It's really not worth dwelling on (or continuing) this, but if the pool increases to 3x the hashrate then, yes, miners will find blocks 3x faster (another way of looking at it is that an average block will last 1/3 as long). But the payout per block is 1/3. So for individual miners the 'expected payout' per unit time remains the same.

As Turbor mentions, the only thing an increase in pool hashrate does is reduce variance. It has no effect on a miner's expected income.

That's true if the difficulty stay the same.
Considering that the difficulty is going up fast, it's more profitable to find bloc faster before the difficulty rises again.

is there a backup server option for guiminer?  would like to stay with you Dr., just seems like it's been down more often lately.  wish you luck with correcting this!

Then you don't notice, because...


So sad. We try so hard to be more objective, but our innate psychological foibles keep tripping us up!

Ok. I have to be honest. The downtime/problems are starting to annoy me to the point of starting to consider making BTCGuild my primary, and Bitminter as my secondary.

Not true.
Let's do some calculations:
Pool1:   1 TH, finds block every 23.07 hours, 1.04 blocks/day.
Pool2: 10 TH, finds block every 2.307 hours, 10.4 blocks/day.
Mining with same hashrate, payouts will be statistically equal.

But there's one interesting thing:

Each block in Bitcoin network have ~0.5, sometimes even more! of Transaction Fees.
In Pool1, we have this bonus only 1 time per day. In Pool2, we have it 10 times a day.
So on Pool2 with stronger power, will collect more Transaction Fees and users get it split between them 10 times per day instead of 1! That's ~5-10 BTC more for pool, every day.
Bonus reward for miners equals ~1/3 of block everyday, at no extra cost? Sure thing.

That's why it's better to mine on bigger pool, more rewards (thanks to network transaction fees) to split and smaller variance.

Can't tell if serious, or bad at math.

LOL either way 

Cgminer has always confused me. I know very little about coding. Do you know of any very simple and very basic guides to Cgminer. More detailed then "run your Cgminer with these settings" or "add this to your conf file."  I know what a conf file is but I have no idea what to do with it.  Thanks.