melvincarvalho on Nostr: No, I dont think they are. slush invented pooled mining, created the first mining ...

No, I dont think they are. slush (npub1q3t…u7l3) invented pooled mining, created the first mining pool, and also stratum to communicate mining. During the big civil war they were the only pool that always stuck with bitcoin, against those that wanted to fork it. It is true that mining got more centralized, and that satoshis asked for a gentleman's agreement not to do that too fast. But Slush pool has been a consistently good actor for bitcoin and in some sense you could say they saved bitcoin when all the other hash went elsewhere. Mining centralization is a potential issue, as is a MASF, but I dont think stratum has much to do with that. #stratumv2 could well decentralize mining. I do like your thought process of trust no one though!