Roger Ver’s Bitcoin.com mining pool users are mining Bitcoin Cash ABC in support of the ongoing contentious hard fork, and if they don’t like that, they’ll have to move to a different mining pool, according to an announcement posted on the dashboard of the Bitcoin.com mining interface.
Bitcoin.com mining allows users to connect their own mining hardware or to purchase hashrate from the company, effectively renting miners. “Cloud mining,” as it were, has a particularly bad reptuation in the Bitcoin world, but to date, there have been no reports of foul play regarding Bitcoin.com.
The pool boasts a regular hashrate of more than 400 petahashes for Bitcoin Core and has mined a total of more than 1700 blocks since its inception. Its success rate has been notably better in Bitcoin Cash, having mined more than 6000 blocks. Its normal BCH hashrate ranges quite a bit less than Bitcoin Core, meaning that Bitcoin.com will have a significant boost from diverting all its hashpower toward BCHABC. It should be noted that Bitcoin.com had only found a few blocks in BTC over the past few days, anyway. This will be good for users of Bitcoin ABC and if the value of Bitcoin ABC stays up, it can be good for miners affected, as well.
We can confirm that for today, at least, all of the hash associated with Bitcoin.com will be mining Bitcoin Cash ABC. According to Coin.dance, Bitcoin.com regularly mines more than 5% of the blocks in Bitcoin Cash.
What we will be learning today is how big a role Bitcoin.com will play in securing the new Bitcoin Cash ABC blockchain. Until September of 2013, Bitcoin Core’s hashrate was less than 1 PH/s. A lot of factors are involved when assessing the importance of hashrate. So long as Bitcoin Cash ABC has the same hashing algorithm as Bitcoin Cash SV and SV has more dedicated hashpower, there are potential security risks in that a rogue SV pool could choose to mine empty blocks on ABC or even conduct what are known as “51% attacks.”
Around 65% of the total Bitcoin Cash hash pool have announced their intention to mine on either pool, with SV Pool and Coingeek representing around 58% of overall hash and very clearly supporting the SV fork. Where the other pools in the below chart go with their hashrate will be determined over the coming hours and days. The odds are high that some pools and individual miners with significant hash will chain surf, automatically changing between chains according to the difficulty to win blocks and, importantly, the actual monetary reward to be had by finding blocks.
CCN will montior the situation and report notable changes. Certainly interested parties are on the edge of their site, curious how the big mining game will play out, and how Bitcoin Cash SV will fare given a lack of economic and user support – at time of writing, Bitcoin Cash ABC still had a massive lead in terms of node count or number of users on their software. This is less important when it comes to mining but more important when it comes to the economic viability of the chain. As reported yesterday, however, speculative trading on SV had seen a serious uptick.
