In a recent study conducted by pseudonymous researchers Mononaut and 0xB10C in April, it was confirmed that Bitmain had a significant influence on the bitcoin mining network. Further research has now revealed the extent of Bitmain’s control over ‘proxy’ mining pools.
While technically miners have the ability to switch between mining pools, the latest research suggests that many miners rarely deviate from using Bitmain-led work templates in practice.
Using a weighted similarity score analysis of transaction ordering and block templates across 37% of Bitcoin’s hashrate, it was found that several supposedly independent mining pools predominantly use Bitmain-templated work for their miners.
For more information, you can read the original research on how Bitcoin mining is centralized around Bitmain.
Specifically, Poolin and BTC.com were found to be 99% and 98% similar to AntPool, which is operated by Bitmain.
While these three mining pools show the highest level of similarity, there are other mining pools like Ultimus, Braiins, Binance, and Spider that also have a correlation of over 80% with the Bitmain-led trio.
Although Bitmain is well-known for manufacturing a majority of bitcoin mining machines, its role in the day-to-day operations of bitcoin mining pools has been brought into question by this research conducted by 0xB10C.
The ongoing research by 0xB10C and Mononaut clarifies that the resemblance of work across pools and the acceptance of block templates from Bitmain entities does not necessarily mean that Bitmain controls their operations.
In fact, miners often opt for Bitmain defaults and block templates for convenience rather than being directed to do so explicitly.
0xB10C is actively involved in monitoring the Bitcoin network through tools like miningpool-observer, peer-observer, and fork-observer. The researcher also receives philanthropic support from OpenSats.