If I were tycho I'd wait. 50% is a terrible time to start forking, perilously close to having authority removed from me. If my pool were still growing as his is, with no reason to see it slowing I'd let my pool grow larger and larger. When I had assumed a large enough safety margin, and people felt all safe and comfortable since I didn't do anything for a long time after 50%, then and only then would I consider any shenanigans.
Though to be fair Tycho is making about $2500 / day right now, so he's sitting pretty. He only has to wait until he gets tired of all this pool operator bitcoin nonsense to start cashing out.
EDIT: Sorry $3,250 / day.
Ummm no he is not making near that much. The pool makes about 3,700 BTC a day at given rates.
Deepbit takes about 1.5% of that (3% fee, but there are no stale shares or invalid blocks which accounts for about 1.5%).
1.5% of 3,700 = 55.5 BTC a day.
55.5 BTC a day x day average of $26 = $1443
He claims to have a couple other people involved and they are sharing profits...
Also you are forgetting the costs of running several high end servers.
Depending on how much he is sharing with others he could be making as little as $400-500 a day, or as much as $1000 or so. Still a lot of money IMO, but not NEAR to how much you think he is making.
Yay, finally someone with different numbers. Much more fun!
Using the current data of difficulty 567358 and deepbits reported pool rate of 2366GHash/sec that calculates to 4,175 Bitcoins a day on average (currently deepbit is on a very unlucky streak so it is only doing about 3450 bitcoins a day, but that's just a bad luck patch).
So with a current mtgox price of $26 and average coin rate of 4175 that's $26 * 4175 * .03 = $3,256. If you count all the pay-per-share people that he rakes 10% off the top of, and doesn't pay out to for solved blocks that actually gets quite a bit higher. But I don't have his statistics on what that is.
If his bad luck stream continues then yes he will make less than $3,256, but higher hashrate typically yields lower variance, so he should be closer to the average than most.
The lack of invalids stales and whatnot is a fair point, but I'm going to guess that the PPS crowd offsets this and leave my numbers above.
I never said that was net, that's just how much the operator pulls off the top. If someone asks you how much you make at your job you don't immediately calculate all your bills and taxes and costs before answering do you? I have no idea how many people he is working with nor his costs, and never made any claim to that effect. Regardless he is doing very well for himself. Good for him too.