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.The other big advantage is that with the way that BBP works, every one of these big miners is putting up a lot of full nodes and actually is beneficial to the crypto as a network (although causing some minor early headaches on the pools themselves). This is unlike most others where you run a miner that just pulls from a stratum pool and you can have thousands of miners running on a single full node. The value of a crypto is found in the network it holds and one thing I like about BBP is how it incentivizes being a full part of the network through the way it hashes and mines.