We need to mine for heat in the northern hemisphere. Every and any electric heater in every home should be replaced with a miner.

I'm v bullish on Heatbit (full disclosure, i have shares in them!) and other mining companies looking to tinker with heat transfer.

It seems to me the main concern is the proxy pools all feeding back to antpool and foundry.

This epoch will be the growth of the at home pleb miner - ideally solo mining. Decentralised hashrate - pointing to deceased pools/solo is our way out of this mess.

Get your hash off zero plebs!

I think it’s a very serious concern. The best solution I see is getting back to making home mining financially realistic through heat recycling.

Bitmain needs more competition

Stratum v2 fixes it but it doesn't fix anything if pools aren't adopting it - which they aren't. Something needs to happen to make the transition costs worth it (censorship/MiTM) or it needs to otherwise be a strict upgrade to miner/pool profitability. Telling people what's good for them often doesn't work. And if you look at v2's website, it doesn't even do a very good job of telling miners what's good for them and why it's urgent they do what's good for them.

Market will work it out.

The Bitcoin community will eventually block it. Block the IP address of these centralized miners or create a hard fork and we will adopt it along with the mining pools. Let them have their Bitcoin fork for themselves. Bitcoin Comedy Central will be their name.

If there is one thing to be concerned about, this would be it.

The problem is that if a pool gets significant percentage above 50%, it can control the network. It can censor transactions. It can reject blocks by other miners. If a block from another miner is rejected and the mining pool has above 50% of the hash rate, the competing miners will have wasted their mining. This disencentivises them from mining on competing pools and incentivises them to mine on the large pool. This makes the dominant miner even bigger. This is an example of misaligned incentives.

Anonymous p2p mining pools with ability to be arbitrarily big or small will be ideal in my mind. Solo mining will not cut it simply because people won't do it (for the same reason they are not doing right now).

This should be solved before a mining pool gets too big since if hypothetically a mining pool starts rejecting valid competing blocks, it may become necessary to change the proof of work algorithm, wich is extremely undesirable.

I only think it could be a potential problem if advancements in nuclear (or other similar energy tech) do not happen in the coming decades.

to me Miner centralization is a significant concern in the cryptocurrency space, particularly with networks like Bitcoin. specially when it comes to network integrity and barrier entry

Market will work it out

Heatbit, bitaxe and other devices like those may help, am I too optimistic?

The solution is solo mining, and moving away from pointing towards pools!

Yes, when you find an odd article telling thay too much decentralisation of mining pools may be dangerous for the network, it can be baffling. However, we must remember the power of Bitcoin. Up to now, Bitcoin has taken care of everything by itself. There were many attempts but all failed. Instead of this mining decentralisation, I would be more concerned about Bitcoin going in the hands of ETF companies.

I don't see getting it upto a level where it starts threatening the whole network. There are concerns , rightly so, we must try to avoid them early.

I personally am not too worried about the fact that mining is centralized in pools. You need to have computing power to solve the puzzle and mine the block. Only one person does not have that computing power and together they solve it faster and the mining speed is maintained, which maintains the transaction approval time.

In any case, it is payment for their work.

I am more concerned about governments having so much access to large amounts of BTC. Because what will the future be like in a BITCOIN ONLY scenario if governments are controlling those large amounts.