If you were hashing the same numbers 200 million times, then your miner would be useless. For all we know, this BitMinter miner could be doing just that.
I don't think it would be creating blocks if that was the case.
What, pray tell, is this good and accurate incentive to keep the source completely closed?
I created the miner for the pool. It's meant as an incentive and bonus for mining in the BitMinter pool.
I wanted to create something different. I made my own miner, pool backend and web application. Of the three, the miner is the one that has been the most work so far. BitMinter is a major development effort. The goal is to create a new community and a new offering that stands apart from the rest. I didn't want to create yet another miner for DeepBit users, with 10 different forks on github. I also didn't want to create a new pushpool with exactly identical pools popping up like toadstools.
That is why BitMinter is closed source. This may change in the future. But for now, the strategy and goals remain the same.
About the hashrate, I never claimed to be fastest on all GPUs. BitMinter was fastest on a few GPUs. The speedtest in the original post is getting a bit old now, though. Most miners, including BitMinter, have gotten faster since then. Back when that speedtest was done, BitMinter was far behind the competition on Radeon 5xxx cards, and I never claimed differently. And more importantly, the miner showed clearly how slow it was. People would start the miner and go "damn this is slow on my 5970". It never showed an artificial hashrate. It's much faster on Radeon 5xxx now, but still useless on CPUs.
Although there are surely still bugs in my software, I never intentionally put anything incorrect or malicious in there. And I am not trying to deceive anyone. So far many are quite happy with the miner, and others mine at the BitMinter pool with different miners. All of them have been paid correctly and on time. I even gave them 5% extra out of my own wallet. I think we are off to a good start. But in the end, of course, who you trust with your bitcoins and your hashrate is up to you.