This really does sound like an interesting feature. The option of receiving coin in the currency mined (as specified by the user) would let us more or less automatically diversify our coin holdings. Of course the percentage of diversification per day would be based on what was mined, which is arbitrary and based on profit. But still I think this is a useful feature.
I also agree the priority of offering this in the larger coins only to start. I'm personally not interested in holding coins other than BTC, LTC, and DOGE right now.
I don't quite understand the issue you raise about what price is "sold". Is this just a statistics reporting issue? Because if there's no exchange, then there's just a transfer from the pool to the user. Or is the issue that in order to determine the share or fees for a user you have to come up with the equivalent of a "sold" price?
Thanks for thinking about this feature.
Yep, its just a statistics problem. Everything we list on the stats page is based on you (miners) earning BTC exclusively. So if we pay out in LTC, how do we count that towards the day's BTC earnings (it never got converted to BTC)? In the case of LTC it matters less (since it by definition is 100% profitability all of the time), but for something like DOGE, how do we count its profitability?
In the long run I don't think its going to be a huge issue, it will either be reported a bit high (this is what most multipools that don't exchange do, count everything at last-trade price), or a bit low (the minimum we expect to be able to sell it for - barring major changes in market), or somewhere in between. Again, it matters a bit more if we do "exchanges" between accounts, because each side wants a different exchange price, so maybe the easy answer is the average between last-price and expected-sell price.