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Fortunately anybody can start a pool. Both GRCPool and https://grc.arikado.ru are open source so this would be a good starting point. When @sau412 built his pool, he received support from various community members (including @bgb) so I think there is willingness to establish more pools.

We currently have two pools. By definition that is not a monopoly.

There is a third pool already: http://pool.gridcoin.co/

That would be Katiee's pool. It was the first pool, but has been inactive for over year now.

I am sure you won't get or take the backlash I have since grcpool opened up and katiee slacked off and screwed off pool.gridcoin.co and the bounty for a fully working gridcoin pool to be developed and completely 100% open source and released to the community.
We have had 1 pool for a year now and I have complained that its a monopoly as you just did, especially the multiple months that unless you bought or begged for some Gridcoin just to send the beacon and start out and new users were forced to join grcpool.org in order to earn Gridcoin , I continued to call it the monopoly pool and if I am not mistaking the bounty was for a fully working gridcoin pool aka a full Plug and Play solution and all of the code , not release just enough code to get someones hopes up but withhold the last 10% most important part needed and tell the community to figure it out on their own.
I can't code other than port existing code to other hardware archutecture and get things running on other platforms. I can Google and find code the snippets I need to setup a website html and css but not code a coin , pool or interact with the Gridcoin neural network for the greylist I don't code , that is why I have to try and collaborate my ideas with others and is why I try to work as a team.
I am anti pool crunching , because you have grcpool cpid 1-4 in the top spots for all projects and it makes competing with friends a little crappy we just know grcpool is winning and in the top 5 positions.
Now we have @sau412 , a newer community member and his pool https://grc.arikado.ru and I personally already have a problem with the wording " trusted community member " trusted by whom ? themselves ? Is @sau412 a trusted community leader? It's just the trusted lackeys and clique etc and really being forced to trust anybody on line is like being forced to trust Trump and Putin.
Then you add CharityEngine as its like a pool and being a boinc proxy like suchflex was and again like we keep asking the USA president Trump lets see some tax records along with proof of donations to whom and or where and not the latest winner 2 years ago some guy won $1000 lets see real factual documentation and proof.
Gridcoin has no checks and balances to keep users like this in check , we have no idea if they are on the level. Pools make it harder to audit users and situations , look at the pool gamer just a few weeks ago and collatz. Had the user been a standard user it would have been noticed instantly by us auditors watching things , but he hid within grcpool.org.No I am not talking grcpool as fraud you see the payouts and BGB has been a part of the Gridcoin community for some time now ( longer than my 2 1/2 years ) but I would also like to see Merlin/UofS-Computer-Science aka University of Saskatchewan whom oddly enough has their own supercomputer @ https://www.usask.ca/ict/services/research-technologies/advanced-computing/plato/index.php available and I assume he was using that for Boinc too , thank God he has stopped crunching and unfortunately all of his Gridcoin has been withdrawn with only his word that they donate to charities but no proof. It's real easy when you are the head of an IT department for a company let alone a University and write your own rules when it comes to Boinc.
You do not run a pool just for the fun of it , or " because I like to run pools " its to make a penny more and all about the overhead and " what can I earn?? "
By the way still congrats , 10,000 active seems a bit sketchy I am sure 10,000 members I know my user isn't active and thats like boinc stats within the team listings active users vs members with credit , you dont have to be crunching to have credit.

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