I was wondering today about how to get a pool of mining together: that is, users who wish to could all go in together on mining the next block. The actual block signer signs over the block to the group. Splitting could happen any number of ways.

This would really help new users who want to generate some BTC, a key problem for adoption right now. And, it would encourage slow-computer users to participate in block generation, something that is not very motivating right now for many.

Obviously, there's the 'cheater' problem: a user has no incentive to share once he/she has generated the block. I can't figure out how to solve that without a client that is patched.

Does anybody else have technical suggestions about accomplishing this? Even patched clients present some interesting problems: one thought I had is that you could include all the transactions to the group inside your block, but that would of course require you had 50+ BTC to start with, or the transactions would be invalid.

Of course, the client can just stay mum about generation until it's matured, then send it off, and you'd only know once you got your portion.

Thoughts?