phreakwhensees t1_izaohye wrote
Reply to comment by printers_rock in Ethereum’s energy switch saves as much electricity as entire Ireland uses | The success of The Merge concept may now serve as a roadmap to enable a switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake in Bitcoin. by chrisdh79
Bitcoin mining pools are not as much of a centralization point as you think they are. First of all, if a pool publishes an invalid block, the non-mining nodes in the network reject the block and it does not get propagated to the rest of the network and the pool never gets the block or the payouts. At most, a nefarious pool could censor transactions or publish empty blocks since those are technically valid blocks. At this point, it is obvious they are acting nefariously and miners can easily switch to another pool or solo mine in a matter of minutes.
Lastly, upgrades to the mining protocols such as Stratum v2 make it so that pools don’t even have the ability to do transaction selection. The only ability they have is to take a proposed block from a miner, publish it, and distribute the rewards.
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