No, that's nonsensical. Exchanges are compeltely antithetical to mining. Miners are CC purists. Sure they like the money and some will cash out through an exchange.
In contrast, exchanges are for the weak and stupid. People who want to speculate go to an exchange and let the exhange keep their value in their own private keys. All those people get is an entry in a centralized database at that exchange. That's completely opposite of how CC's work.
>No, that’s nonsensical. Exchanges are compeltely antithetical to mining. Miners are CC purists.
Thanks for the clarification; I was combining the use of exchanges with that of pools.
Again, I don’t know the other ones, but last I check BTC pays out to whomever gets the right hash at ... 12.5 btc? Pools spread that out across all ‘miners’ which sounds very nice and equitable (less their couple % cut, which seems a better biz to be in than mining).
The thing is: if everyone’s pooling into a few huge collectives because no one individual can win alone, how is that decentralized? And secondly, everyone’s implicitly trusting that the distribution of BTC (or eth, or whatever) is correctly done according to the actual work contributed. Again, the big players are overseas, with no recourse; why assume they’re playing fair (or conversely, if you were running one of these pools and could get massively rich just by tilting the scales very slightly with no consequence, not even a broken law, and the wronged persons are ignorant of your very identity and half a world away...
I’m not an expert so do ring out if I’ve missed something, but the whole thing seems very concentrated in a few hubs.
(On the purely practical side, even assuming all this is clean as snow, when I polled some US people about their energy costs and mining income, they were doing about $0.16 an hour. This is only appealing if you’re mining the next massively cheap coin that then rockets in value 100x or 1000x).