H) When the payout queue grows longer that a few hundred BTC:
1. The pool operator initiates a transaction with the bitcoins in the offline wallet, paying everybody in the payout queue (except those in the first block, so that miners still have something to work on) the full amount of their balance.
2. If a miner was payed out with the manual payout transaction, the payed out amount is removed from it's personnal balance. The date of their last payout is updated to the date the transaction was submitted.
3. The pool refreshes the payout queue.
I'll just clarify here that in a manual payout the payout queue, *not counting potential earnings for the current round*, is generally paid completely (the "As of Last Block" balance value in the user stats). Since the estimated earnings for the current round will obviously sum to 25 BTC, that is why when you see the payout queue it seems like one block was left unpaid, but those are just balances not yet rewarded/earned.
How can balances not yet rewarded/earned show up in the payout queue? Related, what if the payout queue is completely emptied out by a manual payout, and (due to vagaries of the queue and people not yet hitting their threshold) there are not yet enough users in the queue for payouts to total 25 BTC in the currently-being-mined block? Is the remainder just sent to the cold wallet for future manual payouts? Or will the pool just pay out accounts before they hit their thresholds?
The payout queue/coinbase payout normally contains the exact earnings calculation for the moment a block is found (with a correction for the obvious delay in work->mining->block submission) so that miners in the top of the queue are already paid for the block that was just found immediately when it is found. In a manual payout this is not possible, since it's not a block that is found and earning funds. So, only the balances valid/earned as of the previous block are able to be paid.
1) So manual payouts are just normal transactions pushed to the Bitcoin network? I.e., they often end up in blocks that aren't mined by Eligius? If so, it seems that it would be nice to just have that transaction included in the next Eligius-mined block so that the pool can keep the fees (equivalent to not paying fees). Obviously this could lead to a delay in payments if there is a long round, but I think that most people would understand.
2) How often does Eligius push new block contents to miners? If the exact payout amount is fully paid out and kept current (not just the "as of last block" amount) in every block, this would have to be pretty frequent..... several times a minute? So if a miner successfully finds an "old" block (with "old" version of the coinbase transaction that has "old" balances), I suppose the new balance differentials are just kept in the user's account to be paid out the next time they enter the queue?