It depends on how you actually look at it, this is not the first time where two entities alone have more than 50% of the total hasharate, a few years ago Bitmain as an entity (antpool, btc.com and Viabtc) had 30-35% and along with Binance or f2pool they had more than half the total hashrate, so pretty similar to what is happening now, in fact it was even worse since those pools operated in the same country.
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.
Clearly not the highest however ...
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.
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...
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.
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.
This is assumption, someone could perform attack even if there is no financial incentive, if they have unlimited funds and printing machine like governments.
