Could someone indoctrinate me on exactly how the mining process works? From what I understand, it looks for deadlines, it finds deadlines and if it submits it first you win the block? But if you don't process it fast enough and another block appears, you lose any chance at deadlines in the last block. If that's the case wouldn't an extremely fast processor give you a huge leg up on the competition as you'd be sending in deadlines before anyone else if more then one person has the same deadline?
Every combination of accountId, nonce, generationsignature, and height will calculate out to a deadline number. The generationsignature and height will be the same for everyone each block. Every block the miner goes through all your plot files calculating the deadlines for each nonce you have plotted, keeping track of the best one(or ones if you use a pool that takes multiple). The deadline is a number of seconds that if that many seconds pass since the previous block without a new block coming out you can announce a block with that accountId and nonce. Faster speed may help you find your best deadline faster, but once it has been found you can only sit and wait to see if someone else had a lower deadline and releases a block first, or if that much time passes and you can release a block. If your setup finds your best deadline very slowly it does put you at a disadvantage, since it opens up the possibility of someone else's deadline coming up and them releasing a block before you finish finding yours, when you might have had a better one.
Thanks for the informative answer.
So processing your plots faster only helps if more then one block is waiting to hit the chain?
How would they release a block sooner? That only happens if another block appears on the chain and then has to be processed?
Also is there a timeline on PoC2? Like a few weeks, months?
I also think a GPU assisted miner would most definitely help things out here, at least till PoC2 shows up. I'm looking at having to purchase a ~$150 processor upgrade due to mining times as about half my HD space seems to be being flushed away. It seems as though a quad core is a requirement (hex or oct for AMD).
