Big miners pose a growing existential threat to Bitcoin
As of May, AntPool and Foundry USA controlled more than 50% of Bitcoin’s hash rate. That could become a problem for Bitcoin users in the near future.
Bitcoin (BTC) mining is now in the hands of the few. Well-known mining pools have seized overwhelming power, which poses an existential threat to the world’s first digital asset. It’s the logical outcome of a design flaw by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Unfortunately, Bitcoin mining has always tended towards centralization. Bitcoin miners could once mine blocks with CPUs on personal computers due to fewer miners and therefore a lower overall hash rate. That evolved into GPUs around 2010 and into application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners in 2012. ASICs ultimately gave rise to massive mining companies that filled warehouses with hundreds or thousands of rigs.
Miners who control a greater percentage of Bitcoin’s network hash rate are more likely to mine blocks and collect the Bitcoin block reward — the financial incentive for verifying and adding transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain. That’s why small-scale miners often join a mining pool along with others running their own ASICs. These miners earn in proportion to the amount of computing power they contribute to a mining pool’s network.
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Author: Kadan Stadelmann
