The 51% rule on the bitcoin network is like a protocol that suggests that if a miner or mining pool is able to attain 51% of the total Bitcoin network's hash rate they will have an edge over the whole network and can dominate blocks more significantly by being able to do certain things like alter more recent blocks and some other stuff.

The fact is that the chances of some miner or mining pool pulling a 51% attack is very thin. This is because aside from the fact that attaining such amount of hash power would not be easy, I believe no pool will be soo foolish to waste such huge amount of hash rate to harm a network that they can benefit heavily from with that same hash rate. Every miner is out for profit and pulling such an attack that might even be neutralized would be uneconomical.

Performing a 51% attack on the network will be a very tough task considering the things that must be involved. A 51% attack will require the performer to have control over at least 51% of the total computing power (hash rate). This attack would cost so much since the computing power will require more powerful hardware and consume more energy. But we should also understand that the more the network grows with more people on board, the more secure Bitcoin becomes, making 51% attack more difficult to perform. which means, as more adoptors, Bitcoin price, mining difficulty,etc continue to increase, then the network security also increase. I think this increment should be in a linear pattern (correct me if am wrong).


 I think most government or entity might have thought of this idea, but ended up dumping it due to the imaginable cost attached to performing such attack.

This has been discussed over and over again. And I think there is consistency in the assurance that, though this is a possibility, this is far from happening. For one, an attacker needs "between $5 billion and $20 billion" to be able to attempt such attack.^[1] Second, there is not much you can gain from it.

If you wish to make money, it would be way more profitable for you to use your resources to support the network rather than to attack it. On the other hand, if you wish to just bring Bitcoin down, it wouldn't work either. With your $5 billion to $20 billion, all you can do is attack the network for a little while. Neither can you totally control the network nor sustain the attack.

[1] https://cryptopotato.com/this-is-how-much-you-would-need-to-spend-to-execute-51-attacks-on-bitcoin-and-ethereum/

If they do that, both Foundry USA and Antpool will be sued for breaching regulations, remember that big companies are under regulations and they can't monopoly the mining pools. Many mining pools had been sued for done something that give them own benefit, so I wouldn't worry so much about conspiracy thing.

You've talked about the control of governments of Bitcoin but you haven't talked about the big investors that control and manipulate that market of Bitcoin. You can't just hide one thing by  enforcing over another thing.Yoh should have a debate on control of big investors on BTC prices.

Ive seen people applying the best techniques and skills that could be possibly applied for the prediction of trade but often then they have seen suprisingly behaviour of BTc that wasn't expected by anyone so why's that?

They can't do that anyway, that's because there's a regulations about this and when they reach that, they will have no choice to split up again right so the 51% isn't a possibility. People have been speculating about this problem for a really long time and so far, no one's been able to do it so I don't think that it's ever going to be ever worth it.

The simple answer here would be is that it would take a great deal for any entity to try and control most of bitcoin.

Satoshi is right that as long as they are not evil, they will not do anything to sabotage the decentralized nature of bitcoin at all. Since miners can work independently, it would be difficult to try and convince a lot of them to work under a specific entity especially one with malicious intent.

I don’t know if there is any recent data but bitcoin’s decentralization must be strengthened over time in order to prevent this.

no.. mining pools cant edit transactions owned by others to change the destination of funds.. they can:
edit old BLOCKS to not contain transactions and then catch up with the blockheight to then re-org the chain
then edit only their own transactions to then spend their utxo again if it has been un-wound via a re-org

its not about spending other peoples value. its just about reversing payments and if the reversed payment was one of their own then yes they can respend it to a different destination.. however other peoples now reversed transactions(if reversed) are deemed not spent, which they can either try to rebroadcast to get it confirmed again or the key holder can make a new transaction to spend the utxo value to a new destination..
emphasis third time to save reposting.. mining pools cannot 'take control' of other peoples value to edit the transaction to a different destination

miners know many pools of different brands and which are affiliated or not.. heck even you know which ones are affiliated and which are not. so if 2 pools were colluding. and miner owners working for their pool notice dodgy stuff happening to their pools blocks. the miners can hop to a different pool thats not colluding


as for your mentions about nodes.. well yes we did see the NYA group in 2017(group of economic nodes (main exchanges/services)) collude to say they wont accept blocks from pools that didnt vote positively for an upgrade.. and the opposite can be true too, economic nodes can ignore blocks that do certain things like empty blocks or multiple chain re-orgs or other anoyances

mining pools can change ip addresses of their stratums, but then it will cause continuity of hashrate issues as miners would need to change addresses their asics point to each change. meaning the pool loses power until everyone they had on old address moves over, thus not really a good method to "hide" and still remain powerful.. infact it would be a sign of them doing this that would make miners hop away and avoid that type of pool that keeps switching IP's

51% is not about nodes.. its about hashrate

anyways the many preventatives are about monitoring the blockchain and noticing if:
one pool keeps getting too many blocks in a row
one pool keeps getting too many blocks too quickly
a re-org occurred
one pool keeps doing empty blocks
one pool does [insert many annoyances]

where miners then hop to a pool that does not do the annoyances

it also helps by miners hopping to different pools when pools have a high percentage even when there are no annoyances..  to not get near the odds of them repeatedly making blocks in succession.. as the more miners on one pool the more the reward needs to be shared meaning the miners get less reward and risk having the block rejected if pool does annoying things.. so they are risk adverse to not even let things get to those potentials
also if pools have too much hashrate and making blocks too quickly, it shoots them in the foot by raising the difficulty which hurt their income.. so they naturally try to find a safe balance even when pools are not nefarious
its financially incentivised to:
not make too many blocks too quickly and have too much hashpower in one pool
act honourably to ensure blocks are not rejected(rewards cant be spent if rejected)

Yeah, unfortunately there is a small number of mining pools and we need more in order to reach a better decentralization. But an attacker still needs to control miners not mining pools to pull off a sustained attack successfully.

Otherwise, lets say they only need two and pull off a 51% attack. What would that achieve?
A temporary crash + miners abandoning those pools + share holders dumping the hell out of the stocks of those pools (eg. MARA crashed 60% and that was just market reaction to censorship news) + those pools go bankrupt and shut down themselves.

After a while (maybe after 6 months) bitcoin would be back to $70k and rising + new pools pop up + devs get off their asses and find a solution to this centralization ... + the attack becomes impossible in the future!

As I said no business is going to shoot themselves in the foot. If they participate in an attack that would crash bitcoin price, they'll brick their own investment.

It is impossible to know what percentage of bitcoins do things the wrong way. Claiming "most" of bitcoins are like that is just a guess.

95% crash is debatable but they can definitely crash the market with a ban. However, it won't be because people use it in a centralized way. It would be because if dozens of countries suddenly banned bitcoin, people would start panic selling it which would crash bitcoin. Something that would still happen even if not a single centralized exchange (or any other centralized service) existed.

ill answer your question with your own words

as for you endlessly talking about nodes.. (facepalm)
miners are ASIC devices.. asic devices are not nodes