauging your hashrate versus the pool hashrate. E.g. if you are hashing at 1TH/s and the pool is hashing at 7000TH/s then your earnings will be (on average, of course) 1/7000 of the pool earnings. So if there are 17.3B shares paid per block, you can expect for 2.47M of them to be your shares. And you can look at an unlucky round that's say 50% luck, i.e. 34.6B shares accepted during that round. Then you would have submitted 4.94M shares during that round, and you would have been paid out for 2.47M of them, so you would have 2.47M remaining shelved from that round.

But all of this blockwise talk of earnings is really digging into a lot of detail that kind of glosses over the basic facts of mining. Bitcoin mining is a stochastic process; your miners are hashing at a given rate, the pool is hashing at a given rate, and the Bitcoin network expects to find blocks at a given rate. The best way to estimate your earnings is to look over longer periods of time to smooth over the variance that comes with good luck and bad luck. Eligius gives an "Estimated earnings per day" on the right-hand-side of your screen, which is based on your 3-hour average hashrate. This is a pretty solid number which is really just based on your hashrate and the current difficulty, and should hold true regardless of whether you were mining with Eligius, mining with another pool, or solo-mining.