Debunked: "Mining became centralized because Satoshi didn't anticipate pools and pooled mining"

Whether he specifically expected pools for ordinary users or not is largely irrelevant, as he did expect a collection of miners connecting via a single node. But everything seems to suggest that he did, as he even helped building and encouraging the transition.

Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.

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At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN.

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The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.

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If anything, pools give lower hash competitors a steadier revenue and increases the number of market participants past what one might otherwise have expected without them, once an equilibrium hashing node count had been reached.

So what did Satoshi think about pools then?

Here are links to Satoshi working on and discussing the benefits of pooled mining.

The first link happens to be a few days before the first official Bitcoin mining pool started, at which point the basic concept had already been tested for months. 1,2

Still worried that ASICs might have been the problem? Then this is for you.

submitted by /u/fruitsofknowledge
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from Bitcoin - The Internet of Money https://ift.tt/2spvN1u