Yeah... tonight seems especially terrible, and yet my share-rate isn't any worse then usual and it doesn't look like a big surplus is stuck in immature/unexchanged. Any word on what's going on?

Well it's nice to see some consensus here after all the insanity of the middlecoin thread.

Like I was trying to say before, complaining that your miner would have gotten to get a share had the block lasted just a few more seconds is not only wrong because it is a complete misunderstanding of probability, but because by that logic you might as well complain about all the wasted hashes that would have yielded a share on the very next block.

It doesn't make sense? No kidding, eh?

I think you've missed my point. You're claiming that people are losing shares because the block changes before they can find the next valid share. That is to say, at some point during the next block they come by a hash that would have yielded a share on a previous block, but is now useless. By this logic, you might as well be upset about all the hashes you zip by that would have given you a share on the next block as well.

I just though of something. What about all those future shares those poor fast people lose! Some poor guy gets a useless hash that would have solved the next block, if only he had waited a few more seconds to submit it. Why, over time the number of wasted hashes that would have yielded shares on the next block must be exponential, but instead they were wasted in the stupid past and present. In fact, how sad to think of all the wasted hashes that would have solved an infinite number of future shares if only people held off on submitting them.

I should make a graph on just how many future shares people lose due to premature hashing.

I'll play your game and assume for the sake of argument that the average occurs at set intervals - it doesn't at all, just because the guy gets an average successful guess of once per minute it in no way means that he was "going" to get it in ten seconds just because 50 had already elapsed - but even if it did, if it's just a guess anyways why would it be any less valid for the next card? He wasn't homing in on the correct number, his guesses are random. It is just as likely he will get a guess on the next card in those next ten second if we assume average=interval (which it does not).

Not to beat a dead horse too badly, but if anyone was interested, ranlo's deceptively "same odds" dice variation is actually anything but. For a set of 10 rolls, the odds of the same number occurring in the set are as follows:

zero times: 16.15%, once: 32.3%, twice: 29.07%, three times: 15.5%, four times: 5.43%, five times: 1.30%, six times: 0.22% seven times: 0.025%, eight times: 0.00186%, nine times: 0.000083% and ten times: 0.0000017%.

The actual average payout for the guy who gets $1 for every four is $1.67 per ten-roll game. Guy two, who needs to roll four fours for $4 (I don't think I've ever used the "for" sound in my head that many times before), contrary to being 20% worse off as ranlo suggested, is actually averaging $0.23 per game: about 86% worse off. How fortunate that mining doesn't work like that at all.

As has been mentioned, your dice analogy is flawed. By requiring for independent rolls you've imposed a condition that give progress and then takes it away if the condition is not fulfilled. How about this: Guy 1 gets $6 every time he rolls a four, guy two gets $20 every time he rolls a four, but he's using a d20.

Yeah... that's how I feel too. I'm still waiting for an answer on my dice in box scenario. I can't wait to hear about all the "lost sixes" due to switching the box.

The problem with that reasoning is that it still assumes past hashing somehow has an affect on the future. And that an average has anything to do with interval (there's a reason standard deviation exists, you might want to look it up before you keep throwing around the word "statistics" with any air of authority)

Do you believe that in any given second your odds of getting a share are better or worse than any other second? If not, why would it matter when you switch?

Now, someone answer me this time. If I'm throwing dice in a box and I get a point for every six I throw, does it matter if someone keeps swapping in different boxes? if not, how does this differ from hashing?

That's there problem. There is no "halfway" in the probability sense. That's exactly what the gambler's fallacy is all about. If you're throwing dice and trying to roll a six and the first three aren't six, it's incorrect to say "Well gee, it's a 1/6 chance and I've thrown it 3 times, so I must be halfway there!" The harsh reality is you've accomplished nothing. No amount of missed rolls bring you any closer to what you're after. You could roll one hundred non-sixes in a row and the 101st roll would still be a 1/6 chance; no more likely then the first roll.  A die is just a piece of wood or plastic, the way physics behaves on it remains the same.

It doesn't make sense because - here, let me spell it out to you once more. There. Is. No. Set. Interval. Between. Submissions.

Um... I'm pretty sure that that - what you just said there - is what actually doesn't make any sense.
By the way, it's not ad hominem to point out when someone is wrong. And based on what you just said, I think you just lost what little credibility you had. I think you should go read up on how mining actually works before arguing any more.

Interestingly, I didn't realize modern slot machines were programmed to change their odds depending on previous outcomes. Are you sure? That doesn't even really sound legal. I don't actually have much experience with them and was basing my hypothetical scenario on old-school mechanical slot machines, assuming they worked like that at some point. In any case, I'll stick with hypothetical, perfectly-balanced dice for any further analogies.

Unless I've been misunderstanding how a computer solves a block/share, it's not a solution in the same way a human would sit down and solve a differential equation by methodically working through it. Rather the computer just spams thousands to millions of potential answers until one works. This is were it is like throwing dice.

If you throw an endless stream of dice over and over again into a box and you get one point for every 6 that comes up, you will get one point on average every six rolls. This is actually very different from saying that you should expect every sixth roll to be a six. The actual sequence of rolls is random, but due to the six equally probable outcomes of each roll you should expect that in a large set, 6 will account for 1/6 of the total number of rolls (as would every other individual number). If I decide to swap your box every few seconds, it shouldn't matter. Sometimes a box will go by without you rolling a six, other times you'll roll one, two or more sixes into a given box and it will still average out to 1/6. If I swap the boxes even faster, it still doesn't change your chances on each individual roll. Unless you roll a six as I'm switching the box and it hits the side instead of going in, which I suppose is a rejected share in this analogy.

I wanted to bring up the gambler's fallacy several pages ago, but I didn't have an account and so had to wait a while.

It seems to me there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how this whole hashing thing works. It is based on the erroneous belief that during each block you are making "progress" towards a share; progress which is discarded if a new block shows up before you actually find a share. This would be as though you were trying to fill up buckets, but someone kept taking the buckets away and replacing them with empty ones before you could ever fill one entirely. This is wrong. There is no progress.

The reason it's called the gambler's fallacy is this: Imagine a man at a casino. He's been at the same slot machine for hours without getting back a dime. Due to the amount of time and money he's already put in, he's convinced it has to pay off sooner or later and that quitting beforehand would mean forsaking his progress. If for some reason the casino had a weird policy wherein every five minutes he had to move to a new machine, he might be upset by this and claim that every time he moves to a new machine he loses all his "progress" on the previous one. In reality, as long as the different machines are mechanically identical, there is physically nothing different from pulling the crank on one or the other. A slot machine has no memory and has no way of "knowing" that you've tried 500 times and deserve a break.

As for mining, say blocks come by every 10 seconds and you average one share every 12 seconds. Based on a misunderstanding of averages as being discrete times at which a share will be found, one might conclude that he would never get a share as his "progress" would be "reset" 2 seconds shy of finding a share each time. In reality, he has the exact same chance of finding a share every single second, it just averages out to once every twelve. However, it wouldn't be too uncommon to find one in only 8 seconds, or have to wait 16. In fact, while very unlikely, it would be possibly for a CPU miner to solo-mine Bitcoin and find a block within seconds, while a guy with a top of the line ASIC doesn't find anything in a month.

In closing,consider the following: If you throw a die once, what are the odds you roll a six? One in six, right? Yes. How about if you throw it twice? 2/6? Nope. "What!?" you might say "But two rolls should clearly give me twice the chances as one, you're obviously an idiot." Yet by that logic, six throws would give you 6/6, a 100% chance of success, and life is never that certain. The answer is that two rolls net you an 11/36 chance. Why? The answer is actually quite simple: there are a total of 36 equally probable combinations of two rolls, 11 of which include at least one six ([1,6] [2,6] [3,6] [4,6] [5,6] [6,6] [6,1] [6,2] [6,3] [6,4] and [6,5]) And six rolls? Surely in six rolls you should get a six once right? In fact you only have a 66.5% chance. Still more often than not, but not exactly something to bet your life on.

Hi everyone,

I too am a newbie. Well, to be more fair, a lurker. Yet now I feel compelled to say a few things here and there on this forum, so I'm comming out of the lurker-closet so to speak. I enjoy mining Litecoin and other Scrypt based currencies using my very small-time rig and playing at being a Forex trader with them.