Guys, have you seen
bitminter.com? Very neat pool. They do something similar to what we were talking about with bitcoin. Java web start client...relative no-brainer to get started (certainly a LOT better than setting up cgminer). I use cgminer/anubis with my farm, but ran their client on my workstation to try it out. It looks like they have about 8000 miners on their systems, around 2/3 of which are using the bitminter client. Funny thing is, their client does detect the CPU and offer it as a mining device, although I don't think that's used much anymore.
Another option is to create a pushpool client that works like this. A mmcfe fork could be created that offers services like statistics, registration via an API, to allow the user to just download the client and register from it, as well as viewing their statistics. There could be a master pool directory web service that could be used to allow switching between pools possibly. If something like OpenID or Google Accounts OAuth was used, registration could just be off of their google account, for instance, further simplifying things (this is how bitminter works for the initial signin).
p2pool is probably the most "resilent" way to do it, but my thought is that p2pool has a major deficiency currently with their statistics feedback. In short, it really sucks (IMHO). Any user of a tool like this wants to see, at an absolute minimum:
* their current hashrate
* estimated coins per day
* graph of coin yield over the past week or so
* graph of hash rate over the past week or so
This info doesn't necessarily need to be in the tool itself, but has to be available. With bitminter, it's on their site when you're logged in.
If anything, this is food for thought to me at least.
