Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency network whose currency, BTC, is the most valuable, appears to have been invaded by an unknown miner. And the community has the new guest on their radar.
Unknown miner dominates
In the past few hours, the entity not only connected to the network, but also continued to mine several blocks and was rewarded with the precious 6.25 BTC.
What is intriguing is that trackers cannot find out the true identity of the miner who has usurped established pools such as Binance Pool, AntPool and even giant mining companies such as Foundry USA.
For the last day, the miner verified over 10 Bitcoin blocks, earning over 65 BTC worth over $1.7 million at cash rates.
While there is a chance that a “big” player is new to Bitcoin and may have connected thousands of mining rigs to stay competitive and successfully verify blocks, it is almost likely that the “unknown” entity is a mining pool.
In proof-of-work networks like Bitcoin, a group of miners, i.e. retail individuals who operate mining nodes, can band together and pool their computing power, called hash rate, into “pools.” Whenever they do this, they stand a chance of verifying a block of BTC transactions.
In return, the network automatically rewards them with not only the block rewards of 6.25 BTC, but also the fees associated with the block. While rare, rewards collected in a block can exceed 50% of the block reward distributed from the protocol level.
With the Bitcoin hash rate constantly rising and more miners pouring in, mining pools are dominating. However, different pools are tailored to the needs of different miners. Applicable fees, reliability and the size of their hash rate are some considerations that can also affect reputation. However, over the years, AntPool and ViaBTC are some of the biggest.
Is this F2Pool?
It is speculated that the “unknown” entity is F2Pool. The error appears on trackers because “Mempool’s attribution logic just misses them.”
Whether this will turn out to be true or false, will be seen later.
This is because attribution “depends on who the miner says they are. It would be easy to pretend to be another pool and not guaranteed that pool would notice and deny it was them”.
F2Pool is one of the oldest and largest mining pools in the world.
According to data from mempool.spacethe pool controls 8.19% of the total Bitcoin hash rate.
Although it is popular, recent data shows there may have been a hitch in the attribution logic. Trackers show that the last time F2Pool mined was at the end of May 24.
Feature image from Canva, chart from TradingView