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After launching its Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool in April, cryptocurrency exchange Binance has now launched an internal mining pool for the market’s largest altcoin by market cap, Ether (ETH).
For the first month, between November 12 and December 12, Binance is trying to lure miners by offering a zero-fee regime. After that, those who contribute their hash power to the pool will be charged a competitive fee of 0.5% on their earnings.
Binance’s instructions for setting up a mining pool account indicate that participants will need to use a Windows or Linux operating system, GPU (NVIDIA or AMD graphics card memory of at least 4G), 5GB of virtual memory for each GPU, and mining software such as HiveOS or Easy Miner.
The Ethereum mining pool will use a system similar to the existing Bitcoin pool, called FPPS, or Full Pay Per Share. Binance’s Bitcoin pool notably also offers a feature called a smart pool, which allows participants to automatically change hash rates in order to mine the most profitable of the three supported coins based on the SHA-256 algorithm: Bitcoin (BTC ), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) or Bitcoin SV (BSV). The settlement is still paid in BTC.
An online pool distribution tracker for Bitcoin mining pools, BTC.com, indicates that Binance Pool accounted for 9.4% of Bitcoin’s total hash rate in the past week.
Centralization looks set to remain a concern for those committed to cryptocurrency’s founding decentralization ethic. BTC.com data shows that more than 50% of Bitcoin’s current hash rate is represented by four mining pools: F2Pool (18.5%), Poolin (12.2%), BTC.com (11, 6%) and AntPool (11.5%).
