Eligius only pays out the 50 BTC generated, not transaction fees.
Compared to a lot of other pools, I do earn more though, since they are hopping proof and have one of the lowest variances possible.
How do they have a low variance beyond hashrate?
Transaction fees are NOT designed to hinder spamming but to compensate miners (currently rather pools... as they usually don't pay them out). Every time you add a 1 kB feeless transaction, with ~20 000 nodes in the system this creates a need to transfer and store ~20 MB of data forever(!) + some CPU cycles to verify this transaction 20 000 times.
Yes, I agree that is what it's designed for and it's also stated in the documentation (or FAQ or wherever) that at the current stage, the fees are not really relevant. My contention is they are, beyond not being relevant, a hindrance to the acceptance of Bitcoin. If I, as a user, have to pay a fee to send a .05 BTC transaction, it hardly becomes better than Paypal. As someone more involved in the Bitcoin community, I know it's better than Paypal, but Joe Average user is going to be pissed.
As long as deepbit for example anyways wants to keep free transactions, you can set YOUR accepted transactions to anything you like - they own ~50% of the network (give or take a bit) so the maximum delay of a free transaction would be anyways just 1 more block at most.
This is a cogent argument and I appreciate it. However, what if Deepbit decides to change that policy? Just because someone is willing to do the right thing at this time and process free transactions, it's ok for others to be leeches and build their policies and greed off of that largess? Again, we get back to being just plain rude and greedy. "Someone else is cleaning up the park, so we don't have to."
It's everyones job to keep the place clean; Just because their are people walking through the park picking up trash doesn't mean it's ok to throw your trash on the ground.
I think you just didn't read sufficiently through the Bitcoin ressources: transaction fees are designed(!) to be an open market and have competitive prices. The only problem right now is, that it's not really easy to include custom/complex rules on which transactions to accept and which not, as the current client is a mixture of a client for end users with a nice GUI and pool operators (with that ugly "getwork" system) at the same time. As soon as dedicated pool operator clients show up, I expect this to change. A lot!
We are not at the point where we should be letting the free market decide things, nor are we at the technological level where we can let the free market reign. As you said, the getwork system is ugly and clients should be in control as to what they process and what they don't. Pools should be a dumb conduit for that. A pool operator deciding unilaterally whether or not to only accept non-free transactions is motivated by greed/profit. I'm not sure how you can possibly spin that any other way - the only reason not to process free transactions (barring a spam attack) is because you want money for it and do not want to philanthropically support the infant BTC.
That in and of itself is fine for end users, but I don't think pools should do that. The thing is, most users don't understand the philosophical and technical underpinnings of a pool deciding whether or not to accept fees, so letting the free market decide is not really a viable option at this point. Once there's a client (and pools) to support client decision on whether or not to process the transaction, then I think we will be ready to move on to choosing to support feeless transactions or not. But until then or until Bitcoin gains much, much wider acceptance, not processing feeless transactions is anti-social and detrimental to the Bitcoin movement.
