Quote from: stompix on January 23, 2024, 10:19:38 AM

Quote from: alfredaino on January 22, 2024, 06:26:17 AM

According to both articles, some miners, about 50-60 or <=20 per pool, control more than 50% of the network hashing power, thus controlling the PoW consensus. Who do you think own these miners?

Go to every single company listed onto the stock exchange and you're going to see the shareholders and you get pretty much 30% of the hashrate!
Btw, if you think they are some illuminati that can control everything and down in money , why don't you buy shares in them too?

I am not at all interested in investments. I am here for the technology.

Quote from: stompix on January 23, 2024, 10:19:38 AM

Quote from: alfredaino on January 22, 2024, 06:26:17 AM

Thanks for the explanation. As you pointed out, mining is a random process and the probability of being the first to mine a block is proportional to the hash power, i.e. if you have x% of the total hash power, in the long run you will mine x% of the blocks on average. Thus, miners who have at least 51% of the hash power on average control the PoW consensus and are rewarded by the network.

Stop with the POW consensus!!!!
Miners that mine 70% receive 70% of the reward, they can't change the "consensus" , they can fork the chain and keep mining there by their rules but that can be done even by a guy with 5%, see BCH and BSV! If a 51% attacker would try to mine blocks that don't follow the rules they will be rejected by nodes, this is not a democracy where the guys having 51% of the vote can pass every single rule and the rest are forced to obey them!

Quote from: stompix on January 23, 2024, 10:19:38 AM

Quote from: alfredaino on January 22, 2024, 06:26:17 AM

If you have better sources I will gladly read them. They may be out of date, however the data collected shows the history of bitcoin mining has been.

According to the whitepaper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf:
The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes.

So whoever controls most of the hash power controls the PoW consensus. According to the two searches in my first post, 50-60 miners control it.

There is none and there will never be!
As long as a company mines in two countries and points the hashrate at a private pool you have zero chances of knowing how much is there owned by who and where it resides, and this is just a simple example!
I mined over various pools, sent my money to both cold wallets and different exchanges, so there is no way one could allocate my hashrate (of course minuscule in the great scheme) to any location with precision, that unless they have access to all the logs of all mining pools in this world!

From my point of view, this is a serious lack. Knowledge of the distribution of the hash rate is crucial. This invalidates one of the principles of blockchain: don't trust, verify. How is it possible to know whether mining is controlled by finance or government?