It would be almost trivial to implement just bundle it, if nothing else. But I suspect the ship has already sailed for this.
We now have miners with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment which run it off a raspberry pi. Who send their coins directly to coinbase to be sold. Who have never used a Bitcoin client of any kind (except for the coinbase webwallet), certainly not a full node, and they have no concept of why they'd want to. The name they trust most in mining is operator of their chosen pool who could be robbing them blind, but maybe isn't who has a financial interest to the tune of say >$700,000/month in keeping miners on their pool, and who tells them they don't need to worry about things, and who is believed because far too many people including you overly fixate on "51%" and ignore the fact that someone who controls 25% hashpower can reorg 6 confirms with 5% success or 2 with 31% success.
Never mind that the question of parties with large hashpower using it to harm other Bitcoin users is not hypothetical, as its recently been done achieved huge profits in the process and seems to have resulted in no negative consequences for the involved pool, just a lot of victim blaming, and some months delayed promises that the responsible parties have been sacked.
Perhaps many miners could be moved to running something p2pool like if doing so was easy, but just running a Bitcoin node is no longer so easy that it can be treated as costless, with now gigabytes of space wasted by pointless dust-scale messaging transactions. Transactions that the Bitcoin users didn't care about because they weren't running nodes and because many people had a monetary interest in being able to wastefully use the systems resources in that manner.
In any case, I don't think the problems you're facing are technical. The problem is that participants in the system don't know or care. I think the problem is also that to some extent people who should know better are not paying attention to the mining ecosystem and don't realize what a mess things are, and some who do are tempering their statements because saying "Hey everyone, the Bitcoin security assumptions are basically invalid in the current environment" too loudly may be adverse to the value of their holdings.
If you can figure how to educate people on the subject in a world where people have multimillion dollar a year income streams that depend on hashers not being educated and while other people own hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin whos value might be eroded if the concerns become too wide spread then I think progress could be made. Otherwise? ::shrugs::
[I don't even intend to suggest intentional misconduct due to the monetary interest, only: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."]
We now have miners with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment which run it off a raspberry pi. Who send their coins directly to coinbase to be sold. Who have never used a Bitcoin client of any kind (except for the coinbase webwallet), certainly not a full node, and they have no concept of why they'd want to. The name they trust most in mining is operator of their chosen pool who could be robbing them blind, but maybe isn't who has a financial interest to the tune of say >$700,000/month in keeping miners on their pool, and who tells them they don't need to worry about things, and who is believed because far too many people including you overly fixate on "51%" and ignore the fact that someone who controls 25% hashpower can reorg 6 confirms with 5% success or 2 with 31% success.
Never mind that the question of parties with large hashpower using it to harm other Bitcoin users is not hypothetical, as its recently been done achieved huge profits in the process and seems to have resulted in no negative consequences for the involved pool, just a lot of victim blaming, and some months delayed promises that the responsible parties have been sacked.
Perhaps many miners could be moved to running something p2pool like if doing so was easy, but just running a Bitcoin node is no longer so easy that it can be treated as costless, with now gigabytes of space wasted by pointless dust-scale messaging transactions. Transactions that the Bitcoin users didn't care about because they weren't running nodes and because many people had a monetary interest in being able to wastefully use the systems resources in that manner.
In any case, I don't think the problems you're facing are technical. The problem is that participants in the system don't know or care. I think the problem is also that to some extent people who should know better are not paying attention to the mining ecosystem and don't realize what a mess things are, and some who do are tempering their statements because saying "Hey everyone, the Bitcoin security assumptions are basically invalid in the current environment" too loudly may be adverse to the value of their holdings.
If you can figure how to educate people on the subject in a world where people have multimillion dollar a year income streams that depend on hashers not being educated and while other people own hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin whos value might be eroded if the concerns become too wide spread then I think progress could be made. Otherwise? ::shrugs::
[I don't even intend to suggest intentional misconduct due to the monetary interest, only: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."]
Thank you for your insights! It's a breath of fresh air (albeit a bit depressing) compared to the feedback given by people in the General Discussion board.
BTW - I agree with you with respect to levels of control <51% still carrying substantial risk. I mention the number "51%" because it seems like very few people on some of the boards actually believe that lower levels of control are still a significant threat, so without mentioning "51%", many people don't seem to understand what I'm talking about.
I realize that enormous amounts of money have been invested in mining hardware, and as you say, miners are all too often ignorant about the risks associated with mining pools.
But if you ask me, it would be better to try and fix this now (however painful as it may be - especially for pool operators who aren't going to essentially hand over their multi-million-dollar businesses without a fight), rather than suffer catastrophic problems down the road.
So if the problem is education and adoption (rather than technical), then I say bring it on! Save Bitcoin!
Thinking out loud here... if a protocol change actually enforced adoption of a P2Pool-like system, then I'm sure most of the pool operators would (strongly) oppose the change. But the ultimate power is in the hands of those with the hardware (who may or may not understand the need to adopt the change in the protocol). Aren't most miners familiar with the process of periodically updating mining software? What if an announcement were made - loud and clear - prior to the change, followed by the rollout of the updated reference client while urging all other client developers to update accordingly (perhaps there could be a cut over date/block index hardcoded in the software so that the change is somewhat coordinated)? If we could get a majority of miners to adopt the change (screw whatever the pool operators think), then the rest would have to adopt (or they'd stop getting any reward). We get companies like coinbase on board to help support the change by offering services that aid in the transition for current miners.
Thoughts? Is such a change completely out of the question?