Regarding smart mining, I like to quote smooth;
The vision here is a wallet that asks you when you want to install: "Do you want to devote some of you CPU power to help secure the network. You will be eligible to receive free coins as a reward (recommended) [check box]." Get millions of users doing that and it will drive down the value of mining to where neither botnets nor professional/industrial miners will bother, and Satoshi's original vision of a true p2p currency will be realized.
Yeah, I've always liked this concept. I'm curious what the thought is on this smart mining though regarding nodes. In this vision, is this client mining towards the clients individual node? Or is the client mining towards a pool? Because in the second, we're asking a user to choose a pool... unless of course the program just automatically pings all available pool nodes and finds the lowest latency.
Individual node, but we will have to see how that works out in terms of resources and practicality. We want to not only encourage people to run nodes, but also make it easy and inexpensive to do. There are pretty significant advantages in terms of privacy if you are running your own node, and if you are using this coin at all that's probably something you care about.
is this actively developed or a long-term idea?
