The "amount of miners" are simply the number of decentralized participants in the consensus decision. Today, that number is something like 3 or 4. There are 3 or 4 deciders on the consensus decision: the 3 or 4 mining pools that have majority hash power under their decision. About 10 deciders, even though they cannot go against the tacit agreement of the 3 or 4 majority deciders, make up the essence of bitcoin's consensus deciding power.
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The power of consensus is in the hands of 3 or 4 entities.
Let us see what this means. Suppose 3 or 4 entities collude and are pissed against a single exchange. They know that exchange's hot and cold wallets. They decide that no transaction from one of these wallets is going to make it in the block chain. If they are serious about it, they will never include one of these transactions, and will orphan every block that does. People will realize that they cannot withdraw from that exchange. They will think there's something quite fishy with that exchange. The transactions will never be confirmed. They will see the transactions in the mem pool, and never in the chain.
Right, so when Bitcoin advocates say things like:
Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one person to transfer money to another person anywhere in the world, so that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge or block the transfer.
You're saying that's actually
false because these "3 or 4 entities" can block whatever they want and the rest of the network is powerless to prevent it? In my view, the miners would only get away with that if the rest of the network agrees with that action. If the majority of non-mining nodes disagree - and there's an incredibly strong likelihood they
would disagree, because blocking transactions is categorically not part of Bitcoin's ethos or underlying principles - you can expect that a change of algorithm would be promptly forthcoming and there would be many expensive bricks that used to do something profitable left to rot on a shelf somewhere. Not to mention that the users of that exchange would be innocent bystanders and wouldn't deserve to have their withdrawals blocked like that. There would be uproar if miners pulled a stunt like that. So no, "3 or 4 entities" do not have "consensus deciding power". Miners might decide what transactions go in their blocks, but users decide which blockchain they freely choose to follow. If the users aren't accepting those blocks, no one cares who they did or didn't include.
Whoever says miners have all the power is wrong; whoever says users have all the power is wrong; whoever says developers have all the power is wrong. It should be more than self-evident by now that's not how this shit works. It all exists in equilibrium. No one group can act unilaterally if the others don't agree, unless one of them is prepared to fork off or be forked off.