Bitcoin mining pools controlled by China-based industry giant Bitmain now account for more than 40 % of the total Bitcoin hashrate, raising new concerns about miner centralization.
Bitmain Hashrate inches toward 51 percent
According to data from?CoinDance, bitcoin mining pools BTC.com and Antpool have mined 25.Five percent and 16.5 %, respectively, off bitcoin blocks within the past seven days.
Both of these kinds of mining pools belong to?Bitmain,?the world’s largest producer of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners, and thus the firm presently has influence at least 42 percent of this?Bitcoin?hashrate. The two pools also control a combined 21.3 percent of the?Bitcoin Cash?hashrate, which operates on the same algorithm (SHA-256) as Bitcoin.
At this level, Bitmain is dangerously about controlling 51 percent of your Bitcoin hashrate, a mark that may theoretically permit it to attempt a?51 percent attack?on the network. Such attacks have been successfully deployed against a variety of smaller altcoins, including Litecoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Verge, Litecoin Cash, and Monacoin.
There is significantly less financial incentive to fight Bitcoin, but some locally nevertheless worry that, given CEO?Jihan Wu’s support for bitcoin cash and controversial scaling proposal?SegWit2x,?Bitmain might launch a malicious attack up against the network anyway. It’s a very unlikely scenario, but critics believe that the fact that this can be a discussion by any means means that bitcoin mining is centralized.
It’s unsure what percentage of the hashrate is bestowed upon devices physically-operated by Bitmain, but time is somewhat moot since pool operators control the block templates for the pool. This means that, as long as those appliances are pointed at Antpool or BTC.com, Bitmain can decide what transactions the swimming pool will process and which, if any, it will not.
Do not forget, we’ve been here before. In 2019, now-defunct mining pool Ghash briefly?crossed the 51 percent threshold?using response to community concern encouraged users to maneuver some of their hashpower for some other pools. However, it does not appear that Bitmain means to take a similar tack.
In fact, Antpool recently began a zero-fee promotion designed to continue through mid-September in a very bid to draw even more miners for your platform. While pool supports a variety of cryptocurrency mining algorithms, the promotion explicitly lists bitcoin among the list of coins that might be exempt from fees.
It is very important to note this particular; Bitmain did not immediately deal with a acquire comment, on the was raised.
‘BetterHash’ aims to decentralize bitcoin mining
Nevertheless, an answer to the threat of miner centralization could very well be on the horizon.
As CCN?reported, concerns over hashrate centralization inspired Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corallo to cultivate “BetterHash,” a draft proposal developed to decentralize bitcoin mining.
In short, he advocates replacing Stratum, our present-day bitcoin mining protocol, with two new protocols. This tends to allow individual miners to develop their own block templates (or find out from a any such) rather than the need to use the one chosen by the operator within the mining pool where they direct their hashrate.
In addition to providing miners and with autonomy, the implementation of those new protocols should lower ability associated with a malicious mining pool operator to work with their position to fight the network.
Likewise, if your group of miners of a mining pool, in case there is attacking the bitcoin blockchain, this bad practice would location the ecosystem inside a bind and confidence through this cryptocurrency would be very compromised, with the financial opinion not It could be viable because prices would fall and everything tummy flatness, although down.