Mining pools create no advantage in quantity of subsidy obtained
gmaxwell: You beat me to it by about one minute!
Last night gmaxwell's brain had selective reading comprehension. It may be from too much time spent in the custom hardware battlefields. This is a serious problem with Bitcoin:
Miners are encouraged to pool their computing power for no reason but to lower the variance of the subsidy.
Maybe mining pools and the resulting centralization of Bitcoin is an example of good centralization? It is, however, less decentralized than other methods which encourage a wider distribution of the coin.
I'm just attempting to understand this issue myself, and I won't get it by incomplete argument like what gmaxwell says above.
