Troubling new Bitcoin research into Bitmain mining proxies
In April, pseudonymous researchers Mononaut and 0xB10C confirmed a long-held suspicion that Bitmain influenced a concerning percentage of the bitcoin mining network. Today, follow-up research confirms the sway of Bitmain over ‘proxy’ mining pools. Although bitcoin miners are technically able to switch mining pools as they wish, this research reveals that as a practical matter, many of them rarely if ever switch away from Bitmain-led work templates. A detailed follow-up Analysis applied a weighted similarity score of transaction ordering and block templates across 37% of Bitcoin’s hashrate. The Analysis revealed that many supposedly independent mining pools are mostly passing along Bitmain-templated work to their miners. Based on the template similarities, I ended up with these possible pool relationships. These pools together have about 37.6% of the network hashrate. However, it's far from proven that the same entity is behind pool these. pic.twitter.com/iyqVtGYqPx — b...