In a stark reminder about one in all Bitcoin’s lingering immaturities, Bitcoin Core maintainer and mining pool co-founder Luke Dashjr calculated that Bitcoin transactions may want over 800 confirmations (5.5 days) to succeed in even 95% odds of finality.
In alarming distinction to most orientations that advocate a mere six blocks (one hour) for assurance {that a} transaction is irreversibly settled, this 800-block determine recalculates that to account for mistrust in Bitmain.
Was trying to replace the hard-coded and out of date 6-blocks-to-confirm goal within the Knots pockets GUI, however doing the maths, it seems to be like as a result of Antpool conglomerate having 48% of Bitcoin community hashrate, even attending to 95% safe requires over 800 blocks. 😭
— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) February 8, 2025
In one thing of an open secret within the bitcoin mining house, Bitmain has maintained important affect over the sector for years.
Bitmain’s templates for blocks of BTC transactions
All people is aware of Bitmain sits atop the bitcoin mining sector. The sprawling firm, co-founded by billionaires Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan, together with their associates and subsidiaries, makes the overwhelming majority of bodily machines like Antminers that crunch numbers for Bitcoin’s proof-of-work.
As well as, Bitmain operates company mining swimming pools like Antpool.
Most significantly, the Bitmain/Antpool conglomerate has a protracted historical past of incentivizing work task through its extra-profitable block templates to miners who work for third-party swimming pools like Poolin, BTC.com, and several other others.
By means of its well-capitalized affect throughout Bitcoin’s mining community, Dashjr suggests this conglomerate can exert management over roughly 48% of the Bitcoin community’s hashrate.
As a result of many ostensibly unbiased mining swimming pools merely cross alongside Bitmain’s templated suggestions to their miners, Dashjr distrusts that any common transaction has irreversible finality till it receives over 800 blocks of confirmations.
Calculate your individual degree of mistrust in Bitmain/Antpool
Dashjr arrived at his 800-block determine for 95% finality certainty by inputting his assumption of Bitmain/Antpool’s 48% management of hashrate into Gregory Maxwell’s archived “Attack Success” calculator.
If anybody has a special assumption of how a lot of Bitcoin’s hashrate Bitmain/Antpool controls, anybody might enter a special decimal into that very same instrument to calculate their very own variety of blocks for settlement finality.
Within the Bitcoin community, node operators and customers can select their very own degree of belief or mistrust. The extra block confirmations, the safer a transaction is from double-spending or alternative. The less confirmations, the much less safe it’s.
In Dashjr’s view, a person ought to wait practically six days to have greater than 95% confidence that their bitcoin transaction is past the management of Bitmain.
The precise confidence interval might be far much less or greater than that timespan, nonetheless, relying on one’s view of Bitmain’s dominance and beneficence.