And anyone (everyone?) with an ASIC, having invested hundreds of dollars, will be a "serious miner" in my eyes...
Some people, such as myself, can't really afford the high bandwidth usage of running a node. That's the main reason I switched pools.
Really? P2Pool uses ~3 GB/month, normally. How much is too much for you?
With a normal pool, one getwork response/submit takes about 800 bytes of data, plus some HTTP stuff, so about 1KB for every 4 GH (2^32). At 1 GH/s, over a month, that's 650 MB (1 * (24*60*60*30) * (1000/4) / 1e6). It's probably a bit higher than that due to miners requesting more work than they need. In addition, that number scales linearly with the amount of hashing power you have, so with 3 GH/s, you're on par with P2Pool's bandwidth usage.
If I'd heard more complaints about bandwidth, I could have added an option to decrease the number of peers. Bandwidth usage is proportional to the number of peers you have, and 5 is probably enough, so you could halve the usage easily.
P2Pool? Seems like that would mitigate a few issues for remote miners anyway.
While I'm asking, is the P2Pool codebase setup for the block reward halving already? (I'd imagine so, but it gets messy otherwise).
Edit: Pyramining is already setup how they want to and will probably continue in the same. GBT support for p2pool was what I meant to ask about.