as danny is now seeming to realise(congratulations) that its CK that create the block templates and ck that make the payment arrangement to give 98% to someone.
This is something I've known all along, and never disagreed about with you. My disagreement is that the fact that ck is creating the block templates isn't sufficient to disqualify it from being called "solo mining". I know you want to create a new term called pool rewarding that you want understood to be different than pool mining, but that just isn't the way the majority of users have been using those words in the past. Pool mining, since it's beginning, has always been about miners sharing the rewards between them.
the reason for the 2% is easy to explain.
2% was worth alot less years ago. and ck simply has not reduced it to 1% or less, in recent years.
Sure, 2% was worth less, but the block reward was worth less as well, so it was still 2% of all revenue for that miner. Regardless of how little that is, it still seems high to me. I suspect that the biggest reason that it is still that high is due to a lack of competition. If someone else creates a popular pool identical to ckpool and offered a lower fee, then possibly the competition would drive down BOTH fees. However, that's only true if ckpool is actually keeping a profit.
They claim that there is no profit. If that's true, then the 2% is just covering their costs (or they are operating at a loss), in which case competition will not drive the fee any lower since there is no incentive to continue operating at any lower of a fee.