Bitmain Mines 42% of All Bitcoin Blocks

Chinese giant Bitmain mined more than 42% of all Bitcoin blocks last week, edging close to the 51% threshold required to control the entire network.

Both outfits are owned by Beijing-based Bitmain - the world's leading Bitcoin miner and producer of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit chips.

By employing proprietary ASIC mining gear, the multi-national corporation may be able to validate Bitcoin blocks significantly faster than the Graphics Processing Units used by mundane miners.

The outfit also mines Bitcoin Cash - which due to its identical PoW consensus mechanism can be mined using standard Bitcoin mining gear.

While a mining unit cannot split its hashing power between the two protocols, Bitmain may choose to re-allocate its efforts at any point in time.

BITMAIN and their associated "Pools" controls significantly more of the hashing power on Bitcoin, then they do on Bitcoin Cash.

This is how bad mining centralization has become, when even Bitcoin Cash is more decentralized.

While Bitcoin's mining protocol may be held up as one of the more secure ways to reach consensus, it is not without its faults.

As all Bitcoin miners must agree on the validity of each block, its inherent challenge is the '51% attack' - the point at which a single entity controls the majority of the network - being granted the ability to double-spend and arbitrarily reject transactions.

Where the more centralized EOS has drawn criticism for its ability to prohibit such occurrences, Bitcoin has no central authority that could step in to remedy a rogue mining outfit.