A Solitary Bitcoin Mining Pool Boosts Its Hashrate and Mines Its Fourth Block

Parasite Pool, a Bitcoin mining platform operating under the solo mining model, has notably expanded its presence on the network in recent weeks, both in terms of the number of connected devices and its computing power. Amid this growth, a miner from this platform found the fourth block, as recorded by mempool.space, since its launch last year.

Today, July 16, the average hashrate of Parasite Pool over the last hour reached 942 PH/s (petahashes per second), compared to an average of only 181 PH/s over the past seven days, which represents an approximate increase of 420% compared to the weekly average. Considering the average hashrate during the day of July 16, Parasite's computing power stands at 388 PH/s, according to data from the pool.

The following graph of users and workers (individual devices connected to the pool) of Parasite Pool provides a clue about the source of the jump in computing power.

While the average hashrate multiplied compared to the average of the last seven days, the number of workers connected grew by only 16.7%, from about 15,500 to 18,088, and the number of users increased by just 5.6%, from 2,250 to 2,377. This difference in magnitude indicates that the jump is not primarily explained by the arrival of more miners to the pool, but rather by an increase in the average power contributed by each worker, which rose from around 11.7 TH/s to 52 TH/s.

However, Parasite's computing power still remains well below the total that drives the Bitcoin network. The aggregated hashrate of the network averages 909 EH/s (exahashes per second, a unit a thousand times greater than a petahash), according to data from mempool.space. Compared to that total, the peak of Parasite Pool accounts for only 0.10% of the global computing power of the network, a percentage that nuances the magnitude of the jump within the pool.

The increase in the hashrate of the Parasite mining pool coincided with a miner from this platform finding on July 15 the fourth block that the miners of Parasite processed since it became operational. This is block 958,212.

The miner who found the block was operating with 7.9 PH/s distributed across 88 ASICs connected to the pool, averaging close to 100 TH/s (terahashes per second) each, according to the team at Altair Technologies.

During the mining process itself, Parasite Pool operates just like any traditional pool. All the hashrate contributed by connected participants works together to find the next block, without distinction between those who contribute more or less computing power.

The difference appears only afterward, in the distribution of the reward. The miner who solves the block keeps the fixed bonus of 1 bitcoin, while the rest of the participants, including that same team, share the remaining reward according to the number of shares (the measure of the hashrate contributed over a given time by a miner). The project's developers summarize this scheme under the concept of <> (referring to prioritizing smaller miners).

Technically, the mechanism resembles the Pay Per Last N Shares method (payment for the last N shares, a distribution scheme used by numerous traditional pools), although without the moving window that these usually apply. Instead of counting only the shares from a recent period, such as the last 24 hours, Parasite Pool accumulates all the shares contributed since the last block found by the pool.

The project's code, published as open source on GitHub, confirms that it runs on a modified version of ckpool, mining software also used by other solo pools, to which its developers added their own logic for reward distribution from the coinbase transaction (the first transaction of each block, which mints new bitcoins).

This way of distributing its rewards may be one of the explanations for why solo miners are migrating to Parasite, in search of greater income opportunities while maintaining the concept of solo mining.

Parasite Pool's own hashrate history shows that this is not the first marked spike in its short trajectory. At the end of June, the pool's panel had already recorded a similar magnitude jump that later moderated over the days. Whether the current momentum is sustained or repeats that previous pattern is something that only future reports from the pool itself can confirm.

Thus, the growth of Parasite Pool's hashrate demonstrates a growing trend in solo mining, whether with structures of multiple ASIC devices or with mini ASICs for home use.