Mining pools aren't a security threat and aren't examples of centralization of hash power. They represent individual miners. They don't own the hash power. The minute the pool operators advocate for things that violate the individuals' best interest, the pool breaks up. This is pretty basic stuff.
Discussion
Well you were insisting it was a problem for monero.
So is it or isn't it smarty-pants?
The point was the ease with which an entity could reach the 51% level. Not that it was a pool. If you have a smaller number of total miners, it is easier for hostile groups to attack the network. This effect is made worse when mining is unprofitable. There's so much hash power on the bitcoin network that the cost to capture enough of it for a 51% attack is massive. This along with the tens of thousands of nodes that would have to accept the eventual rewrite of the blocks and wouldn't keeps the network secure.
In other words, its got nothing to do with pools at all.
It's also not about # of hashes, its about energy consumption.
You can either have centralized ASIC farms prone to govt pressure using lots of energy
or decentralized low energy hashing impossible to pressure.
everything is tradeoffs.
Energy consumption isn't a demon unless your total energy cost is low enough that a single centralized entity can easily capture the hash power. This is the problem with a small "efficient" miner base, distributed or not. When I say security, I'm thinking about network integrity, not opsec. In this case, the biggest network with the most individual miners wins.