Steve Barbour and Rijndael further discuss here:

@checksum0 Lots of people have demonstrated there is a custody agreement involving Antpool, and possibly F2Pool, for smaller pools (quite a long list).

I'm theorizing Antpool are building blocks for them too (excluding F2Pool), thus controlling all the hashrate for those, by proxy.

@SGBarbour Yes, I thought this was well known.

Bitmain is also backing / financing a significant % of gross market hashrate (hardware + infra). They are also backing / doing sweetheart deals with lots of software infra.

I see this diversifying this cycle with options like ocean and I’m sure many more.

This is why I am mining with ocean.xyz now. I think this is important for the Bitcoin future.

Braiins didn't do that until they went FPPS. I believe it's the result of a big player providing all the FPPS backing, making essentially all FPPS pools just front-ends for that one big backer.

Should have used Ocean pool

Who's the custodian? Coinbase?

it’s probably a low tech version of stratum v2, where they agree to share variance, and have a centralized entity escrow the coins and pay them out pro-rata

They aren’t holding a lot, it’s like a hot wallet sum to us.

I agree with you! This just leads to centralization which is the exact opposite of BTC!

Dude fuck coinbase. It's an exchange, not a wallet. They just want you to treat it like one so they can claim your coins

From these kind of tweets, it feels like Bitcoin's decentralization is under attack.

Isn't it only when they want to sell?

Amazing! BITCOIN isn't decentralized anymore.