Users mining in algorithm where pools are impossible is positive for decentralization of mining.
This is an interesting question. I've seen the counterargument that preventing pools increases the incentive for large farms (including, I suppose, the distributed sort of farms that involve devices in disparate locations but centrally controlled). That might be negative for decentralization of mining broadly, since at least with pools as they mostly exist today, the actual miners can switch pools (often cypherdoc makes this argument). I'm not sure.
I have in mind a cryptographic means of preventing pools. One of the fundamental design errors for PoW mining has been the simultaneity requirement that leads to orphans. It is essentially an aliasing error on consensus. That will give you a big hint as to what the big breakthrough in my design solution is. And it turns out I can retrofit it to a non-PoW algorithm that doesn't suffer from PoS's weaknesses, thus our recent discussion on 21 Inc has proven to be very lucrative for me. As usual I (and the community) benefit greatly from discussions with you. How will I repay you?
PoW is now a dead-end (due to the 21 Inc economics) except it has value in attaining the widest spread initial distribution for a coin.
Thus Bitcoin (and apologetically Monero) are dead ends in terms of a decentralized future. I will fork the community and bring in a somewhat orthogonal userbase of the most intelligent Libertarians. My plan is now solidified.
I am preparing to go silent. Any questions or comments?