@DieJohnny

Quote from: DieJohnny on January 02, 2016, 02:08:12 AM

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From what i read p2pool is pretty much exactly what I am referring to
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Your discussion does closely describe P2pool, which is at this time the only decentralized mining pool. Each node in the P2pool network operate independent from next maintaining a common chain of data called the Sharechain. The Sharecahin operates similar to the Bitcoin Blockchain only faster and with a lower difficulty target. Miners connected to a P2pool node work on shares that include payouts to the previous share owners and itself. When the share is accepted by a P2Pool node it's then broadcast on it's own P2P network to all other nodes. If a majority of other nodes accept the share, it becomes confirmed in the sharechain. If the share also meets the Bitcoin difficulty it is then broadcast to both P2Pool and Bitcoin network, and if confirmed by the Bitcoin network becomes a block, where payment of the last 8,640 shares in the sharechain (3 days) are directly paid from the block generation transaction.

Quote from: DieJohnny on January 02, 2016, 02:08:12 AM

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i am not certain individual miners are running the most optimized mining software that competes with the large pools,
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Your understating could be mixed I think. The individual miners (client side) of a decentralized pool operate the same software as the miners on the centralized pools, typically cgminer or bgminer commonly found in most on-board ASIC controllers. But the pool software (server side) in many cases is different, offering different features and payout methods but normally complying with the stratum protocol for common communication with the mining software.

Quote from: DieJohnny on January 02, 2016, 02:08:12 AM

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using tricks like mining immediately on top of their new blocks et cetera.
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In the case of P2Pool being the pool software, it too has a few tricks. P2pool has improved propagation of found blocks via it's own P2P network giving the pool a very low orphan rate. P2pool will generate its own work if it knows that there is a new block found via it's on P2P network but not yet updated by the Bitcoin network.

Quote from: DieJohnny on January 02, 2016, 02:08:12 AM

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I am also not sure how much p2pool support being independent as a miner. For example, can 1000 individual miners use p2pool and all use their own software, thus having 1000 votes for Bitcoin core rather than 1.....
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Provided the hypothetical 1000 miners are each running their own Bitcoin software and P2Pool software then they each are voting for their respective preference but sharing rewards reducing variance. For example the P2Pool network contains some nodes operating Bitcoin Core and some with Bitcoin XT but each block found for the different versions represent independent votes towards the different direction they represent.