Simple adjustment to prevent mining pools

[Robert Paulson]

there is no need to prevent mining pools, let the free markets sort this out.
as bitcoin becomes more popular and pools start making more money running a pool will become a more lucrative business venture,
naturally more pools will be created and the hashing power will be more distributed between them.

I'm afraid you must not be very experienced with this ecosystem. There have been hundreds of pools created. Operating a pool, especially a small one, is not a business that has many barriers; and large pools have had revenue at times in excess of $100k/mo, so it's not like any more income is needed to justify running one.  Just having a choice of centralization does not result in Bitcoin being decenteralized, and the major reason you see consolidation in pools isn't because there aren't people running them but because pools do their job (reducing variance) when they are large.

but even if we had 100 pools each with 1% of hashing power the variance would be low enough for 99 percent of people (the pool would find approximately 1.44 blocks each day and thus people would get paid every day).
i would say people go to a certain pool not because of slightly better variance but because of a better web interface.

[DannyHamilton]

i would say people go to a certain pool not because of slightly better variance but because of a better web interface.

My opinion is that a rather significant percentage of hashers are actually really bad at mathematics (which is why they are mining at a loss relative to simply purchasing the bitcoins directly).

As such, they don't understand variance, or how pools reduce variance.  Instead they just assume "bigger is better".  They figure that the largest pools must be the best pools, relying on the idea that enough other people have done the investigation as to which pool is best and therefore by going with the majority they are benefiting from the research of others (just like people who aren't very good at computer programming assume that enough other people have already reviewed the bitcoin source, so they choose the wallet that they believe most people are using).

Furthermore, because larger pools get blocks more often, many of these hashers believe that more blocks = more bitcoins, and therefore think that larger pools will earn them more money.

[Willisius]

This sounds like a great idea to me. Pools are necessary for Bitcoin, but they are improperly applied to altcoins.