Miners do not even run full nodes themselves for the purpose of mining, which is why the increased difficulty of running a full node does not increase the difficulty or barrier to entry of mining.
I am a miner myself, solo mining is only feasible if you are a huge industrial operation, not exactly contributing to decentralization. P2P mining unfortunately is not good enough both due to the increased complexity and incompatibility with certain ASIC miners, this is reflected in the hashrate. More then seventy percent of the mining power is presently inside of public pools, this is a good thing. Pools promote decentralization compared to the alternatives, pools are like a form of representative democracy for the miners.
So you are mining in a BU mining pool? Which one is that?I am a miner myself, solo mining is only feasible if you are a huge industrial operation, not exactly contributing to decentralization. P2P mining unfortunately is not good enough both due to the increased complexity and incompatibility with certain ASIC miners, this is reflected in the hashrate. More then seventy percent of the mining power is presently inside of public pools, this is a good thing. Pools promote decentralization compared to the alternatives, pools are like a form of representative democracy for the miners.
Today's way of mining, as a core dev pointed out, is a historical mistake that became popular.
I find this a ridiculous thing to say, pooled mining is how mining works today and it is a good thing.If they had advertised p2pool from the beginning, then pooled mining might not look like it is today.
We should have done what Core told us to do instead of the market deciding for itself?In earlier version of bitcoin, every miner is running a full node and use CPU to mine, that is the ideal configuration for a decentralized network, because there is no concentration of hash power.
That is not how it works today, furthermore it can not work that way today because of the size of the network, pools are essential in countering variance so that small miners can still operate profitably, without the pools we would have much more centralization in mining then we do today.However with the rise of dedicated mining software and hardware, the mining start to concentrate at a handful of large pools, this dramatically increased the degree of centralization, because a few large pool can use miner's hash power to change the network without their awareness (2013 hard fork demonstrated god-like power from pools: BTCGUILD and Slush pool rolled back the fork with their hash power, most of their miners did not even know what happened)
I consider this a positive development, I think we would have gravitated towards this position naturally. Pools are like a form of representative democracy for the miners. Personally I am fond of the idea of having these large organizations like pools watching the blockchain on our behalf night and day, since they are in that position, I can go out and party and have a good time like I did tonight, without having to worry about what my hashpower was doing in case of a fork or any other complications.Another advantage of pooled mining is that you do not require a good internet connection to participate, it in fact lowers the barrier to entry. I can also mine anonymously since latency is also not a significant issue when doing pooled mining. In regards to this blocksize debate it is also evident that pooled mining allows us to increase the blocksize without effecting mining centralization whatsoever, since pooled miners do not run full nodes for the purpose of mining, therefore they are not effected by the increased difficulty of running a full node. For the larger miners and pools, the cost of running a full node is relatively insignificant considering the size of their operations, even with much larger blocks.
P2Pool is painful to setup and run, but if you think long term wise, the future bitcoin mining should ideally all be done through P2POOL or similar way, thus totally eliminate the risk of large mining pools colluding to threaten the network. More importantly, if every miner need to run a full node, then the miner will be very aware of the impact of all the protocol change, thus become more involved in the protocol related discussion.
These are good points, and in principle I do like P2Pool. I even looked into doing P2P mining for my own operation, there where two problems however, one was that some of my equipment seemed to be incompatible or at the very least very complex to setup, secondly the hashrate for P2Pool is still to low, and the variance was to high. The reality therefore is that mining today is mostly done through public pools, I do not see this as a problem. I think that Bitcoin is working as it was intended and it should be allowed to continue to operate as intended by increasing the blocksize thereby not blocking the stream of transactions and allowing Bitcoin to continue to grow. 
