North American bitcoin mining farms all use mining pools to ensure steady block rewards, compiling hash power from miners operating remotely to compete with the industrialized farms based in China. Most of these mining farms use China-based mining pools (pools whose headquarters and, perhaps, servers for collecting hash power, are located in China) because the fees that they charge for collecting and distributing hash power are the lowest in the world.
However, the days of unregulated mining pools serving the North American market may be ending. And hoping to fill that potential void is DMG, a diversified mining services business headquartered in Vancouver that is opening a new pool for North American miners emphasizing full compliance with all regulations.
The Mining Landscape Today
Bitcoin mining in North America got a shot in the arm recently caused by a dramatic drop in difficulty rate as the rainy season in China’s Sichuan province[1] ended and miners went offline.
In a recent newsletter, Bitcoin media company HASHR8[2] described the change:
“… huge amounts of hashrate is coming offline due to the end of rainy season in Sichuan. That means miners are enjoying both greater revenue and will have a significant reduction in their input costs once the difficulty level adjusts to represent the hashrate drop.”
A recent report[3] based on BTC.com data noted that this drop in mining difficulty includes the largest percentage drop (at 16 percent) since the first miners with ASICs were brought online in 2012.
The HASHR8 report also noted that, thanks to this drop and recent bitcoin price increases, miners are entering “an extremely lucrative” mining period. This would be the continuation of a trend, as Coinmetrics reported[4] that in October, bitcoin miners generated an estimated $353
