The reason the Bitcoin.com mining pool chose to run the Bitcoin Unlimited software is that it doesn’t limit network throughput, allowing miners to set their own block size. Essentially, Bitcoin Unlimited lets the market decide the block size limit.
As first published by Ver on the bitcoin forum, the mining pool recently mined its tenth block and has nearly 1 percent of the global hashrate. Additionally, the pool has been able to pay miners 6 percent more than other mining pools.
At press time, the Bitcoin.com mining pool holds around .6 percent of the global hashrate.
Bitcoin.com Mining Pool Stirs the Pot
One of the more controversial aspects of the new mining pool is whether it will support Segregated Witness (SegWit).
SegWit is a soft-fork of the bitcoin network, which includes a variety of features. The main purpose for SegWit is to fix transaction malleability, but one of the side benefits (among others) is that SegWit provides the Bitcoin network with an optimization by moving bitcoin transaction signatures to a new witness section of a transaction, thereby freeing up space in the transaction.
This extra free space allows for more transaction throughput, effectively allowing for a larger dataset to be sent on the Bitcoin network. Unfortunately, the change is a one-time fix which doesn’t scale bitcoin to larger levels needed for bitcoin to grow on a greater magnitude.
When asked in the bitcoin subreddit if the Bitcoin.com mining pool will try to prevent SegWit from activating, Ver said “Undecided, but keeping an open mind. I look forward to discussing it this weekend in Milan.”
Rick Falkvinge Comments on the Update
Swedish Pirate Party founder and bitcoin enthusiast Rick Falkvinge also chimed in on the new milestone, saying “If this can prevent Segwit activation, we won’t have to deal with a crapton of technical debt down the line.”
When challenged on his comment about technical debt, Falkvinge said, “I’m developing solutions based on bitcoin, so perhaps I’m more acutely aware of this pain point than people who are developing bitcoin itself. But this writeup is more to the point.”
Other pools are also running Bitcoin Unlimited, where support for bigger or flexible block sizes is in more demand. Chinese mining pool ViaBTC recently said that they are going to be running Bitcoin Unlimited as well. Although the pool is still fairly new, it already commands an 11 percent market share of all the bitcoin mining pools.
