You know what I like best about your post, deepceleron? It's you telling us you have no misconceptions about what and how evil hopping is and yet you, a hopper, are making a judgement about someone else's morals? Either you're amoral and shouldn't be making these sort of calls, or you've stopped hopping and are bitter.
I am a pool hopper? Find one post where I've said that. Studying lockpicking doesn't make me a thief; studying American history doesn't make me want to own slaves. Bithopper software reveals itself as rather clever and canonical, having other uses, such as the potential to find "who solves the block" from LPs, make an IRC block solve annouce bot, or to spread shares across several pools for backup/failover/variance reduction, etc. I'd post a screen shot with all my pools set to info and backup, but my python install got messed up earlier this week and I haven't bothered fixing it.
However, pool hopping on those pools that have decided it is OK, to the detriment of their other users, would just be defending yourself against others who thought it was cool to bring a gun to a knife fight.
By the way, why would someone be "bitter" if they decided to stop pool hopping? hrm.
If pools care so much about their miners, then why they don't implement a fair reward system like PPLNS or PPS ? PROP is not a fair system.
I think the reasons are 1. That would take some effort, 2. Math fail (such as the below-mentioned pool op not believing that pool hoppers reduce earnings, and me being unable to communicate with him in the language of integral calculus and binomial statistics, since he's working at a hosting company at the age I was studying engineering), 3. User resistance (typical PPLNS conversion discussion: "I don't like the idea of my shares expiring..."), and 4. Greed - hopping doesn't reduce the earnings of pool ops, just the users, and more block solves = more fees they get to keep.
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And hoppers degarding network stability or earnings of bitcoin as a whole? How? Even if someone cracked SH256 and was able to generate hashes with 100x speed than other it would not destabilize the system. Bitcoin doesn't care about the pools or hoppers. The only thing which matters is that a block should happen every 10 minutes. Who gets the block, doesn't really matter.
I am referring to the instability and extra work that hoppers create for
pool operators and their users. I happen to know several network problems at bitcoins.lc were from pool hoppers, specifically from hundreds of connections a second being opened by the multipool op and other unknown actors, essentially DDOSing the pool. Jine had to implement firewall caching because of the load the constant stat-refreshing was causing, and had to switch over to to a VM environment with load distribution between six different servers, because proxied and aggregated connections were not re-using TCP sessions properly and would run pushpoold out of TCP/IP ports and crash the pool for all the users.
That I might be bitter about, along with having to switch my higher aggression mining tasks to a PPLNS pool instead of my first choice, to avoid earning measurably less.
I do somewhat agree that the game is flawed if you have to kick out the card counters. However, you aren't taking from the house, you are taking from other miners in a situation where the ideal would be that we pool our resources for the good of all. My response is to the self-justifying posts every few pages of this thread that "pools should be glad, we help them solve blocks", or "xxx pool is unscrupulous a-holes because they are taking measures against pool hopping".