Now picture a newcomer with no money standing at each door. That picture tells you more about a network than any chart of how spread out it looks today.
Every blockchain has to answer one question: who gets to add the next page to the shared record that thousands of computers keep, which people call the ledger. Bitcoin answers it with mining. A miner is a computer that burns electricity guessing numbers until it wins the right to add a page, and the winner gets paid in new bitcoin. That cost gets paid outside the system, in power bills and in hardware bought from ordinary sellers.
The other common design asks you to lock up coins you already own, a practice called staking. The more you lock, the more often you get picked, and the reward arrives as more of the same coin.
So I ask one question of each design. What can a person with zero coins do today?
On Bitcoin, they can buy a small used miner, plug it into a wall outlet, and start competing tomorrow. I started mining in 2015 and nobody had to approve me. My way in did not depend on who already held the most bitcoin.
Where holding coins is the qualification, a person with zero coins has to buy coins from the people who already hold them before they can take part at all. The entry fee flows to the incumbents.
The pushback here is strong, and I take it seriously. Mining concentrates too. A few companies build almost every chip, cheap power sits in a handful of regions, and a small number of pools, which are groups of miners who share their rewards, coordinate a large share of the work. By some measures that is tighter than the biggest holders on a staking network.
I read those as problems a newcomer can still attack. Chip makers compete, power gets cheaper somewhere new, and a miner can leave a pool in minutes. When holding coins is the ticket, the gap between the largest holder and a newcomer grows with every reward, and no outside market pushes back on it.
What would show me wrong: a staking network keeping many independent operators through a full boom and bust, while Bitcoin mining keeps tightening over the same years.
if this gave you a sharper question to ask, Zap ⚡