Decentralize it! - Eliminate mining pools - Force to mine
I feel like Bitcoin and Steem for example are not as decentralized as they sound for a few reasons
Miners with specific hardware quickly outcompete any miner with a regular desktop
It's already virtually impossible to mine Bitcoin for any kind of profit without asic miners and basically free power. Steem is also barely profitable to mine from a cpu and the blockchain is only 10 months old.
The Bitcoin blockchain is currently somewhere around 80GB large
and therefore very impractical to run on any kind of mobile device. Most peole don't even have desktops or laptops these days, let alone their own server. I know. Crazy right? :)
I would feel much more exited if mining were somehow linked tighter to individuals instead of large hardware operations.
As it is now most crypto-currencies are mined almost entirely by a handful of mining pools.
So that boils down to most of the blockchain being controlled by a hand full of companies. It's like the idea goes around in a full circle to recreate what we were trying to avoid.
At least for me, not paying fees to huge companies that make money just because they already have money, is one of the best things about crypto-currencies.
Force to mine
If you were forced to mine in order to perform a transaction then the network could eliminate the need to pay miners. This approach might reduce transaction fees and eliminate the incentive to build massive mining operations that might end up controlling the blockchain.
By sharing our knowledge openly instead of forcing others to pay for an idea we had we can all advance together much faster.
Let me know what you think @camb.
Your idea of creating a 'fair' decentralized system cannot possibly be made to exist. There will always be certain groups of people who would have an 'unfair' advantage over others. For instance, forcing people to mine to be able to utilize the technology would disincentivize a large number of people, making the project an inevitable failure. But in order to solve this problem, many such Pool Mining platforms would rise up to provide willing customers to pay a fee for their transaction. Assuming the voting power is distributed equally among all miners, this would lead back to the same problem of centralization, where pools would have a greater control over the blockchain.
You make a good point about the idea going full circle again. However by forcing to mine I would also suggest to eliminate the possibility of those secondary mining pools you mentioned. I wonder how the blockchain performance would be affected if every user had to mine for a transaction.