Not even close, just because you like spitting out numbers that mean nothing.
If you ever get off your chair and go to any of the large blockchain events you are going to meet a lot more then 50 to 60 people who control a few EH/s thought their companies.
Hell even here you can see the % of some of the mining in the US and that is spread among dozens and dozens of companies.

https://medium.com/foundry-digital/foundry-usa-pool-hashrate-by-state-f9dc92e7bc3b

Learn how things work before spouting off about them.

-Dave

That's actually a noteworthy fact of the Bitcoin history. The whitepaper does include the phrase "longest chain", and while most people believe he meant "longest difficulty-wise chain", he actually didn't. The "longest chain" in the whitepaper is meant literally; the chain with the highest block.

Im not talking about game theory. I simply pointed out that the operator of a pool could use their users hashrate maliciously before anyone had a chance to move their hashrate off the pool. Effectively when looking at short term attacks like double spends they do control the hash, not the individual miners. Their incentive to do so is completely irrelevant to my statement. Your fork tracker is useless when a longer chain is being built in secret. Sure the pool might have a few hours of bad luck, but so will the whole network if 51% of the hashrate drops.

Really?  Money means nothing to the government. They can print it as they please. Never underestimate what they will do to keep their backdoor inflation tool as the global reserve currency.

Do you think someone like Arion Kurtaj would have cared about economic suicide if he got access to a few pools instead of nvidia, uber and the others?

I think there are a lot of scenarios , although highly unlikely where game theory doesnt apply. I dont think people put enough stock in those.

After reading the OP, I concluded that there might be an issue in the study. It seems unlikely for these students from the London School of Economics to arrive at such a conclusion unless they lack a proper understanding of how mining pools operate. As a result, I spent/wasted half an hour delving into the research paper to uncover the nuances, and here it is.



Obviously, I do not doubt that their figures are accurate, and this conclusion


Could have been guessed by anyone who has been mining long enough, but where did they go wrong?

These individuals seem to be entrenched in the early era of Bitcoin mining. In today's world, Coinbase transactions hold little significance in such research. To simplify, the vast majority of mining pools allocate Coinbase transactions to their own addresses and subsequently distribute rewards from there. Moreover, many mining pools operate on a Pay-Per-Share (PPS) model, meaning they pay out rewards before actually receiving them (or sometimes after). This results in payments originating from a different set of coins than those visible in the coinbase transactions.

Given that almost 90% of all blocks are solved by approximately only 10 pools, it may seem as though these 10 miners control 90% of the blocks. Mining pools typically don't attempt to conceal their rewards, otherwise, they could assign a new address for each coinbase transaction. If this were the case, the entire interpretation of the study would shift drastically. Therefore, while the presented figures may be accurate, the interpretation is fundamentally flawed.

Reading the paper further, I found another critical error in their approach which is linking the origin of exchanges to the location or nationality of miners. Their assumption, based on the use of a Chinese-owned exchange implying the miner is Chinese, or the use of a US or EU exchange indicating nationality, is flawed. Common sense dictates that this inference is far from accurate. Unless exchanges reveal miners' information to these researchers, which is highly unlikely, their methodology only exposes the identity of mining pools rather than individual miners.

In essence, this research may suffice for academic purposes in obtaining a master's or bachelor's degree, using it for anything else -- is a mistake.

Bullshit, the part what you write as "plus 51% hash power". It's certainly some time ago when I read the Whitepaper last, but I can't remember something in it to support your claim.

You do realize that Bitcoin evolves, don't you? The "longest chain" has changed to the "chain with most accumulated work" wins, for obvious reasons. There's no point in clinging to the wording of the whitepaper. It's not the Bible or the Ten Commandments.

I disagree and I seriously can't follow you how you come to this conclusion. While it is somewhat problematic that certain mining pools aggregate quite some percentage of hashrate, I still don't see what kind of an issue it is as long as their percentage doesn't approach substantially more than 35-45%. We had in former times a pool that got to about or slightly over 50% and concerns and "shitstorm" were loud. To my knowledge that didn't happen again.

Where's the problem? Pinpoint it, please! What benefit should a party have which made enormous investments required to approach 50% of the global hashrate. Do funky stuff then and send Bitcoin into unseen turmoil? That would be economic suicide, very certain! I'd say, no government would dare to burn an investment like this to the ground, even if they hate Bitcoin. It wouldn't make any sense, economically.

Fundamentally, Bitcoin is built on the principle of transparency, at least to the extent where feasible. It would be incorrect to say that the principles that Bitcoin was built on is compromised solely because there are limitations to what we can do as far as decentralization, transparency, etc can go. Make no mistake, there are no perfect systems in the world and compromises has to be made in every of them.

For example, if you want something to be completely decentralized, then you would have to do it at the expense of something else, which can be transparency or any other property that Bitcoin has. The assertion that Bitcoin is compromised just because of what is postulated in this thread would be wrong. There are limitations to what an adversary can do with a good proportion of the hashrate, and as mentioned, it wouldn't make sense for adversaries to do so.

NO! Again this is not about control!
The longer chain will take over ONLY if it follows the rules, that's it!
Imagine if that wouldn't have been the case, it would mean every miner with 1TH/s could create his own blockchain, how would that work if you would have to follow whatever chain there is?
The 51% attacker doesn't change the rules, he just present a chain with VALID transactions, VALID blocks that follows the rules but it has more work behind it!

Then I think we should introduce mandatory KYC data in the blockchain since right now:
- you trust mining nodes by verifying the blocks just as you verify a transactions coming from someone
- your NEEDS demand that you know the identity of the miner creating a valid block, then obviously you need the IDENTITY of a guy sending you coins, right?  

What part of permissionless did you skip?  

That's a valid point but there is no provable ways to accurately tell where the hashrates are, what the hashrate is or the distribution of it. Bitcoin is designed to be transparent, but unfortunately the pseudonymous nature also means that it is difficult to ascertain certain things beyond a reasonable degree. I don't think it is easy to do so, or if you have a feasible idea to do it, then we can hear from you as well. If not, then I believe that should be the end of that discussion.

POW or basically any mechanism favours those with the most resources, because it functions by game theory and the assumption that you stand to lose the most if you are dishonest. I have no doubt that financial institutions or governments have a hand in mining. But, what can they do? Attack the chain? That would probably achieve nothing, beyond a minor inconvenience while costing them tens of millions of dollars, and even more in terms of opportunity cost. I don't foresee any governments being willing to attack Bitcoin for practically no benefits.

Go to every single company listed onto the stock exchange and you're going to see the shareholders and you get pretty much 30% of the hashrate!
Btw, if you think they are some illuminati that can control everything and down in money , why don't you buy shares in them too?

Stop with the POW consensus!!!!
Miners that mine 70% receive 70% of the reward, they can't change the "consensus" , they can fork the chain and keep mining there  by their rules but that can be done even by a guy with 5%, see BCH and BSV! If a 51% attacker would try to mine blocks that don't follow the rules they will be rejected by nodes, this is not a democracy where the guys having 51% of the vote can pass every single rule and the rest are forced to obey them!

There is none and there will never be!
As long as a company mines in two countries and points the hashrate at a private pool you have zero chances of knowing how much is there owned by who and where it resides, and this is just a simple example!
I mined over various pools, sent my money to both cold wallets and different exchanges, so there is no way one could allocate my hashrate (of course minuscule in the great scheme) to any location with precision, that unless they have access to all the logs of all mining pools in this world!

I shared but you did not read.

Extra information about Bitcoin Mining History

There are some researches and reports that show in the past, there are some dominating mining pools, which can have combined hash rate big enough to attack Bitcoin network. Unfortunately, they did not do that and I believe they see no good benefit by attacking the network.

Visual Analytics of Bitcoin Mining Pool Evolution: On the Road Toward Stability?


The evolution of mining pools and miners’ behaviors inthe Bitcoin blockchain

How do you come to that conclusion regarding your institutional investors?

Hashpower concentrates into pools. According to your cited paper there are not many miners with a great percentage of hashpower that point their hashpower to large mining pools. Agreed on that and this development isn't actually too surprising and I personally don't see much of an issue here. It's economy in a very competetive playground.

This is nonsense or paints an oversimplified picture. In practice anybody can join a mining pool and point his hashpower to it. You're probably excluded from certain larger pools that have a lower limit of required minimum hashpower, but that doesn't prevent you from finding some other pool that will accept your hashpower.

If there're 50-60 miners who provide a majority of hashpower to pools, then those big miners gain most of the coin rewards from pool payouts. That doesn't mean that all other participating miners don't get anything, see below for explanation.

Are you sure, you understand PoW mining? There's no such thing as PoW consensus (51%). Bitcoin mining PoW forces you do execute hashwork to find a blockheader hash that satisfies the required mining difficulty (your to be found blockheader hash needs to be lower than a certain hash value dictated by current difficulty). Finding such a blockheader hash is due to the used hash algorithm a completely random process. You can hit a valid blockheader hash within a few thousands or millions hashes (statistically very … very unlikely) or you need a ridiculously high number of hashes to hit it for which you need longer than some other miner who was luckier than you.
Again: it's a random process and with higher hashpower you gain statistical advantage.

Mining pools mitigate the risk of solo-mining. With "fair" pools you're paid statistically according to your provided hashpower compared to global hashpower within the granularity of the pool's payout scheme. Choose your mining pool wisely! I didn't want to go into pool payout schemes as it's probably not relevant to go into such details here and now.

It's outdated since it doesn't have Foundry and it's before the great migration, the second the payment tracing is a bit ridiculous, how do you deal with guys that have mining farms in 3 countries and how do you deal with the ones that don't sell their coins! If riot or core decides to make a purchase in BTC from Bitmain and send 1000 BTC to Okex you suddenly move 30 Exahash from the US back to China!   Genuinely curious how would separate with this method Canada and the United States!

Not at all. Learn how mining and pools work. Just the people on this board who mine are more then the "0.1%" that you claim.
Anyone can point their miners at Ant or F2 or Via or Kano or another pool.

Just because you don't have a bunch of S19 sitting in your garage does not mean that other people don't.

https://explorer.btc.com/btc/insights-pools

-Dave

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

How is this an attack to the network?

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.