Bitcoin mining is continuously becoming hard for anonymous people as they are facing severe competition from big mining pools.
Currently, Bitmain is the largest manufacturer company that produces Application Specific Integrated Circuit miners (ASIC), and along with that, they also control some of the biggest mining pools on the Bitcoin network. The sole feature of bitcoin that it runs on is that no one has control over it. But currently, three companies have more than 40% control over bitcoin mining and two of them BTC.com and Antpool are operated by Bitmain alone. There is fear in the industry that bitcoin mining may be on the way of becoming centralized.
CEO of Genisis mining and bitcoin mining veteran Marco Streng, in last month’s Bitcoin Conference he expressed his concern about growing centralization of bitcoin mining. He added that the only way to resolve this issue is by upgrading the Bitcoin mining protocol. Large companies like Bitmain have made it difficult for hobbyists miners to compete.
If somehow Bitmain manages to get over half of the hashpower dedicated to bitcoin mining, they will have the power to alter an older block and change transactions fraudulently.
Currently, 22% of bitcoin miners are truly anonymous. Rest are controlled by mining pool organizations dedicated to it such as ViaBtc, Rush pool, and F2 pool, which together control more than 28% of total bitcoin mining.
According to the Forbes report, theoretically, if all top four mining pool comes together, they will have enough power to pull off a mining-related attack or to reorganize blockchain. And two of them are operated by Bitmain. This scenario is quite alarming to the people of the crypto industry.
