> What? Ownership, and power, is distributed among all the miners, albeit a number much bigger than 7. It still exists and can (and will eventually) be consolidated by a majority cartel.

That's not quite true. To the extent that the Bitcoin network is 'owned', it is owned by the full node operators, of which there are many more than there are miners.

See the SegWit2x vote[0], for example, wherein many large exchanges and miners representing < 83% of the hashing power of the network voted to increase the block size, but it failed for lack of adoption among node operators.

Notably, anyone can operate a full node. There is no specialized hardware required.

[0] https://dcgco.medium.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consen...

>Notably, anyone can operate a full node. There is no specialized hardware required.

Great! The 51% cartel summons their crony Beff Jezos who runs a billion minimal & globally-distributed (compromised) BTC full nodes with his enormous compute resources. How does this affect the integrity of the network?

How does my new full node connect to the network? Are there hardcoded relay/coordinator IPs that it tries to connect to? Who controls those?

>How does this affect the integrity of the network?

it doesn't. operating a node isn't a vote.

>How does my new full node connect to the network

there are boostrap nodes that the client initially connects to, but afterwards it connects to nodes based on previously seen nodes and nodes it has heard from other nodes.

The prior comment implied that full nodes had some power in ensuring the integrity of the network even in the event of a 51% attack. You are suggesting the opposite. Which is true?

It's the economic majority - an exchange or a merchant has a lot of economic influence, some guy with a VPS almost zero.

Isn't this just proof-of-stake with more steps? And those steps aren't built into the protocol, so they require even more trust.

>Isn't this just proof-of-stake with more steps?

It's related, yes. The main difference is that rather than your power being determined by how much bitcoins you hold, your power is determined by how much influence/power/contribution you have in the overall bitcoin ecososytem. A major merchant might not hold that many coins compared to the average whale, but probably holds more influence.

>so they require even more trust.

I wouldn't say it requires more trust. It's not like bitcoin holds an election every few years for determining which party holds the economic majority.

> I wouldn't say it requires more trust. It's not like bitcoin holds an election every few years for determining which party holds the economic majority.

But it's at least possible, from the protocol, to determine the balance of each address, and for each address to vote (with a message on the blockchain) for or against a given proposal.

Compare that to trying to determine which address "probably holds more influence", which seems like something you'd have to trust someone else's (off-chain) judgement on.

Yes, but that doesn't work if what you're voting on is consensus-critical (e.g. the ordering of blocks). If you're talking about other rule changes, sure. In practice, I think most would consider Bitcoin's sluggishness of rule changes to be a feature, not a bug. Because the process is not entirely deterministic, it is much harder for a bad actor to corrupt.

> Because the process is not entirely deterministic, it is much harder for a bad actor to corrupt.

As in software, a lack of determinism means a lack of reproducibility, and without reproducibility it's harder to have consensus.

In particular, if bitcoin makes a rule change (or refuses to implement a rule change), such a decision lacks the transparency and accountability needed for good governance, because the bad actor can just say "Well, that's just how things worked out that time. Blame the RNG.".

I don't think this is a theoretical concern when it comes to a bad actor corrupting the bitcoin protocol development process.

Proof of stake has a very specific definition. In Bitcoin, it's possible for a client to bootstrap with only knowledge of protocol rules. This is not possible in a proof of stake cryptocurrency, which also requires a trusted third party.

Even if you control 70% of hashrate, that doesn't mean you can just do anything. You still have to abide by the rules. You can't approve invalid transactions or directly steal people's money, only re-order past transactions.

This is in contrast to ENS, where the equivalent of a 51% attack allows you to do just that - steal names, change registration parameters, basically anything.

Furthermore, in PoW coins, 51% attacks are fleeting by nature - they usually only run for a short time. Compare this to ENS, where if you get 51% control once, you can give yourself 100% control for perpetuity, because you can execute arbitrary code on the smart contract.

> Compare this to ENS, where if you get 51% control once, you can give yourself 100% control for perpetuity, because you can execute arbitrary code on the smart contract.

Maybe I don't understand crypto well enough, but since everything is in a public ledger, can't 'everyone' just decide to go on a hard fork right before the moment the bad actor took control, thus de facto invalidating all transactions after that point? If that is true, in a way the power over a crypto resides in wherever (rather, whatever fork) the majority of users believes it resides.

Yes (actually, it would only have to be a soft fork), but that would require serious coordination. Ethereum has done it before, so it's not literally impossible, but it would require the whole of the Ethereum network to do it, not just the ENS people.

If it did happen, it would raise serious questions about the nature of the decentralization of Ethereum, and how suitable it is as a deterministic platform to build stuff on. Then again, it already happened and nobody seemed to really care.

If Ethereum is willing to fork over X, what's to say they're not willing to fork over Y? And the answer to this question is probably to do with "the big guys with the money at the top like X, but not Y". So much for decentralization.

Yes, in fact this is exactly what happened when a hacker found a bug in a DAO that allowed them to steal tens of millions of dollars. The outcome flies completely in the face of the idea of decentralization, censorship resistance and "law as code". But don't let that get in the way of the ponzi scheme.

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-...

Additionally to the points raised by other replies, Ownership/power currently is in Binance and Coinbase, because very few people transact directly in Bitcoin, and those that do realize gas fees are so high so Binance and Coinbase provide convenience ledgers that they control. This is exactly the same process as if you were trading stocks on the stock exchanges. Everything eventually becomes centralized, to solve the problems like transacting and punishing bad actors that develop in the bazaar.

I am sorry my man, but you sound like an old boss who was ranting about not being to print the electronic mail. Bitcoin doesn't have gas fees. That's Ether.

> Ownership, and power, is distributed among all the miners, albeit a number much bigger than 7.

Not much bigger. Over the last month, 97% of blocks were mined by the top 10 mining pools.

https://btc.com/stats/pool