Study: Bitcoin transactions show 64 key players mined most of the cryptocurrency in its first two years, contrary to the ethos of decentralized crypto
In myth, the cryptocurrency is egalitarian, decentralized and all but anonymous. The reality is very different, scientists have found. Source: Aiden Lab .
New York TimesSiobhan Roberts
Context & Ripple Effects
Aiden Lab's finding that 64 players mined most of Bitcoin's first two years lands on a well-documented arc: a 2021 study already showed roughly 50 miners controlling half of mining capacity and the top 10K investors holding about a third of supply. TokenAnalyst's earlier count put five China-based mining pools — AntPool, BTC.com, BTC.top, F2 Pool, and ViaBTC — at nearly half the network's computing power.
First-order effects
The paper gives regulators and skeptics an academic citation for what mining-pool data already suggested: Bitcoin's governance is concentrated in a few dozen hands, undercutting the decentralization pitch used to market it to institutions and retail buyers.
Second-order effects
Exchanges and funds marketing Bitcoin as censorship-resistant infrastructure face harder due-diligence questions, while the same concentration pattern documented among miners shows up in holdings — echoing how pseudonymous founders control large sums with little accountability.
Third-order effects
If concentration at genesis compounds into today's pool dominance, 'decentralized' becomes a spectrum claim rather than a binary one — pushing the industry's legitimacy case toward verifiable distribution metrics instead of design ideals.
The trend: Empirical research is steadily replacing crypto's decentralization mythology with measured evidence of concentrated mining power and ownership.
SPURIOUS CLAIMS OF BITCOIN DECENTRALIZATION A NYT article reveals that in spite of the claims, BTC has never been decentralized, thus making my absorbing barrier risk real (see my paper showing BTC worth 0). The study is much clearer than the NYT article. https://www.nytimes.com/…
In myth, the cryptocurrency is egalitarian, decentralized and all but anonymous. Data scientists found the reality to be very different. https://www.nytimes.com/...
“Although Bitcoin was designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents, its early success rested instead on cooperation among a small group of altruistic founders.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
An analysis of the first two years of Bitcoin transactions revealed that, often, just a handful of miners functioned as arbiters of the network — “which is not the ethos of decentralized trustless crypto,” said study coauthor Alyssa Blackburn https://www.nytimes.com/...
This “early bitcoin miner” paper makes some odd conclusions due to misunderstanding how the protocol works, but it's not completely devoid of interesting analysis. In particular, the temporal analysis of Patoshi miner downtime vs Satoshi public activity... https://aidenlab.org/..…
The lab unintentionally replicated Bitcoin's income inequality when it invented a cryptocurrency for buying snacks from a student-run store. Some crypto miners became more successful than others, and the store marked up prices catering to their tastes. https://www.nytimes.com/...