Somewhere, sometime in the past I actually posted something similar to what mikeywith said about preferring to mine in a friendlier environment with a more pleasant operator.
As the saying goes time is money, and if I have to spend *time* dealing with an issue because the person running the pool does not want to, or has the mentality that "it's never my fault, I do a better job then everyone else" then I don't mine there. Because, with the equipment I have after electric & everything else I am only netting about $500 a month. It's not worth it for a few extra bucks to get grief and waste a 1/2 day dealing with something.
Case in point. I spend a lot of time dealing with network routing. I was having issues connecting to a certain pool years ago. Sent the operator detailed logs, showed him where the issue was in his network / data provider and then got back a reply that it had to be my fault everyone else was connecting fine. Guess what, they were not, they just did not notice that what should have been a 10ms to 40ms response depending on where they were was actually closer to 125ms. I showed again what the issue was and posted in the thread where it was. And the post got deleted. So I left.
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Since you brought it up this is not marketing: a Kano solo pool is in the works. While he will understandably still not welcome miners using 3rd-party firmware hacks, the solo WILL accept rentals.
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Unless I am missing something if it's solo then 3rd party firmware should not matter.
Stay safe.
-Dave