Last time I checked, the top 3 pools and the top 4 Chinese pools had ~55% of the total hashpower. The top 5 pools (the Chinese one plus the Ukranian BitFury) had over 70%.
Objectively, bitcoin failed. Users and holders must trust that those top 5 miners will not do anything nasty. If they conspired to put all other miners out of business, they could do it. If they agreed to block an account forever, they could do it.
It seems you are mixing miners and pools? Pools have only short term power because miners will leave fishy pools. RBF in F2Pool was a good example for that.
Satoshi was quite upset when someone published the first GPU mining program
Do you have a link? I'm honestly interested.
Obviously this snowball rolling cannot go on forever, and it can only end in tears.
As it did with gold?