Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on April 24, 2012, 08:33:08 AM

Quote from: kano on April 24, 2012, 05:48:05 AM

Quote from: VoluntaryMan on April 24, 2012, 02:53:52 AM

Quote from: ChanceCoats123 on April 24, 2012, 02:29:08 AM

Just my fucking luck... Angry

My dedicated miner runs for 10 days straight without issue, and on the day that p2pool finds a billion blocks, I come back to a rig that won't give video. Restart and everything is fine and dandy again. WTF is that?!?! It's like every 10-12 days this shit happens and on the day p2pool has good luck, my share count is 1/6 what it typically is. Angry

You're not alone, I made the decision to use my computer to spend the day playing Borderlands and therefore not mining (so only .15BTC today)

The reason why pools exist in the first place - to reduce variance.
P2Pool just happens to reduce it way less than the other pools.

That is just weak. Name me a pool where he would have been compensated for NOT mining?

He wasn't mining, it isn't like he had a 10 minute reboot window and lost 100% of the block value for 3 blocks. He still got credit on each block for the portion of time he was mining in the last 24 hours. The n used by p2pool is ~4. Most pools PPLNS pools use an n of ~1. There is no pool under a similar scenario where he would have been compensated more.

I can name no pool where he would be compensated for not mining.
Though DGM will compensate you after you stop - but that's for mining you have already done.
Edit: hmm though that's similar to p2pool in the respect of being paid for your work after you stop anyway.

As for compensation - well that's an easy one to explain.
It's called granularity (and rounding) when things change.

Say there's 10,000 items - in groups of 10 and each group takes 10s to find.
If I get 1 for every group I find I will of course get 1,000 if I find all of them and it will take 10,000s.

Say there's 10,000 items - in groups of 1,000 and each group takes 1,000s to find.
If I get 100 for every group I find I will of course still get 1,000 if I find all of them and it will take 10,000s again.

However, if I stop collecting 500s before I find them all what will I get?
In the first case I will get 950
In the second case I will get 900

Meaning of all this?
When you stop mining, the amount of time you spent on getting nothing (wasted) will on average be half the time for you to find a share unless you plan waiting and stopping WHEN you find a share.
For P2Pool the amount of wasted time will of course average out to be the P2Pool difficulty times more than a 1 difficulty pool for your hash rate.

All that above is of course what I was referring to