[No.6]

>The winner is always (statistically) going to be a pool

Thus invalidating the root purpose of cryptocurrency, namely decentralization. Who cares if it’s ‘not fiat government money’ if, essentially, only a half-dozen mega-aggregates are actually controlling production, and everyone else is just trusting that they’re playing fair?

[palmer]

Because everyone else can easily verify the pool's work. First there is the 17 million trillion hashes they do each second; to verify the winnner you do it once every 8 minutes. Your work is 8 times 60 times 17 million trillion times easier.

Verifying transactions is harder but since I run a full node I get all of them just like the miners. It would be easy to run tests to make sure my transactions are getting through but not free (I would have to pay for each transaction). But verification can be done by any large non-mining player (e.g. any exhange).

So far nobody has been able to cheat, despite billion dollar incentives to do so.