Quote from: farfiman on November 01, 2011, 06:53:52 PM

Quote from: eleuthria on November 01, 2011, 02:31:31 PM

While I understand your position, if you're basing this decision on "bitcoin is dying" I'd recommend you reconsider. Bitcoin is returning back to a reasonable value, and the latest difficulty adjustments show that. Difficulty will -always- lag behind the price curve, since it's calculated reactively to the changes over the last 2 weeks, rather than as a prediction.

Every pool op has felt the pressure as the prices shrink, the problems rise, and the difficulty seems too slow at catching up to a reasonable level. Obviously at these prices/difficulty, 0% is basically impossible. Over the next few months you will likely see the majority of free pools either close, or change to fee structures. Perhaps you should try implementing a fee and trying to keep your presence known? If you play your cards right, who knows what position you'd be in if we see another bubble 6 months down the road?

Nice to see that the "competition" would like the pool to continue.

Although the op has stated "It ain't coming back this time, thanks for the hashes over the past few months"
maybe these words can help convince him. ( yeah , wishful thinking)

I'm just worried about seeing a large number of small pool operators throw in the towel. The big problem is most of these pools started during in the middle or height of the bubble. There were only3 pools around when I started, but prices were trending up/difficulty was low, so 0% with donations was a very profitable setup and a good draw. A few months later MANY new pools opened up, and by then it was basically impossible to obtain miners without being 0%. Now that the bubble popped, it's scary as a pool operator to try to figure out how to pay your server bills when the old economic model doesn't work anymore.

The last thing Bitcoin needs right now are a bunch of pools closing down, forcing all the hash power to be consolidated into a small number of pools.