Topic: Mining hash rate distribution - page 3. (Read 683 times)

This confirms that mining is very centralised and controlled by a few institutional investors acting in their own interests and not those of the other participants. Is there a chance to know who are the investors of Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool and ViaBTC?
In theory everyone can join the network, but in practice those who actually participate in the PoW consensus (51%) and produce blocks are less than 0.1% of the miners, i.e. those 50-60 miners reported in the research. To achieve such a high hash rate, it is necessary to have a mining farm and an economy of scale.

Keep in mind foundry is mostly for institutional investors. Who are not stupid, if it looks like foundry is going to do something that may hurt the price of BTC they are going to leave and go elsewhere. Or sue them for violating fiduciary trust. Or both. Due to the nature of investing in mining it's a long term ROI having your pool tank the value of BTC is going to make you react.

-Dave

I was referring to the fact that a mining pool like foundry is close to 33% or 1/3 of the total hash rate, which allows a selfish mining attack. Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243.

Thanks for the explanation.

How is this an attack to the network? Exploiting the fee market is not quite an attack or is it? I'm not entirely convinced of the benefit of this controlled hashrate limitting that philipma1957 describes, but there're some transaction market variables which are to some extend beyond the control of mining pools, e.g. transaction volume of bitcoiners induces by external factors like Bitcoin market value development. In situations where bitcoiners demand a spike of transactions for whatever reasons such hashrate control might exaggerate the fee market to a mining pool's benefit.

As far as I remember the last time we didn't have mempool congestion was around midth of April 2023 and before that at the beginning of 2023. Since then mempool never got emptied enough that there wasn't an excess of transactions waiting to be confirmed in new blocks.

When mempool has more unconfirmed transactions than fit in a (few) block(s) there's natural fee rate competition, a natural fee rate market for bitcoiners. To maximize profit mining pools should choose transactions solely based on the max. fee rate they offer, unless the pools have some special paid services, like paid transaction accelerators, that can compensate choice of lower fee rates.

Anything beyond the beneficial choice of transactions based on their top fee rate is likely intransparent, trust based, manipulated and hardly verifiable for participating miners of pools.

Concentration of hashpower in large pools is a problem of concentration of choice of which transactions go into blocks of those pools. Usually the pool decides about the block template that participating miners work on and miners don't have a word on the block template. Miners only choice is at which pool(s) they mine. Most likely this will be a pool which maximizes their profit. Mining gear and energy have to be paid...

Hello,
thank you all for the detailed replies. So I understand that it is not possible to know such important details and to know how really decentralised the bitcoin PoW consensus is.
This is a major drawback that undermines the trustless principle of the network, as the do not trust, verify principle cannot be put into practice. As suggested by some of you, I will try to contact at least the first 5 mining pools to see if I can get some useful information.
Thanks


I'm not sure, but it looks to me like a self mining attack that allows the network to be attacked with only 1/3 of the hash power. Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243. 

A 51% attack is the least of btc worries.  Why is this because it would lose a shit ton of money for the top players.  If you want to worry about btc worry about fee manipulation which will get easier with every ½ ing


Why is that? Simple underclock your gear for ½ of the two week diff period of 2016 blocks.

this makes the mempool crowd.

then over clock your gear to grab blocks fill with fees in the second half of the 2016 block period.

Ie do the first 1008 blocks in 8 days.

do the second 1008 blocks in 6 days.

the diff stays the same.

you lose emptier blocks the first half
you make crowded blocks the second half.

a pool like foundry with ⅓ the hash should do 48 blocks a day.

so they do 38 a day for 8 days in the hole 80 blocks
they make  62 a day for 6 days up 84 blocks. the diff drifts up just a tiny bit.

the pool makes just over 48 blocks a day for the 14 days.

the diff moves just a bit up

and the pool gets  a lot of high fee blocks

6 x 62 = 372 high fee blocks

plus they do not raise the diff much.

they also get 304 low fee blocks

but they slow the diff growth which does not help them since they are near 33%

and this will get far worse after the ½ as they lose less coins.

Pretty sure foundry does this.

This kind of data is not possible to acquire in Bitcoin with its PoW algorithm because of its decentralized nature. However, since there is some degree of centralization involved in Bitcoin mining in the form of mining pools, the data exists in their hands.

If you are serious about your research, your only option is to directly contact bitcoin mining pools one by one and ask them whether they are willing to publish this information. They don't have to publish it in details, all they have to do is to announce: their total hashrate, the IP distribution of the miners that connect to their servers and their individual or average hashrate and general information like that.
Then you can aggregate the data and get a better picture.

The problem is that not all of them are willing to publish this type of statistic and as it was mentioned it is not possible to verify this information. But I'd say if you put enough effort into it and if they actually publish something, the result could be close to reality with small error.

You can use this one
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/pools-timeseries

Data from third party sites about mining pools are not accurate if you consider it by countries, geolocations because miners can connect their ASICs to mining pools through VPNs and IP addresses are not reflecting their real geolocations.

This weakness of data is mentioned by Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index's methodology.
https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/mining_map/methodology

Extra information about Bitcoin Mining History

Not only don't we know who is running mining equipment, where they are located, or how much equipment any of them are running.

Believe it or not, we also have no way of even knowing how much total hashpower is actually running during any timeframe.

All we know is what the current difficulty target is, and how much time it takes for a block to show up. From there we can calculate an ESTIMATED total hash rate.

Some of the mining pools may publish their hash rate, but you have to decide if you trust them to tell the truth or not.  They easily could lie about it.  Some pools add data into their blocks to indicate that they mined that block, but there is nothing forcing them to do so, and they certainly could leave the data out of some blocks or even lie and put some other pools data into their own blocks if they wanted to.

Some mining businesses may publish information about how much hashpower they are running. Again, you have to decide if you trust them to be honest about it or not.

Am I running any minging equipment?  How would you know? If I told you I was (or wasn't) how would you know if you could trust what I said?

You can't find such data because a lot of miners join mining pools, so for example the readily available data is that the Hash rate is sorted according to the pools rather than individual miners. The same applies to location of miner.

A miner from Russia can use the same pool as a miner from the US. How are you going to group them if the pool won't reveal that information to the public.
Remember the crack-down of miners in China? I am pretty sure some solo miners definitely use VPN. So again the information is going to be unreliable

Hello,

I am researching the different types of blockchains both PoS and PoW. In general, I can find important data for the former that is apparently not available for the latter. Specifically, I am looking for a dashboard that shows the distribution of hash rate sorted by miner, by country, by ISP and so on, the total number of miners, how many miners control 51% of the hash rate. Something similar to this data from Ethereum https://beaconcha.in/ and https://etherscan.io/dashboards/beacon-depositors.
I found the following resources, some contain hash rates by country and the network map, but I did not find a complete dashboard like other PoS projects.
This data is very important in the light of the following research that shows the high centralisation of mining and thus of control of PoW consensus.

• Mining map https://chainbulletin.com/bitcoin-mining-map/
• Nodes map https://bitnodes.io/nodes/live-map/
• Hash rate by country https://hashrateindex.com/hashrate/pools

A Deep Dive into Bitcoin Mining Pools https://github.com/MatteoRomiti/Deep_Dive_BTC_Mining_Pools
we conduct the first in-depth analysis of mining reward distribution within three of the four largest Bitcoin mining pools and examine their cross-pool economic relationships. Our results suggest that individual miners are simultaneously operating across all three pools and that in each analyzed pool a small number of actors (≤ 20) receives over 50% of all BTC payouts.

Blockchain Analysis of the Bitcoin Market https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-06/Bitcoin-blockchain%20-%20AER.pdf
We show that the Bitcoin mining capacity is highly concentrated and has been for the last five years. The top 10% of miners control 90% and just 0.1% (about 50 miners) control close to 50% of mining capacity. Furthermore, this concentration of mining capacity is counter cyclical and varies with the Bitcoin price. It decreases following sharp increases in the Bitcoin price and increases in periods when the price drops or when there are halving events. Thus, the risk of a 51% attack increases in these times as well.

Thank you