Okay, I see that there is lot of stuff going on in the backscene we are not necessary aware. I have seen a lot of posts in this forum of people being confused by the timeout. Maybe you could add a "request payout" button, that would pay everything that is unpaid (if the unpaid balance is over 2 TBC, to avoid the botnet annoyance), but could only be invoqued once per week/month?
I've considered this. This would need to be done with signmessage, also, to prevent lamers from requesting that everyone be paid out. Also, it would not be instant and would just be a way to tell me, "Hey, this person wants a payout," since there is no hot wallet for Eligius for security purposes. I have considered keeping a remote (not on Eligius servers) hot wallet with a very small amount of coins (less than 5 BTC at all times or so) for actual near-instant payout requests via signmessage... but this probably won't happen any time soon.
Is there anyway to know what amount is currently in the "reserve" fund? I know that the address 18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B gets the "surplus" money from every block found, but it seems there is a LOT more money than just that at that adress!
The 18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B offline wallet is one address in a shared offline wallet. Some of the coins are Eligius's, some of the coins aren't. There is no "reserve" fund, per se, as there are still shelved shares to be paid. However, the pool cold wallet always does have the funds to cover every satoshi of every unpaid miner balance (not including estimates, obviously). If you really want to know the exact amount the pool has on hand, you can determine this amount by summing the "balance" field in the balances.json then subtract 25 BTC for estimates for the current round (the "balance" field includes estimates).
Two ways I -think- could be used to "efficiently" represent this data is eiter:
a) A line chart of "Total BTC you would get" as a function of "Total BTC the pool catches up". So it would be an constantly increasing line.
b) A histogram of "Shelved shares you have" binned in groups of (say) 10 billion shelved shares, in reversed chronological order. Makes easy to see where in the share log is hidden the bulk of your shelved shares.
Actually, I've been working on a per-user share log visualization for quite a while now. Making it make sense, though, is the hard part, since most of my attempts simply look like noise for most miners. I'm still working on it though and I plan to have a histogram type visualization working in the next major stats/CPPSRB revision.
A while back, you told about the "?timemachine=1" trick to get our full history, but it is "hidden" because you said that web crawlers overloaded your servers with the requests to these pages while indexing your server. Have you tried using a robot.txt file to request that the stats pages not be crawled? (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard)
I have, actually, and it turns out most crawlers don't actually care about robots.txt. Only the major ones (like Google, Yahoo, etc) seem to actually obey it. The longer term goal is to simply make the data accessible more efficiently. The stats have hash rate and balances data for every user since the beginning of Eligius-Ra. I want to make that data accessible. I want people to be able to plot 1 year of their personal hash rate if they so desired, without having to precompute everything all the time.
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Side notes: I do plan to drop the default minimum payout soon, probably to 40 TBC, which makes sense. I haven't considered this a huge priority, since people can simply set their own minimums already. But, it probably is time.
Thank you Wiz: You run a very. fair. pool.
Thanks!