And where is this manual of everything everyone here is supposed to know you seem to profess to have memorized? Why don't I have my copy?

There are two types of people here; a extremely helpful and enthusiastic group, and those that cop a 'tude and shoot down others randomly like your wife/girlfriend/right hand cut you off for a month. Which group do you belong in? Yeah, I thought so.

Finally triple triple luck again 

You'll come back - they always do

If you look at a blockchain record, you will see that there are two time stamps: the time the block was found, as recorded by the finder, and the time it was reported to the blockchain, which is the one that counts (but see the next paragraph).  When a block is solved by two miners almost simultaneously, it can (and does) happen that the first finder loses out through being too slow in reporting their success, which may be caused by their own internal issues or by a delay in the internet.  It appears to happen to most pools sooner or later.  Since everybody will continue to work on a block until the new find has been logged and propagated across the network, occasional duplicates are inevitable.

There is a rare complication: if the miner who loses the race happens to solve and report a second block before the first result has been propagated, his blocks will form the new chain by having the longer fork, and the poor sod who got there first loses out.  This could happen by accident; if intentional - which is theoretically possible - it's called "selfish mining".

I would have thought that the probability of two people finding a sub 2-second block, at the same time would be the probability of one finding it, squared.
Assuming the block difficulty is correct, at the moment, we are on block 288579. 
I don't know how many 2 -second blocks there have been so to make the numbers easier, lets guess at around 300, which makes the odds of a given block being less than 2 seconds around 1 in 1000, or 0.001.
From the statistics on blockchain.info, it looks like there are around 2.5 orphaned blocks per day. The total number of blocks each day is tuned to be 144 (one every ten minutes), so dividing this by 2.5 gives around 60, or a 1 in 60 chance of there being such a collision on a given block.
if my maths is right, this means there is a a 1 in 1000 chance of each participant hitting a 2 second block, so multiply these together to get 1 in 1000000, and there is a 1 in 60 chance of there being a collision in this way, so the odds of this happening would be roughly 1 in sixty million. To put this in perspective, you have a 1 in 600000 chance of being struck by lightning, and this would appear to be some 100 times less likely!

Now, further up there, I made an assumption - that the block difficulty is 'correct'. As I understand it, the block difficulty essentially defines how many leading zeroes must be in a block's hash for it to be considered 'solved'. For example, the last block (found by us!) had a hash of 0000000000000000d69d39dbe4e025909fc30b4be52abfaccfec9315c497ac6c, the digits after the leading zeroes are irrelevant (which is what leads to block collisions in the first place, as two hashes can be found with the same number of leading zeroes).
The block itself is composed of the newly found hash, the hash from the previous block, the block number, difficulty and time, the pool's address, and all the transactions in that block (this is a simplified description), so my question is this - since the odds of two pools finding a 2 second block at the same time is so low (and I stick by 'vanishingly small' as a good description), is it possible that some blocks have more 'solutions' than are statistically expected - in other words, for some blocks, are there more solutions than expected with that number of leading zeroes?
For example, the hash above has 16 leading zeroes, in binary this is 128 leading zeroes, so if my understanding is correct, the odds of getting this out of any random hash would be 2^128.
Any thoughts?

I wonder if Slush had bitcoins tied up in Mt.Gox possibly?....im just looking for excuses now lol...but it is possible...other pools arent having as bad of "luck" as Slush...I've been with slush for awhile now and he has always fixed stuff quick, but this is the first time i hopped ship. Maybe slush got hit by that flaw of the missing coins as well? along with gox and other sites...weird stuff.

I absolutely agree. Pool hashrate doesn't correlate with "luck", er shares/difficulty.

That calls for an "Argh".  You seem to have some math knowledge, but then you confound "expectation" in a mathematical sense, with "expectation" in some other sense.

Your expected income per difficulty 1 share is (Bitcoin reward per block) / (network difficulty). If you earn more than this per share, you've had good luck. Less than this is bad luck.

True, but binja9 is also right - vardiff solves the problem for a single miner and his hashrate, but more miners means more traffic.
If a single miner points more of his equipment at Slush, the pool will change his vardiff and the traffic and server load will remain the same.
If 1000 miners point 1Gh at the pool they will increase the traffic and the server load for just 1Th increase.

Still the pool hashrate is not related to the load it takes to serve it.

I am sure in such cases Slush just starts an additional stratum back-end (or adds a CPU to the virtual server instance) to take the load. With getwork the load was many times more than with stratum, so we are far from the limit. I also have a reason to believe that most of the processing is done in the startum back end servers, so adding another one scales almost linearly.

'Luck' exists, silly! If you earned more than expected, you've had good 'luck'. If you earned less than expected, you had bad 'luck'.


No, the traffic problem is what vardiff solves.

Unfortunately there is no relation between the pool size and the luck in the direction you want. It's the opposite ...
When the luck increases - more people are joining, but then it should go down to compensate it and it look like the higher hashrate is causing the bad luck, but it is not. If no new miners join the pool a 12h block will actually take 13h

Why 'unfortunately'? Because if it was true, then a solo miner with CPU, would have much more luck and much bigger reward, then no one would need to join a pool at all.

+1

Okay, yes, screw that. I'm really more worried about this fifteen hour block. Twilight of the gods? Are we seeing the end of amateur mining, or just really really bad luck?

Apparently the 800 threshold has no baring judging by today. Possibly the red bold font was the fix required. From posts the S1 appears to be the current weapon of choice for the more pedestrian non-100 Th/s ruler of BTC types.

or maybe we dont use colors to purposely annoy others. but that is what newbz do

You have your wish.

Is 200TH enough?

"Genie in the pipes"

If it comes to that we're fortunate enough to have the infamous "ignore" option but you; well your just going to have to live with yourself. 

We're almost at 800. Let's wait and see what happens. 

And a 36min one ... what did I won?