ViaBTC Mining Pool Will Automatically Switch Between BTC and BCH Mining

It looks like ViaBTC is not giving up on its plan to make Bitcoin Cash mining more attractive. The company has noticed that a lot of Bitcoin miners have switched to the BCH chain due to improved profitability. After all, every miner wants to make as much money as possible, and right now, that means not mining Bitcoin. The company hopes to make this process significantly easier by introducing a new service that switches to the more profitable chain automatically.

Bitcoin Cash Mining Picks Up Significantly

More people are mining Bitcoin Cash than ever before. There are many reasons for why that is currently the case. First and foremost, BCH mining is over 100% more profitable compared to mining Bitcoin. That in itself is not all that surprising, even though the value of one BCH is under 20% of the current BTC value. Both chains have the same 12.5 coin block reward paid out in BTC or BCH respectively.

ViaBTC is one of the market leaders when it comes to mining Bitcoin Cash. (That is, assuming you discount the “unknown” entity which seemingly mines the vast majority of network blocks to this very day.) That situation may change now that the top two Bitcoin mining pools are slowly contributing additional hashpower to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain as well. Only time will tell how this situation plays out in the future, as it remains to be seen if BCH remains more profitable for the next few weeks and months.

With mining being so profitable, ViaBTC is planning to introduce a new feature. Right now, its miners have to swap between BTC and BCH manually, which can be quite cumbersome to some. To make things a bit more straightforward, the company will introduce a smart Bitcoin mining service which automatically switches to the more profitable coin to mine. This means users will always get the most bang for their buck in terms of cryptocurrency mining, which can only be a good thing. It is unclear when this feature will be implemented, as there is no official ETA just yet.

Changes are also coming to the Bitcoin Cash mining ecosystem. Right now, the mining difficulty is just 7% of the Bitcoin network difficulty. That in itself makes it more profitable to mine BCH, despite its value taking quite a beating across the exchanges. When this difficulty changes for the worse, mining BCH will become more difficult. If the value per coin does not pick up by that time, the relative profitability of mining Bitcoin will increase once again. It is a very interesting ecosystem, but things can go from bad to worse pretty quickly if there is a lack of hashrate to support the nascent network.

Right now, though, that does not appear to be much of a problem. The Bitcoin Cash network has close to 2 exahash of mining power, which is quite significant. It does not appear the overall Bitcoin mining hashrate is going down, which is pretty unusual. Someone is seemingly bringing additional mining hardware online for the sole purpose of mining BCH. While this is an interesting turn of events, it remains to be seen if other miners will follow suit.

All things considered, people have not given up on Bitcoin Cash just yet. There is still plenty of bad blood between community members, however. A lot of people feel BCH is a scam and needs to be put down as quickly as possible. Others think it will eventually overtake Bitcoin and become the longest blockchain. The arms race is in full effect. Which chain will come out on top remains to be determined, but it is likely Bitcoin will not be displaced anytime soon. The new feature to be implemented by ViaBTC is still pretty intriguing, though.