This statement is false. Blocks will continue to be produced on average every 10 minutes with or without pools.

With 100,000 people who have equal hashing power, they will produce a block on average once every 2 years. 

With 144 mining conglomerates they would each produce a block once per day.... of course, if you increase mining frequency to once per minute, then you could have 1440 conglomerates each producing on average once per day.

The end result is that hash power would end up held by a couple thousand conglomerates each of which would still have acceptable variance.

Anyone with 0.05% or more of total hash power could produce daily.  Anyone with .001% of the hash power could produce monthly.

How many total individual miners does Bitcoin have today?  There are only ~500,000 unspent outputs. If 1% of all bitcoiners have mining hardware, that would be 5000 people mining. 

How many individuals miners actively mining less than 0.08 BTC per month?   Those are the only individuals who might get excluded by solo mining.

Mining pools should actually be considered good thinking that not all miners are able to find a block on their own to get a full reward, but instead of that, in pools, one is at least assured of having a secured share for his mining work, one can at least gain what one invested into mining...

this would bring up the barrier to entry for mining bitcoin several orders of magnitude.  not good.


With pooled mining, anyone, even someone with very very bad internet connection and low hashrate CAN mine bitcoin. the fact that a handful pools each have a big slice of hashing power is not an issue, pools must behave they way there users want them to behave,  Individual miners choose the pool they mine at, if they are unhappy with the way to pool operates they will leave an another pool.

not only does pool mining greatly lower the barrier to entry, I believe they will be instrumental in scaling bitcoin while keeping it highly decentralized.  

Having low-latency internet is just another kind of POW, like having a fast CPU, a GPU, or any other kind of work.

I prefer to live in la la land where everything is possible and lovely. In that case we should all be mining on our alarm clocks.

I think one problem with pools is that it makes miners complacent and placid. They're letting the guy at the head make the moves while the coins still arrive when it might be better to show some independent thought on occasion.

While I do partially agree with your opinion, considering that there are petahashes of mining power on the network, it would be borderline impossible for individual miners to actually get any blocks. With pools, more miners have access to get a part of a block, allowing for them to continue mining without relying on finding an entire block themselves.

I don't think the concept of a pool itself is so bad, but do agree that mining should be spread to more than just 3-4 super-pools. Maybe 30-40 pools would be better, but unfortunately most miners are just out for immediate profits more than they are looking out for the long term health of a coin. What I would like to see is more emphasis on non-asic mining. Even with GPU mining, at least the average person has somewhat of a chance to stay in the mining game. Once a coin switches to dedicated hardware, home miners quickly become out-priced with both hardware and electrical costs. Of course there will always be the mega farmers in warehouses located where there is cheap electricity no matter what, but I think the move to totally dedicated asic hardware was the death-blow to most home mining.

New coins such as Ethereum with memory-hard algorithms seems for now to be resistant to this, so while the difficulty is still going up, it is still possible for many home miners to make a ROI and then a bit extra. I think to maintain decentralization this needs to be a requirement going forward. It will be interesting to see how much more Bitcoin mining centralized after the block halving, as I am sure many borderline miners will be forced to turn off their unprofitable rigs. Fast forward another 4 years, and we will again see another halving further reducing the number of miners, etc until is all in the hands of a few big players.

I would think in addition to keeping mining on platforms available to the most people, GPUs are probably more preferable to CPU only as to avoid botnets, but there would need to be a way to minimize the electrical cost to help even the playing field. So maybe some hybrid GPU PoW, with a storage cost attached, such as needing 1 TB HDD space for each mining instance. I don't know what, if anything would work, but believe any coin with a true chance at decentralization will need to keep mining accessible to the masses.

If mining could be done by anyone with a laptop computer for a few satoshis per hour without needing a mining pool, I think that would be not only good for the btc ecosystem, but for engaging the wider public, and promoting global adoption. Who wouldn't want to get satoshis, or something, just for having a computer with some "downtime" to use for mining.

(Caveat - I did not do the math, I don't know if I am talking about satoshis or smalll fractions of satoshi) But the concept I think stands and I voted accordingly in the poll.

The reason I stopped running folding@home is because it made my downtime expensive, the cpu was always drawing power and the fan was always maxed out.

I would only want my idle CPU time used for mining if it paid more than the power it consumed.