I learned a lesson today that disenchanted me with Eligius, pool mining and Bitcoin in general.

Last night, one of my miners found a block.  Hope against hope, it found a block!    With only 1.2TH at my command, with odds of five quadrillion to one, it found a block!  I briefly did the Snoopy happy dance.  25BTC!  That's $15,750!  The things I could do with that amount of money.  I could pay for the miners I had gone into debt to purchase and still have a nice chiunk of pocket change!  Stats were still offline so I couldn't see the impact.  I went to bed.

This morning I checked my payouts... and there was nothing.  Nothing but a measly 0.39BTC for four days of mining.  
$15,750 had been taken from me!  Distributed to the pool!  Not one extra bitcoin was given to me for having the miner that did the work.  Then I realized what a Communist plot pool mining is.  You have no chance to rise above your station in life comrade.  Your efforts are for the good of all.  You shall not benefit from your efforts beyond the average level of your hashing power.

Given my inability to afford to purchase at least 100TH of mining power, I will never know the joy of mining a block and receiving the full reward.  I could try mining solo, but I may never see that level of luck again in my lifetime without the aforementioned 100TH of mining power, and the target keeps rising.  With each person or group that struggles to surpass the competition by having more mining power that most of the pack, the difficulty rises almost exponentially.

In Bitcoin, as in life, the spoils once again go only to the wealthy power-brokers.  Satoshi you have failed to create the coin of the common man!  This shall be its fatal flaw that will either make Bitcoin fail entirely, or cause it to become just another currency used to manipulate and control the masses.