The launch of Bitcoin Cash has gone a lot smoother than most people anticipated. This is both a good thing and a bit of a strange turn of events. More specifically, many people hoped to see Bitcoin Cash fail right away, but that is not the case so far. There is one oddity about this concept, though, as it seems one person is mining more blocks than ViaBTC right now.
Who is the Mysterious Bitcoin Cash Miner?
That seems the big question for now. Reddit claims they have identified this person as the “Hennessy Road Miner”. It is quite peculiar to see an unknown entity mine 75% of all network blocks to date instead of the official mining pools. ViaBTC found one in four blocks, which is rather disappointing and surprising. The pool has been advocating BCH for some time now yet is still a minority mining entity.
That being said, the unknown miner has been doing quite well in the mining department. Finding 9 out of the 12 network blocks so far is pretty significant. Whatever the plan by Wan Chai Hong Kong may be, he is doing the Bitcoin Cash network some favors right now by the look of things. Then again, he is also pointing out a weakness in the ecosystem, as there is not enough mining support from pools right now. This is despite other pools acknowledging they will mine BCH as well, but it seems none of them is actually gaining traction right now.
Various mining pools give their users the option to mine BCH instead of BTC if they want to. It doesn’t appear a lot of people are in favor of this switch right now, though. Whether or not that situation will change, remains to be seen. There is enough hashpower to keep the chain alive, for now, but it still requires a lot more interest until transactions can get processed at an acceptable pace. More specifically, the network still requires 6 confirmations, but with so few blocks, that becomes a very patient waiting game.
Speaking of Bitcoin Cash network blocks, the first successfully mined block included nearly 7,000 transactions. It was also 1.9MB in size, which is quite significant. Compared to the current BTC block size limit of 1MB, that is quite a size increase. All of the blocks coming after that are about a third of the regular block size, though. This indicates people aren’t moving a lot of funds on the BCH chain just yet until things settle down. It will be interesting to see how this situation evolves.
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