Topic: Pool Feature Request (Read 326 times)

I'm rather new to Bitcoins and mining and have been using mining pools for about a week so this idea might not be feasible or outright stupid, but then again it might have great potential.

I would like for one of the 4-5 major pool operators to offer a new type of payment method: Lifetime Shares. Here's how they would work: While mining under the pools' usual payment policy you would get the option of choosing a percentage of your earnings to go towards Lifetime Shares. The pool operator gathers these earnings until they are of a somewhat significant value (maybe converts some to $ or other less volatile currencies). Then the pool operator invests these Lifetime Shares into mining equipment. Something like a few server racks to begin with (although more likely the new ASICS hitting the market) and has them mining 24/7. The earnings from these machines is used to pay for their operating costs first (power, employees etc.), then the pool operator takes a percentage based commission and whatever is left is divided between all the members that have contributed Lifetime Shares based on how many shares they own. As more people buy more Lifetime Shares, more hardware can be added. And in order to keep Lifetime Share value from fluctuating wildly, I would set their value in $ rather than BTC based on some official exchange rate.

Pool operators would get additional income, and normal users would get a really low buy-in into efficient Bitcoin mining: not everyone can afford ASICS and even the ones that do can't actually buy them  anywhere except E-Bay at 20x the price. And yes, I get that if this works, it would eventually concentrate a lot of the hashing power in a few centers, but with the limited ASIC availability that will happen anyway.

Sorry for the lengthy message, but let me know what you think. And what are the chances someone would implement this. Doing it myself seems unfeasible at this point, especially considering one of the large mining pools could just swoop in later and take all my clients.