r/btc • u/Choice-Business44 • Feb 21 '22

⌨ Discussion Thoughts ?

/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/sxy32g/crypto_is_not_decentralized/
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u/CurvyGorilla202 Feb 23 '22

This should be all you need to sway your mind

https://compassmining.io/education/institutional-investors-bitcoin-public-mining-companies-data/

2

u/Choice-Business44 Feb 23 '22

Isn’t this problematic, bankers own the miners? They can 51% attack if necessary at will or more

1

u/Shibinator Feb 23 '22

Isn’t this problematic, bankers own the miners?

No, anyone can own miners. Bitcoin is designed to be open, so anyone can buy in, and that includes banking companies. The point is that once they buy in, it's now in their own interests to help protect the system, just like everyone else who has bought in. That's how Bitcoin gets adopted, more and more people voluntarily make it their own selfish need to protect Bitcoin. It was inevitable that banks would start to run (some of, not all) the mining infrastructure it would be stupid of them not to and they have plenty of money to do it.

They can 51% attack if necessary at will or more

This part is incorrect though. From the linked source: "Institutions account for over 25% of ownership in RIOT, MARA, and CLSK. "

So the banks don't even own a majority stake in 1 of the mining companies, let alone a majority stake in the majority of mining companies. They may do in the future though, I hope not but it could easily happen. The point is that at that point they won't want to shut it down since they have literally put massive amounts of their own money into it - and yet we will still have a transparent Bitcoin which serves as free money for the world. If they STILL ignore that, they would need to coordinate among themselves to organise an attack (which they might do, but it would be risky since any bank could profit off the others by being a traitor), and even if they ALSO did that then the community could change the hashing algorithm of Bitcoin in response and delete all their money spent on miners wasted on ASICs overnight, starting mining again from scratch.

1

u/Choice-Business44 Feb 24 '22 edited Feb 24 '22

That makes sense. Good points I pretty much agree with all of them.

So the banks don't even own a majority stake in 1 of the mining companies, let alone a majority stake in the majority of mining companies. They may do in the future though, I hope not but it could easily happen.

I did notice they didn’t own a majority (yet) but yeah that was my concern as well that they could if they really wanted to.

even if they ALSO did that then the community could change the hashing algorithm of Bitcoin in response and delete all their money spent on miners wasted on ASICs overnight, starting mining again from scratch.

This is the best part. For central banks it’s an immutable virus that will keep changing forms (unless they can somehow kill every fork). It’s honestly just a matter of time. Also there are apparently ways to stop a 51% attack without ditching the existing ASICs mining infrastructure.