Bitcoin Cash mining pools had mixed reactions to BTC.top CEO Jiang Zhuoer’s proposal to have them donate 12.5% of mining rewards to fund the blockchain’s development. Outcries of “taxation” and “extortion” led to a reworking of the proposal; however it still proposes the donation of 2-3% till mid-2020, and 1% following that.
According to stats from BTC.com, nearly 51% of the blocks mined over the last 24 hours were validated by the BTC.top pool. As per the updated proposal, if 2/3 of the network hash rate votes in its favor over the next three months, Zhuoer wants developers to include it in the upgrade schedule for May this year, and November failing that.
Source: BTC.com
The BTC.top CEO also mentioned that there are a lot of “anonymous BCH miners whose hash power sometimes account for half of the total network.” He also stated that most of these anonymous miners come from the Poolin mining pool and that they mine BCH only when it is more profitable. “As long as we mine at a loss and control the BCH mining profit slightly lower than BTC mining profit,” he said, “those anonymous miners who think of nothing but making money will not mine BCH.” Whether or not this means he is above controlling the hash rate to get his way, however, is up for debate.
According to BTC.com, the ’unknown’ BCH mining pool mined around 49.2% of the blocks over the last one month and just above 40% of the blocks over the last three months. In the last week, however, the unknown pool has reduced the amount of hash power it has allocated to mining Bitcoin Cash and so has Poolin, despite a rising overall hash rate since late January. One could argue that this leaves more room for BTC.top to dominate the vote.
However, this goes against Zhuoer’s theory as Bitcoin Cash has seen a ~18% increase in value since just over a week ago, meaning the unknown pool should have raised the amount of hash power they were contributing to mining BCH. At the time of writing, BCH is more profitable to mine than Bitcoin and critics of the funding proposal suggest BTC.top is using its hash power and influence over other mining pools to sway the vote in the proposal’s favor. However, there is little to no evidence beyond speculation to back this claim up.
Further, Zhuoer has gone on record to say that in the event of an additional voting round, he would “vote against the donation to ensure that the donation will stop at the next version 6 months after the donation.”
