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?
Investors != Miners. If they are investors, they may not necessary be the ones mining at the pool either. Hihi, yeah but also
Investors != Miners. hmmm but also != Poll owners != Investors in a mining company != CEOs out of touch with reality != Drunk technician coming high at work!
The FUD that is put forth in this thread is largely unwarranted. The key factor that you're ignoring is with the game theory that the miners are involved in when they invest their resources into mining. The key question would lie with whether they gain more when they act maliciously, or honestly. It would be obvious that the answer is to be honest. Selfish mining is largely only a concern among pools, because they are able to gain an unfair advantage than the rest of the pools. It poses much less of a security threat than you think.
The only way a 51% would unfold right now (not counting area 52 having a replica of Omnius in the basement) would be a wave of bankruptcies due to losing profits and someone being able to take over those mining farms at a fraction of the costs or even for free and with deep enough pockets and grudge to actually mount such a thing, but by the time this happen we would already be in a lot of deep *** since it would come with a ridiculous drop in price.
So basically nobody is going to kill the golden goose, but someone might want to throw a few rocks at it when you leave it out of the yard unguarded!
I've glimpsed over your cited paper and their methodology to try to identify individual miners who point their hashpower to pools looks quite legit (to me).
It's outdated since it doesn't have Foundry and it's before the great migration, the second the payment tracing is a bit ridiculous, how do you deal with guys that have mining farms in 3 countries and how do you deal with the ones that don't sell their coins! If riot or core decides to make a purchase in BTC from Bitmain and send 1000 BTC to Okex you suddenly move 30 Exahash from the US back to China!
Genuinely curious how would separate with this method Canada and the United States!