BTC.com, the bitcoin specialist where wallet users, miners, and developers access tools and coins, today released an Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) mining client through its portal pool.btc.com.
BTC.com produced 21% of all newly-mined Bitcoin in the last year, and Ethereum is BTC.com’s first step in diversifying its mining portfolio to include more GPU/CPU mining options for its users.
Miners will now have the flexibility to switch hashing power between pools in response to market forces. BTC.com will release an integrated Ethereum block explorer and API to accompany the mining pool.
BTC.com looks to transfer its industry-leading experience, processing over eight quintillion SHA-256d hashes per second, to help Ethereum scale its mining infrastructure. BTC.com rewards miners directly using a Full Pay Per Share (FPPS) accounting system that calculates a standard transaction fee within a certain period of time.
Shares are calculated from the block reward, associated transaction fees set by gas prices, and up to two uncle blocks. BTC.com will support both ETH and ETC right from the beginning, and miners can easily switch their hashing power between them depending upon profit margins.
While Ethereum has been working on ‘Casper’, an update to replace Proof of Work consensus with Proof of Stake (PoS), mining continues to run the ETH blockchain. BTC.com’s Zhuang Zhong comments that “it’s still possible to host a mining pool in PoS mode. It will increase the complexity to design such a pool since miners need to deposit ether to the mining pool, but we have a lot of hands-on experience with wallet and Ethereum smart contracts to make a PoS mining pool possible.”
“As contracts are charged per line of executed code and miners are rewarded for dedicated hashes using GHOST, Ethereum provides multiple different reward incentives to contribute hash power to the network. We hope to expand Ethereum’s network by relaying those rewards through our FPPS system. By competing to provide the best reward margins along with our product development, we expect mining operations to grow to 12% of ETH total hashrate in the next 12 months.”
BTC.com Ethereum Mining Pool Features:
Uncle reward 0.75ETH and 2.625ETH if BTC.com mines an uncle block
BTC.com Miners can include up to two uncle blocks from other pools
BTC.com distribute rewards in FPPS mode