Let's compare Best shares while we're bored waiting to solve a block.

15.3B...

next?

S5, 434m

Pool fee went up, hash rate went down, difficulty went up. It's all numbers. It'll happen again, it'll just take a bit longer.

Lets make a flashmob .
Let us all rent 100th each, on friday at 12pm CT(Central time) for 3 hours.
What do you think guys?

I expect to see the network hash rate drop a bunch at the halving.  So many miners will not be able to make money for folks.  So a diff drop.  It'll normalize again.

I've stopped home mining completely now and have sold my equipment, just rent some hash to solo mine here when I have some spare money but even that's getting hard to justify.

Half a year ago, I was in your situation.

I have tried all of the scenarios you mentioned above.

Yes, I have invested (gambled) many BTCs on solo mining and even at one time got half of my s7 farm to point to ckpool instead of full time at kano.is

Conclusion: No difference. As CK once said, it's all random luck, big TH rental or small miners, anything can happen!

I hit a solo block here in January this year - how did I got that? By accident!

I was doing some maintenance on 4 of my S7s and had to poweroff them that day.

The next morning, I let them run and decided to get them warmed up to ckpool just for heck of it.

All looked OK, and I was about to point them back to main pool at kano.is, then this Fedex guy came to deliver a package for me so I was delayed for a few minutes.

By the time I came back to my desktop.... I saw CK's email on block announcement and the rest is history.

That's not really true about people getting turned off. The average hashrate on solo pool has continued to climb consistently. The only thing really is that diff exploded for a while there proportionately more than hashrate and predicting a loss in my revenue with that diff rise, along with having invested in more infrastructure at the same time I had no choice but to increase fees. If I hadn't, this would have become a non-profit venture, only making profit from donations. That would have made it hardly worth the effort I put into code and pool maintenance.

Anyway I can't see people stopping mining solo and as they fall off the profit curve, more people are throwing their straggling hardware here. The proportion that rent I cannot predict and to be honest more people rent than I ever expected would.

Mine on.

No worries on the fee, especially since you were kind enough to open-source the code so anyone can mine solo without it, if they were so inclined. I'm not too surprised by the rentals... they're like raffle tickets. 50/50 raffles sell like hotcakes - this is a 99/1 raffle.