On Sunday, August 20, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network dropped its mining difficulty another notch down to 7 percent of BTC’s difficulty, on block 479808. Since then another mining pool has joined in on processing blocks on the BCH chain as the mining pool BTC.com has found its first block on the network.
The game theory for miners begins to get more interesting as the BCH network has become 115 percent more profitable to mine than the Bitcoin blockchain. This is due to the digital currency’s price which is hovering between the $760-790 range and because of the difficulty drop down to 7 percent of the Bitcoin network’s difficulty. Blocks are being processed rapidly now on the BCH chain as each block is being found every 3-7 minutes. BCH average hashrate per day has spiked significantly over the past four days to roughly 10 percent of the Bitcoin network’s seven exahash.
The mystery miner is now capturing fewer blocks over the past few days as other mining pools have picked up the pace. Mining pools like pool.Bitcoin.com, Bitclub, and Viabtc especially have been processing a lot more blocks recently, spreading out hashrate distribution. Viabtc has mined over 27 percent of the last 144 BCH blocks found, and the mystery miner now has only 68 percent. So far since the fork 1507 blocks have been mined and the fork is currently 1349 blocks behind the BTC chain. However, at the current speed of processing blocks and with the BCH network difficulty so low the chain should start to catch up.
BTC.com Mining Pool Joins In on BCH Mining, Other Pools to Follow This Week
In addition to the network difficulty changes, another mining pool has joined in on processing BCH blocks. The mining pool BTC.com mined its first block, 480002, on August 20, being the first pool to join since Bitclub last week. Additionally, according to Trustnodes the large mining pool BTC.top will begin mining BCH on Monday, August 21. Jiang Zhuo’er, BTC.TOP’s founder told the publication that there would be an option for miners to choose between BTC or BCH from the pool’s settings.
The new pool follows statements made on August 17 by Bitmain founder and Antpool operator, Jihan Wu, saying “Antpool will start to provide bitcoin cash mining option after at least one of Segwit supporter/fan pools start to mining bitcoin cash.” This means as more mining pools jump in on processing BCH blocks Jihan Wu’s Antpool may join in on mining the digital currency in the near future. A couple of days later Jihan Wu made some more interesting statements about BCH and BTC as well.
“If you want to kill bitcoin cash, please pitch Brian Armstrong to list bitcoin cash. Because lots of investors at Coinbase want to sell their bitcoin cash,” Jihan Wu states on Twitter. In another statement, Jihan Wu gives his Twitter followers a thought-provoking analogy.
BCH supporters are looking forward to this week as they believe there will be some more action with the digital currency’s hashrate and the token’s market price. At press time the BCH price has dipped well below this past Friday’s $960 highs and is currently hovering in the $760 price territory.