Topic: Are We Being Fucked? The centralization of Bitcoin (Read 386 times)

Mining has been centralized forca good amount of bitcoin's lifetime now. It hss proved to work well thus far in providing services to the rest of the crypto indistry so I think no shift is needed despite its centralized nature. That being said DGC as far as I know only has around 20% of the industry's hashrate on its back, while the foundry lies somewhere within 27%, numbers that when added up do not total to 50% , so for me this post is a little fear mongering and misleading too.

whats said in purple was satoshis consensus mechanism 2009-2016
but in 2017 that changed
and that has been admitted by devs that created the bypass..

in 2017 rules changed whereby every user was not required to upgrade to be "activation ready" by august 2017 for an activation to occur
and since then users have not needed to be activation ready for other things to be slid in..

Actially, if the government will just choose to restrict decentralized platform, they can do such thing. But that is also true; if people won't choose to use centralisation, then such thing won't work. Problem is that people won't have other option to continue with this technology so it would be somehow a display of supression. What's more likely to happen in the future is for all categories to co-exust with one another. It would depend to the users on the other hand which tokens and exchanges to be used. Some are just okay with centralized tokens especially for transactions while decentralized ones are for investment purposes(as what I have observed from being here for years).

I have to say that people are overreacting to it, it requires everyone to agree to use a chain for it to change in any capacity, meaning you could be a single person who would control 90% of it, and if people do not use any changes you want to make, then you wouldn't have it. Everyone acts as if this would be possible but it's not, centralization is not real.

Satoshi thought about everything before he left, he developed it to a point where it would be awesome to handle and wouldn't have these type of problems and that's why we have what we have. If there were any loopholes or issues then someone would have done it long time ago, and it would have been gone already.

Honestly centralization of mining and centralization of bitcoin are two different things and won't be the same. I believe that the best thing to do in this case is to ignore miners. Because, they have tried before and failed. Remember the whole Bitcoin cash period? They wanted to take over bitcoin and they wanted to change it what bitcoin cash was, and they failed so they created their own fork basically.

We all know how stupid that was and they had no chance, same here, they can control however much they want, it will always fail and they will never be able to control it because we have the control, if we ignore then nothing will matter to us.

there are risks..

things can move into being more centralised and just as fast jump out of it. the point is to keep an eye on it

with regards to mining. mining alone can only really do some empty blocks but the rest of the network will flill blocks so not all blocks will be empty(end result some transaction delays/congestion)

a pool if they got over 51% of network could go back and edit a recent block but the further back they go the more expensive it becomes to edit. and odds of catching back up with the good network to overtake it, to re-org the blockchain, become less.. thus the "6 confirm" rule is pretty much a good risk mitigation for large emount spends people might worry might re-org as unreceived.. ..
EG if you are receiving $100k. then 2 confirm is more expensive to re-org
EG if you are receiving $600k. then 3 confirm is more expensive to re-org
EG if you are receiving $1.2m. then 6 confirm is more expensive to re-org

so unless a pool was shifting millions and then decided a hour later to want to double spend. its not worth it

..
the more riskier risks to the network of actually "breaking bitcoin" is in development.. the risk of sliding in a bug into the protocol which is something more on the developers review and central point of failure risk
we should not be slack, and just trust the devs are honourable gods that self review themselves in a clan. where we just "trust in mod"

we should not allow one brand of node, that moderate themselves and moderate out any critiques.  to have absolute control over proposal decisions and be sponsored by one main business that has most of the economic nodes to help push it into action without needing user node votes

so we really need to be critically watching what the devs and economic nodes propose and want to change. we independant users should be moderating the devs. no the other way around.. and really try to get them to think before they act if they did want to push it through(tripple checking its good code that adds a benefit for the wider community outside the sponsored dev clan).

ensuring they dont just go full on rule break on the whole community of hundreds of millions of users indirectly and hundreds of thousands of direct node users.

.. in short mining is no big deal.. but a dev collaboration is a risk
unlike what they want to think.. where they think bitcoin writes itself and devs just are janitors that clean up the code.. that is wrong. bitcoin is not AI, its the devs that write it so its the devs we need to be watching

it's so into details. yeah but are we getting fucked or not?
seems it is a real threat, isn't it

you do realise if you look at the portfolio of DCG, that sponsor core devs(#blockstream)
own exchanges like
#circle
#coinbase
#greyscale
#kraken

did you know greyscales trust has ~660k btc .. stored at coinbase

coinbase(as of sept 2022) holds about 1070k btc combined from all customers/service holdings.. compared to binances 575k

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i know im goona get the usual onslaught by the same half dozen idiots.. but lets say it anyways

when a large majority of economic nodes and mining does collaborate
https://dcgco.medium.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consensus-2017-133521fe9a77
(NYA was created and promoted by as the reference shows DCG)

to say they were going to run a piece of software that flags for a upgrade to activate,

where by when their flag reached 80% and held for a month their software started to reject native blocks not signalling for the upgrade. to get the signal for upgrade to grow to appear as 100%(unnatural) within a fortnight(2nd half of july). .. then that will trigger the upgrade....... and it did
(they did however have no code to implement their second part of the pledge.. that was just an empty promise to pretend they are compromising to appease the community .. )

notice the natural wiggle upto 35% in june
(only 35% openly voluntarily wanted it from november 2016-june 2017)

notice the natural fear mongered wiggle to 45% first half of july
(only 45% openly feared but voted for it from mid june-mid july 2017)
then the unnatural straight diagonal line to unnatural 100% second half of july
(100% had no choice but vote for it or have block rejected from mid mid july-aug 1st 2017)
to then activate a feature on august

yep just 58 entities collaborating in a NYA caused segwit to 100% false vote activate unnaturally

Yes, Bitcoin is great because of decentralization, because centralization is the gene that is controlled, and many loopholes in the platform are caused by centralization, and people cannot overcome their own selfish desires.

Bitcoin mining has always been centralized if you ask me, but the good news is that this centralization is not in the hands of the government, for this would have been a different thing all together.
That majorly two mining pools are controlling 51 percent of bitcoin hash rate is not what's important, i think what's important is knowing who this two pools are, and as long as they are not controlled or affiliated with the government or any central body of the government, then we are good, they are true bitcoin believers.
Sincerely, if i can afford it, i will set up my own mining company, and try all i can to control even a higher hash rate than 51 percent, as long as it means making profit.

We are not Fucked. Bitcoin will always be decentralized. Miners are centralized, and someone is in charge of that. This does not imply that it will have an impact on Bitcoin because a 51% attack will not harm Bitcoin or decentralization. Bitcoin is hard coded and cannot be changed or edited by anyone. There is no way to achieve centralization. However, you already stated that two companies control 51%, so why are you concerned? It is not produced by the same company.

Just because 51% of the global hash rate is controlled by two mining pools, does not mean that bitcoin is centralized. Also, i don't think it will have any big impact on the centralization or decentralization.

Bitcoin is decentralized and we do not need to think too much that can lead to wrong perception and wrong reality.

Are you being serious? This mining company invested huge amount of money to there mining pool and most of there funds comes to there investors which means they have liability that needs to be paid overtime through mining. Attacking the Bitcoin network which is there main source of income makes no sense at all because they will just destroy there own business unless some mega huge whale will pay them there total investment in exchange for doing it which will not gonna happened because who’s very rich people that willing to burn money just to create temporary chaos on Bitcoin?

The fact is that mining bitcoins is not as easy as it seems. Apart from needing a lot of money for initial capital, things like this are also a little difficult, especially when we don't have conditions where this is possible. not to mention about the electricity supply which is now increasingly difficult.
On the other hand, for bitcoin 2021, every two weeks there are 2016 blocks that will be rearranged by bitcoin, so of course this will make mining conditions even more difficult.
I think we also have to start realistically. If indeed we can't afford it, I don't think there is a need to force mining as if anyone can do it.

If you are trying to evaluate centralization in btc, then why didn't you bring in all the aspects and why put emphasis on mining aspect only? Because you can check and see the numbers available and bring them here, try to criticize btc without any factual evidence?

Let's talk about mining, it looks like it is centralized because pools are the places where people want to draw their hashrate because chances of getting rewarded are far better and bigger than going alone mining, you get it?
Now, who will these miners mine with? Where the pool fee is less and they give a good share to the miners, these pools have been competing for so long but even after holding a considerable percentage in mining hashrate, antpool never gets all the blocks every single time (point: competition) and there are others too who tend to make it when it comes to finding blocks.

About Foundry, you have got a nice explanation already from franky1. It is the miners' decision to choose what they want to do with their purchases (equipment) and where do they want to use it.

Next part, the addresses that hold the most amount of btc, and mind well buddy, they are not miners. You can check the top 100 wallets and will find that they hold a very big percentage of total btc mined till date, and still accumulating. Why didn't you talk about it? Isn't it centralization? Still they are not pulling out their btc at all and holding like legends. Would you consider btc as centralized after knowing this?

Let's go to another part: manipulation
Traders who hold considerable amount of fiat in their exchange accounts, move btc high or low according to their wish but that takes place in a timely manner, else btc won't be less than a pump and dump ponzi. The best example of word of mouth manipulation is Elon Musk. Now, he doesn't have the power to do that because we all have understood his tricks very fantastically.

Next: Exchanges
I won't write an article here and this will be my final point.
There have been a stiff competition between exchanges since I came to know btc, Mt Gox was one of the best exchanges then. Bittrex and poloniex took over later on when Mt Gox was hacked and funds were stolen. Then came Binance into competition after a very long time, and since then, none of the exchanges, namely Kraken, Kucoin, Gate, Huobi, and even Coinbase hold such huge volumes and amount of assets that Binance holds even at the time of writing. Binance was also accused of fraudulent trading to increase the volume of the exchange and show fake volumes, but nothing was proven till date. However, we are aware that Binance holds a huge percentage of overall crypto assets collectively. If it's too centralized, then why didn't Binance run away taking away all those assets worth over $70 bn and why is it the number one exchange as of now?

i would like to add that pools are not the only issue, also it is the manufacturer of the mining hardware!

This information is misleading and not entirely true.
You can easily check the state of all mining pools and there are not two mining pools that have more than 51% of hashrate.
FoundryUSA has less then 27% and Antpool has less than 21% that is below 50%, but mining pools are not single entity and they change all the time.
Compared to all other shitcoins and bitcoin forks I would say that Bitcoin certainly has most decentralized mining, but situation can certainly be better.
Anyone who wants to help decentralization should join smaller mining pool, there is nothing complicates about that.

You don't know what you are talking about, because how would you encourage people to mine Bitcoin if we know that it is no longer possible without special devices, which are extremely expensive and consume a significant amount of energy, and in addition create a lot of noise. What you are talking about cannot be done as long as Bitcoin uses POW, which is the only logical thing - and once again I tell you that if you have so many doubts about Bitcoin, find another coin that you can mine yourself with your personal computer.

One would think that you understood something after all the posts, but you still live in some illusions that have little to do with reality.

main risks of mining 51% is
half of blocks are "empty blocks"
or
malicious pool tries to get its pool customers to not mine a current block. and instead mine an old(edited) block again. and then try to mine forward to catch up and overtake the good pools current height, to re-org the chain and make the malicious pools coin rewards become visible..

however to go back and mine a old block again and then catch up needs more then  51% to catch up meaning alot of asics noticing their asic is mining an old node and those users not jumping pools

im not concerned, after all why would users of a pool want to mine an old block not earning them any sat rewards for hours, while they waste time trying to catch-up with only a hope to take over to win possible rewards

in most cases if this was to occur pool users would prefer to jump to active height block mining pools.. same also if their asic was hashing empty blocks too often
after all why would a pool customer agree to empty block mine when the pool is actively not putting tx in blocks meaning users cant spend their rewards if the pool is not allowing spends

im not worried about mining pools at all.
im more concentrating on the dev and economic node power houses possibly colluding

No we are not being fucked as far that I know that 51% can only be happened if the miner have one single entity address in this case we have 2 different pool and different company so I things we are not doomed yet. For now hahah

In history mining always changing because people small and medium miner keep changing their pool for different reason