The bitcoin mining pool industry is highly competitive, and each player in the space is doing everything they can to attract more miners to their platforms. BTC.com recently launched a transaction accelerator on their website and a new payout scheme for their mining pool as they attempt to position themselves as one of the key players in the overall bitcoin ecosystem.

Crypto Insider reached out to BTC.com to gain more insight into these recent developments.

Accelerate Your Bitcoin Transactions for an Extra Fee

The concept of a transaction accelerator was originally introduced by the ViaBTC mining pool. The basic idea is that bitcoin users can go to a website and enter a transaction ID to be accelerated in situations where it has become stuck in a network backlog. The mining pool will take the transaction and put it into one of the next blocks they mine rather than some other transaction in the mempool.

BTC.com introduced their own transaction accelerator a couple of weeks ago, and it gained attention after Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver pointed out that only credit cards could be used to pay for transaction acceleration on BTC.com.

“The transaction accelerator is designed to help users confirm their transactions fast when there is a big backlog of unconfirmed transactions,” a spokesperson for BTC.com told Crypto Insider. “Accepting Bitcoin payments for this accelerator would only further add to the backlog and the woes of the accelerator’s users.”

While BTC.com charges an added, dynamic fee for transaction acceleration, ViaBTC offers the service for free on a limited basis.

In addition to the transaction acceleration services offered by the likes of BTC.com and ViaBTC, there are also protocol-level solutions for speeding up transaction confirmation. Replace-by-fee (RBF) allows users to resend previous transactions with a higher fee, while child-pays-for-parent (CPFP) allows the recipient of a transaction to essentially do the same.

“I believe we should use protocol-level RBF,” said BTC.com mining pool operator Kevin Pan when asked about these sorts of solutions. “As for the transaction accelerator, it is an off-chain RBF.”

Sharing Transaction Fees with Miners

Another recent trend in the world of bitcoin mining pools is sharing transaction fee revenue with the miners. In the past, mining pools have kept all of the transaction fees on the network for themselves and only shared the block reward with the miners.

“In the usual ‘zero fee’ or ‘0% fee’ PPS (Pay Per Share) method, miners receive the coinbase reward while the pool keeps the transaction fee,” explained the BTC.com spokesperson. “In the Full PPS (FPPS) method that BTC.COM’s pool has introduced, the miners receive the coinbase reward as well as the transaction fee while the pool keeps only 4% of both. This has been introduced by BTC.COM because of the rising transaction fee. As the Tx fee percentage of the coinbase reward rises, the percentage of the coinbase reward received by the BTC.COM pool’s miners continues to rise.”

“Bitcoin mining pools have started giving a percentage of the coinbase transaction fee to their users to remain competitive,” added the BTC.com spokesperson. “This is a positive change for miners worldwide.

No Comments on Bitcoin Unlimited

Crypto Insider also asked BTC.com for their thoughts on Segregated Witness and Bitcoin Unlimited, but he had no comment to share on behalf of BTC.com.

BTC.com is owned by Bitmain, where CEOs Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan have had positive things to say about Bitcoin Unlimited in the past. Antpool, which is a mining pool owned by Bitmain, recently started signaling their support for Bitcoin Unlimited in coinbase transactions.

On a related note, BTC.com recently mined the first ever block found via a JavaScript implementation of Bitcoin known as Bcoin.

It’s unclear if BTC.com will follow the lead of their parent company and begin signaling for Bitcoin Unlimited.