Does this mean that we have to scale the ability of small miners to be as relevant in proving a block as a monopoly is, am I thinking in the right direction here?
Yup, but we can't eliminate pools. Can you imagine a smaller miner earning a coin every 6 months (e.g. when the coin is worth $10,000). Instead the pool helps the small miner earn 1/180th of a coin every day.
We also need pools because it is the only way to control orphan rate and get sub-1 minute transaction speed. Also we need pools for another very important reason.
It seems that solo miners in the Bitcoin mining scene though probably have just as good a chance of profiting if not better through lack of pool fees (tradeoff: variance increases the smaller the % a miner is of the total hashrate), consequently in a democratic setting, they have as much power as a minority does in any given democracy, which is almost none (though they may have voice).
We must have pools.
Instead of the gamble for one entity to receive the one block reward which allocates disproportional power to leading pool operators, how can the nature of the block reward be changed to promote decentralized mining as opposed to the centralization that the current schema promotes?
Make transaction fees 0, fund from perpetual debasement, and contemplate a design to prevent pools from growing too large.
