Variance absorption gets cheaper as you get bigger, engineering cost is basically fixed, and the marginal cost of onboarding another exahash rounds to zero. The economically optimal pool is the whole network.
The only things holding it apart are customer preference for not having a single vendor, counterparty caution, and jurisdictional convenience. Those are preferences. They aren't economics, and preferences lose to cost curves over long enough periods.
Which is why shaming the big pool is a losing strategy. You cannot moralize your way out of a cost curve. If you want pool size to stop being frightening, make it stop mattering, which means separating the accounting function from the block building function. A pool that doesn't build the template is a payment processor, and nobody loses sleep over how big Stripe is.
Variance absorption gets cheaper as you get bigger, engineering cost is basically fixed, and the marginal cost of onboarding another exahash rounds to zero. The economically optimal pool is the whole network.
The only things holding it apart are customer preference for not having a single vendor, counterparty caution, and jurisdictional convenience. Those are preferences. They aren't economics, and preferences lose to cost curves over long enough periods.
Which is why shaming the big pool is a losing strategy. You cannot moralize your way out of a cost curve. If you want pool size to stop being frightening, make it stop mattering, which means separating the accounting function from the block building function. A pool that doesn't build the template is a payment processor, and nobody loses sleep over how big Stripe is.