well it's still averaging about ten blocks a day, today was looking pretty crap but we found three out of the last six blocks in a row, and hash rate is up to about 9200. I have an account on ghash.io and they were about 46ph a couple of days ago, but tonight they're down to 37ph, so it looks like a lot of people with their own hardware are shifting across to discus fish, but their own people are locked in with the hardware pointing at their pool. I found when I switched a few weeks ago to ghash for a weekend, that while there were four times as many blocks, I was getting only half of what I was seeing with BTC Guild for a smaller number of blocks.
I'd say a lot have seen the discus fish post from a few days ago, and the PPS definitely is attractive as I only had that for a few weeks when I started before BTC Guild stopped offering that, and dropped their pool fee to 2%. In a space where ROI drops every fortnight, I understand profit focused people jumping to pool giving the steady return while also hitting more blocks.
Did a quick check on blockchain and they've mining pool share has been
4 day ghash 31% - discus 20% - btc guild 7%
2 day ghash 30% - discus 22% - btc guild 6%
1 day ghash 26% - discus 23% - btc guild 7%
but ghash dropping 17% market share in less than 100 hours is probably a good thing for the ecosystem, especially when they got such a high % before.
What does the pool owner need things to be to be sustainable? is there a target market share you'd like to keep (ie 5% - 10%), or want to grow to (ie back up to 20%+) ? surely a bit of PR to the bitcoin media plugging the strengths of the pool might bring a lot of new miners in, and increase the block finding rate. There's a lot of pools now, and it's all about economics now
i see the law of diminishing returns when it comes to hardware, which is why I don't run my own, especially in a country where electricity is so expensive to begin with, and a hard lesson from litecoin mining which basically superheated my laptop case, through the hinge, and cooked 1/3 of my monitor. 2 ltc for €400 of damage = lesson learned ;p Love watching the bitcoin arms race though from the sidelines, reminds me of all the graphics cards trying to one up each other in the days of 3dfx and OpenGL