With the recent accusations floating around of DigiByte’s mining centralization, and the fearmongering around the possibility of a 51% attack from some unknown miners, it’s time to put it in to perspective!

So I took Bitcoins base of 100 blocks (16.5-ish hours), and instead did 4,000 blocks for DigiByte (Faster block timings) at the same timeframe. To be honest I was lazy when it came to Litecoin, so their 100 blocks is a little over 4 hours worth. You’re welcome to go do it for yourself for the same timeframe for Litecoin if you want a completely apples to apples comparison but to be honest I simply don’t have time to sync a node and re-do it all for no real difference.

I’m also aware that 16 hours isn’t the “best” view of things, but it’s good enough to give you a better example than what we’ve seen floating around. In this instance I used DigiByte blocks 10732213 to 10736213 (1/40th block timing of BTC so used 40X the blocks).

You can see the original methodology used, along with 9 months ago’s details here, where you’ll see this isn’t some new trend: https://medium.com/@josiah_digibyte/measuring-decentralization-through-unique-miners-410522491665

Let’s look at DigiByte vs Litecoin vs Bitcoin

Bitcoin currently has 4x miners making up 52% of all blocks mined.

Bitcoin mining distribution

Litecoin currently has 3x miners making up 53% of all blocks mined.

Litecoin mining distribution

DigiByte is not quite as clear-cut as the others though, because 51% attacking DigiByte doesn’t involve just getting more than the rest of the network in one, or two algorithms. It’s actually a lot more complex. That said, here’s the raw graph that I put together in a spreadsheet using the above block information, which is the same timing as used for the other two above:

DigiByte’s graph for the same timeframe as BTC’s, blocks 10732213 to 10736213

You’ll note I had to get rid of the white border around each when I made the graph, because otherwise it became too difficult to see them all there’s so many!

In fact there was 170 unique miners for DigiByte in that 16 hour period! During the same time BTC had just 21, and in the 4 hour period Litecoin had only 13.

Side-by-side comparison:

16 hour mining comparison ending 28th April 2020

As you can see, if anything, we need to be having some *serious* talks about Bitcoin / Litecoin right now.

Could DigiByte still improve?

Absolutely! Which is why we’re bringing further mining distribution with ProgPoW & RandomX, replacing two of the existing 5 with these two. It will definitely improve, and further strengthen DigiBytes lead in the mining distribution aspect.

As always, I’m more than happy to discuss this kind of thing in a polite and friendly manner. If this is how people start to learn about the superiority of DigiByte, by seeing the *real* stats, then fantastic! My DM’s aren’t open, because I don’t like the idea of things being done “in private”, there’s nothing I discuss around this that isn’t 100% in the open!

But let’s share some accurate info with the world :-)