1. I considered this, but since CPPSRB is not actually straight PPS, prominently displaying a maximum potential PPS value would likely be confusing. Even displaying it where it is has already caused confusion and I've considered just removing it entirely.
7. This was the case before, and people, again, just got confused thinking that the pool in some way owed them or was otherwise cheating them out of the value of the shelved shares. Since the switch to a percentage, which is actually a much more useful stat, there has been much less confusion.
I get the point. Maybe you sould call it something like "Maximum potential reward per submitted share"? Then add another sentence like "(The pool has, historically rewarded [computed average] percent of all submitted shares.)"
Maybe it would be an interesting stat to have a graph that shows the distribution of "amount of users" as a function of "percent PPS"; to show that because of CPPSRB, and the date one has starded mining, the percent PPS is variable per user.
By taking the data from the API, it would be a graph looking like this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3d64buquo0hr7ml/Screenshot%202014-02-01%2020.35.39.png6. Historical luck doesn't actually have any affect on future earnings or make any real sense to display in more detail than it already is (luck % for each block, variance graph), so its a next-to-useless stat IMO. I did put the estimated earnings/variance graph on the main page already, though, to show that things even out as they should.
It could also be interesting, then, to have on userstats page a graph of the evolution of your personal percent PPS over the last few weeks. Just like the graph you put on main page, but for you, and not for an hypothetical miner.
The stats are being redone and integrated into a new single site soon anyway. (spoiler)
Nice! Looking forward to it!
Yeah I noticed that and that block was mined on: 2013-12-31 09:01:22. Almost all of the "quickest" blocks from that one to the one just now were mined in the last 4 months or so... since the rise of the asics... it could also just be pure luck...
It is both, in some way.
The ASICS don't have to do anything in that per se; they juste provide more hashpower. But since the network difficulty automatically adjust to an increase in hashpower, the asics, by themselves dont't do anything.
However recently, Eligius has gotten more and more larger of the whole network's hashpower. THAT does increase the odds of finding blocks rapidly. Still, it's no luck yet, it is just simple math. With 1% of the network's hashpower, we expect to find a block every 16 hours and 40 minutes on average; with 10% of the network, the expected block time is 1 hour and 40 minutes.
The expected block time is just that, an expectation. It might be shorter or longer, and THAT is luck. But the average block time (averaged over a few hundreds of blocks), must be (and is) the same as the expected block time.
Luck of a given block is the "expected block time" over "actual block time" (Well, technically, it is "expected number of shares (difficulty)" over "actual accepted shares", but the ratio should be the same/very similar if the hashrate does not change significally during a block). So a block with 200% luck would have taken 8h20m when Eligius had 1% of the network, and 50 minutes with 10% of the network.
Currently, mining a block in less than 5 min would take a luck of over 1100%, but when we the pool had 1%, it would have taken a luck of 20 000%. Thus, ASIC don't really have much to do to explain the quickest block we had recently. The main reason is that more people entrust Eligius with their hashpower, and we have got a big part of the network now. Thus, even tough very quick blocks (less that 5 mins) are still an unlikely event, they are nontheless much more likely now that they were months ago.