Maybe a sticky or some kind of bold statement from organofcorti in his pools thread, or any respected community members for that matter would help?
Various people quite often state that they would prefer to see people mine at smaller pools (for reasons besides any concerns about coinbase-only blocks). In the end, well, see my previous post. I'm happy to mine at Slush's pool, kano.is and BTCDig with the smidgens of hash rate I've got, but then I don't worry about that marginal increase in income or whether I go without a payout for weeks on end..I'm not running anything profitable anyway, even with solar (get more money feeding back into the utility network)
organofcorti posts mostly just verifiable (with a bit of effort) statistics - I think that actively discouraging certain pools on his blog or even his pools thread (which looks like it'll be replaced if the guy volunteering gets his thread off the ground) would just introduce partiality that would both hurt objective interpretations and credibility of his stuff. As it is, some might think the
BTC20 donation 'coincidentally' made after a post that showed the pool involved as being the biggest is of potential concern. ( I'm not, as long as he keeps posting statistics, and the funds are probably welcome for covering expenses and justifying what is mostly a hobby. )
To skip an item...
EDIT: Some kind of list showing which pools are contributing to the network & which ones aren't - name & shame kinda thing......
That certainly is something that organofcorti could do. This thread started out with some statistics of coinbase-only blocks vs non-, how that relates to previous block time, and in another thread how it relates to the previous block's size, etc. Presented in a simple table it again just becomes verifiable statistics and people can make up their own mind; and do remember that miners who aren't including any regular transactions are still contributing to the network by building the block chain, and there are differing opinions on whether coinbase-only blocks are actually a bad thing, a good thing, or one of several shades of grey in between.
I'm sure that #2 would be possible somehow, but it would take time to implement I think.....?
It's possible, I think would require another consensus round (considering you'd have to deny certain blocks as being invalid after some time), and a whole lot of discussion.. which is where most of the time would be (I think that was discussed in this thread as well? It was discussed somewhere anyway). The required code itself is somewhat trivial once the rules have been fleshed out. Good luck with that, though... the max block
size debate hasn't even been properly settled yet