Topic: With ~90% of blocks solved by 10 pools, is Bitcoin really decentralized anymore? - page 2. (Read 331 times)

Nah, not worried at all about this.    I am a individual miners and I mine through a mining Pool as 1000's of other miners are doing. So, even if 10 mining pools have the support of 1000's of small miners, they still do not own the hash power being used.

Those miners can split away from mining pools if they do not agree with their decisions and policies and other people are free to mine on their own. It is not like the farming industry in the USA, where smaller farms are being bought by the large corporations and these smaller farms has no say in the matter. 

We saw what happened when GHash.IO briefly controlled more than 51% of bitcoin's computinhg power in 2014 .... miners just left it to join other mining pools to break that control. 

First you need to understand what is a mining pool. It's not a mining company with thousands of mining rigs working at its backyard. A simple illustration of a mining pool is below,



It consists of thousands of individual or corporate miners of all sizes. The form up together so that they can have a better chance of finding a block. They don't change the rules of the bitcoin network.


I thought so! However, there are home miners who have successfully ramped-up their mining operation to cope-up with the increasing difficulty. Also we have a group of ex-miners who couldn't ramp-up their operations due to various reasons and fallen out of the league. That certainly doesn't mean that the bitcoin network is becoming centralized.

I believe mining pools are providing better chance to small miners to earn some rewards at least. If mining pools were never existed, the small miners wouldn't have a chance to earn mining rewards at all. Re-think the opportunity!

Honest question... we have 10 pools making up like 90% of solved blocks according to https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/ and https://www.blockchain.com/pools (not sure the validity of these, but they seem to agree).
But even if it's not QUITE that desperate, with the mega-mines making up the vast majority of hashrate, and the effective impossibility of the "casual home miner" to even mine at a break-even rate, how is this really decentralized anymore?
I came in when it was CPU and then GPU mining. Anyone could start mining and make a small amount of bitcoin, and it wouldn't cost thousands in electricity, it really felt like it was "the people's" but now it's just giant corporations that control it all.

A few things first - yes, I know there are altcoins but this is about Bitcoin specifically. And yes I know some of the hashrate of those huge pools are made up of individual miners, but I'm willing to bet it's a very small fraction.

So all that being said...
1) Is this as concerning to anyone else as it is to me in terms of the future of Bitcoin
2) Is there a possible future that I'm not seeing right now where it goes back into the hands of thousands / millions of people around the world who each have a meaningful share
    2.a) When I say meaningful share I mean in relation to each other, not the overall
    2.b) Right now, the disparity in hashrate is nearly as bad as the disparity in wealth we already have in the world
3) Right now there are ~900 bitcoins mined a day (please check me on that number if I'm misremembering the math) and transactions only add ~15 to that. Do we expect an order of magnitude rise in transactions / transaction fees (which have already risen and greatly reduced the use of bitcoin as a means of cheap money transfer) to magically happen?
4) How does that happen when a majority of bitcoin are held in exchange/wallet services cold wallets and so likewise very centralized (and transfers between users on those services don't go through the blockchain)?

I realize maybe this sounds all doom and gloom, I'm just honestly curious how others feel about all this. I see time and again people touting how Bitcoin will survive because it's decentralized, but as you can see above, it's really not.
It was designed to be, and has the ability to be, but that's not the same as actually being...