Experts warn: Mining concentration puts Bitcoin at 51% risk

Despite Bitcoin (BTC) hashrate and mining difficulty standing at a record high, there have been some concerns over the possibility of a 51% attack, as it appears that two major mining pools are currently controlling more than half of Bitcoin’s total mining power.

As it happens, financial analyst Jacob King noted that Foundry now controls 33.63% of Bitcoin’s mining hashrate, whereas AntPool holds 17.94%, which would mean that between the two of them, they dominate more than 50% of the network hashrate, according to his analysis on X shared on August 19.

Is a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network possible?

In other words, if these two miners were to join forces, they could easily overcome the 51% threshold of hashrate control, which would expose the network to a manipulation attack and “could completely destroy BTC,” as King, who’s also the CEO of WhaleWire, opined.

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Furthermore, he noted the only other time this happened was 11 years ago with the now-collapsed GHash.io, which voluntarily reduced its hashrate to address centralization concerns. Still, it was enough to cause panic and tank Bitcoin as much as 87% in the following months. As King concluded:

“Once reality sets in about how centralized, manipulated, and useless Bitcoin truly is, everything will collapse faster than ever. It’s essentially a giant game of musical chairs!”

At the same time, TXPool Capital CIO Evan Van Ness observed that “even Bitcoiners recognize that mining has become ‘highly centralized’ [and] 3 pools routinely have more than 80% of BTC hashrate,” adding that Proof-of-Work (PoW) “is too centralized to be the backbone of the financial system.”

Other analysts, like Doq Holliday, have warned that such a state of things might have turned Bitcoin into “a major risk and liability,” although many community members have disagreed, pointing out that it would make no sense from the financial point of view for any of the miners to actually try and carry out a 51% attack.