Yes, you're 100% right. 1 miner can solve a block and get the reward no matter what hashing power they have, even a 1gh/s usb miner.  Now, in reality, the more hashes you process per second, the likelihood (not probability) of you solving a block is greater. I used p2pool for a week and earned 45% less BTC than I earned with the same hashing power using ghash.
Bottom line is p2pool is pplns plus a % fee.  Oh wait, I forgot the 0.5% subsidy a node gets for the solved block.  

p2pool is not popular because it suffers from the fact that miners will always act in a way to directly maximize their profits. We can cry in our cups all day about 51% and how p2pool should be this amazing solution. However at the end of the day, it's just less money in the miners pocket.

Personally, I don't think ghash going to attempt a 51% attack. I'm more concerned with the large private pools out there, granted they don't have 45Ph/s to do a 51% yet, but in the coming months, who knows what someone with enough private cash might do. Ghash would have to create a large forked block chain with all the petahashes at their disposal and the evidence of that would be pretty clear.

From a mining perspective, since PPS has pretty much gone away, you have to throw your hashes at the pool that solving the most blocks otherwise you won't make as much money. Less blocks solved by the pool = less money. If btcguild started PPS again, I'd go back to them, but they stopped PPS, so you need to go with who's going to pay the most for the hashes. P2Pool was awful, I took a 45% income hit when I gave it a try.  Maybe in the future when (or if) fees kick in, but right now p2pool doesn't pay like the larger pools, so there's little point. In short, if PPS comes back into the play, great, otherwise there's no incentive to move out of a large pool.

No, I am saying the longterm solution is creating awesome pools with nice payout systems.

Eligius works with 0% fees just fine.

At the end of the day the "consumer" decides on which service to use. He votes with his choice for the model he likes most. That vote should be respected.

I am not willing to destroy anything, as I am not the destroyer. Even a 51% pool doesn´t destroy anything without malicious intent.

As explained, the pool would first have to withhold a large number of blocks from the network to then submit them at once, verifying each block on its own and creating a new sidechain,
which would then become the main chain.

The longterm solution can´t be "boycott pool X"

The different pools have to improve to get their service up to the level of GH.io, not the other way around.

That means merged mining atleast NMC, 0% pool cost, TX cost payout etc.


Also, for 51% attacks a pool would need to WITHHOLD a large number of blocks from the network, building a side chain which it can verify with its own hash power.
As long as GH.io pools` blocks show up fairly regularly, there is no reason to worry.

They obviously feel that they are better than the other pools and want to have a discussion only on their terms.

Clearly a block withholding att--err, wait a minute...block producing attack?

ASICs do not always test every nonce from 1 - 2^32.  There's many reasons this may happen such as

1) Many will slice that range into pieces based on the # of chips on the board, giving each one a slice.  If a chip is damaged, that range isn't checked.  Hardware errors.

2) It may be setup to have modules, with each module getting a range, but some units only have 1 or 2 while others have 8.  Instead of splitting the ranges up evenly between available modules, it gives them their static range and ignores the others.

3) It may immediately feed in new work once a solution is found for a nonce range, even though multiple solutions can exist in the full range.



Additionally, modern mining protocols have the miner use a local counter inserted into the coinbase in order to generate work (this is why stratum and GBT are immensely more efficient than getwork, they can make their own work locally).  That counter will be in a different state for every single miner.  If a call were added which forced miners to have that counter in a specific state, you've just clued in a block withholder that the work it received is a test for withholding, so they won't.

Which ever way you eat it, by the time you finished the last bite, you wish you'll never see a gummy bear ever again (or anything sweet)

I'd suggest buying bitcoins if you think their price is going to go up.  ASICs are all incredibly overpriced, as is the 'rented' ghash at cex.io (they'd use it themselves if they made more money that way).

GPUs are pointless for bitcoins.

If you're a gamer and have a good card and live with your parents, they probably wouldn't notice an extra $10 or something on their electricity bill if you mined some scrypt coin at night or somesuch.  You should be able to make a little bit off of that.

You can roi. I have and i'm no wizard.
I don't understand the miner price today though as they were cheaper, or the same price 2-3 weeks ago, and it is a later point in time. 
Companies just ripping people off from recent price increase right now.

Now anyone who is trying to mine alts with gpus these days, myself included, needs some wizard assistance cause were all fucked lol. 

Looked exactly like this, maybe a little worse (picture from another user with the same experience as me).

Didnt take my own pictures, i had other things going on and its not like i had recourse.