It’s easier to come up with problems and reasons why decentralisation won’t happen than it is to come up with solutions and I wish I could offer more constructive ideas. It does seem that everything tends towards centralisation and you have to actively guard against it.
I've got to agree here. It is a hard problem that we all thought Bitcoin had conquered. Turns out; not so much.
I think the issue is profit. It's very hard to monetise a distributed system. It is why we have the internet we have to day and why Apple, Google and now Windows are walled gardens behind controlled access-ways. The target end-game of all for-profit ventures is a monopoly as that guarantees income, guarantees market share and guarantees a price.
Targeting and crippling pools I don't think is a real solution. It just removes the only real competition to commercial miners - so I question the motives. Pools were the natural progression once hobbyists were overtaken by the costs of hardware needed to claim a steady income. I see pools as more of a community enterprise to pool resources in times of hardship. Unfortunately, that always provides the way through for the rentier business to offer coordination services very much the way Amazon, Ebay or Uber do. Eventually, they will be forced out or bought out by the commercial miners who will disincentivise hard-core hobbyist to give up on mining or exploit them with unfair terms. It's the town market verses the supermarket scenario and we know who wins that.
So I suggest we don't target pools. We target mining, period. If un-outsourcable POW can decentralise away from commercial farms as well as pools, then I'm in. If it only targets my next door neigbour who bought a single Ant Miner with his Xmas cheque, then I am firmly against. Most non-outsourcable POW systems I've seen so far, however, only target the latter since a commercial miner is the admin and participants and therefor always gets the reward however you want to cut it.
