> And of course, claiming that anybody can have access to this hardware is very very debatable. The best indicator of how this is not accessible by everybody is how centralized this industry is nowadays (just look at the correlation between ASIC manufacturers and owners of mining pools).
Even if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it's not going to become true :)
If there was no centralization, people would still be profitable doing solo mining. Most of the pools these days are pools because they own huge mining datacenters already (not because they have a lot of miner-users).
That's not how we should see decentralization, "lacking a central point of control" is a better definition. What you're arguing for is the mining to be distributed.
That's like saying Thomas W. Farley controls 21 trillion dollars worth of companies.
Pools do not control hash power, they merely organize it. That's not to say they don't play a major role in the politics of Bitcoin clients and rules, but to say they 'completely control' Bitcoin is wholly incorrect. These sorts of hyperbolic statements greatly degrade the quality of discourse on centralization.
Thomas W. Farley is so far from the same thing, I can only assume your being intentionally disingenuous. It's much closer to talking about the CEO of hedge fund, and they frankly do have massive amounts of control.
However, in this case the Chinese government can take over these data centers on a whim. You can argue it's a different story when it's spread across a million basements, but highly centralized hashing power is easy to either take over or take offline.
Centralization is not a bool variable: true|false. There are degrees to it. Of course I'm not claiming that bitcoin mining is centralized (100%), but it's definitely not very decentralized.
Pools are not miners. Pools can only make decisions that the miners will tolerate, and historically miners have recognized the dangers even of pool centralization.
That's the four biggest pools (to get a consistent > 50% it might not even be enough) who need to collude. That's not very centralized. Of course the situation could be better, but it's still in a good place imo. It's better than it has been historically for example when a single pool (GHash.IO) approached 50% by itself.
Even if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it's not going to become true :)
https://coin.dance/blocks
Where is the centralization?
Also, the issue isn't as much ASICs as it is the free electricity in China.