Chinese Twitter account cnLedger revealed recently that a new mining pool by the name of CANOE was online. The pool was attracting much attention in China for signaling the Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) software client, which adds to another mining pool supporting BU.



As the person in charge of the CANOE pool, Li Ang dived into the world of bitcoin in 2013 and became a miner in 2015. In 2016, he built a large-scale mine in Sichuan.

Noticeably, all of the 22 Petahashes are owned by CANOE itself and the mine is in Sichuan province, China.



Another mining farm in Xinjian province is also under preparation and is set to be online before March,15th. It’s said that the new mine is in Hefeng Industrial park in Xinjiang with a capacity of 130,000 Kw. The new project, named Dian Jin Blockchain, or Electric Gold Blockchain, is co-founded by Bitmain, CANOE and other industrial players in an effort to make it the world’s largest mining pool with well-built software and hardware facilities.

Supporting BU is beneficial to miners

Li told that Bitcoin’s network congestion is the reason why bitcoin’s block size needs to be increased. While Bitcoin’s users and transactions have been expanding, the network can still only handle 3 transactions per second.

“Now the reward for a new block is 12.5 BTC, but the fees are almost 1 BTC. Many people are paying more fees in order to make sure their transaction will be confirmed soon.”

A scaling solution called the Lightning Network is believed to be an alternative to the BU client. The network’s solution calls for high-valued transactions to be processed on the Bitcoin blockchain while smaller transactions are meant to take place across their network instead. Keeping transactions ‘on-chain’ will require higher fees under this arrangement. He argued:

“BS (Blockstream) supports Core dev team’s path which will lead to the Lightning Network”, Li said. “They’re thinking of the interest of their own company and team instead of miners. Meanwhile, their solution cannot solve the long-term problem of network congestion. It is also against the original vision of Bitcoin.”

As for the heated discussion about scaling, Li believes that as new miners and big money are flowing into the network, most miners cannot fathom the potential outcomes of the various scaling plans like BU and Lightning. The lack of technical knowledge has contributed their indifferent attitude towards scaling.

“We are much more deeply involved in the mining business. Therefore, we want to guide miners to work toward the best of their interest. This is also the reason to found the pool”.

“To support scaling is to defend the interests of miners. Mining is the foundation of the whole bitcoin network and business. So defending the interests of miners means defending the bitcoin network too.”

It may seem like a lofty goal for bitcoin network to handle 150 million processed transactions per day, but Li believes that bitcoin will be able to handle a number of transactions much more than credit cards.

Miners work toward the best of their interest. However, as the block reward halves every four years, miners ’income will continue to decline and only a larger mining transaction fee will maintain the balance.

“By increasing block size, and transaction numbers, the fees will gradually replace the block reward, providing enough incentive for the miners to defend the bitcoin hashrate. This is the fundamental way to achieve healthy development of the whole ecosystem.”

He says that by supporting BU, he is not ruling out other scaling plans. He noted:

“We support increasing the capacity, it does not simply mean that BU’s plan is the best one. But increasing the capacity is a must-be.”

There are a lot of rumors about the relationship between CANOE and other mining pools on the Internet. Li argued:

“The ownership and decision-making of a mining pool is separate from others, We prefer the BU client out of our own knowledge about bitcoin and the interests of miners.”

The share of the overall network hashrate keeps increasing

Since the second half of 2016, a growing number of mining facilities are seeking for the solution of BU client, roughly 20% of total hashpower.

According to the statistics of Coin.Dance, 25.6% of mining pools are for segwit and 20% for BU.

Apart from CANOE, a pool called BTC.top is another newcomer that has been publicly supporting BU. Launched in December 2016, BTC.top now has about 7% of the network’s hashrate.

So far, other pools that have publicly supported BU’s scaling plans include the Bitcoin.com pool, ViaBTC, Slush Pool, and India’s GBMiners.