Monthly reports on Bitcoin Mining Pool distribution

I've been keeping an eye on the Bitcoin Mining Pool distribution lately, and honestly, it's looking way more decentralized than it used to be. No single pool is holding more than 18% of the hashrate right now. I checked out some stats from btc.com and coin.dance, and it's cool to see new pools popping up and gaining traction. For instance, Binance pool is making some moves with about 7% of the hashrate in the last 24 hours. The largest pools are still mainly in China though. What’s your take on the rapid growth of Binance pool? Honestly, after what CZ said about the rollback back in May, I'm a bit uneasy seeing their pool expand so quickly. They've climbed to the 7th largest now.

I currently use F2Pool. I was attracted to Binance pool as they were 'offering' a better pay-out which always seemed to track above other pool's quoted pay-outs, so I decided to try it out over a period of 5 days. At the time of trial, this was the quoted payout: F2Pool: 0.00000825 per TH/s Binance: 0.00000845 per TH/s I run 5PH of gear, so the theoritical payouts: F2Pool: 0.04125 BTC per 24h Binance: 0.04225 BTC per 24h For the trial, I used 5 x Whatsminer M31S+ 82T on each pool (setting a temporary test account in F2pool for these miners, so as not to confuse earnings with the rest of my gear). All 10 x miners were started and stopped at the same time. At the end of the trial, the total earnings were as follows: F2Pool: 0.022061 BTC / $209.58 Binance: 0.02196194 BTC / $208.64 So Binance actually paid less, despite 'promising' a higher payout per TH/s.

but they are meaningless tests as simply reflect the results of the pools luck for 5 days.

Now do a pie chart of pool by operating country and see your decentralization results. Any PPS score isn’t really dependent on luck unless maybe fpps where they average txs fee with reward. I’ll be very interested to see how LP shapes up once commitments hit our minimum in regard to “profitability” measures. Luck and tx fees will drive our result certainly.

These are both FPPS pools that quote a fixed payout based on your hashrate, so why should luck affect the payout?

the luck of hitting a block with a fee of .5 vs .4 both pools give a part of the fees so if 1 pool hit 10 blocks with fees of .5 and the other block hit 10 blocks with fees of .4 the block that was lucky enough to hit the higher fee blocks will pay more. f2pool binance viabtc all give some fee money back no one has control of the fees of the blocks they hit (not quite true) so the very small differences are entirely up to the luck of the fees for a block. down the road 2024 this will become more pronounced. blocks --------rewards----fees 640157.         6.25.        1.06672 640156          6.25         0.79108 640155.         6.25.        0.70532 640154.         6.25.        0.76962 last 4 blocks you can give a more accurate number for your 5 day test find every block each of your pools made look here https://www.blockchain.com/explorer lets say they made 30 blocks each and the fee average was.   0.7 for binance while the fee average was  0.8 for f2pool the fact that f2pool paid more was simple due to fee luck. lets say both pools had exactly 0.7 in fees. your conclusion would be correct lets say binance did 0.8 in fees and f2pool did 0.7 in fees it would indicate binance is a bit sleazy. So at the moment now we know f2pool paid better yes we do not know which pool had better fee luck. Fee luck will be the newest 'cool' factor for calculating how good a pool is. when rewards were 50 fees did not matter much when rewards were 25 fees did not matter much when rewards were 12.5 fees started to matter now rewards are 6.25 fees are important fee luck is more important then ever fee luck can be manipulated but this is a complex matter this link can help you to understand ways that fee luck can be manipulated. https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator every hour you can push 100 free tx ids they will go to the next viabtc block. you can also pay extra to push a tx id. Someone could easily  push 25 transactions on viabtc and pay 0.01 each to do so. that would add 0.25 to the fees.  I have a sticky that explains how fees can be played with by large pools. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2634505.msg26809430#msg26809430 I am sure we will see a variation of that sticky thread  along with viabtc tx accelerator concept I just mentioned. As we move on this year and towards 2024.

That all makes sense, thank you. So to make it a fair test, I guess I could look up the fee rewards for the blocks F2Pool and Binance Pool found during my test and bring those into the equation.

yeah find the average fee per block since the amount of blocks hit does not matter  the amount of fees does not matter. the average fee per each block would be the key. In theory if both pools are trying to do it correctly then f2pool should have had a better average fee per block I am interested to see what really happened.

The meaning of decentralization is really subjective here, one can assume it's cetnerlized because probably 70% of the pools are Chinese based, I could go to as far as pointing out the fact that 99% of the hashpower comes form mining gears made in China, and probably 2/3 of that comes from the same exact company (Bitmain), so true decentralization doesn't really exist in life, anything that has to do with wealth/profit/money can't be truly decentralization, there is however a different degree of decentralization, to me as long as not a single entity owns above 40% of the total hashrate, things should be fine, also pool distribution isn't as crucial as the actual physical ownership of the mining gears, if pool x does something stupid, it will be a matter of time before miners move to another pool, but if someone has access to 60% of the actual gears, it will take time to recover, a hard form will be needed, we will probably switch to different algo and after all that BTC might never recover, so that what worries the me most. OP, aside from what others stated, you need to know which pools are owned by the same person/s, for an example, Btc.com and Antpool are owned by Bitmain, Bitmain are also the largest investor in Viabtc, so in theory, those 3 pools are owned by Bitmain.

Unfortunately that can only be done by the pool operators. They are the ones that can see the IPs their miners connect from, and make an educated guess of their geographical location. Of course not every pool is going to want to reveal (or even collect) this info. From a pure speculative point of view, find out where in the world electricity is cheaper, and that's where you'll likely find the large farms.

It is true that most pools are located in China. Do we know what pools exactly are owned by Bitmain? I tried to find that information but I only found some rumors and not proven facts.

My comment  was on ownership of the pools. What also affects decentralization is the push for vertical “integration” which is buzz word for monopoly. One thing people miss are exchanges and their local as well. Where companies like Binance make it more apparent in this avenue as selling coin is important to miners for operational cost. Though I’m not certain on the operating country of exchanges I feel it’s important to consider where all the fee money is going that users provide to pools, to exchanges. Essentially my take is decentralization is a unicorn but users can do what they can to disperse this now multi billion dollar industry as close to their local economy as possible if they do actually care about any sort of decentralization, or specifically further centralization.

Facts: Bitmain owns: -Antpool and BTC.com Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmain Bitmain openly admits ownership of both pools. - Bitmain invested 2.9M dollars with Viabtc Source: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/viabtc-series-a--58443cc6#section-overview Viabtc also happened to launch BCH fork which is oneway or the other Bitmain's coin, it's pretty safe to assume that Bitmain has the final say in Viabtc, I learned these information recently, and I stopped mining at Viabtc despite the fact that it is indeed a solid pool. I sadly went back to viabtc after a short while of testing many other pools, nothing was half as good, i will indeed leave viabtc for good once another good pool is found. Rumors: Poolin is owned by a Bitmain's former employees, conspiracy theories suggest that bitmain still has control over them, however, they are actually fighting in court over Poolin mining pool, so it's unlikely that the co-founders of Poolin are "controlled" by Bitmain anymore.

https://coin.dance https://btc.com Here is the latest update from Bitcoin mining pools, and we can see that Binance pool is still growing and it is now around 10% from total hashrate or around 12,468 PH/s. That means that now they are in top five pools, and they can easily climb to second or third place. Total hashrate is around 133.40 EH/s and it is till growing.

Hate to say this but binance offers better than other pools epecially fees, initially they offer zero fees and lesser than other mining pools, If I have some of equipments maybe I'll do participate their pool due to this advantage and maybe just maybe others do the same. Though it might be hard for them to top the 2-3 largest pools coz afaik these top 3 has largest and miners with their own company's miner rigs especially poolin.

It is not that hard to see what they are doing with zero and low fees. They want to become one of the largest Bitcoin pools like they are doing with everything leading to more centralization. They only need 2% - 3% more to climb up, and that is not so hard to imagine, but Huobi is ready for fight also.

mikeywith pointed it out very clearly. Most of bitcoin mining pools are located in China and operated by Chinese companies. Base on geographical locations, you can call it as centralization and the risks of government take-over is not impossible by CPCC. The total hashrates on network came from Bitman's mining pools were more than 51% years ago but to avoid community complain and bad impacts on price of bitcoin, they splited their pools. There are risks if Chinese mining pools make cooperations and have net hashrates up to more than 51%. However, they don't want to create bad impacts on bitcoin price or create a worldwide fear on bitcoin, replay attacks. If those things happen, the adoption of bitcoin might be destroyed and might not be recovered after that. Mining pools or Bitman don't need catastrophy on bitcoin. Binance pool, they can grow more in hashrates and move up to top mining pools but why is it important? Binance can not get their hashrates to 51% of the network. They can make cooperations with other pools but it is already cleared by mikeywith. The risk comes from combination of biggest pools and not come from a single pool, Binance, Huobi or any pool.

https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart There was a significant reduction of hashrate in last few days and people speculate it was due to moving of miners in China better locations. We can now see that Binance pool took the 5th place with over 10% of total hashrate in last 3 days based on btc.com statistics 1   Poolin   14.77 %   18.46 EH/s 2   F2Pool   13.85 %   17.31 EH/s 3   BTC.com   12.62 %   15.77 EH/s 4   AntPool   11.08 %   13.85 EH/s 5   Binance     10.15 %   12.69 EH/s    And if we look at last 24h Binance is 3rd place with over 13% of hashrate 1   F2Pool   17.39 %   21.74 EH/s 2   BTC.com   13.04 %   16.30 EH/s 3   Binance     13.04 %   16.30 EH/s

There is one controversial Blockseer Bitcoin Mining Pool that is started to censor transactions from blacklisted wallets. This pool also requires all miners to pass KYC procedure! Blockseer is first North America bitcoin mining pool that will meet all US Government compliance. They are located in San Francisco and have parent company DMG located in Canada. This is alert for everyone, and we should not allow this to spill over on other pools. Website and info: https://dmgblockchain.com/ https://stockhouse.com/news/press-releases/2020/10/29/dmg-s-subsidiary-blockseer-launches-bitcoin-mining-pool-focused-on-good

Much as I don't like crypto theft and money laundering, This move is not good for the Bitcoin Network at all. Imagine your transaction getting ignored just because the inputs are from suspicious sources you have no idea about. What if miners just decided to stand in solidarity and abandon or boycott the said mining pool for other much better mining pools