If you wish to support a pool that contributes more to the Bitcoin ecosystem than mining alone, Slush pool is the place to go. They will be renamed Braiins pool as of September. They are one of the driving forces behind Stratumv2 (more decentralized mining) and the Braiins software (tuning miners). Their current share is around 5 - 6%

Every industry has this problem that lead to market concentration. Big pools get smaller costs by miner, thus offering lower fees and then getting more miners. Same with any other industry (eg amazon, nike, walmart, bp, you name it). I guess the only option would be like a p2pool, a protocol level designed pool, with no admin that would offer 0 fees. However it may be harder to implement specific high speed communications between miners to work with coordination. Clearly big pools use their own specific custom made super fast protocols so they save time on gossip, proof sending, block building, etc. IMHO.

I don't think so. The mining pool operator doesn't have control over the individual miners. If a pool has bad behavior miners can switch to another pool.

I would want to see the distribution of hashrate by decision-making entities, but I don't know how to get that data.

We need StratumV2

Ideally, mining power wouldn’t be so concentrated but the beauty of Bitcoin is that the miners don’t control the network. The node operators do, and pretty much anyone can run a node. Remember, miners opposed SegWit but they were forced to comply thanks to the nodes.

The link to that chart:

Not really a threat. StratumV2 will make it even less of a threat.

Not yet. But if one were to join mining they should join a smaller pool.

Not good.

But they aren't in China any more! Lol

Yeah this would only be concerning if three companies owned over 51% of miners. If a pool started mining empty blocks, it wouldn’t be able to pay miners, and they’d switch to a different pool pretty quickly.

10% для каждого пула будет нормой. но тот кто хочет иметь более будет это делать в одиночестве. особенно если это США. и будет вынужден майнить и наращивать сеть своего пула что б пробывать провести атаку. им ещё нужно 100% своей мощности. и только после 51% они могут сделать попытку провести атаку 51%.для сохранения $ как мировой валюты. но спешу вас успокоить. этого не случиться так как есть программа для наращивания сети в такой ситуации. или будет сделан регрес для вечной гонки на пороге 1% который не набрать. 49% так и останется не преодалимой цыфрой. имхо