Why is it you you don't care? I feel bad for the people that have drank your kool-aid.
Of course I care. I built everything alone from scratch, including all the software. I've been working on the pool for over five and a half years now. I worked extremely hard the first two years, where I barely did much else, apart from working a different full-time job. I still work on the pool, and a loud alarm, WWII air raid siren style, still wakes me up in the night if there is an issue with any of the servers. The alarm is always on and my laptop is always within reach. I do what I can to ensure our mining never stops. But I do sleep more and work less than before. I was burning out and it was not possible to continue like that.
Here is what remains of the old (2010-2011) pools:
Slush: 124 PH/s - the one that invented mining pools
Eligius: 2.25 PH/s - the one that wanted to pay you directly instead of going through a pool wallet
P2pool: 1.7 PH/s - the one that wanted to decentralize the pool
Bitminter: 1.4 PH/s - the one that wanted to make mining accessible to everyone, with a GUI
(Bitminter had 2.7 PH/s before this unlucky round)
Yes, at this point it looks like the three smallest are dying and there will be only Slush left. So you can think that these other three must really suck and those pool operators don't give a damn. There is a survivor bias here. You think a survivor who is not doing so good sucks, because you have completely forgotten the dead.
So many pools started in 2011. So many pools have come and gone from 2010 till today. Most you probably never heard of. Some I can't remember anymore. What was the name of that Swedish one? I think it was the first to add IPv6 support. I just can't remember its name. It feels like a hundred years ago. All those pools I worked so hard to be able to compete with. I thought some of them would just crush me. All those old battles. All forgotten now.
Some pools just suddenly disappeared. Some are still listed in the bitcoin wiki although their websites have been down for months. Those are the pool operators that didn't care. And I can understand that after they put a lot of effort into their pool and it still died, they don't want to put any more effort into it. But they should leave a short goodbye notice and give people a little time to cash out their coins before shutting the servers down. That's a minimum obligation you have when you run a pool.
Unlike most pools, Bitminter didn't die yet. Because I do care. And because the miners care, some who have been here for years, and a few even all the way back to the beginning.
But yes, it looks grim. We have never before had this combination of extremely low hashpower and extremely bad luck at the same time. The result is that we lost half our hashpower in a month.