Is Bitcoin’s Hashing Power too centralized to bring Bitcoin down?
Bitcoin is the most famous and arguably the most stable coin in the world of cryptocurrency. This is despite the fact that it lost more than half of its price since its all-time high in December 2017 when it almost hit the $20,000 mark. There has been a lot of talk about the future of Bitcoin and a lot has been said that the future of Bitcoin has been secured by Mathematics and that the Cryptocurrency is immutable.
This does not mean that Bitcoin has not had its shortcomings. In 2010 Bitcoin network was hacked and 92 billion coins produced but the handled immediately. This, however, happened when Bitcoin was still very young and did not have a lot of publicity like it does now. Bitcoin gained its most awaited momentum in 2017 which saw it be branded the digital gold. Bitcoin has remained a hedge above other digital coins because of its hash rate.
Bitcoin’s latest crash has seen the digital currency lose more than half of its value which has mainly been contributed by continuous attacks and numerous regulation talks.
There has been a worry that that Bitcoin is too centralized mainly because most of the hashing power is now becoming concentrated with just a few major players. Many people are saying that Bitmain is the main player despite Bitmain’s founder denying the claims. Many miners and interested parties believe that Bitmain has hidden hashing power and makes it have the power to take over Bitcoin.
Taking over Bitcoin is however not easy even with 51% control of the coin. We have seen many exchange hacks in the past but we have not seen any incidence which has threatened the Bitcoin network.
However, the talk of Bitmain’s major control was not taken lightly since it saw the creation of ASIC-resistant fork called the Bitcoin Gold. However Bitcoin Gold had a very low hashrate before it received a 51% attack on something which has also happened to ZenCash. This meant that it’s very hard to change the mining algorithm if Bitcoin. Changing the algorithm means that the most powerful virtual assets would change to low-scale mining where they would be vulnerable to attacks or the current version of Bitcoin is kept to continue being mined using ASIC. Bitcoin controls the cryptocurrency market and a price increase or decrease seems to affect all the other digital coins.
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