Today's post covers a form of a mining pool that can be operated as sort of a map-reduce over blocks without any "infrastructure".
There's still some really open-ended questions (perhaps for y'all to consider) around how to select an analyze the choice of window and payout functions, but something like this could alleviate a lot of the centralization pressures typically faced by pools.
Notably, compared to previous attempts, combining the payment pool payout with this concept means that there is practically very little on-chain overhead from this approach as the chain-load
for including payouts in every block is deferred for future cooperation among miners. Although that can be considered cooperation itself, if you think of it like a pipeline, the cooperation happens out of band from mining and block production so it really is coordination free to mine.