New Mining Entity Controlling One-Fourth of BCH’s Hashrate Draws Attention Over Empty Blocks

A new mining entity reportedly partly responsible for mining empty blocks on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain has drawn the community’s attention, as it quickly captured one-fourth of the network’s hashrate.

Members of the cryptocurrency’s community recently noticed that a mining operation called HathorMM managed to get up to one-third of the network’s hashrate at one point, at a time in which a considerable number of empty blocks – blocks that do not include any transactions in them – were being mined.

They found that the mining operation appears to be related to a cryptocurrency called Hathor (HTR), which allows for merged mining, meaning miners can mine HTR and BCH at the same time to maximize their earnings. Per Bitcoin.com, its website claims the project is a “scalable and easy-to-use blockchain for digital assets.” Merged mining can be done between HT and BCH, Bitcoin SV, and Digibyte (DGB).

Addressing the empty blocks, General Protocols and BCHN developer John Nieri claimed that Hathor’s creator’s have nothing to do with the mining pool miners are using, and there are “four main Hathor merge mining outputs.” He added:

Three of them mine regular blocks with relatively low hashrate. We have not been able to get in touch with them yet but will make another attempt this week. One of them mines empty blocks with a high hashrate.

Nieri added that his team is “pretty sure” it identified the mining pool mining empty blocks, and is “working on communicating with them to make sure they are aware of issues in November.” Next month, it’s worth noting, the Bitcoin Cash network will undergo a planned hard fork.

The HTR token’s price has been steadily going up, as according to available data in late September the token was trading at $0.058, while on October 12 it wwas trading above $0.30 after rising by over 500%. Since then, its price plunged to $0.177.

Currently, the Bitcoin Cash network has 2.77 exahash (EH/S) of hashrate, while the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain has 138 EH/s meaning that large mining pools on the BTC network can direct their hashrate to BCH and have a significant impact.

Featured image via Pixabay.