Why not change to just one giant pool, sort of. In a pool, the coinbase transaction has the pool's address, not the miner's address. That could be changed to output to a collective list of all miners addresses.
Congratulations, you re-invented P2Pool. Eligius does the same thing: paying the miners directly instead of paying everything to the Pool's wallet (Both examples still use the traditional approach for alt-coins).
There is a bit of a definition issue though: miners generate blocks, while hashers generate proof-of-work. We are in this crisis mainly because those two functions have been separated.
While I understand setting up merged mining may be costly and a lot of work; hashers need to understand that they have to monitor the entities they are lending their hash-power to.
LOL Except mine would be forced on you.
How? A pool could connect to p2pool (or your p2pool re-invention) and miners could choose to connect to that pool instead. PoW is by design a nearly perfectly parallel problem.
One thousand miners can appear to be a single node in any system you devise. There are some systems proposed but they involve zero knowledge proofs which prevent the (secure) sharing of mining information
You know what? I just want the devs of this cute little beta software to find a solution to a problem that I have been reading about for three and a half years. If it can't be solved then tell us there is no reasonable solution to fixing this problem.
Gavin Andresen almost did that when he said, "Bitcoin is still a work in progress, and you should only risk time or money on it that you can afford to lose." And "A malicious 51% attacker could prevent transactions or new blocks from other people getting accepted, effectively stopping all payments and shutting down the network.”
Since I'm not really fond of losing any money he is telling me to cash out. Since this happened years ago with Deepbit, it's still happening now with Ghash.IO, the devs aren't fixing it, the former lead dev says Bitcoin is very risky, I have to assume I'm being told not to buy any more Bitcoin.
p2pool isn't a solution because greed is forcing people to gravitate toward Ghash.IO. If I won the lotto, decided that I was pissed at all those bitcoiners and wanted to hurt them I might just start a 0 fee pool to capture most of the network and then shut it down. If I was a government and believed that this little charade has gone on long enough I might start a 0 fee pool to capture most of the network and then shut it down. My solution is stupid and I know it. At least I'm attempting to come up with something but I don't have any mandate to find a fix. What are the devs doing about it?