At this point Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool control more than 51% of the bitcoin Hash.
Bitcoin mining pools are really nothing more than a node that you point your Bitcoin miner at. Bitcoin miners also known as ASIC application specific integrated circuits are computers that do one thing and only one thing really well which is to run the shot 256 hashing algorithm. By joining a mining pool you get a proportionate share of the rewards. Bitcoin mining pools do not custody or have possession of the ASICs in their pool. These are ASICs owned by other people that are pointed to that particular mining pool. They only exist in cyberspace; they’re not physical places where ASIC’s are held.
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ASIC centralization is the actual potential problem, not mining pool centralization, since mining pools really only exist online. We had most Bitcoin ASICs sitting in China for many many years and this was the cause of a lot of Bitcoin China floods and that never caused any problems even with an oppressive government like the CCP. In the U.S there seems to be a concentration of ASIC’s especially in Texas and that’s only a potential problem if those ASICs are mostly sitting in large warehouses and are owned by large corporations. Bitcoin mining pools do not custody ASICs, Ethereum staking pools do custody your eth. What happens if Lido or Coinbase or Kraken don’t give you your stake back or if Vitalik decides never to write the code to allow you to withdraw your eth that you’ve staked yourself, what are you going to do if you politely request it from them?
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