So if you chase [the big miners] off the pools, the pools will get fewer shares and do so less frequently. While mathematically it works out to be the same for all players, most people I would think would rather get small payouts more frequently than large payouts less frequently. That's because I'd say a decent number of smaller miners do what I do, run hard at night or while at work, run light while they're on the PC.
Great post, I would like to add - putting aside if people would rather have frequent small payouts or infrequent big payouts, and speaking purely of mathematics, being in a small pool (i.e. with a low hashrate) is actually not the same as being in a large pool because of the luck factor - a small pool could find blocks per day in the range of, for example, 15 to 30, while a large pool would consistently find around let's say 85-90 blocks per day, which is a lot less volatile. In the long term (actually, infinity ∞), math always wins and it would be exactly the same whether you are in a small or a large pool, but in the real world time frames, even a month is a very short term (a lot less than infinity
), so it's always strictly better (i.e. more profitable) to be in a mid-size to large pool. It's only by a few %, but still.Of course, if you're mining 24/7, as time goes by, the difference is getting less significant (as you're getting closer to infinity
), but as you said there are a lot of casual miners (especially for a CPU coin), who will mine maybe only a few hours a day on their home PC for example while it's idle and they will not keep it running at night because of heat and noise etc. So at a large pool, they will be rewarded after contributing for even just a few minutes, so they can rely on the pool giving them their part for even very small work, while a small pool could maybe not even find one block while their miner is active, which can get awfully close to solo mining.