These five mining pools dominate in 2023

Decentralization is an ideal of Bitcoin. Yet there has been an increase in the centrality of BTC miners in the network.

Bitcoin miners successfully mined more than 54,000 blocks in 2023. This is confirmed by data from btc.com.

The mining pool Foundry USA stands out as the leader: with 16,492, the pool found more than 30 percent of the blocks.

Together with Antpool, F2pool, Viabtc and the Binance Pool, the total comes to 45,707, about 84 percent of all blocks found in 2023.

Critics see this as centralization in the mining industry:

A mining pool is a decentralized association of individual miners who pool their computing power. This increases the likelihood of regular income.

The criticism, however, is not unjustified. Bitcoin is considered the most decentralized network in the world. About 29 percent of all Bitcoin nodes runs however, in the US.

Yet Bitcoin is sufficiently decentralized. As long as no single pool controls more than 50 percent of the hashrate, attacks are virtually impossible because they incur enormous costs and are difficult to coordinate.

The decentralization in the Lightning Network also leaves much to be desired: according to data from Mempool Space runs about half of all Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) nodes through centralized cloud service providers. Amazon Web Service (AWS) hosts about 26 percent and Google Cloud just under 20 percent.