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According to new research data that has been released through the course of January 2019, there has been a growing trend of unknown mining operations “processing blocks on the Bitcoin Core (BTC) network”.
This is because over the course of the past 10-12 months, established mining giants have started to lose a considerable share of their hashrate— thus allowing unknown elements to start dominating this domain.
A Deeper Look at the Matter
As we all know, the BTC mining industry is super competitive— so much so that the overall SHA-256 hashrate for major public blockchains has grown quite monumentally over the course of the last few years.
In this regard, a recent study by Diar has shown that secret mining entities have gradually been gaining more and more power by shifting the dominance of major known mining pools towards their operations.
As per the report:
“Unknown miners closed December having solved a whopping 22% of the total blocks up from 6% at the start of last year. The small miner exodus could be a possible positive for Bitcoin’s network security as smaller miners joined to the hip of large pools began turning off their computing power resulting in a decline in mining pool dominance.”
Some other key data worth remembering:
- Mining pools such as Btc.com, Antpool, and Viabtc have all seen their total hashrate percentage drop quite significantly over the past year.
- The above mentioned mining entities have witnessed a 55 percent increase in their total pooled resources.
- The three pools combined previously dominated a whopping 53 percent of the mining market (a number that has since shrunk to just around 39 percent).
A Resurgence of Mystery Miners Has Been Observed Recently
According to reports released by crypto analytics website Coinmetrics, following the parsing of the last 450,000 BTC blocks, it has become quite evident that there has been a massive resurgence in the number of unknown miners that currently exist within this domain.
To further elaborate on the matter, we can see that through 2015-17, most miners disclosed their identity along with the name of their pool, however, as per some recent studies, all of that has seemingly changed now:
“Through 2018, unknown miners picked up — This may be due to the waning importance of miner signaling due to the resolution of the Segwit saga, a newly-found appreciation for privacy, or the emergence of miners who have something to hide,”
Final Take
In closing out this article, it is worth mentioning that as things stand, mystery miners dominate more than 22% of the BTC chain and 17% of the BCH chain.
Also worth noting is the fact that ever since the BCH hard fork took place a couple of months back, there has been a “huge influx of unknown miners on both networks”.
Disclaimer
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