I Shrugged wrote: ↑Tue Oct 26, 2021 6:32 pm
I read that 0.1% of Bitcoin miners control half of all mining capacity. This gives rise to the 51% problem. Meaning the network could be abused by a small cohort of miners. I’m not claiming knowledge of how. But you can search 51% Attack and read up.
Id be curious as to the source on this, sounds wildly wrong.
Also there is some nuance here, a couple points:
There is no way to know for sure which miner is mining which blocks as mining in bitcoin is anonymous. Anonymous mining (transaction processing) is critical for the decentralization of the network.
Also, there is a difference between Bitcoin MINERS and Bitcoin MINING POOLS. Bitcoin miners join Bitcoin mining pools of other miners to smooth out their BTC mining rewards (otherwise small miners might get no revenue for a year+ and then find one block reward after 18 months of mining, for example). Here is a chart of mining pools:
https://btc.com/stats/pool
Pools voluntarily choose to identify themselves when they mine a block as a way of advertising how big their network of miners is to other potential miners.
Miners can join and leave pools with ease, instantly. So if there is misbehaving pool, or if
a pool gets too big, things rapidly resolve.
I suppose in theory a miner could own 99% of the hashrate and just join many different pools to "pretend" they are not the owner of 99% of the bitcoin hashrate. So it is possible, but there is no evidence of this.
Clear as mud?