Altcoin News: Blockstream Has Opened Large Bitcoin Mining Centers and Attracted Fidelity as a Client

August 9, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Blockstream technology blockchain company on Thursday announced the launch of two major data centers for Bitcoin mining in Quebec, Canada and American Adele, Forbes writes.

The facilities account for a combined 300 megawatts worth of energy capacity. They will be used to serve the needs of corporate clients, as well as to implement Blockstream’s own cryptocurrency mining operations. In the future, the company intends to provide access to its services to smaller miners. So far, two active clients are investment company Fidelity with its application technology center and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

According to Blockstream CSO Samson Mow, the centers will produce 6 execs for Bitcoin mining if they are used at full capacity with the most advanced ASIC equipment. More than a month ago, it would constitute about 10% of the aggregate hash Bitcoins Breit, but today value exceeded 80 EH /S.

According to the company’s blog, for the first time, Bitstream began mining Bitcoin in 2017 amid concerns about the centralization of the industry and disputes regarding the activation of Segregated Witness (SegWit) technology.

In addition to mining centers, Blockstream will soon launch a mining pool, which will attract individual miners through the BetterHash protocol. BetterHash is expected to be another step towards reducing the centralization of mining, as it will allow individual miners, and not the owner of the mining pool, to choose which transactions to add to the block.

At the same time, Mow rejects the assumption that the scale of the new Blockstream business may become a factor in the centralization of mining.

“I don’t believe Blockstream Mining poses centralization risks,” said Mow. “If anything, Blockstream Mining serves to decentralize the Bitcoin mining ecosystem in many ways. We’re self-mining with just a small portion of our available power, with the rest allocated to customers, and we have plans to make the hosting service available to smaller miners that otherwise would not be able to mine effectively. Also, by leveraging the BetterHash protocol in our mining pool, all of our customers can run their own full-nodes and build block templates. This means the pool cannot use their hashrate for censoring transactions or falsely signaling readiness for Bitcoin protocol upgrades — which has happened in the past as with SegWit2x.”

Author: Marko Vidrih