The centralization of the community is even worse than it seems when you look intently. The founding father of the Ocean pool said this weekend that many small swimming pools are literally simply fronts for Bitmain. This allegation relies on three issues:

1. Some small swimming pools clearly use blocks truly ready by Antpool.
2. They share the identical custodian for the rewards earned at every block (Cobo).
3. An settlement exists to bail out swimming pools which are unfortunate (our article on this: Bitcoin – A cartel of swimming pools unveiled).

For the founding father of the Ocean pool, “Bitmain is not just behind Antpool; this company represents more than 50% of the blocks and manufactures over 90% of the machines used to mine bitcoins.”

Empty blocks

Relating to empty blocks, they’ve at all times existed. There have been 147 in 2023, representing 0.27% of all mined blocks.

The existence of empty blocks is because of the truth that a pool has two decisions when it finds a block:

• Ship a block containing the next transactions to its miners.
• First, ship an empty block containing solely the earlier block’s hash. The benefit is that this block arrives sooner. The earlier block’s hash is the one completely obligatory information for a miner to start out working.

Clarification:

The information miners hash (run by way of the SHA-256 algorithm) is within the header of a block. This header comprises six items of knowledge: Model quantity / Earlier block hash / Merkle tree root hash / Time stamp / Goal hash worth / Nonce.

The nonce (quick for “number only used once”) is a quantity miners differ frantically till they discover a legitimate block (i.e., a hash of this header that begins with a sure variety of zeros).

All this to say that rapidly receiving the earlier block’s hash permits miners to hash for a couple of additional seconds. And the actual fact is that blocks are typically discovered on this time-frame, leading to empty blocks.

Sure, some blocks are discovered simply seconds aside. Blocks usually are not discovered precisely each 10 minutes. It’s not unusual for a whole hour to move with out a block being discovered.

Fishy habits

We’re attending to the guts of the issue. Given the chances, it’s not regular for 10% of the blocks discovered by a pool to be empty.

The obvious unhealthy luck of Ocean has led to investigations concluding that some miners (antminers) take method too lengthy to interchange the empty block with the crammed block containing transactions.

However somewhat than a producing defect, it appears that evidently Bitmain has truly intentionally hindered its opponents. Right here’s the reason from @GrassFedBitcoin, the founding father of Ocean:

“Why aren’t empty blocks changed instantly after receiving blocks containing transactions?

As a result of Bitmain’s antminers are poor. What we didn’t know is that they had been deliberately poor. The antminers proceed to work on empty blocks – typically for greater than 60 seconds – regardless of having lengthy obtained the crammed block with transactions.

We initially thought the issue was with the design of the ASIC itself (the digital chip) and thus poor engineering by Bitmain. However it seems we had been unsuitable; this delay comes from the antminers’ firmware.

We all know this as a result of they simply launched a repair (for the S19 Ok Professional and XP fashions). However what are the chances that this repair will get launched proper after Ocean began publicly elevating questions? It’s clear that they had a repair and used it for their very own antminers.”

A severe risk to pool centralization

In abstract, an antminer is more likely to seek out an empty block as a result of it spends extra time engaged on empty blocks. Which has led some to say that the producer Bitmain sells machines designed to be much less environment friendly than these it makes use of for its personal operations.

That’s why MicroBT’s whatsminers and different producers’ ASICs don’t discover as many empty blocks…

Moreover, it goes past empty blocks:

“It’s not simply the empty blocks that take an eternity to get replaced. That is truly the case for all blocks. In actual fact, swimming pools continually replace the transactions contained in the block as extra profitable transactions are available in providing increased charges.

Think about an excellent profitable transaction seems. All swimming pools will instantly ship a brand new block to the tons of of 1000’s of miners who (due to Bitmain’s firmware) will ignore it for some time, besides the miners working with Antpool [which belongs to Bitmain’s nebula].

It’s not arduous to know Bitmain’s motivations, particularly since as time goes on, transaction charges naturally grow to be an more and more necessary a part of miners’ revenues.”

So, after the”Antbleed” and ASICBoost scandals, Bitmain is as soon as once more on the middle of criticism. Antbleed refers back to the well-known again door that allowed any antminer on the earth to be remotely shut down. Bitmain defended itself, claiming it was only a option to cease stolen ASICs. Besides the code was instantly mounted as soon as found…

One other well-known case includes the “ASICBoost” know-how. This provides an effectivity acquire by lowering the variety of calculations wanted to generate hashes. This system saves power and permits sooner hashing.

Let’s conclude by noting that the newest era of MicroBT miners are already outperforming Bitmain’s. Our article on this matter.

Additionally, don’t miss our article on pool centralization: Bitcoin and the pool risk.

Nicolas T.

Bitcoin, geopolitical, financial and power journalist.