It does, but this is already the case. A relatively small minority control the hash power and it will likely only consolidate as time goes on.

True decentralization—the way we want to imagine it—failed because the compute model changed. In a perfect world everyone invested in the network would contribute, and everyone would received some small reward for contributing. This isn’t necessary, just ideal. But instead a fraction of a percent run the network, and 99.99% just hold coins.

Bitcoin doesn’t require a lot of nodes or miners to function. In fact, it was designed so that the network was resilient enough to be maintained with minimal infrastructure. But no one could have predicted the radical change in how CPU power is actually used even in the last 10 years. Most CPU power now sits idle. In your pocket. Doing nothing. People have become less computer literate, not more, as layer upon layer of abstraction has been added to make things easier for consumers.

It was thought that interest in running nodes would increase over time, and so difficulty would increase. But interest in running nodes really didn’t increase among the general population. Instead those with existing stakes in hardware just started stacking CPU power. Now they literally move them around the world to wherever electricity is cheapest. It started an arms race for CPU power.

The real “problem” was the adoption came too late. If we had tens or hundreds of millions running nodes no one would really try to stack CPU power because they wouldn’t be able to outpace the natural growth of nodes. The network would be far more decentralized and the decisions made would benefit everyone more equally. But the reverse has happened. Power has consolidated such that all decisions made about the blockchain’s future are really made to preserve the value of the investments made by a handful of mining pools.