2 mining pools control more than 53% of the hashrate of the bitcoin network

On the evening of December 28, 2022, the computing power of the bitcoin network (BTC) increased to 300 Eh/s (hash/sec). Three days before its growth on December 25, the BTC hashrate fell to a minimum of 170 Eh/s, which happened due to a power outage by bitcoin miners from Texas to remove excess load from the network.

Most of the SHA256 hashrate returned on the same day — by 12:00 am ET, its indicator had grown to 240 Eh/s. After a jump above 300 Eh/s on Wednesday, statistics for Thursday showed that the total hashrate of the network was kept at the level of 250.57 Eh/s.

In addition, over the past three days, more than 50% of the total hashrate of the network belongs to only two mining pools.

Hashrate distribution data for Bitcoin pools as of December 29, 2022 (statistics for 3 days)

In this regard, accusations of centralization poured into the network. As of December 29, the Foundry USA mining pool controlled 31.45% of the total hashrate, and Antpool - 21.87% of the current 250.57 Eh/s— Together, both Antpool and Foundry pools control 53.32% of the BTC hashrate.

On December 29, F2pool accounted for about 14.25% of the hashrate, while Viabtc accounted for about 9.34%. Foundry, Antpool and F2pool together hold about 67.57% of the hashrate, and if you include Viabtc here, then together these four will occupy about 76.91% of the total hashrate over the past three days.

Only 12 known mining pools allocate SHA256 hashrate for the BTC network, and 5.64 Eh/s or 2.46% of the global network is associated with unknown miners.

After an increase in the complexity of bitcoin mining by 3.27% at block 768,096 on December 19, 2022, a noticeable decrease in this indicator is expected on January 3, 2023. Current estimates show that the difficulty may decrease by 7.39-8.1%.