This confirms that mining is very centralised and controlled by a few institutional investors acting in their own interests and not those of the other participants. Is there a chance to know who are the investors of Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool and ViaBTC?
In theory everyone can join the network, but in practice those who actually participate in the PoW consensus (51%) and produce blocks are less than 0.1% of the miners, i.e. those 50-60 miners reported in the research. To achieve such a high hash rate, it is necessary to have a mining farm and an economy of scale.
Not at all. Learn how mining and pools work. Just the people on this board who mine are more then the "0.1%" that you claim.
Anyone can point their miners at Ant or F2 or Via or Kano or another pool.
Just because you don't have a bunch of S19 sitting in your garage does not mean that other people don't.
https://explorer.btc.com/btc/insights-pools-Dave
According to the research reported in my first post:
Blockchain Analysis of the Bitcoin Market
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-06/Bitcoin-blockchain%20-%20AER.pdfWe show that the Bitcoin mining capacity is highly concentrated and has been for the last five years. The top 10% of miners control 90% and just 0.1% (about 50 miners) control close to 50% of mining capacity. Furthermore, this concentration of mining capacity is counter cyclical and varies with the Bitcoin price. It decreases following sharp increases in the Bitcoin price and increases in periods when the price drops or when there are halving events. Thus, the risk of a 51% attack increases in these times as well.Also, according to this research from August 2022 pg. 13 when the hash rate was about 207.2 EH/s
https://kraken.docsend.com/view/2gwc64da9h5ccmhm, to get 51% strike rate 2.16 M S19 antminer, $8.6 B and $19.8 M electricity cost/day were needed.
So, in theory, everyone can participate, but in practice to be in the 51% hash rate, i.e. 0.1% of the miners, about 50, several hundred million dollars are needed. These are the reasons for the questions in my first post.