Quote from: teukon on October 12, 2011, 12:04:31 PM

Bitcoin pools agree to use the hashes you submit to generate Bitcoin blocks and, in exchange, they send you Bitcoins. What else the pool does with this hash is irrelevant to this agreement. They could publish an article about Bitcoin containing one of the hashes you submitted as an example and make a lot of money from this publication. By what you have said I'm guessing you would feel entitled to some of this profit. The only way I can make sense of that is if you somehow feel that you "own" the hashes you submit to the pool! This is, of course, ridiculous.

No look at the wording of most bitcoin pools.

They talk about submitting shares and received a PROPORTIONAL SHARE of the REWARD.

Well if the pool also hashes namecoins, crapcoins, or cosbycoins then the REWARD includes those alt coins either directly or indirectly (no problem w/ pool selling those alt coins and increasing the the pool reward.

Have you actually gone back and looked at the intro, faq, getting started, and signup pages for major pools?

Maybe if you did you would realize your perception and reality aren't the same thing.

IF your promise to share "the reward" fairly then put 10% (or x%) of the reward into your own pocket before you start the sharing it is theft by deception.

The only pools which could "secret mine" and even have the shred of legitimacy are pools which PPS and don't make any claims about fair share, proprotionality, splitting equally, etc.

Even with most PPS (for example Arsbitcoin) the wording implies a fair split of revenue.

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You will earn (1 / difficulty) * 50 BTC per share, which is currently 0.000029597456 BTC. This is the average expected value per share, because each share has a 1 / difficulty chance to find a block.

If arsbitcoin (which I don't think ever would) wanted to engage in "secret mining" to be ethical about it would need to change the text on their webpages.

If a website simply said.
"We will pay you 0.000029597456 BTC per share you submit (Period) it wouldn't be a problem if they used shares for anything they wanted. Pools can't have their cake and eat it too. They can't use language which indicates a "fair split" and then perform an unfair split.

Pools can compensate however they want it wouldn't even need to be an equitable split. Someone could make a pool that simply paid 0.025 BTC per 10K shares flat. Now I would point out this isn't a very good deal but it wouldn't be unethical if they simply promised a flat payout without any claims of "fairness". Alternatively someone could make a PPS hopping pool (which hops other pools) and promises to pay 0.03 BTC per 10K. If they end up making more than that well that is fine. Just don't try to have it both ways.