Terk,
Even if you consider yourself a software development guy, you are one with a firm grasp of how to design a web site to draw people in. In particular, I was keenly aware of the many ever-present repeated "start mining now" banners all over your main page. You could likely find a second career in the production of porn web sites or infomercials with subliminal undertones should either interest you. What you do choose to share, you present well.
The reason I decided to write was because as I was taking it all in, I was thinking to myself that here is a pool operator who finally gets what miners want, and then I stumbled upon the secrecy clause, buried deep within the bowels of the web site, hidden out of view seemingly with intention. One of your competitors obfuscates anything and everything, and never bothers to answer anyone for any reason except that he was first in the game and still thinks he is the only one in town. Another chooses to ignore tangible data including easily verified block chain data and how it shows that his switching algorithm likely has a correctable operational inefficiency affecting all of his miners, and instead of looking into it he chooses to go back and forth with a 140Kh/s miner on why he is missing his 0.000000002 btc from a single altcoin because his share fell below the eight digit precision to the right of the decimal point.
I don't care what coins I am mining. I don't care which coins my unexchanged balance is sitting in. It's largely irrelevant to me until it is converted into btc which is all I care to receive. I don't need much of the extra data waffle provides, and I am a guy who recognizes that good decisions are based upon good data. The real problem is, that with the exception of payouts and fees, all other data is subject to being easily fudged and finessed for personal benefit. All I need is how much the proceeds are from my mining, and how much I pay you to make that possible. It figures into my opportunity cost calculations.
Profitability is paramount of course, but I have a right to know how much I am paying you for your services. And I am more than willing to pay more here than elsewhere for exceptional results, over statistically relevant time periods. Though I strongly believe your 80% secret sauce / 20% luck estimates to be way off base, I am not interested in working though the data to prove it to you or anyone else. It is a very common mistake to underestimate the effect of luck in short term statistics, and even the data sample size required in order to accurately reflect long term results. And I believe you are making the very same one. I don't want your secret sauce, I want to know how much I am paying you to make it.
There is tremendous opportunity in this space, and it will likely pass you by if you do not shore up your shortcomings. Kudos to h2o. He was first (I think) and deserves some credit for that. But you're not second or third, or likely even tenth, but you could be a player if you shore up your shortcomings.
The relationship between miners and pool operators is a symbiotic one. If you take more than you give, as a pool operator you will likely find the relationship to be a very temporary one.
You ask for transparency? Which multi coin pools detail the trades they make? Stating a % fee is one thing, but without anyone knowing how much of each coin has been generated and how much it was traded for, who is to know that the % fee stated is actually the amount being taken?
Unless I am missing something h2o is not providing these stats for middlecoin, so his 3% fee means nothing to me.
Yes transparency is a great thing to have, but at the end of the day it revolves around profit for the miner (and the pool owner). If the pool owner is too greedy or his/her algorithms just plain suck then people will walk.
