I really found out this idea of a “pool sidechain” very elegant, though don’t know exactly how it would work. That is, the idea of a blockchain is itself a way to coordinate multiple nodes in a descentralized manner, and thinking in that way, a descentralized pool could be based on it.
Maybe we could have miners that are mining BTC blocks, but these blocks are, at the same time, commiting to a sidechain. Maybe the commiting part could be at the nonce, or in the coinbase. Actually, the miner could commit to a Merkle tree of multiple values.
Even if a miner fails on finding a block, maybe he could share weak blocks to the sidechain, prooving that he is indeed spending power. These sidechain commits could also serve as a proof that his templates send the coinbase to the pool.
The sidechain could have faster blocks, and could also be a lattice, I don’t know. Miners don’t need to sync to the entire sidechain, once the commits would be available on the BTC chain.
Just gathering a bunch of ideas, don’t really know how these could glue together, but at least I think someome smarter than me could have an insight lmao. Also, if this were to be glued together, there must be a way to limit bandwidth usage or unecessary computation. The system overall cannot be a burden to the miner, to the point of making mining with this pool disadvantageous.