CoinDesk Mining Roundup: Miner Meetups and Pool Pressures
With just over 13 million bitcoins mined - a milestone achieved earlier this month - the mining sector is showing few, if any, signs of slowing. In fact, the past month has shown a new level of activity and awareness in the space, particularly regarding the key issues: scalability, network share and the future infrastructure that will deliver more bitcoins to the system. As Bitcoin Foundation executive chairman Jon Matonis wrote, recent events all point to one overarching outcome: more communication between miners and those with a vested interest in seeing the network succeed. But beyond....
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Last week, there were 1,145 blocks rewarded to miners, according to the Neighbourhood Pool Watch. Based on the recent price of BTC times the 25 coin reward, that's more than $12m. At bitcoin's current price and network difficulty, the network is generating millions of dollars per week. But that's with miner operating costs notwithstanding. For example, Dave Carlson's MegaBigPower pool earned 18 blocks last week, representing 1.57% a share of total rewards. That's about $200,000, and some of those spoils will need to go to running the datacenter that supports his pool. With that in mind,....
Why do ASIC mining hardware manufacturers give their products names like Klondike and GoldStrike? It's because bitcoin mining is like a gold rush. People are rushing to stake a claim to a limited resource, and they need the best equipment that they can to mine it. After GPUs and FPGAs, the rush is on to produce ASIC-based miners that are faster and more power efficient than their predecessors. The market is flooded with vendors promising the next, greatest ASIC hardware. But all that glitters is not gold. Here is a roundup of what's on offer (and what's actually shipping, which isn't....
A newly published Cornell University paper suggests that Bitcoin mining pools should eventually become smaller in size. The author, Ittay Eyal, comes to this conclusion because he believes pools are incentivized to attack each other through a block withholding attack, making it risky to allow any unidentified miners to contribute to pooled mining. The paper, which is partly funded by the SWIFT Institute, examines the consequences of a block withholding attack in an environment with competing mining pools. In a block withholding attack, an individual miner makes it seem as if he is working....
An individual miner defied the odds and managed to collect 168 ETH from a solo mining pool this week worth 42 times the average block reward. An individual Ether (ETH) miner struck it big by mining a block on their own and receiving a reward valued at about $540,000. The miner was operating through the 2miners Ethereum SOLO pool on Jan. 17 when they mined an entire block and received 168 ETH. That reward vastly outstrips the per-block average reward of about 4 ETH according to BitInfoCharts.Adding to the remarkable nature of the reward is the size and hash power of the SOLO pool. It is....
Bitmain has announced the launch of its latest open source BTC.com bitcoin mining pool with new improvements and attractive pricing. Bitmain, the Bitcoin Mining ASICs manufacturer has launched a new open source mining pool. The new mining pool is part of BTC.com, the company’s Bitcoin block explorer, analytics tools and wallet services arm. According to the company’s blog post, Bitmain is offering a great deal to all the users joining its new mining pool. All miners on BTC.com mining pool will be able to mine the digital currency without having to pay any mining fee until next year.....