Definitely seems to be some confusion lately on how mining works in general. Seems to be a large portion of people buying mining hardware that have absolutely no clue what they're doing, no clue how mining even works, sometimes no clue about bitcoin in general, etc.
I got an email from someone this morning insisting that Eligius cheated him out of something like 50 BTC. Aside from the usual "lol" I get from these emails, it's getting a little irritating because they're becoming more frequent. Details in this case being that he bought mining hardware a couple of weeks ago at a ridiculously over priced cost, less than 100 Gh/sec worth that will *never* break even, and was expecting returns of something like 10 BTC/day ("over $2k per day" according to his email). Whoever is peddling this mining hardware to people who don't know any better with the get rich quick smile on their faces should be ashamed of themselves. All too often I end up being the person that has to tell these folks that they took it up the back side when they bought their hardware, and usually these people are not grateful and still try to believe that somehow I'm the one screwing them over.... at which point I just ignore further communication. Gets pretty old.
Also a lot of confusion from people in the middle who somewhat understand how mining works..... about how mining works.
I don't think people understand that there are no longer any straight PPS mining pools in existence anymore, for obvious reasons. None that I'm aware of anyway, which means none large enough to not be a scam probably. Yet at least once per day I get an email/support ticket/whatever from someone saying something like, "I have X Th/sec of hardware, I should be making Y BTC/day." And usually this is after something like 2 days or less of mining. Seems many people mining today have no idea about variance. There is no way to earn a set amount per day with a set amount of hash power. It just isn't going to happen.
Pools iron out variance to an extent. Eligius's CPPSRB reward system, even with today's high network difficulties and relatively low percentage of the network, still comes out ahead in all of my simulations. It's the most consistent you can be, outside of straight pool-takes-all-risk PPS. But I'll still get someone mining for less than one day (sometimes just a couple of hours!) sending me messages about how they haven't been paid exactly what they should have been. Someone even emailed me a while back after a month insisting the pool was broken because based on his hardware's manufacturer advertised hash rate he should have earned 0.7xxxxxxx BTC and he actually was only paid 0.698xxxxx BTC (shares rewarded were actually 99.9%). Surprisingly his math was fine, and his hash rate was nearly what he was supposed to be getting (not quite 100%, but close)... and just didn't understand how things worked well enough to understand that his earnings were completely normal. He earned 99.9% of his expected earnings, but this wasn't good enough. He switched to a pool with a fee. I just shook my head and laughed.
Anyway. Just a mild rant from me. I guess these miner education issues aren't really going to change any time soon, especially with smaller miners being edged out.
Oh, and about 9 months left until the next block subsidy halving. Just going to throw that out there for people buying mining hardware with 1+ year expected ROI. lol.
