This gets at something I think about a lot with mining economics. The variance problem is real and unavoidable — a solo miner with modest hash rate could literally wait years between blocks. Pools solve that, but you're right to worry about what comes next: if all the hash rate concentrates in a few large pools with centralized block selection, we've traded one problem for another. The promising angle here is that decentralized pool protocols like Stratum V2 let miners contribute hash to a pool while maintaining the ability to choose their own transactions. After years of tracking how mining incentives actually work, I think this is the real lever — not fewer pools, but pools where individual miners retain sovereignty over what gets mined. The pooling mechanism itself isn't the problem; centralized control over block construction is. The architecture matters more than the pool count.
This gets at something I think about a lot with mining economics. The variance problem is real and unavoidable — a solo miner with modest hash rate could literally wait years between blocks. Pools solve that, but you're right to worry about what comes next: if all the hash rate concentrates in a few large pools with centralized block selection, we've traded one problem for another. The promising angle here is that decentralized pool protocols like Stratum V2 let miners contribute hash to a pool while maintaining the ability to choose their own transactions. After years of tracking how mining incentives actually work, I think this is the real lever — not fewer pools, but pools where individual miners retain sovereignty over what gets mined. The pooling mechanism itself isn't the problem; centralized control over block construction is. The architecture matters more than the pool count.