The Bitcoin network will soon become more centralized

[safar1980]

Bitcoin’s hashrate is going public
An increasing share of Bitcoin's hashrate is controlled by publicly-listed companies, driven by private miners going public and faster capacity expansion among public miners.
Jaran Mellerud(c)
Publicly listed miners' share of the Bitcoin hashrate is 19%, up from only 3% in January 2021.
Many mining companies have gone public during this period, bringing private hashrate to the public markets. An example is Core Scientific, with a self-mining capacity of 8.2 EH/s, going public this January.
source
https://arcane.no/research/bitcoins-hashrate-is-going-public

[Poker Player]

And are there any conclusions you would like to draw after telling us about this?

I don't know too much about the technical aspect, but I know that in the beginning individuals mined from home with a simple pc or laptop. As the hasrate and difficulty increased, they had to start investing in mining equipment and it started to make more sense to mine in pools or large teams. I see it as a simple evolution of the system, that although it is more centralized in terms of mining compared to the beginnings, it serves as a guarantee for a decentralized system of custody and transmission of value.

[avikz]

Can we do anything about it? I guess no! Mining is a cash intensive operation so mining operators need a constant flow of cash in order to continue paying the overheads.but the risk of centralization is not just with the miners alone.

When corporates buy bitcoin it moves towards further centralization. Microstrategy holds an awful lot of bitcoins that can anytime bring the market to its feet if they wish. That's the actual risk I see, more than a miner going public.

[DOH!]

I think just relying on updated parameters from Arcane may not prove to be related to hashrate in any way.  It could be a matter of the motivation used to increase the flashiness and leverage the shares of these listed mining corporations.  This only really shows how intense interest is in bitcoin after only 2 million bitcoins are left.  Bitcoin is still fighting the organization-mining war, we may soon see a win-win.

[NeuroticFish]

With Intel getting into building mining chips, I would not be surprised if the US miners' hash rate will keep increasing in the near future faster than in the rest of the world.
Interesting enough, until now people were crying that mining was centralized in China.
Now we're shifting towards centralization in US.
I find it laughable...

Is this a problem? It doesn't look a problem to me.
Is this centralization? Hardly, since they're private companies competing against each other.


Ah, some entities with fat fiat wallets will get a piece of the cake without caring what Bitcoin or mining actually is? Oh well.... nothing unexpected...

[stompix]

I think just relying on updated parameters from Arcane may not prove to be related to hashrate in any way. 

Then you should come with your own numbers, right?

I'm actually surprised it would be only 19%, from the companies I was tracking last year they had by the end of 2021 at least 20exa of hashrate available, and this is without counting Core as they didn't release any details, all of them have on order more than 75 exa of gear, that would bring them at nearly 100 Exa by the end of 2022, so about half of the current or taking into account, this is added hash on top of it about 40%.
Foundry has 16-19% of the hash rate and it's only for large US-based clients, so I would expect the numbers to be far bigger.

With Intel getting into building mining chips, I would not be surprised if the US miners' hash rate will keep increasing in the near future faster than in the rest of the world.

Till Intel start producing those chips and their clients start mining they have a ton of orders from Bitmain, I don't remember if it was Hive or Mara that had reserved shipping even in 2023 already, probably Intel will be the one cementing the 90%.

When corporates buy bitcoin it moves towards further centralization. Microstrategy holds an awful lot of bitcoins that can anytime bring the market to its feet if they wish. That's the actual risk I see, more than a miner going public.

Microstrategy dumping their coins will crash the price once and that's it, a single company owning 50% of the hash rate can decide to make a lot of stupid things that will hurt the chain forever. Remember what plans Mara had with their pool!

[evilgreed]

               Well, what can you expect tho? The governments almost everywhere in the world are serious about money laundering and thus uses this excuse as well to suppress every crypto enthusiast as much as they can. But then most crypto enthusiasts are against this. And so after a few years several compromises have been made which is what we see nowadays. Centralization just cannot be avlided and along with other variables, we can expect bitcoin to be more centralised in the future specially after being fully mined.

[fiulpro]

The whole system is way more centralized than the inventor of Bitcoin would have ever thought. If it's not government it's the whales, with almost 50% coins which are being held by them at the same time these highs and lows do make a good volatile market for the trading as well. I do think that you are already aware that any platform for either trading or buying/selling or even storing your coins offline does require require your documents which are generally linked to your bank accounts where you withdraw as well. For me I can only withdraw in the bank which is linked to my wallet which does mean that they have a huge report about each and everyone out there and are definately already steps ahead of making the whole market more centralized.

[carlfebz2]

              Well, what can you expect tho? The governments almost everywhere in the world are serious about money laundering and thus uses this excuse as well to suppress every crypto enthusiast as much as they can. But then most crypto enthusiasts are against this. And so after a few years several compromises have been made which is what we see nowadays. Centralization just cannot be avlided and along with other variables, we can expect bitcoin to be more centralised in the future specially after being fully mined.

Minding about money laundering is just one of their excuses which their total aim is to centralized everything and dont let  things which is out of their control and thats why they do really persevere on finding ways

on how they would able to control nor get rid the decentralized aspect of crypto.They do know that they could really be having some advantage in speaking with regulation into platforms that do connects out with crypto.
They might not able to control nor get rid of it technically yet its really impossible but they do redirect their attention or focus on other aspects which us crypto users wont really be leaving no choice but to deal
with it.

[evilgreed]

~

              Which leaves simple people like us with too little to no choice about the matter. We are forced to accept centralisation for the sake of being able to make use of the profits we are gaining from all the investments and hard work we put into a wide variety of crypto and crypto related assets. I just hope that the governments and banks do not take it a bit too far because if they do, it'll be a huge war between people who have already been accustomed to decentralisation and the people who loves to impose limitations or rid us off of this little extent of anonymity we have when we use crypto.

[Kakmakr]

I think this phenomenon is not just happening with Bitcoin mining.... because we see this with a lot of industries where "Fiat" rich companies start to dominate and eventually take over all the smaller companies. (Take Maize farming in the USA as an example) 

As long as the hashrate stay relatively low and the difficulty makes it economical for the small operations to still continue mining, you will have decentralization, but when the hashrate increase drastically.... the increased difficulty will make it uneconomical for the solo miners to continue. 

[kryptqnick]

Mining has been quite centralized for a long time, but not enough to threaten the existence or integrity of Bitcoin, and centralized mining doesn't mean centralized Bitcoin. After all, there are also BTC owners, and the biggest owners don't seem to be the biggest miners. The institutionalization of mining seems natural to me, and as long as it's not a single decision-making center, it's fine. Also, to be honest, I thought that mining was way more centralized than these numbers are saying, believing that a couple of market giants have been controlling around half of all mining.

[Welsh]

This is pretty much expected, and to be honest I'm quite shocked it hasn't happened sooner. This has trade off's too, basically this legitimatises Bitcoin in peoples minds, even if that's not the intention. So, while these bigger companies will likely price out the smaller ones. Overall, it probably isn't a massive deal for the consumer.
 

Is this a problem? It doesn't look a problem to me.
Is this centralization? Hardly, since they're private companies competing against each other.

While it encourages centralisation because they're likely to have the higher budget of others, however if you care about centralisation, maybe the best investment is going for lower hashrate, less expensive machines. You aren't being forced to use the leading companies.

Though, where you get your mining machines might become a little less diverse, it doesn't necessarily increase centralisation in Bitcoin.

[jrrsparkles]

How can you say that it is more centralized just because miners are going to be the big tech companies? Even now all the transactions are public anyone can trace the address and look into the confirmation with tx id so probably it's not going to be completely anonymous but the transactions are not going to be controlled anyway, it will work in the same way as its happening now.

[tranthidung]

Bitcoin mining started with PCs, solo mining, then mining pools, GPUs, then ASICs. Power used for mining is switched from mostly fossil fuels to more environmental friendly resources: water, wind, solar, etc.

Recently, we see Tesla joined the party and I imagined about it about 2 years ago. I thought Tesla will provide environmental friendly power solutions for Bitcoin mining industry and they might produce ASICs for this industry as well.

More centralized? I don't think so because Bitcoin by its design is for a peer to peer transactions with a decentralized network. The more adoption for Bitcoin, the more decentralized its network will be. In the past, dominant hashrate is from China mainland, months ago it has gradually spread towards other nations. The trend will continue when Bitcoin becomes legal tender in more nations.