Why does geographic latency push miners toward centralization in legacy blockchains?

In traditional linear blockchains, network delays cause valid blocks to be discarded — a process called orphaning — and that wasted work creates economic pressure for miners to cluster into large, well-connected pools. Geographic latency is the starting domino: the longer it takes a new block to reach distant nodes, the higher the chance that two miners produce competing blocks at the same moment. Only one block survives; the other is orphaned, and all the computing power behind it earns nothing. To reduce that risk, miners are pushed to join centralized pools with fast, reliable connections to the rest of the network. Understanding this chain — latency → higher orphan rate → pressure to centralize — reveals the structural flaw in linear chains that Kaspa's blockDAG design was built to address.

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