sorry to jump off the rail regarding the discussion ... though I must say this is the best company for miners, and this is one of the best forums I watch as well.
good points made by all, and at the end of the day we all have our own style ...
my question is probably pretty silly, but how do you point the SP's to multiple pools in the "Pools" menu?
You point it to first one and have the second as a backup. I was saying about 100 pages ago, changing the pools on the fly does not work with the present cgminer & SPT watchdog approach. As long as when you change the pool priority, the pool ID does not change, the SPT watchdog will restart the software if it detects connectivity with the 1st pool in the list.
Once restarted, cgminer will point again to the ID 0 pool, no matter what the priorities set on the fly are.
You probably will end up making a script to swap cgminer.conf files with different configurations (main pool + backup pool). A small PHP script placed and ran from /etc folder will suffice.
With it, you just rename the config file from your set (i.e. cgminer.btc or cgminer.ppc) into "cgminer.conf" and kill the cgminer process. The watchdog will do the rest.
Hint: if you need to cycle through various pools just call the script with cron .. it'll give you the possibility to mine for example 30% of your miner time for one pool, and the rest for another
you can even use my eligius address for about 1% of the time LOL
On the other hand, mining contacts will make BTC even more scarce and all the geeks who used to mine will cash out and start something else. I won't buy ever a contract, since for me, the whole fun is in setting up the hardware. If I get paid for it, is even better. I don't need to transfer money, so my real use of BTC is on Newegg or tigerdirect. Buying a miner or two with what I made a couple of years ago is another fun part. Heh .. there are more expensive hobbies
For those who made a business out on the BTC landscape, I'm hoping you will do well without end-user owned miners in the future. Guys like jtoomim can use their setup for all kinds of hosting. The landscape its just transforming.