2 Bitcoin Mining Pools Command More than 53% of BTC Total Hashrate

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After a number of Texas-based bitcoin mining operations temporarily shut down on December 25, 2022, Bitcoin’s hashrate increased from the low 170 exahash/second (EH/s), to the high 300 exahash range. Three-day hashrate distribution statistics from Dec. 29, 2022 show that two mining pools control more than half of the global hashrate.
2 Mining Entities Produce More Than Half of the Global Hashrate. Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Expected To Decline Significantly in 5 days
On the evening of December 28, 2022, the computational processing power behind Bitcoin (BTC), jumped to 300 EH/s. Three days prior to the rise, BTC’s hashrate fell to a low point of 170 EH/s Dec. 28, 2022 when Texas-based bitcoin miners cut their hashpower in an effort to relieve the grid of any excess load.
The majority of the SHA256 hashpower returned on the same day. Bitcoin.com News reported that it had climbed back to 240 EH/s at 12:00 p.m. ET. After Wednesday’s jump above 300EH/s, statistics for Thursday show that the total network hashrate is now at 250.57 EH/s. Two mining pools have captured more that half of the network’s total havehrate over the past three days.

This has led to criticisms of the network and accusations this week of centralization. Foundry USA, the mining pool, controls 31.45%. Antpool commands 21.87%. The current 250.57 EH/s was posted on Thursday morning (ET). Antpool and Foundry control 53.32% of total BTC hashrate between them.
F2pool holds 14.25% of total hashrate, while Viabtc holds 9.34%. Foundry, Antpool and F2pool account for 67.57% of total hashrate, while Viabtc commands around 76.91%. Only 12 mining pools have SHA256 hashrate for the BTC chain. 5.64 EH/s, or 2.46% of global network, is associated with unknown miners.
The Bitcoin network’s mining difficulty target retarget was set for Dec. 19, 2022 at block height 768.096, an increase of 3.27%. The difficulty change is expected decrease on Jan. 3, 2023. Current estimates suggest that the difficulty reduction could range from 7.39% to 8.1% below today’s difficulty metric.

Some block generation times have been faster that the 10-minute average, at 9:33 on occasion, but the vast majority of recent block intervals have been greater than the 10-minute median at around 10:54. The Bitmain Antminer S19 XPHYD is currently the most profitable SHA256 Bitcoin mining machine. With 255 terahash per Second (TH/s), of hashpower.
What do you think of the two bitcoin mining pools that have more than 53% Bitcoin’s total hashrate? Please comment below to let us know your thoughts on this topic.