21 Companies That Control Bitcoin

Startups like Coinbase, Circle, Blockchain, and BitPay are some of the most famous companies in the Bitcoin industry, and are well known to everyone. But the more important part of the Bitcoin industry is arguably the miners, who are the backbone of the Bitcoin industry, and their work ensures the integrity of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin transactions are conducted through the blockchain, a decentralized public ledger that records every transaction that takes place on the Internet. In order to promote the development of the blockchain, users have the opportunity to earn bitcoins from it, which has also triggered a scramble by miners to assemble more sophisticated and powerful equipment to mine new bitcoins.

Some people work alone, while others join public mining pools to combine resources to increase the probability of mining Bitcoin, and some large companies are also committed to mining. However, the top miners change every week. We ranked some large mining companies based on data from August 5 to August 12 provided by Bitcoin network analysis company Blocktrail.

twenty one
Unknown entity — 0.1%
The "unknown entity" currently accounts for 0.1% of the Bitcoin network hashing power. This "unknown entity" may be a private organization that conducts mining in secret, or it may be an unknown public mining pool.

20
Unknown entity — 0.28%
Another unknown entity.

19
P2Pool — 0.47%
This relatively small mining pool was founded in 2011 by programmer Forrest Voight. It calls itself the "most transparent mining pool in the world" because it makes all its data publicly available. As of September 2014, it has mined more than 78,000 Bitcoins, worth £13.4 million or $20.9 million at current prices.

18
Solo CKPool — 0.47%
Solo CKPool is a public mining pool created by Australian anesthesiologist and programmer Con Kolivas and another partner Kano.

The mining pool was created in September 2014 and also offers a separate "personal" mining pool for adventurous people. This means that users can pool their resources to mine Bitcoin blocks faster and more efficiently than if they were to do it alone, but only the user who finds the block will receive the reward.

This specifically refers to CKPool's personal mining pool.

17
Unknown entity — 0.66%
A third unknown entity accounts for 0.5% of the total hash power.

16
Kano CKPool — 0.66%
This mining pool was mentioned above, and here we are referring to the standard mining pool.

15
BitMinter — 0.76%
BitMinter was founded by Geir Harald Hansen in 2011 and is a veteran mining pool. According to Bitcoin Wiki, the digital currency Wikipedia, the mining pool has servers in Europe and the United States.

14
Babaochi — 0.85%
Babaochi is one of the small mining pools in China, where bitcoin is booming. The pool also mines Litecoin, another popular digital currency.

13
BitClub Network — 1.33%
Unlike other mining pools, BitClub Network did not disclose its founder, only stating that the mining pool is operated by a "team of programmers, digital mining experts, entrepreneurs and MLM experts from all over the world."

MLM is the abbreviation of Multi-Level Marketing, which means multi-level direct sales, which means that each user gets bonuses by adding a new user, and gets bonuses by adding new users, and so on. Multi-level direct sales are controversial because they are similar to pyramid schemes, but BitClub Network insists that it is legal and not a "Ponzi scheme."

For some users, BitClub Network is a cloud mining pool, that is, users do not need to own hardware equipment, they can pay to rent equipment provided by BitClub. However, miners with their own equipment can also join the network.

12
Unknown entity — 1.42%
The fourth largest unknown entity accounts for more than 1% of the Bitcoin hash power distribution.

11
Unknown — 1.9%
Refers to all unknown entities that attempted to mine blocks on the network in the last week. (Other small mining pools and individuals who did not mine blocks also exist).

This includes individual miners, mining pools and organizations that are too small to register.

10
Ghash.io — 1.99%
Ghash.io was founded in July 2013 and became famous for its success last year. In June 2014, Ghash.io once controlled 51% of the Bitcoin network. This kind of control is undoubtedly a threat to Bitcoin. When the scale is too large, the power of miners is also greater, so that they can rewrite the blockchain at will, which may seriously affect the stability of the Bitcoin network.

Since then, Ghash.io’s hashing power has declined and now accounts for only 2%. Jeffrey Smith, the company’s chief information officer, is also a spokesman for the company. Ghash.io also operates a bitcoin exchange, CEX.io.

9
21 Inc. — 3.79%
21 Inc announced in March 2015 that it had received $116 million (about £74 million), becoming the company with the most funding among Bitcoin startups. Investors include Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, where 21 Inc CEO Balaji Srinivasan was a partner.

Despite the company’s tight-lipped nature about its business, it has received a significant amount of funding. In May, the company unveiled its main goal of embedding bitcoin network hardware in consumer products, as many predicted.

21Inc does not offer public mining pools and does not yet provide chips, but its private hardware currently accounts for nearly 4% of the hash power.

8
Slush — 4.08%
Slush Mining Pool was established in November 2010 and is the world's first public mining pool. It still holds a prominent position today. The official name of Slush is Bitcoin Pooled Mining.

In real life, Slush refers to Marek Palatinus, a programmer from the Czech Republic.

7
KnCMiner — 4.27%
KnCMiner is a Swedish mining hardware company. For many years, mining Bitcoin with standard computer hardware was not cost-effective due to computer processing power, so a large number of miners in public mining pools purchased mining machines from companies like KnCMiner.

KnCMiner received a $15 million Series B investment from Accel Partners in February 2015. The company claims to provide green energy and has data centers in Iceland, Finland and Sweden.

6
Eligius — 4.83%
Eligius was founded in April 2011 and is a public mining pool in North America. According to CryptoCoinsNews, the operator of Eligius, Luke Dashjr, is a Catholic who has written religious messages on the blockchain, the public ledger that records all Bitcoin transactions.

The pool's namesake, Saint Eligius, is the patron saint of goldsmiths and coin collectors.

5
Biwang Mining Pool — 7.68%
Biwang is another Chinese mining pool. Despite its size, it is little known outside of China. In July 2015, Biwang made a rare public statement when it co-signed a Reddit post in support of increasing the block size. Block size has long been a technical issue of debate in the Bitcoin community.

4
Bitcoin China Mining Pool — 13.74%
Although BTC China is a newcomer to the mining pool industry, having just launched its mining pool in late 2014, it is one of the largest players in the field. This growth is due to BTC China being the largest Bitcoin trading platform in China, and BTC China also provides other digital currency solutions.

Founded in 2011, it is currently led by Bobby Lee, who became CEO in 2013.

3
BitFury — 16.4%
BitFury is the most funded mining company in the bitcoin industry, raising $20 million (£12.8 million) in July 2015. According to CoinDesk, this is BitFury's third round of funding in two years, and its total funding has now reached $60 million (£38.4 million).

BitFury was founded by Valery Vavilov, a native of Latvia. BitFury does not have a public mining pool, but has private mining pools in Finland, Iceland and the Republic of Georgia. Despite its impressive achievements in the mining industry, Vavilov insisted that "we are not a mining company. I don't like the word mining."

“We are a technology company, but we are currently focused on bitcoin,” he told CoinDesk. “Our goal over the next three to five years is to move into different areas where computing power is valuable. We plan to expand into other areas of human knowledge that require a lot of computing power.”

2
F2Pool — 16.49%
Officially known as F2Pool, the Chinese mining pool is also known as Discus Fish because of its trademark, the Discus fish. The mining pool was founded by Wang Chun and Mao Shixing, who Wang Chun described in a September 2014 CoinDesk interview as "two Chinese technology enthusiasts." According to Business Insider, a spokesperson once said that F2Pool does not have its own hardware and that all its hashing power comes from users.

In July this year, F2Pool generated the largest Bitcoin transaction in history to resolve a malicious attack of small Bitcoin transactions that blocked the network.

1
AntPool — 17.82%
AntPool is a mining pool owned by Bitmain, a Chinese mining machine company headquartered in Beijing. AntPool claims to own 56% of the world's mining machine technology and is the world's largest cloud miner.

Bitmain was founded in the first quarter of 2013, and its co-founder Jihan Wu is the CEO of Bitmain.