Another mining pool is online? BU support rate has reached 20%

Recently, Bitcoin enthusiast cnLedger revealed on his Twitter that a mining pool called CANOE has quietly gone online.

The reason for the attention is that its block version is marked with bitcoin unlimited, which means that bitcoin unlimited has obtained the support of another mining pool.

Li Ang, the head of CANOE mining pool, is an old miner who entered the Bitcoin industry in 2013. He entered the mining industry in 2015 and started to build his own mining farm to deploy large-scale Bitcoin mining in 2016. Currently, the 22P computing power connected to CANOE mining pool is all self-owned computing power, and its physical mining farm is located in Sichuan.

In addition to the physical mine in Sichuan, the mine in Xinjiang is also being deployed and is expected to be powered on in early to mid-March. According to the official introduction, the new mine is located in Tacheng District, Bukesaier County, Shituoluoge Town, Hefeng Industrial Park, Xinjiang, with a capacity of 130,000 kilowatts. The project name is Electric Gold Blockchain, which is jointly planned and built by Bitmain, CANOE team and other relevant investors. After completion, it will be the world's largest Bitcoin mine, and its software and hardware facilities will also be at the forefront of the world.

The essence of supporting BU is to protect the interests of miners

Talking about the reason why the new mining pool supports the BU expansion plan, Li Ang admitted that the current congestion of the Bitcoin network is the direct reason for the expansion. The user scale and transaction scale of Bitcoin are expanding. Currently, the number of transactions per second has reached 3, and the overall user scale has increased several times compared with previous years. At the same time, "now a block reward is 12.5 bitcoins, and the handling fee is almost one bitcoin. This is because many people pay more handling fees in order to complete their transactions earlier." (Reference article: Bitcoin transaction fees soared 1200% in two years)

In the Lightning Network solution, large transactions that require more handling fees are conducted on the main chain, while other small transactions are conducted on the side chain. The Lightning Network provider can charge the handling fees for side chain transactions, while those who want to trade on the main chain have to pay more and more handling fees. "BS (Blockstream) supports the Core team to take the Lightning Network route, considering the interests of its own company and team, and not the interests of the majority of miners. At the same time, this solution cannot solve the long-term problem of Bitcoin network congestion, and it is also contrary to the original intention of Bitcoin."

Talking about the current stalemate of the expansion situation, Li Ang said that although the number of miners is gradually increasing and large funds are flowing into the mining field, a large number of miners do not understand the differences in the results of various expansion plans and lack technical knowledge, which is why many miners have an indifferent attitude. "We are deeply involved in mining, so we want to guide miners to protect their own interests to the greatest extent, and building a mining pool is also based on this consideration."

Li Ang believes that

Supporting capacity expansion is essentially to protect the interests of miners. Mining is the cornerstone of the entire Bitcoin network and industry, and protecting the interests of miners is also to protect the entire Bitcoin network.

In Li Ang's opinion, the current popularity of Bitcoin is far from what the community expects. The current number of Visa transactions per second is several thousand times that of the Bitcoin network. In the future, Bitcoin will reach or even exceed the transfer speed between banks, and the number of transactions processed by Bitcoin per second will increase in the future.

The motivation for mining depends on profits, but since the output of Bitcoin is halved every four years, the number of Bitcoins rewarded in blocks is getting smaller and smaller, so new profits need to be injected. The incentive at this time is transaction fees.

"Therefore, expanding block capacity, increasing the number of transactions, gradually replacing block rewards with transaction fees, and allowing miners to have sufficient motivation to maintain Bitcoin's computing power base are the fundamental ways to ensure the healthy development of the entire ecosystem," said Li Ang.

However, Li Ang believes that other more appropriate expansion solutions are not ruled out. "We support expansion. It's not that BU's solution is the best, but expansion is necessary."

Regarding the rumors on the Internet about the relationship between CANOE and other mining pools, Li Ang emphasized that "the ownership and decision-making power of the mining pool are independent, and the choice of the BU plan is entirely based on our understanding of Bitcoin and consideration of the interests of miners."

BU computing power share gradually increases

Since the second half of last year, BU's support rate has been gradually increasing. In recent days, the share of computing power supporting BU has hovered around 20%. According to Coin.Danc statistics, in terms of the support rate of mining pools for various proposals, isolated verification is 25.6%, while BU is 20%.

Chart source: https://coin.dance/blocks

In addition to CANOE, BTC.top is also a recently launched mining pool that directly expressed its support for BU. BTC.top was launched in December 2016 and currently accounts for about 7% of the computing power of the entire network.

So far, the mining pools that have publicly expressed support for the BU expansion plan include Bitcoin.com led by Roger Ver, ViaBTC, SlushPool, Indian mining pool giant GBMiners, and the recently launched BTC.top and CANOE.