The only problem with this is that it won't work. You should read the tech paper.

Even if every pool were DDOS'd and they all broke, permanently even, so what? It doesn't affect Bitcoin, pools are just a way to make mining give you money more immediately. (not faster, as there's a slight fee and theoretically the amount of time it takes you to get 50 BTC with a pool is the average amount of time it would have taken you to get a block by yourself)

Bitcoin doesn't rely on pools, pools rely on Bitcoin.

Good point, hadn't factored in difficulty increases.

The hash rate has actually gone down massively today.
Network total rate is at 5.4 blocks per hour.

Also, all the big pools have had insanely long rounds today (just look at deepbit or bitcoins.lc history in the last 24 hours).
It *could* be luck, but if it is, it's a hell of a coincidence.

All of them have gone through the longest round in a month today. Even the small ones like triplemining.com are undergoing ridiculous rounds.

Good point. I haven't really tracked the blocks/hour stat, and Bitcoin Watch's network hash rate graph looks screwy.

I do find it odd then that so many people would leave their miners idle rather than to setup a backup pool, or 2 or 3.

All things considered, though, of the pools that stayed online today every one of them looked like they enjoyed a growth in hash rate. So, at least a non-negligible amount of miners took precaution and picked backup pools.

Most people play the lottery alone. Most people don't mine bitcoins alone.

Mining solo at this difficulty level *is* a lottery. Your chances of ever earning anything are very, very low.

Well, not very, very low.  You would on average win one block of 50 coins every 50 days mining solo if you had 2.7 GH/S of power and the difficulty didn't increase.  In fact over a year or so, you will on average come out ahead on your own rather than pooling because of the pooling charge.  The problem is that difficulty has been increasing so quickly that you are chasing a target that moves faster than you can catch.

Pooling basically allows you to pull the future 50 coin win into the present so that you can mine at the current difficulty level instead of the much larger future one.  The price to be paid for this benefit is the pool charge.

I do not agree solo mining must be bad.

Are people always more afraid of loss then thinking of possible extra profit? (afair studies say that yes, x2 more)

Look at it this way,  assume 2.6 GHash solo.
Assume diff doubling each month (same affect as +30% but easier calculations)

You will on avg. get a block once per month.
You have 50% to get a block in 30 days.
(http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php)

So in pool after a month you get 50 BTC, then 25 BTC, 12.5, 6.25, 3.12 = 96.8 BTC
after more month you would get close to 100 and then some pennies monthly.

So 100 BTC in 5 months in pool.
Solo, you have 50% chance to get in this time same 100 BTC or even 150 or perhaps 200 BTC.
Also you could get 250 or 300 is very lucky - but also you can get just 50 or even 0 if very unlucky.

Mining Solo is NOT less profitable at it does NOT mean you will get nothing - you may get nothing but you may also get much more then from pool, even +50% more is not that unlikely.

It is the risk of getting 0 BTC what scares people it seems.

That is why I said we should CHANGE the default protocol. And yes it affects the overall network computation power!

And as far as I understand from the technical paper. Bitcoin can be taken out if you can afford computation power larger than the sum of the network.

I am talking about the worst case scenario. Let us say three of the major pools have been taken over and hacked! then what! a faulty blocks can be introduced!

not just slowing the total network computation power due to DDoS. But the whole thing can be wiped out!

what I am saying is that we can convert the whole network to one large gigantic pool with all the miners working WITH each others. And the only things that can take this out is to block the BTC traffic all over the internet.

So everyone is working in cooperation Yet every one will be still competing for larger share. umm maybe extra digits can be introduced as 8 digits after decimal point might be not enough.

Away from how much hard effort to see this accomplished. but what will be the disadvantages of this suggestion ?