Now picture one dispatcher deciding which fares all of them take.
Bitcoin has a version of this, and the number most of us quote describes the cars.
To add new payments to Bitcoin's public record, computers race to bundle up recent payments and solve a hard math puzzle. That is mining, and the winner gets paid. One machine on its own might win once a decade, so operators team up and split the reward. A group like that is called a pool.
The machines are scattered. People run them in garages, in old warehouses, beside power plants in a dozen countries, and nobody needs permission to plug one in. That part is spread wide, and it spreads wider every year.
The dispatching is not. When your machine joins a pool, the pool usually hands it a ready made list of which payments go in the block. Your machine does the work. Somebody else chose the contents.
So the ownership number and the coordination number tell two different stories, and one of them does almost all the talking.
Choosing what goes in a block is where pressure would land. A rule about who may transact would arrive at a handful of dispatchers rather than at ten thousand garages.
The pushback is fair and i take it seriously. If a few pools can coordinate on what goes in a block, the practical result looks much like it would if they owned every machine, so calling it a separate problem is splitting hairs. And software that hands the choice back to the individual operator has existed for years while most of the industry kept its dispatcher. A fix nobody adopts is a weak fix.
What would show me wrong: most of the network's machines running software where the operator picks the contents, holding for a couple of years, with the measured spread of who chooses widening over that time.
Bitcoin made it so anybody can own a car, and that part worked. Who writes the tickets is still open, and the hardware you cannot change this afternoon. The pool you point it at, you can.
if this changed how you read the concentration numbers, Zap ⚡
