I've been mining on this pool for a while and these concerns came up for me as well when I saw myself slipping in the queue and not really understanding why but as time went on I've started to grasp it more and the one thing that I have found to be true is that I always get paid what is owed to me -- even if sometimes it does take a bit. I've started to understand this manual payout thing a bit more and it fits with what I've seen.... it sometimes seems like I'm slipping in the queue but then all of a sudden at one shot everyone (or nearly everyone) in the queue gets paid in one shot which I've come to understand is the manual payout thing.
One of the most important things that I've learned in looking at myself and my own attitudes is that the saying that the customer who pays the least always complains the most and that kind of seems to fit the bill here in the inverse.... It took me a while to fully grasp that my Antminer S5 is a tiny tiny tiny tiny drop in the bucket.... I always knew it wasn't much but I didn't really understand how little.... I don't do this for profits but more of something to play with so it hasn't hurt me to find that I'm not going to turn a profit but people who are buying a $300 miner expecting to get rich are going to be sorely let down no matter which pool they join.... and while some of those facts might become clearer faster on a small pool such as this even if it feels like you're making more somewhere else, you really aren't. The other thing that small time miners have to realize is that we *NEED* the miners that appear to be hogging all of the payouts because our little miners aren't going to get anything if we are on our own..... even if a huge miner shows up on the pool and starts hogging the automatic payouts they are helping us find blocks which is the only way ANYONE in the pool is going to get paid.
I'm not an expert at all... far from it.... but these are things that I've started to grasp.... I thank wizkid for all of his work and I haven't found ANY reason not to trust him. The fact that he is still working on this pool with as small as it's become tells me, in it's self, that he is doing it for the love of it and not the money or glory which is exactly the person I would trust more.
Thanks for that. Yeah, I think it's pretty obvious that I've definitely not been here for the money or glory, that's for sure. While the volunteer nature of my work here does tend to result in some delays with upgrades and sometimes getting payouts done, they always do get done. And really, not remotely for my own benefit since it takes well in excess of of currently received donations to operate the pool (servers/hosting) and I personally don't mine much anymore. I think all of this definitely tends to get lost on some people, so it's reassuring when people recognize it.
I get at a minimum a half-dozen messages/tickets/etc per week from someone who was basically scammed into buying mining hardware expecting a huge return, then trying to blame me/the pool because their 5 Gh/s BFL Jalapeno isn't earning them $500/day worth of bitcoin. Some remain angry and continue to just believe that I must be cheating them somehow... to the point where one guy attempted to DDoS the pool in retaliation for the pool not paying him like 1 BTC/day for his 20Gh/sec. Others accept reality. Some in between. One guy linked me to a bitcoin mining profitability calculator that utilized a network difficulty from 2013, and MtGox's peak BTC/USD price..... which of course makes a few GH/s device look like a bargain at a few hundred bucks. The whole, "if it looks too good to be true" adage seems to apply for sure. Some even get conned or misinformed into running CPU or GPU miners, to which I have to tell them they'll never earn a penny. But in all cases, I always seem to be the bearer of bad news... and some people tend to still want to shoot the messenger.
And while generally I encourage people to recommend the pool, I wish these unscrupulous sellers would not. "I've got this magic device that can earn you hundreds of dollars per day! On sale now for only $500!" "So, why do you just run it yourself?" I'd probably find the excuses amusing.
While I feel bad for these people, especially those who have been scammed out of money when they bought their hardware, there's nothing I can do about it. I had a back and forth with one gentleman who was scammed into buying some hardware who genuinely expected for me to just pay him what he was told he would earn by the hardware seller (which was probably 100,000x more than he would actually earn) anyway to "make things right"... which simply is not mine nor the pool's responsibility.