<p>Yes Bitcoin and Ethereum are still decentralized. What happened is it got to risky to mine solo so miners banded together to have a better chance of getting blocks. I suppose you could say that Bitcoin or Ethereum could be federated but the fact that these pools are competing against each other destroys that idea.
 Federated means <code>(with reference to a number of states or organizations) form or be formed into a single centralized unit, within which each state or organization keeps some internal autonomy.*</code> According to the definition of federated I would rather say that each mining pool is a federation of miners in itself. But with all these different federations involved it is still decentralized system because not one of these federations control more than 50% of the hashrate.</p>

<p>*Definition from Google Dictionary </p>

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2018-04-26T15:15:12.360Z
2018-04-26T15:21:14.630Z
2018-04-26T15:21:14.630Z
Learn2Mine
<p>By looking at the bitcoin and ethereum mining pool hashrate distribution I feel that only 5-10 relevant full nodes exist. So it's more like a federated system among those.</p>

<p>Am I seeing something wrong here?</p>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/lgTUN.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/lgTUN.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>

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<mining-pools><majority-attack><decentralization>
Are Bitcoin and Ethereum really de-centralized? Or is federated a better term?
Romeo Kienzler
# Are Bitcoin and Ethereum really de-centralized? Or is federated a better term?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-04-26)

By looking at the bitcoin and ethereum mining pool hashrate distribution I feel that only 5-10 relevant full nodes exist. So it's more like a federated system among those.

Am I seeing something wrong here?

[![enter image description here](https://i.sstatic.net/lgTUN.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/lgTUN.png)

[![enter image description here](https://i.sstatic.net/lpaPI.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/lpaPI.png)

**Tags:** mining-pools, majority-attack, decentralization


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2018-04-26. Score: 1 | Accepted answer

Yes Bitcoin and Ethereum are still decentralized. What happened is it got to risky to mine solo so miners banded together to have a better chance of getting blocks. I suppose you could say that Bitcoin or Ethereum could be federated but the fact that these pools are competing against each other destroys that idea.
Federated means `(with reference to a number of states or organizations) form or be formed into a single centralized unit, within which each state or organization keeps some internal autonomy.*` According to the definition of federated I would rather say that each mining pool is a federation of miners in itself. But with all these different federations involved it is still decentralized system because not one of these federations control more than 50% of the hashrate.

\*Definition from Google Dictionary


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