Security - the most part where miners plays important role. Without them, the security of Bitcoin technology would be weak and prone for attacks with bad actors. Bitcoin users don’t bother on this idea.
But miners keeps the checks and balance of the BTC ecosystem.
Warehouses can now cater Bitcoin mining that you are doing with your computer in a large scale. Those warehouses connects the hashing strategy thru Bitcoin mining pools.
The question now is “what is a bitcoin mining pool and how it affects the bitcoin ecosystem?”.
Bitcoin mining pools are collection of Bitcoin miners who have the same strategy and group up to get block solve and share on the same reward. The reward sharing will depend on their power contribution and the method that they are exercising towards Bitcoin mining.
While the idea of mining pool is astonishing, the downside also is that you are directly putting all your hash power to the pool owner. It can however be transferred to another pool as soon as the miner wants to shift to another pool.
While looking at the scale of each pool either it’s small or large or might be pointing all your power to the owner, it is also good to know if the owner uses it’s own power or they are just using third party in it.
Examples of pool companies using third party power are BitFury and KnCMiner where they are working with the mining but utilizing different power source.
DiscusFish/F2Pool
- popular as F2Pool
- China based
- 19.5% of all blocks
AntPool
- China based
- creator BitMain
- 18.5% of all blocks
BitFury Pool
- largest producers of hardware and chips
- mines 13% of all Bitcoins
- has 3 data centers in Georgia
- private mining pool
- hobby miners are welcome
- biggest Bitcoin miner of the world
BTCC
- China based
- 3rd largest in BTC exchange
- 11.5% of all blocks
BW Pool
- created 2014
- China based
- 8% of all blocks
KnCMiner
- Sweden based
- 6% of all blocks
- not a pool but mines in their own warehouses
Slush
- very first mining pool
- 5% of all blocks
21 Inc.
- California based
- sells low powered BTC miners
- 4% of the blocks
Eligius
- one of the first pools created
- 3% of all blocks
GHASH.IO
- once the largest pool that owns 50% of all blocks
- has been attack causes miners to shift with different pools
1.China
2.Georgia
3.Sweden
4.US
When segwit is activated, you will want to be able to mine and relay segwit-style blocks. The following mining software has been upgraded to support segwit.
Please note that software that supports the GetBlockTemplate (GBT) RPC must be upgraded to support the BIP9 and BIP145 changes to GBT. All the programs linked above that support GBT have been upgraded.
Segwit is already activated and enforced on testnet, so you may find it useful to test your infrastructure upgrade by mining with some small amount of hashrate on testnet. Alternatively, Bitcoin Core 0.13.1’s regression test mode (regtest) also supports segwit by default.