Looks like timetravel algo is acting up. I'm getting extremely low accepted hashrate (~7MH/s vs ~45MH/s reported by miner), and pool stats seem pretty off as well - as of right now, it reports 260 miners and 2GH/s hashrate. That seems absurdly low when even a single high-end card should provide 30-40MH/s.

EDIT: Looks like it was fixed shortly after I posted this

Nist5 is acting up again. 70-ish MH/s reported by the miner, and only 2-ish MH/s shows up in web interface.
It's exactly as it was a couple of days ago, before Nist5 pool was reported to be fixed.

Because you're getting earnings only when the pool finds a new block. Which may be happening only in quite a while, for example, for Decred, there may be 1 block per week or even slower, depending on luck.

Because you're not the only person in the pool, you know. If you're not mining on an algo - then other people do. And your share will naturally become smaller.

You should be checking zpool's twitter sometimes.

1. No. Read zpool instructions on how to make sure you'll be getting BTC. Otherwise you're risking getting some other coin.
2. Yes. If the page displays your balance in BTC - you're getting BTC.
3. AwesomeMiner is the manager software. It doesn't do any mining by itself. It helps with setting up miners or doing the profit switching, that's all. And it's pretty good at what it does, though of course their UI is not terribly intuitive.
4. Again, AwesomeMiner is the manager software. It doesn't do any mining by itself.

Thanks. My hashrate reported by website now at least roughly matches "raw" miner hashrate. Will be looking at it for some hours, but so far math generally checks out.

Some real net increase due to useful work being done.

An extreme portion of altcoin market doesn't do anything productive and I suspect that a great part of that is intentionally set up not to do anything productive.
A bubble can be blown only so much before bursting.

First off, you can't expect that a business will show a planned amount of income. Especially over fairly long period, such as three years. Second, Polybius tokens will not have fixed price after ICO completes, nor they will necessarily amount to 20M in quantity.

Bottom line - nothing about your initial post "calculation" is particularly sound. It might be so as you have "calculated". It might be not. As usual with ICOs, there's an extreme amount of uncertainty and risks here.

PS: Polybius has a business model that's a good deal "traditional" - a bank, registered and legalized as such. It would be far-fetched to expect an extreme growth rate from such a business, even if they'll be successful. You shouldn't expect growth rates such as >100% per year here.

The whitepaper doesn't address any question in vein of "why it will work", though. The model of operation is PoS (with extra bells and whistles), it is not yet known if a PoS model can be scalable and/or fast enough to match their declarations. There's not a single PoS altcoin in the world that has grown to even be comparable with "millions of transactions per second".

PS: I'm not questioning if it can do that theoretically, in a closed ecosystem with all the necessary hardware. But I have doubts as to whether it is possible to do it "naturally" in an open ecosystem, and even stronger doubts about this particular altcoin doing it.

I'm seeing quite a rise in the number of various altcoins that adopt PoS model. And still I have little understanding as to what altcoins based on such a model could potentially achieve. And PoS altcoin founders generally don't like "why?" questions at all (as in: why do you think your idea will work?).

One might say that in simple terms, it's a crypto-equivalent of shares/stakes. However, this doesn't address the harder question - why it is better than "vanilla" shareholding? Surely, there are nice aspects in it for an ICO performer, such as considerably lowered (up to non-existence) need for any kind of legal conformance, and much lower costs of the whole operation, compared to IPO. And there's a number of problematic aspects as well, such as extremely volatile market, which can skew the results of ICO quite severely and in both ways.
However, I find it really tough to find benefits in PoS-model altcoins for a "common joe", an ICO participant. Compared to "vanilla" shareholding, it exists in a legal grey zone (and quite close to legal void). It gives less power to a stakeholder, as any power distribution abnormalities and/or outright abuses can't be dealt with legally. One might say "but hey, it can be independent from any government" - but that's hardly a benefit in itself, as since times immemorial it didn't require any government for a person to trust his valuables to another person under some terms that couldn't necessarily be enforced.

And if you look at PoS altcoins without any rosy-tinted glasses, there are a number of things such altcoins can achieve, but none of them are any good. For example, any PoS altcoin in itself is a natural pyramid scheme: make your own altcoin then try to find "believers" to bring it real funds while keeping their interest piqued by PoS's "the more you invest, the more profit & power you will have" line, while in reality all the net worth increase will be due to more people joining the scheme. Of course I'm not saying that all PoS model altcoins do behave that way, but the model itself is readily compatible with all kinds of "lets get rich quick by pulling more people in" schemes.

PoW, on the other hand, is built around deeds (as in: for a bitcoin, a "deed" is a transaction), and if people find deeds performed by participants valuable enough, they will pay for them to be performed. This creates a simple system that closely mirrors real-world basic principles of economics: do useful things and be paid in valuables. PoS tries to be a "invest your valuables into a business", but in my current opinion, it fails to provide any meaningful benefits over traditional investment models, while at the same time currently has numerous glaring problems.