>> Is the value of pooled mining that participants in the pool share the nounce they’re calculating, to avoid duplicating work within the pool? This is an exce

>> Is the value of pooled mining that participants in the pool share the nounce they’re calculating, to avoid duplicating work within the pool? This is an excellent question. The pools do not need to divide the nonces across participants as far as I can tell, it's not necessary. The nonce isn't big enough (being only 32 bits) for today's difficulty, so miners change other parts of the block (known as extranonce, which is part of the coinbase transaction). The chance of two participants in the pool (or the universe for that matter) selecting the same nonce/extranonce (of which there are 2^256) is next to nil. The pool does something different: it isolates a group of participants which then divide the mining reward among themselves, proportional to the hashrate they each have contributed. The "value" is that unlike with "solo mining" everyone gets something, as opposed to there being only one huge winner. But I don't see how pools are in any way "bad" for the decentralized PoW clock, how the reward is divided afterwards doesn't really matter to the blockchain. If anything may be pools make mining more attractive/profitable and because of them we have the insanely high hash rate? Thanks for pointing this out.