I am new to mining. I have several S3's and an S4 and have started mining today.
What I have noticed as a relative outsider is the following:
Whatever your hashrate, you will only earn money when your pool finds a block. So when all the pools that you are not with are finding blocks, your own pool is eating up electricity for nothing. I noticed in some pools that it took a massive 6 hours to find a block.
Have I got this wildly wrong or should all pools integrate into one big one?
I think the same as you do. Pools have done some damage to the bitcoin system because they came in too early and there where too many different payout systems. but because mining bitcoins is like a lottery solo mining at this point would be devastating to most people even if there where no pools. What would happen is that at current hashing power for home miners and current difficulty you would be waiting five to 10 years to win a block or just as easily, never. Having an official pool could salve the problem but a single pool can bring in other issues such as vulnerability to attacks and bandwidth issues. To mitigate network problems there should be 3 to 5 official pools to chose from.
I define an official pool as pools that are mandatory for mining coins. this means that an agency needs to be set up to govern the rules and license to these pools and any one who wants to mine coins are required to chose between one of those pools. any pool not officially licence to mine coins should be rejected (Known and private pools). to prevent the 51% issue each pool must be required to close new account signups or the addition of miners when approaching a high percentage of hashing power until other pools can catch up. Cloud mining sites could just simply link to official pools.