Key facts:
-
These two are followed by F2Pool and VíaBTC, with more than 10%.
-
19% of the global Bitcoin hashrate is shared between 9 pools.
Antpool and Foundry, the two largest Bitcoin Mining pools in the world, have been concentrating more than 51% of the network’s hashrate for the past 20 months. 54.48%, to be exact, according to the mempool.space mining pool ranking.
At the time of writing, Foundry USA, a US-based mining and staking services company with up to 67 data centers around the world, She alone owns 31.38% of the bitcoin hashrate. He hashrate It is nothing more than the mining power, which is measured in hashes per second (h/s).
Foundry has been climbing in its dominance of the Bitcoin hashrate. At the beginning of 2021, its hash rate accounted for only 0.36% of the global Bitcoin mining power. By the end of the same year, its share of the mining power was almost 18%.
Foundry is the largest bitcoin mining pool in the world. Source: mempool.space
AntPool, another mining and cloud mining services company, owns 23.28% of Bitcoin’s hashrate according to mempool.space. Antpool has a longer history than Foundry. At the beginning of 2015, it held almost 14% of the global hashrate. By early 2021, its hash power had reached just under 9%. In between, there was a large plateau of declining hashrate performance, until it started to grow again in a sustained manner in mid-2021.
According to mempool.space, the closest pursuers of these two companies are ViaBTC, with 13.56% of the global hashrate, and F2Pool, with 10.2%. Immediately after, 9 pools share 19% of the global Bitcoin hashrate. These include MARA Pool, Binance Pool, Luxor, and SBI Crypto, to name a few.
9 pools share only 19% of the global Bitcoin hashrate. Source: mempool.space
Conclusively, 97.52% of Bitcoin’s hashrate is dominated by 12 mining pools. Only the remaining 2.48% is distributed among representatives such as small pools or solo miners contributing to the network.
As an illustrative comment at the time of writing, AntPool has mined 3 of the last 5 most recent blocks, which also speaks to the existing centralization.
Bitcoin mining is distributed among a few pools. Source: mempool.space.
Are there real risks of a Bitcoin mining attack?
The current level of centralization of bitcoin mining is potentially worrying for the health and distribution of the network in the future. If for some corporate and strategic reason Foundry and Antpool, the two largest pools, wanted to merge into one, he pool which would result in him dominating 54.48% of the hashrate alone.
No less important is that the centralization of the hashrate makes it easier for governments to exert pressure on certain mining pools. Since the hashrate is concentrated in them, governments can more easily identify their participants and exert large-scale influence on them through the companies that offer them. However, the risks mentioned are more potential than real.
While the percentage mentioned is more than necessary to carry out a 51% attack and a perpetrator with such a high hashrate would be able to censor and reverse transactions or perform double-spends, Bitcoin’s incentive system has effectively prevented this from happening; an event of such magnitude would collapse half of the mining ecosystem, and with it, the regular, cyclical Bitcoin incentives that such pools rely on.
Incidentally, Bitcoin requires computational and electrical power, which have associated costs; a 51% attack on Bitcoin lasting one hour would incur huge costsworth more than a million dollars.
Also remember that the pools of mining are made up of groups and individuals motivated by productive efficiency, and that these associations of miners are not necessarily dangerous and can be disintegrated. A monopoly event like that could cause many miners to leave these pools to participate in others more in line with the decentralized spirit of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin mining is resilient
The spatio-temporal dispersion of miners and nodes means that each of them, separately, must accept the consensus rules of the network; all of this voluntarily in order to participate in it. This dispersion means that massive attacks on it are difficult or impossible, given how difficult it is to achieve sufficient coordination power to achieve this.
When a few people accumulate a lot of power over a network, the difficulty of coordination decreases worryingly. That is why the main drivers of decentralization in bitcoin mining are betting on trying to add more individual miners and small mining pools to the ecosystem, as well as open source mining chips and systems.
The resilience of Bitcoin mining is also demonstrated in the face of government pressure, one of the most worrying attack vectors for the network. Miners appear to be willing to reorganize geographically when activity bans occur; as happened in China.
While events like this do produce a global drop in hash power, this is temporary, and the hashrate consolidates again again. That is, government pressure on identifiable pools produces a temporary effect on mining difficulty and hash power, which has never managed to stop Bitcoin block processing and the full functioning of its network. Bitcoin is thus still sufficiently distributed to fear its disappearance.
Crypto Keynote USA
For the Latest Crypto News, Follow ©KeynoteUSA on Twitter Or Google News.
