Bitcoin Mining Pools Hashrate Share

Mining pool hashrate share, sourced from mempool.space's public pool statistics: each block's coinbase transaction usually carries a pool tag (a signature string or a known payout address), which attributes the past year's blocks to pools; block share converts to hashrate share. The top ten pools are shown with the remainder merged into Other — including blocks whose origin can't be identified. Note this is hashrate inferred from block share: luck dominates short windows, and only longer periods converge on true hashpower.

Finding a block is a Poisson lottery: a single machine might not win for years. Pools merge the hashpower of thousands of miners into one ticket and split winnings by contribution, converting wildly uncertain income into steady cash flow — a pure variance-management instrument. The pool operator merely coordinates block templates and accounting; the machines and hashpower belong to countless independent miners behind it.

Pool distribution is the most direct gauge of block-production concentration. The most famous alarm: in 2014, GHash.io briefly exceeded 51% of network hashrate — theoretically enough to double-spend and censor transactions. After fierce community backlash the pool voluntarily pledged to stay below 40%, and hashpower migrated away. The pool landscape has reshuffled repeatedly since, but the trend toward the top persists: in recent years the largest two or three pools have jointly held over half the network, and the top ten cover nearly all of it. Concentration never left — it just changed protagonists.

Reading pool share as 'company X controls X% of hashpower' is the classic misread: the hashpower belongs to independent miners who can switch pools at will — the great hashrate migration during China's 2021 mining ban proved exactly that. But full comfort isn't warranted either: block templates are built by pool operators, so transaction-censorship capability does concentrate in a few hands (protocols like Stratum V2 aim to hand transaction selection back to miners). Research has also flagged that nominally distinct pools may share custodians or parent entities — nominal dispersion can overstate real dispersion.

Beyond network data, see the broader market via total crypto market cap and BTC liquidations.