I've read the
description of the Braidpool protocol, and it seems promising to me. Braidpool aims to make mining more decentralized. The problem it addresses is described in the protocol as follows:
Bitcoin's long block time (10 minutes) introduces revenue variance for miners that can only be overcome by being a larger and larger miner. For this reason, Mining Pools have come into existence to pool hashrate from different miners to reduce their variance. This directly impacts the decentralization of the bitcoin network since pools want to maximize their hashrate to minimize their variance, but cannot get bigger than 51% or they are perceived as an attack risk on Bitcoin. A centralized pool "looks like" an individual miner with respect to the Bitcoin network.
Braidpool aims to relieve mining pools of the function of selecting transactions, leaving them with tasks of monitoring devices and distributing payouts. The formation of blocks will be handled by a unified decentralized network. In a context where governments are attacking anyone who helps develop cryptocurrency, relinquishing control functions could be beneficial for pool owners. If they don't control the contents of the blocks, they won't be as interesting to government agencies.
Braidpool promises to be free and not require significant restructuring of the existing interaction between miners and pools. So, it seems like the idea should be in demand. However, several months have passed since the project was announced on Github, and it hasn't attracted serious public attention. Even here on Bitcointalk, there hasn't been a thread about it until now.
Why is that? Are neither pools nor miners interested in developing such a project? Does it deprive them of certain opportunities they currently have, or does it create some difficulties that are not obvious to me?
