eleuthria, you should just eliminate the luck graph on the site entirely.  Even though the metric is measurable, it cannot be acted upon, so, in this instance, the measurement is not valuable.  And if I have to read the "bad luck" posts for 4 more months (until we are even again), I'm going to kill myself.

P.S.  Yes, I do know that the 4 month number is not really the guaranteed length of time it will take until the variances work themselves out - it was a joke.

I'm confused.  If two people flip a coin six times an hour, and each time the winner gets 25 bitcoins - doesn't ones person's luck affect the other persons luck? In this analogy, I understand the "size of the player" doesn't matter because they have the same chance of winning (the exact same pool size), but one player's luck seems to affect the other player.

I also understand how a smaller pool's share of the total bitcoin rewards will eventually equal its percent of the total network hashrate; however, even taking this into consideration, one pool's luck should impact other pools (in the short term).

Yep:

http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu229/ericisback1/2014-03-31_203735.jpg

EDIT:  Back up...

Is GHash.IO down again?  My miner just switched to a failover, away from GHash.IO

Just an FYI, my miners is switch automatically to other pools when GHash.IO went down.

I'm fairly new to mining; however, I have read that balancing your hash rate between pools is a best practice, to minimize variance.  I'm assuming that just choosing "(b)alanced" from the "[C]hange Management Strategy" option in BFGMiner, is all I have to do (if I already have multiple pools listed in the command line), correct?  BFGMiner is telling me it is "Connected to multiple pools without LP".

What is "LP"?

When using BTC Guild as one of multiple pools, is there any disadvantage to using this strategy (slower share acceptance, etc.)?

Finally, when I am connected to multiple pools, only BTC Guild (pool 0 in my example) seems to be requesting regular work updates.  Is this normal?  FWIW, all pools are accepting shares normally (best I can tell)

Wow, I asked four questions... I feel like a hog sometimes...

Looks like the wheels are coming off at Ghash.io's LTC pool:

http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu229/ericisback1/photo-4.jpg

Not sure what the heck is going on.  My workers are filling up the shifts, but the block payouts are MESSED up

+1

If the fee for Pay Per Share (PPS) Method is 7.5%, is it correct that if the pool's luck (hypothetically) ran at 92.5% forever, than the PPS method would break even?  Asked another way, if a miner is using PPS, and the pool luck is below 92.5% for an very extended period, would the miner make more than if he was using PPLNS, for the same extended time period?

Finally, anyone think there is actually any shot of the difficulty increase actually slowing down:

http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu229/ericisback1/2014-03-02_234625.jpg

Man, I hate being the dumbest guy in the room....

At the risk of looking like a complete idiot, I'll ask this...

So, if the current network difficulty is 3,815,723,799, and with ZERO variance, how do you compute the number of shares it should take to find a block (is it just the network difficultly number)?  Asked another way, what math do you use to to see if you are above or below 100%, on your "luck chart"?

Is there a good reference where I can learn about the relationship between the time between blocks, the pool size, and network difficulty?  Specifically, how can I look at this info and see if the time is 2x difficulity etc.?  Thanks.

Holy cow, had no idea.

eleuthria, just a small heads up, the PPLNS info on your "How Am I Paid" page, here:

https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=support§ion=howamipaid

still references 250 million shares per shifts.  I think I remember that you up'ed the shares to 325 million per shift (3.25 billion total for the 10 completed payable shifts).

Now we're talking:


http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu229/ericisback1/2014-02-11_075853.jpg

It seems to me that BTC Guild does not require any confirmations before found blocks are paid out.  Is this correct?  If so, is that because BTC Guild pays for orphan blocks, so there is no need to wait for confirmations?!?  Just curious.

https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison/raw_data is where I found the orginal config info that allowed me to get 160Gh/s.  Similar lines bump the speed to over 200 Gh/s total for the two cards, but im not sure what any of the settings actually do (what they mean).  For example, which settings should I change to affect the WU vs. Gh/s ratio?!? Where can I learn about the specifics of each setting? 

Yes, the case was right next to a heat vent?!?  I've moved it now. But, I don't know anything about how to tweak the configuration. Is there anywhere I can go to find out more?  Any help would be great. Thanks!

Starscream, thanks for the guidance.  I updated the drivers as you suggested, and ended up getting about 160+ Kh/s (thats better than nothing):

http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu229/ericisback1/2014-02-07_111113.jpg

The extra worker put my total hashes over 1 Gh/s. Thanks again.  I learned a lot, and hopefully I can use the info, going forward.