Quote from: roy7 on April 15, 2014, 01:58:14 PM

Quote from: KyrosKrane on April 15, 2014, 12:59:39 PM

Which would you pick?

The point you are seemingly missing or ignoring is that the odds of either great luck or terrible luck happening are the same, and you don't know which will happen ahead of time. You don't get to pick.

Yes, larger pools provide smaller variance. Everyone knows that.

Quote from: KyrosKrane on April 15, 2014, 12:59:39 PM

Given that your BTC payout per block is constant (as per our assumptions), I'd much rather have the first option.

What the heck, I'll play along. How do I choose the pool which is about to have 3 months of finding blocks at twice the normal rate? Yes I'll choose that option too. Will you share which pool it is going to be?

I'm not missing it at all; in fact, that's the point I was trying to make. I even highlighted it with my example of the gambler's fallacy! What I was saying is that while you can't predict when a good streak will come, you have to judge for yourself whether you can ride out the cold streaks. For a machine with a useful life of months, an extended cold streak like what we're seeing now means a significant loss. Many users will decide they'd rather have smaller but more consistent payouts from a traditional pool, rather than larger but inconsistent payouts from p2pool. If we want p2pool to thrive, we have to find a way to counter that.