Roughly two weeks ago, ViaBTC , a relatively new bitcoin mining pool that launched earlier this summer, garnered some attention on social media due to the announcement that they’re currently testing Bitcoin Unlimited , which is a software client that allows users to signal support for hard fork induced changes to Bitcoin’s block size limit. Although the mining pool was only launched this summer, it has already gained enough hash rate to become the fifth largest pool . Bitcoin Magazine recently reached out to ViaBTC CEO and founder Haiyang to find out more about this relatively unknown player in the bitcoin mining space. Who is ViaBTC? The history of ViaBTC has been described in a post on the mining pool’s Medium blog. To summarize, Haiyang left Tencent to start a mining pool and found an investor to help with the project on Chinese-language Bitcoin forum 8btc . According to Haiyang, ViaBTC’s early investor resources account for a large portion of the mining pool’s hash rate. “ViaBTC mining pool had an investor at its early stage, who provided us with the startup capital and hash rate, but didn’t take part in the decision-making and operating of the mining pool,” he told Bitcoin Magazine . “Currently, approximately one third of the hash rate is from our investor, and the rest from our customers.” Haiyang added that the mining pool mainly uses the Ant Miner S7 , but they also use the Avalon 6 , though less frequently. Support for Bigger Blocks In addition to their sizeable share of the network hash rate, ViaBTC has also gained some notoriety due to their stance on the Bitcoin block size debate. On Twitter, the mining pool noted , “We are No. 5 Bitcoin mining pool, running Bitcoin Core currently, interested in big [blocks].” While […]
