[2016-09-14] One of Bitcoin's Biggest Miners is Launching a Second Pool

"A key focus for the software is on reducing "orphan rates", a metric that has a material impact on miner profitability.

In bitcoin mining, it's not uncommon for two separate miners to find the same block almost at the same time. This results in the creation of two blockchains, but only one can become the longest chain that is accepted as official by the network.

The blockchain that is eliminated is called an orphan, and each time one occurs, some member of the mining network misses out on the revenue that would come from official recognition.

According to analytics provider Blockchain, it's not uncommon for there to be three to five orphan blocks in any given week. Though this is only 0.5% of the total blocks produced every seven days, bitcoin mining has become a low margin business.

To combat this, one of the primary features associated with the pool is a "PoolWatcher" function.

As Bitmain explains it, this looks for signals that another pool has found a block. Rather than continuing to mine on a potential orphan, it will instead, immediately switch to that block.

Sharma explained that Bitmain is spinning up clusters of servers around the world to help with latency of new block discovery. If another miner finds a block, these clusters will transmit that data faster, allowing the pool to switch to the next block.

Though the software is open-source, only users of the BTC.com pool will have access to these server clusters, Sharma said"

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