This worries me 10x more than token fads 'spamming' Bitcoin.
Discussion
It would be nice if mining equipment is more accessible and affordable to a regular person.
That isn't going to happen as long as mining is so profitable. Why would they make less than they can? Also, you can mine on pretty much anything. Your chances of success will just reflect how much you spent on hardware. If you want the same reward without the same cost of entry then good luck. Life will never work that way.
As it stands, buying mining equipment is so opaque to an outsider that he's more likely to get scammed trying to get one. If I haven't read Mining for the Streets by Diverter and Econoalchemist's Mining blog, I wouldn't even have a lick of idea where to start.
There's a clear lack of open and accssible knowledge on this side of Bitcoin. It also doesn't help that there's only a handful of companies that actually produce the equipment.
If you're to ask me why Bitcoin mining got so centralized, it's because of those two factors.
Check out the BitAxe project ⚡️
IT IS EVEN WORSE THAN THE CHART MAKES IT SEEM SINCE ANTPOOL, VIABTC, F2POOL, BINANCE, BRAIINS, AND SECPOOL ARE ALL USING THE SAME CUSTODIAN AND BLOCK TEMPLATE PROVIDER.
BASICALLY ONE BIG CHINESE POOL AT ~47% HASH.
Who is their provider
From my understanding, bitmain historically has been malicious. They should be crushed.
YES this has been going on for a while time to shout this nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx we gotta do something
😓😓😓
What can we do about it?
Buy and run a miner?
With ocean pool?
Solo mining or ocean or send the hashes to the smaller pools.
But will it make any difference?
Not with that attitude!
Not really, if you solo-mine, it's too much headache to create the infrastructure and cooling system for your miner, and you'd be mining in one of these pools anyway. And lose money on a depreciating machine before gaining any meaningful amount of btc. Some mining companies have hundreds if not thousands of rigs and yours will be a pass in the sea
Btc.com seemingly is SECPOOL too
no onchain privacy, wasabi and samourai gone, lightning does not scale and self custodial LN is a pain in the ass still, ecash mints allow to break the 21m cap - the state of bitcoin is pretty terrible, sadly.
It's impossible to break the 21M cap on the base chain. Even if it was on one of the L2s, it would mean that some of the money wouldn't make it back to the base chain.
that is true, but it will not matter to the users who get rug pulled by the next ugly nerd SBF like crew which runs the mint, sells unbacked tokens to their users for real bitcoin and then do an exit scam. It is beyond retarded to create a system which allows that, it is the most anti bitcoin thing i can imagine.
IT SHOULD COME ON
Big miner centralization, I’m mining on f2pool currently.
For the love of God the fact no one is paying any attention and miners don’t care as long as they get their steady expected payout
Moving out little 400th to ocean next week. If every pleb does this though, does it impact at all?
this is the real attack on bitcoin
Why is Mining pool centralization problematic? I really know nothing in this area.
Majority consensus to control the blockchain itself.
This is a case where votes absolutely matter.
Agreed. Bitcoin fixes everything but we need to be open to threats and not let it be centralized. What is the solution to miner centralization?
If #bitcoin pools continue to centralize maybe the incentives alignment for pools don't align
Talk about timely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqaBPALIM6c&pp=ygUMdGZ0YyBwb2RjYXN0
nostr:note1qgq2647zw6vtkfrzwkrytc6c9r8erwhsrfgxh9w865jmrrjuchns6whg4d
Yeah it’s a big issue.
What's the status of Stratum V2?
Getting there
looking forward to it being ready for mainnet
This is not an issue in my opinion. Pools does not represent a single entity. They are composed by a lot of miners, right?
Marty Bent has a podcast on this subject today with the title Bitcoin Mining Pools are Critically Centralized. His guest is a well known bitcoin developer. I haven't listened to it yet but it's in my dowloads. Here it is if you want to check it out:
https://primal.net/e/note1ntrlr3ueex53qdeg3wzyghfwz2rsj38kgk5lh33nsk4nfdl6spusnnafty
Miners recognize
It’s a concern
Bitcoin has survived worse.
Yeah this feels like a problem in need of solving. Haven’t read up on Sv2 in a while, but it at least helps with this correct?
I believe so
🤙🧡
Is it a coincidence that since miners have literally had their income sliced in half, this chart surfaces
💯 .. and neither of those jurisdictions with concentrated mining pools are good actors from a Bitcoin perspective
As it should. Mining will become more centralized and will be mostly state owned, unless some mircle happens.
Next stop is how bitcoin get capture by middlemen.
You actually mean this much bigger KYC'd pools
No incentive for a miner
This is quite bullish, frankly; if SoftWar plays out, we will have healthy competition that supports the protocol.
Block selection needs decentralising to the hashers.