You're throwing numbers and conclusions as if they mean the same thing, they do not I was reluctant to reply to this thread, as to be frank, I'm unsure of your intentions. You're posting this on ET when it's probably more appropriate if you go on reddit under bitcoin or bitcoin mining section Anyway, we're here now, but I can't discuss the topic without educating you and that's going to be a tl;dr and you'll have to accept my words or you can study the subject yourself, there are many resources starting with the the bitcoin whitepaper I was a bitcoin miner in early 2014, when my antminer s1's were no longer profitable, started mining bitcoin clones coin launches and some had clear instructions on setting up a stratum pool mining server via github, so I had experience running my own mining pool with my s1's for those coins Let's define some terms, bitcoin network is composed of bitcoin nodes that each have a copy of the blockchain about 400GB, contains all of the history and transactions of all the coins since genesis block. You can have your bitcoin node. It's free, you can download the bitcoin software or compile from github source. You already saw a link to bitnodes on a different post, those are visible nodes, that accept incoming connections. If you run your own bitcoin node but do not open your router for tcp port 8333 to that node, no nodes from the outside can connect to your node and your node won't be counted on bitnodes stats, but you're still part of the network and can get updates from other nodes and your node can broadcast to nodes you're connected to I doubt any bitcoin node is mining, but it's built in to the software to allow mining by a simple command, although it might cause your node to overheat You give too much power to the mining farms in China and Russia and Iran as if they control the network, but if you were around in 2017 when we had the forks, you would know it's not the miners that have more power on the bitcoin network, but rather the bitcoin nodes Surprise, the concept has already been proven, there were hostile disagreements in 2017 between bitcoin miners and the bitcoin core developers, most importantly, the bitcoin cash fork, bcash, which had a lot of mining support The bcash supporters thought the network was going to follow their fork, their network and they had the mining support and vowed to remove the hash power from bitcoin core, now just called btc Bcash had and still have enough supporters that many payment gateways and infrastructure supported their forked network, but most of the nodes and community, including myself, stayed with the bitcoin core network What was the effect when btc lost all the hash power from the miners who supported and moved their mining power to the bcash network overnight? It slowed down the block, and fees shot up, but only until the next difficulty. There was some community effort to fire up old bitcoin miners, indeed if I had not gotten rid of my bitcoin miners I'd have powered them up again https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate Recently, there were some fud surrounding the loss of hashrate 172TH/s to 131TH/s overnight, but what no one failed to mention that after the initial power outage, the hash rate started to increase even though the power had not been restored in the China province, do you know why? The answer is mining farm vs mining pool I was a bitcoin miner for hobby, I was getting 0.06 btc per 24 hours and paying $200/mo (yea, I was exceeding the highest tier) when ROI was about 45 days, or I could just buy 1 btc for ~$500 using credit card, but there's a lesson here, I was signed up with a mining pool in China even though there was community PSA to move the bitcoin mining to smaller mining pools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GHash.io I only did so when the GHash exceeded 51% and was an existential threat. Btw, no mining pool want's to have 51% of the hash rate, even GHash stopped accepting new miners. Right now, your chart does not show any mining pool that has more than 20%, the biggest one is Poolin has 19% and you cannot combine multiple mining pools and say, see they have over 50%, if you understand mining pool software which I mentioned above, you can google stratum mining, distributed pow, each miner getting work assignments, and so forth I remember getting daily payouts mining at a big mining pool, or the extreme, I forgot the name where we didn't get paid until on average every 3 days as that was the amount of time by probability the mining pool was supposed to solve a block, which if you did not know is based on luck, via brute force, every miner has a chance to solve the next block by luck, you can even do it by hand, or a raspberry pi So maybe you got enough education now or it still doesn't make sense? Let me put it to you this way, we have big mining farms outside of the hostile territories, some are publicly listed companies, MARA, RIOT, ARGO, some are financed privately big $. If all the "hostile miners" by your definition stopped mining, the blocks will be delayed until the next difficulty adjustment usually every 12 days, but it's not based on time but the number of blocks And "we" will be very happy if they stopped mining, I'll be a miner again as it might become profitable again even where I'm located Don't forget the other lesson, those Chinese mining pools don't own all of that mining power, a lot of them are outside China and would switch to a different mining pool in a heartbeat if they shut down. Poolin has over 600K active miners https://www.poolin.com/