Not too long ago, a lot of people were taken by surprise when ViaBTC was climbing the mining pool ranks rather quickly. Fast forward to today and things have quieted down where ViaBTC is concerned. It appears a lot of mining power has switched to other pools, albeit no one knows why exactly.
What is Happening To ViaBTC?
Just over a week ago, ViaBTC became the world’s second largest mining pool. This was quite a shock to many miners, as the platform has only been around for just over two months. However, it seemed a lot of miners took a liking to the platform, leading to a significant hashpower increase.
Things have quieted down quite a bit ever since, though. ViaBTC is no longer the second largest mining pool, albeit they are still number 6. That seems a more realistic position for a platform that is still relatively new. Antpool, BW, Slush, and Bitfury all improved their “rankings” once again over the past few days.
Looking over the last 156 Bitcoin network blocks, only twelve of those were mined by ViaBTC. That is not entirely surprising, given the fact there is quite a bit of competition on the network. F2Pool remains the mining leader, with 27 out of the last 156 blocks being mined by the pool. Do keep in mind there is such a thing as ‘mining pool luck”, though.
For some reason, a lot of the ViaBTC hashpower has found its way back to the main competitors. For now, there is no clear indication as to why this has happened. Moreover, we do not know if this exodus of miners will continue or not. Keeping in mind how the pool offers 0% fees on their pay-per-share structure, there should be a bigger interest in mining there.
It is possible the announcement of potentially supporting Bitcoin Unlimited created some bad blood with some of the ViaBTC miners. There are a lot of Bitcoin Core die-hards in the mining world, and they will not hesitate to switch pools if they dare to support a different branch of development. But for now, that is only speculation.
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