And please let off with the "Same Value in the Long Term" argument. While perfectly valid in statistical terms, it has little relevance to the intermittent miner since it's far more important to know how much reward he/she can expect to earn for a given period of mining.
To clarify, when you say "expect" are you referring to the concept of "expected value" from the theory of probability or something more along the lines of "a high chance of receiving at least a certain amount".
If you are concerned about the latter it would be worth pointing out that mining for a few hours at a small PPLNS pool (say N = [difficulty]) has a definite, positive, non-negligible probability of paying out 0 BTC (similar to how a lottery ticket can end up being worthless). This is one aspect of PPLNS that many miners (even 24/7 miners) find psychologically difficult to handle and, consequently, I feel it is a fair criticism of the reward system.
Do you have a thread where you talk about possible far future scenarios for mining? Both the topics of possible reward systems and number/sizes of pools would make for interesting discussion.
No coherent thread, but here's a short version of my vision: There will be several low-fee PPS pools, acting as a proxy to a p2pool as a backend. There will be many getwork servers, and people will freely mix-and-match their pool and getwork server(s). Oblivious shares will be used to prevent block withholding. Larger miners will skip the PPS pool and participate directly in the p2pool.
Interesting. I might also expect a large array of small PPLNS (or similar) pools. If there were one such pool a miner may well want to send 2% of their hashing power to increase their variance and expected income so such a setup seems stable. That's juts a knee-jerk reaction though, I think I'll give this some thought.
