Look at the following pie chart from Blockchain.info . In the Unknown pie slice are private datacenters and ASIC manufacturers that are large enough to keep the 1% typical pool fee for themselves. Suppose there are four very large datacenters in there. Count the named pie slices and add say 4 for the private datacenters in Unknown and get 12.
Those 12 miners control Proof-of-Work Bitcoin mining.
Wrong, these "named slices" are not miners, they are public pools with thousands miners contributing to each one. The second those miners sense their pools get bribed to destroy bitcoin, their source of income, they would switch to non-corrupted one. Instantly, within a day. With each month passing and more and more money being poured in mining hardware the chances that hardware being obsoleted by some external bribing attempt are diminishing rapidly.
No, you are wrong and here is why. These "named slices" plus a few private datacenters are the miners, only they execute a few instances of bitcoind.
The numerous ASIC owners execute cgminer or another program that adheres to the stratum protocol which is not a part of the Bitcoin Network and was never envisioned by Satoshi....
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You can write a wall of text and that will not make your statement less false: "named slices" are not some entities which are hard to control, they are simple pools run on a few servers. Those servers serve thousands of real miners, people that invested hundreds of millions of dollars in their equipment, people that spend electricity, people that are real flash and blood of bitcoin network. "Named slices" can go up or down in their network percentage at the whim of the miners, and that already happened several times through the life of the bitcoin. And it will happen again, those names that we see on that chart will probably not be there in a year or two. Those handful of servers each pool consists of provide healthy competition for their services to the miners, if that was not a case we would not have 0-fee-pools we have today, and if any of them ever starts to misbehave it will go down in hours. There's no reason we should worry about "named slices" as you call them, they are by far most easily controllable part of the bitcoin community.