To reiterate, if all miners were forced onto p2pool tomorrow, the share difficulty would be pushed up so high that I suspect many lower hashing rigs would quit due to the uncertainty of getting a payout (people with less than > 1TH/s rigs could be mining for months with zero payout, which is a risk they won't tolerate in an environment with rising block difficulty and 24/7 multi-100 watt electricity usage)
My brief tug of war with Tier Nolan should illustrate one important area of improvement to investigate: hardware design. The current generation of hardware comprises many ASIC chips working in a single unit, interfacing with a low cost computing device to run the mining software that schedules and feeds the work to the chips. Some aspect of these current designs makes it necessary to only return the results of work in batches that last ~30 seconds. Forrestv overhauled the share interval and the length of the PPLNS window that p2pool uses just in order to accommodate this type of hardware. When GPUs and FPGAs were the dominant mining devices available, 10 second share interval spread over 24 hours was fine. This was changed to 30 second share interval spread over 72 hours for the typical ASIC.
Can we get ASIC designers to produce chips or PCB layouts that make <10 second share intervals possible once again? The dust is beginning to settle in the ASIC node geometry wars, so they'll need some different direction to go in if they wish to continue to innovate.
Sorry for potentially misunderstanding the problem, but why is hardware -
in any way - dictating the direction of software development here? Bitcoin itself is built to scale with changing hardware capabilities by automatically adjusting difficulty as needed. What makes a decentralized mining pool so different conceptually?
Why do you worry about forcing out a subset of current miners who will be forced out with time (and increasing difficulty) anyway? If all miners were forced onto p2pool tomorrow and people with less than (as an example) 1TH/s rigs are no longer competitive, would the remainder of the hashing power distribution really be any less diverse in terms of control than the current situation with GHash.IO? It seems to me that with a bit of time,
everyone currently mining is going to be "forced out" anyway due to the competitive forces of hardware advancement. If a software change temporarily accelerates that process in an
unbiased way for everyone on the network, how is that bad? The only way I can see it mattering significantly is if the % of miners forced out is very high (e.g., a majority of all miners) causing a slightly "unfair" advantage for those with access to the best hardware (since the marginal cost for additional ASIC hardware could buy a slightly bigger piece of the pie than it could previously), but that was true when the first ASIC rigs became available anyway. The market (in my opinion) has and will adjust if there is any such economic advantage for certain classes of mining hardware.