We decentralized the machines, not the power

The previous piece started from my chair: what the operator gets. Let’s rise higher, because the problem isn’t about pay. It’s a law. Every wave, crypto promises to hand power back to people; every wave, power re-concentrates — with those who can afford the hardware the race demands.

Bitcoin: the CPU betrayed

Satoshi wrote one CPU, one vote. In 2009, anyone mined on their computer. Then came GPUs. Then FPGAs. Then ASICs: dedicated machines, expensive, devouring megawatts, that only industrial farms can line up. Within a few years, the small miner was simply priced out.

The result today, figures in hand: four pools control ~73% of block production, six exceed 95%. The Nakamoto coefficient — the number of entities needed to reach 51% — stands at three. Three. And once you look at the block templates shared between supposedly independent pools, a single actor (Bitmain, via AntPool and its satellites) is estimated to hold 37 to 50% of hashrate.

Worse than the concentration: who builds the blocks. Hashrate is spread across thousands of machines, but it’s the pool that decides which transactions go into the block — the miner merely hashes a header handed to him. The concrete consequence: pools have filtered transactions hit by sanctions (OFAC). The network built to resist censorship starts censoring. You cannot betray Satoshi more completely.

Ethereum: exclusion by price, then by capital

The “open to all” network saw gas fees climb to tens, sometimes hundreds of dollars per transaction at peak: workable for the big, out of reach for the small. Then Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake. One CPU, one vote became one dollar, one vote: to validate now is to stake — and to stake a lot. A handful of actors, Lido first, then the exchanges, concentrate a dominant share of staked ETH. Plutocracy, in protocol’s clothing.

The next wave is already here: the GPU

Demand for compute — mining yesterday, AI today — has blown up the price and scarcity of graphics cards. “Decentralized compute” is now played with racks of unaffordable GPUs. Another hardware threshold rising, the small again excluded, capital again sweeping the board. The pattern never changes. Only the scarce component gets a new name: hashrate, then stake, then GPU.

The law

Decentralizing the machines does not decentralize the power. As long as running the network requires a scarce, expensive resource — an ASIC farm, a pile of ETH, a wall of GPUs — power flows mechanically back to those who can afford it. The topology changes (thousands of nodes!), the sociology doesn’t (a few hands decide). We spread the machines everywhere, and concentrated the power like never before.

Satoshi saw the trap, and one CPU, one vote was precisely the guard: keep the entry threshold at ground level, within everyone’s reach. Every “innovation” since has raised that threshold. It wasn’t progress. It was a retaking of power — slow, polite, and almost no one to name it.

The accounts, from the operator’s chair: Who pays whom. And what we demand: the Operators’ Charter.