Well my experiment is done. Payout was prompt. Earning were no different to slush really but is a close 2nd.
I too have been experimenting with the payouts of a few pools, mainly Slush vs BTC Guild but also to a lesser extent with Eligius, I have dabbled with a few others but will not present those numbers at this time.
In October last year, I ran all 3 guilds at the same time and when the results are scaled to make sure they all received equal hash power, I find that I have a reward ratio of 5.28:4.37:3.68 (Slush:BTC Guild:Eligius)
Since then I have been only running Slush vs BTC Guild (lthough I tracked Eligius blocks to get a longer comparison) and in the last 106 days, Slush has earned more than BTC Guild on 64 days, with BTC doing better on 42 days - although by the end of today I suspect that will be 43 to BTC Guild. In terms of earnings, this a ratio of 1:0.82 (Slush:BTC Guild) - in other words, what ever your hash power, for every £1 you could generate at Slush, the same hash power would yield £0.82 at the BTC Guild.
We all hate the 1 day+ blocks and whilst I can see a correlation between pool hash power and no. blocks found, I cannot see any real correlation between pool hash power and average reward over time since as the power goes up, the blocks go up but the reward per block goes down. Notice I did not say anything about luck since over the last 3 months, the average number of blocks per day has remained fairly constant (4.8/day for Slush and 6.3/day for BTC Guild) so has our luck - around 100%. If anyone is interested, we are currently on 5.2/day for February as confirmed by the 7 day luck value.
Basically, I have a monster spreadsheet of figures, month-by-month, pool-by-pool, block-by-block and there is nothing strange going on anywhere that I can see (except my love of spreadsheets maybe
), so can we please stop with the conspiracy theories about our hash power of 10Ph, because they are ridiculous and I hate reading through them to get to the more interesting posts! We have had 10 blocks in a day at 8Ph and also at 12Ph but it all averages out in the end folks.
In conclusion, I have been with Slush for coming up to 2 years and have yet to find a better paying pool.
Cheers n beers for all
HP