I'm not sure what you mean by adjust the difficulty.  That is determined by the bitcoin network.  If you mean adjust the amount of work you get, just power down your rig for part of the day.

No. VarDiff will in time will optimize your difficulty for your miners to maximize your submitted shares and minimize stales.

So a different pool or someone found the block 24 seconds before us?

I'd vote for keeping things as they are...

I find is useful that poeple who mindlessly rent their sigs as spam openly demonstrate that they can be bought dirt cheap and have no principles or conscience.
It tells alot about someone who does that, thus I consider it useful info.

For what it is worth I totally missed that post. Either way seeing that or from my brief exchange with Slush support the root cause was found by me, and I did contrary to what you believe. Deal with it or continue to be a dick. Nothing more to be added.

First you should probably get a grip on typical human nature. Someone looking at stats where I show plenty of shares but no payout looks like something happened at the pool to me at first, and I argue to anyone else looking at the same thing. "members read it again and again..." will continue just as it has, you can bet on it. But the more intelligent of us are most likely to get to the root cause whereas the remainder say Slush is ripping us off and move on.

+2
Support email answered in a few hours. I was offline for a period of time. I looked at my server and UPS logs and found I lost power for a few hours that I was not aware of.

But gee, I dunno about "Slush ripping us off" like all the whiners a month ago were saying. During my experiment when I reached the 0.01 payout on BTC Guild I was only at 0.0096 here on Slush. They knew best, for sure... ;->

I would read through it, I was just on a mobile phone at the time and it would've been a pain. I've read through longer threads before!

As per the signature, well, I can't remove the colour, as I won't get paid. Unfortunately, it's my only source of BTC at this present moment in time.

Maybe I'll remove it when I get some money

Liam

No.

Shortest I ever seen was block 239570 found by slush on 2013-06-03 in just 2 seconds. Unfortunately it was invalid for us...

Thanks for the vote of confidence guys, but I'm having trouble following the question and answers. Can someone boil post a precis of the question?

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?

Why was this removed? Or are you going to make me find the relevant post in this 12 page thread...?

Liam

My understanding is that when two pools find the 'same' block, they are actually finding different hashes that meet the difficulty requirement (please correct me if I am wrong). In this case, given that the network difficulty makes this so that the expected block length is ten minutes, and invalid blocks are not that common (IIRC, we have seen two in the last month or so), I am quite surprised that there should be such a 'collision' on a two-second block - surely the odds of this happening would be vanishingly small, unless there is something intrinsic that makes the difficulty on certain blocks much lower than it should be.

naw, i saw a 20 second block once.

It is not in effect right now.

I replied to binja9:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976.msg5418642#msg5418642

As for gourmet, I understand where he's coming from. The question of "luck" get raised every ten pages or so, and someone has to answer them. Sometimes it takes longer to get the idea across, and it get's a little frustrating because I have (or someone else has) had to explain this before, many times. If the blame lies anywhere, it's in me being a poor teacher.

I should probably write up something permanent somewhere that just addresses pool luck, and that people can link to whenever luck gets raised.

I'd actually like to hear more of what he has to say, and I don't see a need for your criticism. It's a forum and open discussion isn't for any member to regulate like this. That whole "think twice and don't oppose" comment you made, reminds me of someone I once know, real toxic bastard type... Seriously, why try to bully people out of presenting ideas?

Of course luck doesn't exist it is a convenient word to cover bad judgement, calculations or events we choose not to understand or have control of.

If you expect to earn  X and you earn Y then a force has acted upon X to move its value to Y - an event, not luck.
Either way your expectation/calculation was wrong.

Yeah isn't it funny how they repair the server, then the rounds get short and our luck improves drastically and immediately?!

Why do I feel like so many people are in denial about the fact technical issues are very likely tied to our long blocks? Lot of IT guys in this thread or what? Afraid to consider exploration of the unknown grey area we cannot see? Try just for a moment to imagine like you don't have all the answers, and that maybe the number sold to us as "luck" does not represent factors of pure un-corrupted chance probability. Pay attention next time our luck takes a major nosedive, usually we get an announcement about a technical issue that was being resolved, or a DDOS attack being fended off. I'm fine with it, no plans to leave the pool, but I think too many people here reach for their rifles when people ask questions or make suggestions- what's the harm in a reasonable hypothesis about a backstage technical issue impacting our performance? People come here bitching about luck, but luck isn't truly "luck" if it's caused by a technical issue.

Anyways, now that they resolved the technical issues I am glad to see our "luck" is back to where it should be. On the other hand, if the server shits the bed then you could say it's bad luck, I mean for a server to just crap out like that, or the way the pool always chokes when we approach 900TH. In that sense maybe it is all luck, but if the system is stable backstage we seem to have some very nice runs, and maybe you could argue not having technical issue for a week is a matter of good luck. Happy? See, I argued both sides in terms I can even agree with.