Bitcoin Forum

These days it's almost insane not to mine in a pool, simply because the amount of rewards (solving a block) to the amount of attempts (hashing power) is so crazily high it would take months for an average person to be successful. This creates the need for pools to combine hashing power, and on average hit the reward more often, then more fairly distribute the rewards among the pool.

Now this is starting to create a few issues. With the centralized nature of pools we're loosing more and more nodes on the network, as people aren't willing to solo mine given the likelihood of no reward.

As a potential solution would we ever (or could we ever) see a situation where the reward is dramatically lowered, but the amount of blocks dramatically increase? For example the reward might drop to 0.25 per block, the amount of blocks raises by 100 times, and the difficulty would lower by 100. This would open up the possibility of solo mining for many more people, yet leave the core fundamentals of bitcoin intact (limited currency, etc). The advantage also is more nodes to help with network resilience.

So, I suppose what's the downside?

Short answer: No

Long answer: Lets say we did what you said, and increased the number of blocks by 100x, and lowered the difficulty by 100x.

This would mean that there would be a block every 6 SECONDS. This would be very similar to the P2Pool blockchain, or actually even worse. IIRC, you can have upwards of a 40% orphaned/reject rate in the P2Pool chain. That's fine for P2Pool, but that would be terrible for Bitcoin.

And going back to the solo mining advantage, the current difficulty of 7.6M would be lowered to 76,000. This is pretty obtainable for a solo miner, even someone with just a single GPU. However, what happens when the difficulty hits 500M, or 5M after your conversion. You're still talking about impossible solo mining numbers, unless you had some serious ASICs.