That works but most miners just pull from the network, what is the benefit of using side-channeled txns?

I don't have to deal with using my badnwidth on behalf of others.

This doesn't work if we want mining to be decentralized and permissionless. Unfortunately it works today because there are so few mining pools.

Correct. But the incentive is there and yet to be fully exercised. Reducing the economically viable scale of mining ops is the key. Waiting some halvings may help but we need better market making tools for hashrate in the meantime. This is why i'm interested in working on ehash pools.

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