Newby question. I've been mining with Eligius for a month now. How come it went from a 3-1/2 day payout, fairly consistently, to now a 5-1/2 day payout? Is that just the luck of the pool for now or is there another explanation. I noticed it happened around the time of this last difficulty increase.
Yes, the difficulty increase means that it takes that much longer for you to hit your threshold. Unless you build up your hashrate to keep up with the difficulty increases, your payouts will become less and less frequent, if you keep your payout threshold the same.
I saw absolutely no change from any of the other difficulty increases. And since we theoretically have the same amount of miners hashing away, makes no sense that it should take now 2-1/2 days longer?
Oh Man... (Face in palms). You need to do some reading.
You probably didn't notice the changes in income before because the jumps in diff were a lot smaller than normal the last was 20.86%.
Go here
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficultyAug 19 2014 23,844,670,039 20.86% 170,686,797 GH/s
Aug 08 2014 19,729,645,941 5.30% 141,230,307 GH/s
Jul 25 2014 18,736,441,558 8.08% 134,120,673 GH/s
Jul 12 2014 17,336,316,979 3.08% 124,098,191 GH/s