why?  I'm asking in earnest.


I know we all say that it doesnt matter which pool is used as they balance out over time but I think that is false.  To me, you would want to be part of the larger pool getting the majority of blocks solved such that you have the highest chance of earning btc within a day.  I would think that picking a smaller pool such as something like ozarks pool or slush or possibly eligus pool you will see a larger proportion of shares per block solved, but that you wouldnt see this payout nearly as often (maybe you would be lucky and your pool would solve one block per day)  My point is that I think you would see a larger per share reward if mining the same hashpower on a smaller pool but it would happen less often...so much less often that you end up losing btc when comparing day to day performance within the same difficulty cycle.

indeed.
from this viewpoint the best case imaginable would be a single pool, but not a centralized one for sure!
so a merge of a p2pool-like implementation into bitcoind would offer both: decentralization and most frequent payout possible with 0% fee

Ok so my experience goes like this  - I got some BEs for super cheap maybe 8 weeks ago.  (around 20 bucks each shipped)  I have them all pointed to two different pools:  1st one was bitminter pool which was hashing around 35 TH at that time.  I was able to get coin steadily, but then one day I just stopped getting paid It was hashing but bitminter ran into a string of bad luck, zero payouts for a day straight.  I was using cex.io at that point and saw that I could point my gear towards ghash.io pool and decided to do that instead as I knew that was a guaranteeds 200+TH all mining for that single pool, yes I did get small payouts per block, but now I'm seeing a block reward on average once every 20-30 minutes not just from once or twice per day. (isnt it doubled now to approximately 400 TH+) (didnt really keep a good comparison between pools for coins earned as the difficulty jumped)...that is what made me switch to staying on ghash.io for my btc mining.  HOWEVER, I am seeing that my hashrate seems to fluxuate a lot more from Ghash.io whereas bitminter seems to have less variation in hashrate and seemed to keep it high consistently. 

I....just like you all......want to make as much money as possible have hashpower wasted as little as possible. 

Hashrate will level out when peoples want/need for money/greed levels out.

It's not 100% on BTC, it's 100% minus TX fees, which are probably around 1-2%

erm... or maybe everything gets sent in the 25 Bitcoin transaction that the pool mines?? How about that?

What's this with people picking on the pool with the best fees (absence of, plus tx fees to miners, plus 105% NMC!!!) by far?

was trying to understand it, now I do.
BTW. on the eligius homepage, it says that they pay transaction fees out to miners, and Wizkid(the pool owner) just said so.

Seems to be just a ploy to upsell people to a more expensive level of account, which doesn't have those limits.

//  ... What you are seeing now will be the largest single increase - proportionately - for a given finite period.  .../

If this finite period is 9 months (18 difficulty jumps, 30% hike everytime), then that would make all existing ASICs obsolete.

Anyways, 2014 is going to be interesting.