Not only don't we know who is running mining equipment, where they are located, or how much equipment any of them are running.

Believe it or not, we also have no way of even knowing how much total hashpower is actually running during any timeframe.

All we know is what the current difficulty target is, and how much time it takes for a block to show up. From there we can calculate an ESTIMATED total hash rate.

Some of the mining pools may publish their hash rate, but you have to decide if you trust them to tell the truth or not.  They easily could lie about it.  Some pools add data into their blocks to indicate that they mined that block, but there is nothing forcing them to do so, and they certainly could leave the data out of some blocks or even lie and put some other pools data into their own blocks if they wanted to.

Some mining businesses may publish information about how much hashpower they are running. Again, you have to decide if you trust them to be honest about it or not.

Am I running any minging equipment?  How would you know? If I told you I was (or wasn't) how would you know if you could trust what I said?

This kind of data is not possible to acquire in Bitcoin with its PoW algorithm because of its decentralized nature. However, since there is some degree of centralization involved in Bitcoin mining in the form of mining pools, the data exists in their hands.

If you are serious about your research, your only option is to directly contact bitcoin mining pools one by one and ask them whether they are willing to publish this information. They don't have to publish it in details, all they have to do is to announce: their total hashrate, the IP distribution of the miners that connect to their servers and their individual or average hashrate and general information like that.
Then you can aggregate the data and get a better picture.

The problem is that not all of them are willing to publish this type of statistic and as it was mentioned it is not possible to verify this information. But I'd say if you put enough effort into it and if they actually publish something, the result could be close to reality with small error.

Hello,
thank you all for the detailed replies. So I understand that it is not possible to know such important details and to know how really decentralised the bitcoin PoW consensus is.
This is a major drawback that undermines the trustless principle of the network, as the do not trust, verify principle cannot be put into practice. As suggested by some of you, I will try to contact at least the first 5 mining pools to see if I can get some useful information.
Thanks


I'm not sure, but it looks to me like a self mining attack that allows the network to be attacked with only 1/3 of the hash power. Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243. 

I was referring to the fact that a mining pool like foundry is close to 33% or 1/3 of the total hash rate, which allows a selfish mining attack. Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243.

Thanks for the explanation.

This confirms that mining is very centralised and controlled by a few institutional investors acting in their own interests and not those of the other participants. Is there a chance to know who are the investors of Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool and ViaBTC?
In theory everyone can join the network, but in practice those who actually participate in the PoW consensus (51%) and produce blocks are less than 0.1% of the miners, i.e. those 50-60 miners reported in the research. To achieve such a high hash rate, it is necessary to have a mining farm and an economy of scale.

Not at all. Learn how mining and pools work. Just the people on this board who mine are more then the "0.1%" that you claim.
Anyone can point their miners at Ant or F2 or Via or Kano or another pool.

Just because you don't have a bunch of S19 sitting in your garage does not mean that other people don't.

https://explorer.btc.com/btc/insights-pools

-Dave

Investors != Miners. If they are investors, they may not necessary be the ones mining at the pool either. The thing about these pools is that they are NOT exclusively tailored for a small number of miners, but they are tailored to accommodate for a large number of miners with their own farms. That alone should tell you how decentralized Bitcoin mining is.

The FUD that is put forth in this thread is largely unwarranted. The key factor that you're ignoring is with the game theory that the miners are involved in when they invest their resources into mining. The key question would lie with whether they gain more when they act maliciously, or honestly. It would be obvious that the answer is to be honest. Selfish mining is largely only a concern among pools, because they are able to gain an unfair advantage than the rest of the pools. It poses much less of a security threat than you think.

I've glimpsed over your cited paper and their methodology to try to identify individual miners who point their hashpower to pools looks quite legit (to me). It's not fool-proof but to my understanding they tried to apply reasonable efford to make a good miner attribution (in the sense to identify pool payout to individual miners and thus those miner's hashpower contribution).

It's not too surprising that in Bitcoin mining bigger is better as you gain advantage with size because certain cost factors don't scale linearly with size. A very simple example is an individual miner with 10 ASICs. This individual could likely handle also 20 ASICSs alone, so no additional expenses for labour. Maybe this miner also has the space for the additional 10 ASICs, so almost no additional cost for storage of his mining rig. On the other hand he has doubled costs for energy and likely cooling. I'm very much simplifying here…



How do you come to that conclusion regarding your institutional investors?

Hashpower concentrates into pools. According to your cited paper there are not many miners with a great percentage of hashpower that point their hashpower to large mining pools. Agreed on that and this development isn't actually too surprising and I personally don't see much of an issue here. It's economy in a very competetive playground.


This is nonsense or paints an oversimplified picture. In practice anybody can join a mining pool and point his hashpower to it. You're probably excluded from certain larger pools that have a lower limit of required minimum hashpower, but that doesn't prevent you from finding some other pool that will accept your hashpower.

If there're 50-60 miners who provide a majority of hashpower to pools, then those big miners gain most of the coin rewards from pool payouts. That doesn't mean that all other participating miners don't get anything, see below for explanation.

Are you sure, you understand PoW mining? There's no such thing as PoW consensus (51%). Bitcoin mining PoW forces you do execute hashwork to find a blockheader hash that satisfies the required mining difficulty (your to be found blockheader hash needs to be lower than a certain hash value dictated by current difficulty). Finding such a blockheader hash is due to the used hash algorithm a completely random process. You can hit a valid blockheader hash within a few thousands or millions hashes (statistically very … very unlikely) or you need a ridiculously high number of hashes to hit it for which you need longer than some other miner who was luckier than you.
Again: it's a random process and with higher hashpower you gain statistical advantage.

Mining pools mitigate the risk of solo-mining. With "fair" pools you're paid statistically according to your provided hashpower compared to global hashpower within the granularity of the pool's payout scheme. Choose your mining pool wisely! I didn't want to go into pool payout schemes as it's probably not relevant to go into such details here and now.

My first paper in my first post confirms the results:
A Deep Dive into Bitcoin Mining Pools https://github.com/MatteoRomiti/Deep_Dive_BTC_Mining_Pools
we conduct the first in-depth analysis of mining reward distribution within three of the four largest Bitcoin mining pools and examine their cross-pool economic relationships. Our results suggest that individual miners are simultaneously operating across all three pools and that in each analyzed pool a small number of actors (≤ 20) receives over 50% of all BTC payouts.
However, if you have a more updated and better version, I will read it.


According to both articles, some miners, about 50-60 or <=20 per pool, control more than 50% of the network hashing power, thus controlling the PoW consensus. Who do you think own these miners? They need hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.


Thanks for the explanation. As you pointed out, mining is a random process and the probability of being the first to mine a block is proportional to the hash power, i.e. if you have x% of the total hash power, in the long run you will mine x% of the blocks on average. Thus, miners who have at least 51% of the hash power on average control the PoW consensus and are rewarded by the network. Again, in theory everyone can participate, but in practice the chances of influencing the 51% decision and being rewarded are only statistically significant for those with a high hash rate and an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars.


If you have better sources I will gladly read them. They may be out of date, however the data collected shows the history of bitcoin mining has been.