Category Archives: Mining

F2Pool Lashes Out When Called Out For SPV Mining

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Discus FishLate last week some minor drama occurred on the old forum when a certain large SPV mining pool which has caused headaches for Bitcoin's network stability before had some of their IP addresses published publicly.

Bitcointalk user Kano revealed that a part of the SPV mining process used by F2Pool (nee. Discus Fish) and likely others involves connecting miners to other pools in order to more rapidly detect block changes and generate an empty block header to feed to their miners sooner than they could otherwise. The connected listening "miners" at least as implemented by F2Pool at the time of this outing did not actually mine on the connected pools making their detection easier. Continue reading →

Biggest Difficulty Increase In a Year

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The Bitcoin network difficulty has now climbed to 72,722,780,643 which is an increase of 10.44% over the previous increase. The previous difficulty was 65,848,255,179.7 which arrived via a 5.77% increase the highest in six months. Today's increase is the most substantial jump in more than a year with the closest recent increase of this magnitude being a 10.05% increase on November 5th of 2014, with the previous greater increase coming all the way back on September 25th 2014. New all time high difficulty figures come with astounding regularity, but the magnitude of these last two increases is notable.

Bitcoin Difficulty Jumps By Six-Month Record

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Today's difficulty adjustment to 65`848`255`179.7, a rise of 5.77%, is notable as both the tenth consecutive increase — a streak the likes of which has not occurred for nearly a year — and the largest increase since April 5th, when difficulty rose by 5.84%. This ongoing rise should come as no surprise: naive estimates (archived) place the next reward halving on July 24th, so work must accelerate to realize the market's prediction of July 20th.

Small Mining Firm Takes Regulatory Compliance Pill, Moves to the Dark Side

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A small mining firm referring to itself as HashingSpace Corporation has pushed out a press release bragging that they have retained the services of IdentityMind Global to implement anti money laundering, know your customer, and other criminal regulatory services antithetical to Bitcoin. IdentityMind Global claims to have relationships with "more than 40" "virtual currency businesses" most of which serve as interfaces between fiat currency and Bitcoin. HashingSpace professes to primarily be a mining and miner hosting operation that also just happens to provide other services like a "wallet" and Bitcoin ATMs. On social media earlier this summer HashingSpace has claimed to possess 5 petahashes of mining hardware, an amount eerily similar to that claimed by GAW Miners before their collapse.

Many Pools Rejecting XT in Favor of Other Undefined Fork

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A handful of large mining pools including those operated by BTCChina and Bitfury have rejected Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's XTCoin proposal in favor of a different forking change which would leave them still more influence on their forked blockchain. The pools currently authoring blocks which support the proposal known as BIP 100 currently compromise a bit more than 50% of the hashrate, an amount which if BIP 100 actually had any working implementations would be insufficient to trigger a switch without an attack orphaning all blocks without a "triggering" vote.

At the moment BIP 100 exists as a proposal requesting comments, so it is not possible at the time of this writing to describe any of its points with certainty beyond votes for it being a clear repudiation of the XT effort. As BIP 100 exists now it preserves the 32 MB maximum message size as a hard explicit limit which the blocksize limit must stay under on a BIP 100 forked chain. With so many particulars of BIP 100 not being set in stone yet, it is not unlikely that support for it may wane though at the moment support is likely to persist as a repudiation of the XT effort to hijack Bitcoin.

Concerns for the Toomim Brothers Mining

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BIP-101 requires 750 of the last 1000 consecutive blocks to have a version bits set to 0x20000007 in hex to trigger a hard fork to remove the block size limit. Qntra recently published an article indicating the negligible miner support for XT, of which Jonathan Toomim commented the brothers' mining initiative would be supporting BIP-101 with blocks they solve. This lead into a brief investigation of the Toomim brothers who use GPG, yet are not in the Web of Trust. Continue reading →

Mining Difficulty Advances For The Fourth Consecutive Time

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Amongst a coup attempt which fell flat on its face, the Bitcoin mining difficulty continues to strive forward by way of reaching a new all time high of 54,256,630,328, an increase of 2.95% over the August 8th adjustment. Today's change also marks the fourth consecutive increase in the mining difficulty – a first for 2015.

A total of 3 BIP 101 blocks have been mined to date, representing an inconsequential 0.3% of the last 1000 blocks mined.