"Bitcoin is centralized, but that's OK because the central authorities can be trusted to do the right thing" isn't exactly a compelling argument. Especially when decentralization is supposed to be one of Bitcoin's major selling points.
The fact that those efforts have failed, despite them being the largest miner, is pretty strong evidence that Bitcoin is not under the control of any small group of people.
There also is no "central authority" since anyone can become a validator. Bitmain, while absolutely huge producer of hardware and a miner, is not the only manufacturer of the hardware.
Even better, there is a giant financial incentive to build the best miner [1].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/15/square-ceo-jack-dorsey-says-...
By this reasoning, there is no central authority in the dollar system since anyone could become chair of the federal reserve. The odds for an individual without specific hardware to actually mine (and then becoming a validator) a single block are extremely thin. (Granted it's more likely than becoming the chair of the Fed, but less likely than becoming the head of the central bank of Malta for a citizen of that country …)
Being a Bitcoin validator requires nothing particularly powerful in terms of hardware. A cell phone won't cut it, but a 10 year old laptop is enough to be a validator.
For more information, this is a good explainer:
The only “validation” in the bitcoin protocol occurs at mining time (and ironically enough, it's not even mandatory so invalid blocks have been mined by Antpool before), everything else is just social convention (and assume that laypeople can have access to an untampered bitcoin executable: what if Google Chrome, or Windows, or whatever software running on the same machine replaced it with an alternative binary on behalf of the NSA?).
As a side note, Bitcoin, like all p2p protocols, is extremely brittle if run only by benevolent individuals. It's only secure because it's more of a federated ecosystem of players with pockets deep enough and a relational network between one another to cooperate.
For bitcoin, this federated network is fairly adversarial, and nobody ever managed to get a dangerous leadership on it. But if you look at Ethereum, you'll see a very hierarchical social structure, where Vitalik & Al. have almost complete power over the so called “distributed” network. (rolling back transactions, or completely changing the protocol at the expense of the miners with their move to proof of stake).
"Note that in the future, it is likely that Ethereum will switch to a proof-of-stake model for security"
It doesn't get more clear than that.
Ok, you win! Nobody knew PoS was coming! What a great surprise! /s :facepalm:
We don't need to trust miners for bitcoin to work and if we do trust them, what is the downside to someone who is just validating transactions?
They built a better gold. People trust gold. They put the majority of it into vaults and trust the people who run those vaults. This is the best solution anyone has ever come up with to digitize gold. It doesn't tick all the boxes 100% and isn't perfect, but it sure does one single thing well.
The world revolves on financial transactions. I wish I could have said that I built something that can be validated by anyone at any time and then get people all over the world to freely invest insane amounts of capex/opex. All without a marketing budget or CEO. It has never been done before.
And I say that as a bitcoin and eth proponent and long time holder. I'm just saying, we should be careful before we jump to conclusions this is still experimental technology ( even encryption itself is still young, and implementation is very prone to error )
I'd also bet that bitcoind is probably the most deeply studied codebase on the planet.
The inevitable problem that I see is that they will be able to censor transactions, since transactions are not private. But they can't change the rules or the chain splits, so what else do you think people are trusting them not to do?