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other pools dont waste their connections on that many random users
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its not in the same hierarchy of the important nodes peer connections (pools and merchants) so it gets its last block delayed by atleast two peer 'relay times',
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all of which gives pools an upper hand of multiple seconds compared to a home hobby miner doing it truly solo.
Thanks, that's exactly what I was asking about. That said, I didn't do the math, but 1% (or 2%) of in case I find a block within seconds of another blocks...
How many seconds of latency must a miner save for the odds of a block collision to decrease by 1%?And don't I have to just trust the claim about being "well connected" or is there a way for a miner to verify that?
I am in no way saying that it doesn't have legitimate use case. "I'd rather pay a cut than having to bother with all that" is absolutely legit. As for the connectivity advantage, I still feel that the line is so fine that we may only guess whether it it is worth that 1% or 2%.
Though, considering the current value of the block reward, it's still difficult for me to think that the owner of a farm large enough to mine solo would not want to "bother" doing it itself.