User talk:Occasional comments

As of this writing, the 'Bitcoin' page, section 2.8 Decentralization states:

'''As of 2013 just six mining pools controlled 75% of overall bitcoin hashing power.[158] In 2014 mining pool Ghash.io obtained 51% hashing power which raised significant controversies about the safety of the network. The pool has voluntarily capped their hashing power at 39.99% and requested other pools to act responsibly for the benefit of the whole network.[159] Around the year 2017, over 70% of the hashing power and 90% of transactions were operating from China.[160]''' '''According to researchers, other parts of the ecosystem are also "controlled by a small set of entities", notably the maintenance of the client software, online wallets and simplified payment verification (SPV) clients.[158] '''

It would be helpful to make clear that gov't influence over ostensibly private organizations may make the number of effectively independent entities much smaller than it appears. In particular, gov't influence may result in effective control exceeding the 51% threshold, violating the core tenet of decentralization: 'decentralization of the network requires that no single miner or mining pool obtains 51% of the hashing power, which would allow them to double-spend coins, prevent certain transactions from being verified and prevent other miners from earning income.[158]'

Occasional comments (talk) 20:21, 18 July 2021 (UTC)