One of the biggest mining pools in the market, known as Antpool – operated by the most important cryptocurrency mining company, Bitmain – announced that they will be reducing fees in order for other users to join the mining pool. The fees will be substantially reduced from 4% to zero.
This is a very important decision for the market. Why? Because Bitmain owns over 42% of the total Bitcoin hashrate. If it reaches 51% then it would be able to attack the network. At the moment is not clear why such a decision was made.
Bitmain owns Antpool, and BTC.com, the two most important mining pools in the market. BTC.com owns 25.2% of the hashrate, and Antpool 16.9%. Then, SlushPool follows with 10.7% and F2Pool with 10.5%.
The decision to divide the hashrate into two pools is a very useful decision that helps protecting the network in case an employee wants to exploit the hashrate, for example. But, both mining pools are owned by the same company, which means that there is one individual controlling the hashrate, Jihan Wu, Bitmain’s CEO.
Of course, if Bitmain is able to control 51% of the network, then, other miners would try to stop it by increasing their hashrate and investing in more mining equipments.
If a company like Bitmain would like to avoid having 51% control of the hashrate, then it would increase the fees for other miners to move to other mining pools and keep the market decentralized.
At the moment, Bitmain is one of the most important crypto mining hardware manufacturers around the world. According to some analysis, 80% of the ASIC miners in the market have been produced by this company. Furthermore, there are no clear competitors that could take part of the ASIC market. Samsung has announced its interest in participating in the market.
Never too late to join @AntPoolofficial, the income is increasing. No Fee for 3 months. Your income will increase 4%. What are you waiting for ? Join us and start your wonderful mining at @AntPoolofficial . https://t.co/SwceNO58Du
— AntPool (@AntPoolofficial) June 25, 2018
