Feels like there could be a risk here, that could end up making it hard to get into the mining business.

jeff

I haven't read the responses to this yet, but an interesting thing to bring up. The disadvantages of nodes maintaining a mempool are pretty significant and are "extra" given that there are few block template producing network participants. Off my dome, the trouble would be maintaining The List of who is a block template producer while not reinforcing mining centralization.