I think a lot of people are frustrated because they don't understand the difference between pooled and solo mining.
In pooled mining, (ie, what we all do with Bitcoin), the work is broken down into a ton of discrete chunks - each miner is compensated when a block is solved based on their proportion of work contributed - ie everyone gets a slow, steady and somewhat predictable payout.
Solo minings different - blocks don't get shared, so each individual gets a much greater payout, but whether they get it or not is a LOT more dependent on whether they're lucky enough to solve a block before someone else does. There have only been 8000 or so blocks solved so far. I've got the miner running on various computers at varying pps rates - during the first 17 hours or so, I solved no blocks at all. Then they started getting solved. And the thing was, the difference between the number of blocks solved from a computer running at 10 pps and another running at 150pps is much smaller than the difference in prime generation rate.
So, there are 8000 blocks awarded so far.
Lets say there are 500 people attempting to mine them and each person is using 3 computers to do so - on average, if they've all been mining since the beginning, each computer would have solved 5.333 blocks. But the distribution is a lot more random; some people will have gotten 5 blocks, others have gotten zero, and others have gotten 20+. But that's the thing with solo mining. And if, in the beginning, there were only 50 people mining during the first hour, 200 mining 6 hours later, and 500 24-hours later, of course there will be drop-offs in the rate that people see blocks get solved...
Given the newness of the coin, the lack of markets for it, etc, I'd be shocked if someone had already figured out how to have a GPU solve the problems - it's not just rewriting the existing SHA algorithm that bitcoin uses, changing a couple lines to make it primecoin ready, it's revising everything about the miner to handle a completely different type of work. Optmizing the CPU miner? Sure. But even so, I don't think they'ed be churning out coins in this environment, as, again, I think the payout has a lot more to do with luck at this point than anything else including raw horse power.
Putting together some charts to demonstrate the distribution of the rewards I've seen so far.... maybe someone will find it to be of interest, who knows?
But in the meantime, if people want to see more predictable coin generation, then maybe they should start a fund to pay a bounty to the first person to develop a mining pool? i assume it'll be a lot of work, because, again, the dynamics of this coin are much different than any of the others, including this time to "mature". Or, you could make an informal "pool" with someone you know and really trust - just have both of you mine to the same wallet.dat file, and, as you add machines, the randomness that a single miner sees will be evened out more and more...
That my two cents. Utterly useless, because I'm not a programmer. But so far, I'm pretty excited about this coin and I can't quite fathom why people are getting upset with it already?
People are getting upset because some people not sharing their compiled code are damaging their own reputation and the reputation of the coin. Also, it's just flat out unethical to steal blocks. 'Of course they are! This is the internetz where anything goes!' is the typical argument, however I'd like to think the crypto-community and particularly XPM miners are for the most part much better than the worst posters on theb forums. Right now there are a lot of people proving me wrong. All you have to do is look at the statistics.
