Thank you for saying it. Tycho is gaining 50% of the market because he has a great pool with consistent payout and features people want. Other pools could gain more users if they take a page from his book, and offer a more competitive 'product.' Most miners are in it for the money, and that's the bottom line. People are going to go where they are consistently making the most money.
There is simply no way a 3% fee pool is paying out more Bitcoins than a 0% fee pool in the long run (even with invalid insurance). It may have less variance, that is all.
That's exactly what it is. Deepbit got huge by being the best but it's staying huge simply
because it's huge. Its large size ensures that it wins lotteries far more often than any other pool. Think about it: lotteries hit what, every 10 minutes? and if deepbit is about half of the network that means it hits every 20 on average. Nobody gets more money from this pattern because it's being split more ways, but the result is a visually appealing constantly incrementing counter. You can refresh the page all day and say "there's another bitcent, and another and another" while in smaller pools you might go an hour or more before seeing an increase. Mind you the increase will be larger when it hits, but that doesn't fix the psychological issue at hand.
Realistically, if you point 100 MH/s at deepbit, 100 MH/s at BTC Guild and solo mine at 100 MH/s you will, over the long term, see exactly equal earnings before fees. The fact that deepbit charges 3%, BTC Guild charges 0-2.5% (depending on what features you want) and solo mining costs 0% should be deepbit's death knell, but that feeling of the tiny constant trickle of BTC has people seduced.
