Nick Szabo  🔑

I interpreted as contributing to diversification by adding an additional minority hashrate miner. More is better, especially, with diversification away from China.

Yes, Blockstream has always mined themselves, and that's a good thing. The new change is offering hosted mining to other people. Apparently passing it off as helping decentralisation in a sense that it isn't.

Decentralisation is relative, this is an incremental improvement, with Bitcoin centric ethos, betterhash protocol, and an interest to make improved user control of hosted miners more widely available.

It's not an improvement, though. It's the same as any other hosted mining. Betterhash only helps when the miner has physical control over the hardware.

That is a strict improvement in contribution to decentralisation contribution over not self-mining at all, or doing so with hosting and a big centralised pool.

More specifics needed. Have you introduced a new protocol for trust-minimizing mining pools?

That's what BetterHash is. But it's not useful when the hardware itself is centralised.