Is Bitcoin Mining Becoming More, or Less Decentralized?

Mining decentralization in my opinion is probably one of the ways bitcoin can ultimately be hurt. The main reason is if a bad actor controls a majority percentage of the hash power, they can basically mess things up temporarily. They could basically mess with things in the future, like who mines the blocks, double spending, but the real problem is it sets a precedent as an attack vector. You could basically freeze the network and take out a lot of trust, especially if big institutions are using it.

You cant go back in time and change things from the past, or move around coins, but like I said you do have to worry about the future. If there was a bad actor well enough distributed that you couldnt stop them in short notice, it would really hurt things. If anything was really ever that disruptive, the chain could be hard forked, but that is usually a nuclear option if something terrible were to happen and most people would oppose it.

The question I ask is if today the mining scene is getting more or less decentralized? With the creation of bitcoin cash, there is a large group of miners who have decided to mine on the more profitable chain, which changes often. This can slow down the time of transactions on both chains, but things are more or less leveling out with the recent difficulty adjustment hard fork that bitcoin cash went through. Many of the miners who seem to be mining on the bitcoin cash chain, seem to be doing it for political reasons even if it is less profitable in the short term, so the amount of miners seems to be getting smaller.

The good thing is that with the price skyrocketing, it is much more profitable for miners who can develop their own technology so we might see new companies enter. For example we heard that Btc Drak's Dragonmint apparently is going to be creating newer and better miners in the medium term. The biggest thing for future decentralization of hashpower will ultimately be when the technology catches up with the most advance and smaller nanometer tech. At that point it will be years for new generations to come out, so selling to consumers actually makes sense.

We also have the possibility of bigger companies like Intel possibly creating chips one day and either mining or selling them directly. I would say that we are actually more decentralized than we were a few years ago, especially in times when miners were barely making profit. I think we will see many miners enter the space on the down low in the next year, given the price of coins stays the same. Also the amount of mining hardware being used will jump. If new people enter the market, it will push hashrate to the high heavens.

-Calaber24p