A few thoughts on this in no particular order:
- pools don’t directly own/control their hardware and hash rate, so it would require prolonged collusion among their participating miners
- the cost would be prohibitively astronomical even if they somehow convinced their miners to participate
- the incentives just don’t line up at all
- it’s good/necessary to practice adversarial thinking, while also important to be mindful of reality when doing so
This works in theory, but reality doesn’t back it up. Case in point: miners not redirecting hashrate despite clear forensic evidence that most of the smaller pools in the top 10 are just AntPool proxies - meaning a handful of people control what goes into 70% of mined blocks. On top of that, we’ve seen miners stick with pools even when those operators are actively attacking Bitcoin (spamming the chain and bloating the UTXO set). And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve got yet another example: miners refusing to switch pools even when they could earn 10–20% more in rewards, like with Ocean. In short, theory tells us one thing, but the actual behavior of miners (or should I say hashers?) keeps proving the opposite.
Clearly you’re the expert here. We should all just give up. Bitcoin is dead.
That’s not what I’m saying.
