I think why there is so many questions is because some wording on the payouts help page is not clear. Terminology is new to most people, like 5nD.
If someone told me that 5nd is 5 times the difficulty level currently, and that represents the number of shares that are used to calculate the payout, and explained that the 5nd as being a "moving window" where as you get paid on your percentage of the contributions you made to the pool during that number of shares ( NOT TIME nor BLOCKS) So, of the 9,365,527,376,108 shares submitted before our block was found, you gave X percent, in my case on the first block I had .03% but I also was not contributing during the full 9,365,527,376,108 shares prior to the block. When the second block is found, I will have a higher percentage of that 9,365,527,376,108 shares and the payout will be higher, and so on with the 3rd and 4th and 5th blocks.
The confusion for me and I seen for many others is that they expected whatever the first payout was to be paid 5 times, ie one time per the 5 blocks found, Which is not true. The payout gets bigger becuase a higher percentage of shares has been submitted ( Assuming you contiunue to mine 24/7 on the pool without leaving)
Explaining that Network Difficulty works out to about 3.3 days, and x 5 = 16.5 days and this is approx. how long it will take to be paid the full amount for the first block of the 5 blocks - again this is without factoring in luck, difficulty level changes etc.
I may have butchered some of that, but hopefully it makes sense
** Note to new users, this is set up this way so that people do not pool hop, and show commitment, and that the fee is less than anywhere else, so you do actually end up getting paid more.
A good example is the current transaction fees paid per block now are upwards of 10 BTC, at Kano, that is awarded to the miners, where many other large pools keep that extra as a bonus for their engineers. Is that fair? 10x17000usd = 170 000usd per found block, and how many in a day? Why do you want to be the one helping that other pool rip you off? If your answer is that they pay you every day and you THINK you are making more, then don't actually let me know why. I have heard that excuse many times.
Keep this in mind - If a site/pool looks good on the front end then the back end is not so nice. If the front end is ok, and gets the job done, the back end is probably better than the other guy.
3 good examples. Nice hash - user interface nice, graphs etc. easy to work. - backend, not so good, got hacked, 4700 BTC Stolen
Antpool - Nice front end, graphs, organized, some analytical data etc. Backend - Engineers getting crazy bonuses for your work - I will bet that they do not get all of that either.
Zpool - I was here right after nicehash got hacked. was good data on front end, somewhat easy to use once you understood the layout. they were at 3 PH/s for SHA, climed to 11.2 PH/s after nice hash went dead. I had 1 S9 there for 2 days, total pay was .0010. During that time their sql server could not handle the load, was falling behind. Owner got new server, set it all up, earned BTC was not accounted for correctly, people started to leave, they are back to around 3 PH/s again. To gain so many new users with no effort, and only to lose them so fast.. what a shame. He gets to keep my .0010 BTC because I will never mine there at all.