An Indian-based mining pool called GBMiners now controls 3 to 4 percent of Bitcoin's total computational power, placing it in the top ten globally. Amit Bhardwaj, the pool's co-founder, supplied undis
An Indian-based mining pool called GBMiners now controls 3 to 4 percent of Bitcoin's total computational power, placing it in the top ten globally. Amit Bhardwaj, the pool's co-founder, supplied undisclosed funding and owns the bulk of mining hardware directed at the operation.
Bhardwaj runs Amaze Mining & Blockchain Research Ltd. The company operates bitcoin mining equipment representing more than 5 percent of the network's overall hashrate. Some outlets report GBMiners as the largest non-Chinese mining pool, but BitFury and Slushpool both maintain larger shares of the network's computing power.
GBMiners mined its first block on August 30th. Sanjay Goswami, who works at the pool, described how it came together. Two founders from Darwin Labs, Nikunj Jain and Sahil Baghla, met Bhardwaj at a party. "Amit ran huge amounts of mining power, spread across all major pools," Goswami said. "We had gotten interested in cryptocurrencies and were trying to decide our first product. Seeing our energy and enthusiasm, Amit said, 'I have an idea we can work on together.'"
For Jain and Baghla, this was an offer hard to refuse. Bhardwaj had been mining for years across multiple pools connected to the Bitcoin network. "We started researching, put out some of our test servers, and most of what he said resonated with our findings," Goswami said.
While independent miners use GBMiners, Bhardwaj controls the bulk of the hardware pointing to the pool. GBMiners operates from India, though its mining equipment sits in China. "We are discovering the machine setup in India," Goswami said.
GBMiners plans to mine Ethereum and Zcash, expanding beyond Bitcoin.
Mining pools have become focal points in the dispute over Bitcoin's software. ViaBTC and Bitcoin.com's pool have pushed for Bitcoin Unlimited, a software client that would trigger a hard fork to increase the network's block size limit. During an online Q&A, ViaBTC founder and CEO Haipo Yang said GBMiners and other pools planned to switch from Bitcoin Core, the current reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, to Bitcoin Unlimited.
When asked about GBMiners's stance on Bitcoin Core and the block size debate, Goswami said the pool was still forming its position. "We are still forming a concrete opinion about it, but we are positive about Bitcoin Unlimited," he said.
GBMiners emerged from Darwin Labs, which is developing a bitcoin bank operating in stealth mode.
