It's not miners who are driving fees up. They have strong incentive to fill blocks as much as possible. Due to limited block space, fees will always rise as transaction volume increases.
It's users employing horrible fee estimation -- including exchanges like Bitmex -- that drives fees up so much. Lots of exchanges weren't batching transactions in 2017 (and still aren't), which greatly exacerbated the congestion.
In theory in more decentralized mining you could increase the chance of a tx with small or no fees to be mined at some point, either because some miners dont have the same txs, or because they dont sort the memory pool on tx fees, because they are not mining 100% for maximizing profits etcIt's users employing horrible fee estimation -- including exchanges like Bitmex -- that drives fees up so much. Lots of exchanges weren't batching transactions in 2017 (and still aren't), which greatly exacerbated the congestion.
I'm not sure that's a function of mining centralization. I think it has more to do with how capital-intensive mining is, which in turn is a function of market demand for bitcoins.
The extreme example is when Bitcoin was CPU-minable and the mining costs were almost imperceptible. Profitability is not a concern when sunk costs barely exist. That dynamic drastically changes when it costs thousands of dollars just to buy a single miner, not to mention the other overheads involved. Naturally, hobby miners get forced out of the market, and a purely profit-motivated industry emerges.
The 1st step towards fixing something is identifying something is wrong... The worse thing which could happen is we let these things slip by till its too late to fix.
