As of February 2025, a few large mining pools control over 50% of Bitcoin’s hash rate.
🔹 Foundry USA's hash rate surged from 157 EH/s to approximately 280 EH/s by December 2024.
🔹 Two U.S.-based pools—Foundry and MARA Pool—mined 38.5% of all Bitcoin blocks by the end of 2024, up from 32.4% at the start of the year.
🔹 Bitcoin Transactions: Processing 400,000 transactions per day, with total transactions reaching 1.155B as of February 14, 2025—a 19.58% increase from one year ago.
🔍 Why This Matters
⚠️ Higher risk of 51% attacks if large pools collude.🚫 Potential transaction censorship from centralized entities.🔓 Weaker network security due to reduced decentralization.📜 Regulatory pressure on centralized mining pools may compromise Bitcoin’s permissionless nature and limit development to a select few.
🛠️ How to Fix It?
✅ Encourage home & small-scale mining via better incentives.✅ Promote decentralized mining pools (Stratum V2 can help).✅ Expand jurisdictional diversity in mining operations.✅ Layer 2 Solutions like the Lightning Network to reduce reliance on centralized transactions.
Bitcoin thrives on decentralization. The network must adapt to remain resilient. 🚀
What do you think? Is centralization a threat to Bitcoin’s future?