Hello,
thank you all for the detailed replies. So I understand that it is not possible to know such important details and to know how really decentralised the bitcoin PoW consensus is.
This is a major drawback that undermines the trustless principle of the network, as the do not trust, verify principle cannot be put into practice. As suggested by some of you, I will try to contact at least the first 5 mining pools to see if I can get some useful information.
Thanks
A 51% attack is the least of btc worries. Why is this because it would lose a shit ton of money for the top players. If you want to worry about btc worry about fee manipulation which will get easier with every ½ ing
Why is that? Simple underclock your gear for ½ of the two week diff period of 2016 blocks.
this makes the mempool crowd.
then over clock your gear to grab blocks fill with fees in the second half of the 2016 block period.
Ie do the first 1008 blocks in 8 days.
do the second 1008 blocks in 6 days.
the diff stays the same.
you lose emptier blocks the first half
you make crowded blocks the second half.
a pool like foundry with ⅓ the hash should do 48 blocks a day.
so they do 38 a day for 8 days in the hole 80 blocks
they make 62 a day for 6 days up 84 blocks. the diff drifts up just a tiny bit.
the pool makes just over 48 blocks a day for the 14 days.
the diff moves just a bit up
and the pool gets a lot of high fee blocks
6 x 62 = 372 high fee blocks
plus they do not raise the diff much.
they also get 304 low fee blocks
but they slow the diff growth which does not help them since they are near 33%
and this will get far worse after the ½ as they lose less coins.
Pretty sure foundry does this.
I'm not sure, but it looks to me like a self mining attack that allows the network to be attacked with only 1/3 of the hash power. Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable
https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243.