Quote from: gmaxwell on September 22, 2014, 02:01:02 AM

Quote from: Willisius on September 21, 2014, 11:12:37 PM

Quote from: gmaxwell on September 18, 2014, 03:34:15 AM

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and if they are in fact a desirable thing to have as part of the network.

Pooling for payment? The network doesn't care, thats a matter which only impacts the miners in question. But the common way that miners are implemented using "stratum" is actively harmful to the network and the security model of the Bitcoin system.
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Curious here: What's harmful about stratum? Is it that miners have to trust the pool operator completely?

Not just that, though thats true too... it's only harmful to the miners themselves, it's foolish to mine with a centralized pool who could be stealing from you via skimming (or via 'hacking' incidents) but it only harms the miner who chooses to do it.

Stratum continues and cements a historical inertia of conflating pooling for payment (which encourages more small participants by reducing variance) with "selling your vote" on the valid state of the network, creating real centralization which is antithetical to the security model.

There is no technical reason why you can't form your blocks locally, according to your own preference and policy, but pay out the coinbase according to a pool's spec and get credited for that work.

This means that pools create a large centralization risk when there is no need for it to be so to get their benefit. Indeed, it's arguable that miners can move so they're less of a risk than, say, cloud mining but in practice miners do not move even when a pool is caught ripping people off (and certantly not quickly).

Thanks for the detailed response.