[bitcoin-dev] Mining Pools in Bitcoin and their involvement in Bitcoin development

[Prayank]

Hello World,

Lets start with facts instead of opinion. Mining pool distribution in last 24 hours:

Binance - 16%
F2Pool - 15%
Huobi - 11%
AntPool - 10%
ViaBTC - 10%
Poolin - 9%
BTC.com - 8%

This is 80% and things are not really different even if look at last 2 weeks. Most of the pools have been reusing address for coinbase transaction and sharing name in coinbase text. 

Their opinion on "Taproot": https://taprootactivation.com/

I won't comment on the origin of these mining pools or history. Maybe things will improve with Stratum v2, lets look at miners but its difficult to know the exact location of miners considering no such details in protocol and people can use Tor, VPN, proxy etc. Mining pools can be non-KYC or have their own understanding with miners. Few countries increased their involvement in Bitcoin mining recently and governments:

Russia
Iran
Venezuela
Pakistan

China, US and few others are already involved from  years. Maybe others that we don't know and were not highlighted in mainstream media. What are the risks and rewards involved in bitcoin mining:

Rewards:

 Block reward (6.25 BTC right now) + transaction fees
Freedom to include transactions (can censor few transactions if they want)
Involved in signaling for soft forks (Bitcoin Development)

Risks:

BTCUSD (Can be hedged)
Hashrate and Difficulty (Can be hedged)

What are the opportunities we provide when mining pools (businesses) are asked to agree/disagree on some soft fork, follow with communication and then signaling?

Politics and misinformation for few months or years
Forked coin as add-on in some cases
Delay Bitcoin development
Maybe convince everyone Bitcoin needs no improvement
Others
Who can sponsor for the above mentioned things?

Government
Scammers with money and time who were even able to remove whitepaper
Altcoin foundations
Is this FUD? No. These are possible issues related to mining pools and we need to plan accordingly. Many people are concerned about UASF and prefer future markets. I don't agree with them and reasons are simple. Changes in Bitcoin Protocol doesn't need futures markets or tokens, both can be easily manipulated by traders and exchanges to make profits. Where is the "Adversarial Thinking" involved in changing Bitcoin Protocol and considering involvement of mining pools?

Already a long email so will share the link to a recent question I asked on "Bitcoin" Stackexchange about identifying which mining pool mined a block: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/103409/identify-which-mining-pool-mined-a-block

I am hopeful things will improve and interested to contribute more. Will be helpful if someone could also answer why do we have 30% vulnerable nodes in Bitcoin network?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/lb6dpi/vulnerable_bitcoin_nodes/

Thanks.

Will end the email on a positive note with something that inspires me a lot:

Satoshi's lesson is that you don't need to be the next Einstein in order to change the world. Nor do you need to have much money, or influence with the world's "movers & shakers". You just need to put in the effort. Satoshi, probably just an ordinary hobbyist like anyone here, saw that something was lacking in the Universe, and he fought tooth-and-nail for 2+ years until this imperfection was corrected. This is what makes Satoshi and his work my greatest inspiration.
 
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5092492.0
-- 
 Prayank
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