What would be required to disincentivize mining pools? Now that mining pools are starting to hit the 51% cusp of total mining power, what would need to happen to the Bitcoin protocol to reduce their success, and encourage distributed mining power over pools?
It doesn't matter if a mining pool has 100% of the total mining power so long as that mining pool can't choose which transactions its users work on, prevent them from submitting blocks that they find, or choose which blocks they build from. No change is needed to the Bitcoin protocol as far as I know. Only the protocol used between pools and their clients needs to be changed.