Quote from: dinofelis on March 26, 2017, 05:58:41 AM

Quote from: Holliday on March 25, 2017, 07:05:42 PM

Advancements in either p2pool software or something similar would go a long way in starting to alleviate the problems associated with mining centralization. Unfortunately, there hasn't been enough incentive to advance these things. I think instead of removing mining from the reference client, it should have adopted and improved upon the p2pool software.

No, really, once you have a cartel of pools, which is unavoidable with a PoW type income lottery, the network topology doesn't really matter, in *reality* you have a server/client system, where the pools are the collective server of block chain because they are the principal source of the data. The other nodes in the network are nothing else but proxy servers of this data and ultimately, the clients.

The real P2P nature of the network only made sense if a block could be mined *anywhere* on the network ; if essentially all nodes were also miners. Then the whole network is at the same time client and server, and the P2P style network is justified.
But if you have a specialized set of nodes that *make* the data, and a *large quantity* of nodes that only *use* the data, then you get an automatic adaptation of the network topology to the reality of the data flow: server/client.

Note that *amongst* the mining pools, the P2P topology still makes sense ; this is why they most probably connect in an almost full mesh, because they don't trust one another (subcartels of selfish miners might form). But FROM the mining pools to the non-mining nodes, the relationship is not P2P, but is client/server, and hence the optimal network topology adapts to that given.

Partly agreed: only blocksize won't stop this. However lifting the cap right now will accelerate the problem.

There is more work to be done to make this system useful in anyway whatsoever in the endgame.

Seems you think it's helpless, but I disagree. What I don't see is why do you care, because your theory implies that nothing will save Bitcoin from becoming a pointless Rube-Goldberg Paypal that ultimately won't be able to compete at anything.