Topic: Bitcoin Mining Pool distribution monthly reports - page 2. (Read 2188 times)

You need to think outside the box.

So I am now creating stupid fud, and that makes you what? Smart guy who knows everything?  
We are so happy to have genius in this forum that takes everything he writes from his own head, unlike other people who only copy things  
Thank you for your service and for mining bitcoin.

I didnt take anything personal, and I didnt get upset.
If anyone needs explanation about bitcoin mining I will refer them to you.

Alas, you have to learn to read things in thier context, i said


Also, "everyone who is following pools' share hashrate" do it with a software that reads the blockchain and put it into a chart/table, that is fine, what is not, is people copying the already available charts and thinking they have spotted something that nobody else know about, and creating some stupid fud on how 51% attack is going to happen because a few pools have 51% of the total hashrate, those same people have no clue that this is no news and it has been the case for a decade.




This is not how mining works, and I am not going to explain why because then you will just get upset and take it personal again.

Than you should contact everyone who is following state of mining pools and tell them they are wasting time, because you know better and they are all irrelevant 
I could say the similar thing for every other thing in the world that follow statistics, we don't really need it and we don't need to care about 51% attack.
This is not accurate science, but I could argue that one or two companies like BlackRock own everything in the world, and there is not real competition anywhere.

It is not so hard to use VPN or Tor to hide real location, so you cant be sure what country is really mining.

Before the China ban it was Bitmain with their pools (Antpool, BTC.com and Viabtc) arguably even Poolin which was founded by an ex-Bitmain employee before the 2020 lawsuit, and then, on the other side, you had F2pool, those pools combined always had well over 50% of the total hashrate, and don't be fooled by all the names, essentially, 2-4 Chinese men sitting in closed room had the final say on what to do with all that hashrate.


Fast forward, China banned mining, and U.S players started to get into the business, creating their own mining pools, and now it's no more 2-3 Chinese men, it's 1-2 Chinese and 1-2 Americas, still the same number of entities who control well over 50% of the total hashrate, and since BTC doesn't care about those folk's nationality or names, nothing has changed in terms of hashrate distribution.

 
I have been professionally mining BTC long before this topic took place, and I have been following hashrate distribution years before Foundry USA pool came into existence and the fact that 2-3 entities owning over 50% of the hashrate have been the case since at least 2016, it's a lot more than just looking at a pie chart and thinking you solved the puzzle, you need to understand how are all these pools are connected, then use that knowledge to compare hashrate distribution for the past decade, and you will come to the same conclusion.

Furthermore, pool distribution is pretty irrelevant compared to gear ownership and the physical location of that hash power, at least 80% of the hashrate comes from a single manufacturer, that's more to worry about than some random pool distribution which can change drastically over the course of a few hours, the physical location of the gears and the law which they operate under is also a serious matter.

I'd rather see 3 large pools each owning 33% but hashrate divided between 50 different countries where no country has over 10% of it, rather than seeing 100 pools, each with 1% hashrate but 70% of that hashrate located in the same countries with the same laws and regulation, even worse, that majority of that 70% is owned by a single entity.

I didn't know about this connection between this pools, but this is interesting observation that adds more on centralization of mining.
Bitmain is one of the biggest manufacturing of asic miners and it is expected from them to do all kinds of deals with different mining pools.

If you follow this topic from start you will see that situation changed a lot, and having more than 51% of hashrate was always problematic.

Might as well add the 10% of Viabtc to Antpool and that would give you over 60% controlled by two entities (Foundry and Bitmian), while Haipo Yang tries his best to deny the fact his pool isn't indirectly owned by Bitmain, his attempts just keep failing, judging by the who is the largest investor in Viabtc, and the team that founded Viabtc, you can clearly see that it's just another branch for Bitmain.

Although, as I mentioned before, this isn't new, and there is nothing to worry about, 2-3 entities owning over 50% of the hashrate has been the norm for many years, and will always be the case.

It is time for another overview of Bitcoin mining pools as we entered moth on July.
I am not very happy to see that two biggest pools are still having over 51% of hashrate but it is on edge right now with 51.1%.
FoundryUSA is biggest pool with 29.2% hashrate and they are followed with second place AntPool that has 21.9% of total hashare.
Thee is a big difference with third place ViaBTC that have slightly more than 10% of hasharate, similar like Binance pool on fourth place.
F2pool have almost 9% hashrate on fifth place, and rest of the pools are significantly smaller, with some new small pools showing up this time.


https://mempool.space/graphs/mining/pools

Month of May is here and its time for one more report on the state of bitcoin mining pools.
We can see that transaction fees have gone significantly higher recently and we had top most transactions ever recorded on Bitcoin blockchain.
I am not happy to see that two pools again have more than 52% together and that is Foundry USA in first place with 27.67% and Antpool with slightly over 25% of total hashrate.
F2Fpool is in third place with much less hashrate with around 11%, followed by Binance pool in fourth place that have around 11% of total hashrate.
ViaBTC is fifth biggest mining pool with 5.66% hashrate and all other mining pools are much less in size.
Five biggest pools have almost 85% of total Bitcoin hashrate and smaller recorded pool is PEGA Pool with 0.63% hashrate.


https://mempool.space/graphs/mining/pools

Cointelegraph just released new article about this topic named Bitcoin hash rates threaten blockchain decentralization:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-hash-rates-threaten-blockchain-decentralization

Yes I did read what you wrote, but you didnt make any example of weak points that can be exploited in reality.
You wrote about fork and secret purchase of big amount of miners, but you say this is not going to happen.
After that I came to conclusion that Bitcoin have no exploitable weak points for you.

I really dont understand some of your interpretations, but you can have your opinion and I am glad we talked about this.

Going back to standard mode of tracking bitcoin mining pools, new report coming in May but I already saw two big pools going below 50% again, maybe some big miners are reading this topic  

No - I never said that - I gave two examples - did you read what I said at all?
I simply pointed out two that in reality would not be exploited.

Which falls under what I said at the start ...

They made global ban for many things so they can do it for Bitcoin if they want, but I hope they wont.
If it happens everything will still exist with mining but it would be more underground.
I dont think Bitcoin can function globally if mining would only happen in El Salvador 

You think Bitcoin is perfect and have no weak points?
If someone would turn off internet globally that would seriously affect Bitcoin, and everything else yes, but that is weak point

Govt's have been trying for almost 14 years, nothing new there.
As you also pointed out, the biggest example of that had very little effect on Bitcoin, the miners just moved elsewhere.

A global ban that could stop bitcoin is impossible.

Aside: there is already a country that accepts it as legal tender.

Well I gave details about what messing can be done and you seem to have ignored them.
The details clearly say it wont happen.

You claim 'weak points' that can be exploited.
What are they?

What I've listed, that clearly isn't possible, you've ignored.

I don't know exactly what governments are doing but I know they are concerned about Bitcoin and they dont fit Bitcoin mining in their green agenda.
They cant stop mining, they can only try to ban it like China did, but look what happened with that, many miners migrated to other countries.
Making global bitcoin ban is possible to happen but I think chances are low, so they can only attack from inside.

There are other type of incentives, not just financial.
Someone can have incentive to eliminate things that mess with their plans.

I wouldn't say this is impossible to happen, and Bitcoin have some weak points.
They literally have money printing machine, and they can bring entire financial system down that is much larger than bitcoin.

"could" is just another version of "no one would do this, but lets pretend it's possible, so I can write something people will think is interesting"

No Govt has unlimited funds to attack bitcoin, maybe it was possible many years ago, but no longer possible.
Bitcoin is too large, and too well spread out around the world.

The side effect of any breaking of BTC rules would be to create a fork that current bitcoin miners would simply ignore.

The other option would be to build (currently) over 170EH of miners (1700000 x 100TH) in secret then get some massive power source (over 5.6GW) facility and have it mine bitcoin for weeks ... yeah not gonna happen either.

But that has nothing to do with hashrate distribution between pools unless you think that the government is using public mining pools and even worse, spreading their hashrate between more than one pool, your concern is valid but not related to the subject, you are talking about 2 pools having 56% of the total hashrate, those two pools need to work together, run the same code and plan for the same attack, so this brings us back to the original "assumption", what does Bitmain get from screwing with BTC when everything Bitmain related depends on BTC?

If an entity is trying to perform an attack with no financial incentive then they would more likely use their own "unknown" pool, the fact that the largest pools are public pools suggests that only said pools can perform the attack, and thus, they would need a financial incentive.

It's not the first time for two mining pools have over 50% but it never happened for two of them to have over 56% like it is now.
Few percent is a big number that makes a difference for someone who wants to perform some kind of attack on Bitcoin, even if they are in different locations.
I would like much more to have three or more pools sharing around 50% of hashrate.

I said it was highest number since I am following mining pools in this topic, that started from end of July 2020.
We always criticized altcoins for having centralized mining pools, so I dont see why we cant do the same thing for Bitcoin.

I know it's not a single guy or company who is controlling all this hash power but it is still sort of centralization of mining power.

This is assumption, someone could perform attack even if there is no financial incentive, if they have unlimited funds and printing machine like governments.

Indeed, there is no incentives for any pool or large miners to screw with BTC, the rewards will be a lot less than the risk taken but any one of those entities since those have so much at stake, however, there is valid concern in terms of the "law", so mining pools that operate whiting the same country could be "forced"to do some stupid things just to obey the laws and regulation.

Well, the real issue that makes his analysis pointless is the fact that no large 'pool' would be willing to lose most of their income by trying to fuck over BTC.

Every full node has the BTC rules and would reject any blocks mined by any large pools that break those rules.

While that leads to a 'fork', even if that fork has 60% of BTC mining, the remaining % of BTC mining and the exchanges, will all stay on the valid fork.
This has even happened before, in July 2015, however the reason was stupid code, but the result was a large % of BTC mining off on their own, ignored, fork until they realised their stupidity.

The other option is to attempt to mine all blocks, ignoring all other miners, which is 'possible' with 51% or more of the BTC hash rate, and thus decide all transactions that get confirmed.
Again I cannot see this happening without BTC price crashing and thus their income crashing.

It should also be pointed out that Foundry is not a pool per-se. They mine strictly for themselves and smaller farms that buy gear from them and have it hosted by Foundry. My guess is that the hosted farms are splitting the blocks w/Foundry so in one sense it *is* a pool. Just a huge private one...

As for tx censoring - only Marathon tried doing that last year. They soon stopped that when they saw no one else was censoring tx's and realized it was costing them potential income.

Clearly not the highest however ...

BTCGuild had a massive % of all mining for a long time.
Here's the months they mined over 1000 blocks and estimated % of all bitcoin blocks (assuming 144 a day) for that month:


2013
Feb 1050 26%
Mar 1749 39%
Apr 1879 43%
May 1772 40%
Jun 1222 28%
Jul 1236 27%
Aug 1552 35%
Sep 1805 42%
Oct 1754 39%
Nov 1454 34%
Dec 1488 33%

2014
Jan 1300 29%