>>>>

I could go on for several screens-worth of typing about the auto-switching auto-exchange pools and the damage that they do to the markets, nevermind to their own users' profitability, but I won't. Suffice to say that they will collapse in on themselves and deservedly so. You have the biggest one needing to spend most of its time mining LTC because it's simply too big for anything else, and that of course begs the question of why you would pay someone 3% + exchange fees to mine something that you could mine yourself for far less. Those are the kinds of lazy miners who IMHO will get bored with making < $10 per MH/s per day and quit rather than making decisions for themselves. Add in certain pool admins who exit their large positions with all the grace of a rutting rhinocerous (really, if you have for example 12,000 of a coin to sell then do it in 500 coin blocks throughout the day - it's better for your users and the markets than hurr durr hit the sell button all at once) and the lazy / incompetent will disappear eventually. I also think that more and more up-and-coming coins like EAC will use the difficulty-adjustment-per-block approach that makes them a nightmare for those pools. Other deserving coins will gain so much hash rate as the trashcoins die out that the pools won't have the same effect as they do right now when the total hash rate is spread so thinly.

So when I threw the line out about not relying on a 2 week old coin to pay the electric bills, this was the thinking behind it. Treat your business like a business and don't assume that an untested new product is going to pay the bills. That's what established low risk / low reward coins should be used for. And for those who say that EAC at 200 Satoshois wasn't worth the cost to mine it, I'd love to see the math behind that. I was getting around 170,000 per day when the difficulty was in the 20s and 30s which at 200 Satoshis would be 0.34BTC per day, or $280ish at the current CoinBase sell price. For that claim to be even remotely realistic would require an electric rate of about 40-45c per kWh. Please show me another business where the "failures" return a 75% profit margin for very little effort? No really, please?

Flame suit on