Someone pointed out in another thread that these chain-hoppers screw themselves as well as everyone else, because if they were careful not to throw "too much" hashing power on a chain they could milk it of many more blocks than they can if they stick its difficulty as high as possible as fast as possible then leave.
I do not know though if the writer was correct. The idea was theh igh difficulty was lowering the total number of blocks per hour or day or whatever so much that there would have been many many more blocks to grab in that timeframe by carefully ensuring the difficulty did not rise, or only rose minimally or something like that.
Jump in fast, grab 100 blocks in ten minutes, no more blocks for a month, versus jump in less precipitously, get 100 blocks or more per day for a month, kind of concept.
Maybe they just didn't do the math and the total blocks the chainjumpers get is the same either way?
-MarkM-
Yeah that was me in the ARG thread, the idea being that the pool would work our a desired difficulty in advance to keep the coin below based on the nethash of the pool added to the coins nethash. Then vary the mark/space ratio of when it mines to keep the profit as high as possible. eg. mine the coin for a predefined number of blocks, mine another coin or two, until a predefined number of blocks have passed on the first coin then go back to it and mine it for a certain number of blocks again. Rinse and repeat, recalculating the optimum number of blocks to mine each time to maintain the desired difficulty.
I doubt if the pool operators would bother to do this, they seem arithmetically lazy to me, else they would have already worked out that they are forcing their users to spend most of the day mining inefficient high difficulty, high hash rate coins that are tolerant to the hopping effects of their net hash like LTC,FTC.
The claim that flash pools are "always mining the most profitable coin" is bogus, because to make it happen they destroy the profitability of other coins for extended periods of time, so the less profitable coins look better.
The best money to be made is mining the lowest diff coin you can get away with, not just for 20min then bouncing to a high diff coin where you have no impact or decent share, just because you have smashed down all the way more profitable coins.