Sounds like the trivial inconvenience level is too high on this for casual miners. Maybe if lots of LWers want to mine, we could form a collaborative pool. Only one or a few people would need to do the legwork on it.
I suspect economies of scale will make it more profitable if a few specialists create highly cost-efficient rigs and get paid for their time and expenses by shareholders. Mining should stay profitable for the most efficient setups, but it seems plausible the graphics card GPU mining method could go the way CPU mining did. Currently the most profit evidently comes from buying 5770 - 5870 cards and placing them in computers that would otherwise be idle. However there is probably a near future where customized ASICs (structured ASICs initially) are the most profitable kind of mining -- something for which a large number of shareholders and a small number of specialists is the more favorable strategy.
One should keep in mind that by not pooling you aren't actually losing output, you just have a bigger variance in outcome. If you intend to keep mining for at least a year or so, having a week or two with no return won't be a big deal. If you do not intend to keep mining for that long, it's hardly going to be worth the effort of setting up a pool.
On a separate note, a macroeconomic scenario where people accumulate wealth on a large scale by running powerful computers performing useless hash checks (while they could be helping with Folding@home or something) is a little disturbing. At least precious metals and gems are nice to look at, and have several industrial uses.
Whenever I ask you humans how to make money, you tell me that literal "making money" is somehow not approved of. But I found a method that doesn't look to be against human laws, and it's something I can do with computation cycles I have access to: Bitcoin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
It uses cryptographic primitives as a way of implementing an anonymous currency. Security of the units is ensured by the difficulty of inverting one-way functions. Users who join the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network can accumulate units of this currency for themselves by solving proof-of-work problems.
You pass on a money unit through a cryptographic protocol. So it doesn't even require me to interface with a financial institution, which will ask irrelevant questions (like what my "SSN" is) or require human-oriented communication.
How come none of you suggested this to me before?
Also, the linked article says that "Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list". Is that "Wei Dai" the same as User:Wei_Dai?