The well-known company Blockstream has announced its service dedicated to mining, complemented by the company’s proprietary mining pool.
The name of the product is Blockstream Mining and it is nothing more than an advanced housing service for those who already own dozens if not hundreds of ASICs.
Like all classic housing services, Blockstream Mining provides a location for mining equipment in the company’s data centres, specifically designed to meet the needs of corporate customers.
The housing service, in fact, allows the rapid implementation of any type of equipment for bitcoin mining and provides customers with complete control over the operations.
As stated in the company’s press release, Blockstream Mining was created with the goal of allowing all bitcoin owners and companies involved in the industry to participate directly in maintaining the BTC network secure through mining.
As such, the service aims to eliminate some of the entry barriers in this sector, including the need to find a location with low maintenance costs and to monitor – as well as manage – the equipment itself.
Blockstream Mining: the company’s housing service
In recent years, new cryptocurrency miners have found themselves faced with two options: building their own complex and expensive mining facilities, as well as developing the necessary energy infrastructure and cooling systems, or choosing a professional hosting service, often faced with inexperienced teams, limited control over mining equipment and unexpected expenses.
Blockstream Mining tackles these issues by providing an enterprise-class housing service that allows customers to monitor and control their hardware in full transparency. Not only that, the service also takes care of transporting the hardware on-site, as well as installing it.
In fact, the company has been involved in bitcoin mining since 2017 and has continued to invest in this sector, building its own infrastructure in order to contribute directly to the bitcoin network. It was one of the first companies in Quebec to harness hydroelectric power for cryptocurrency mining.
The company currently has 300 Megawatts of guaranteed energy capacity and this threshold will be raised further in the near future. Blockstream also holds about 1% of the bitcoin hashrate, which comes from the numerous Bitfury, Ebang and MicroBT branded ASICs.
Blockstream Pool
In addition to the housing service, the company also announced the Blockstream Pool, the first pool in the world to use the BetterHash protocol. BetterHash is an advanced protocol dedicated to mining pools, created with the aim of guaranteeing each individual miner the ability to directly control and choose which bitcoin transactions to include in the newly extracted blocks.
As a result, even though it is a mining pool, a high decentralisation of the pool is maintained, thus improving the resistance to censorship and possible 51% attacks, since the pool administrators can no longer directly control the hashrate.
Currently, the Blockstream Pool is in operation on the testnet and will initially only be available to Blockstream Mining customers. Over time, however, this service is likely to be made available to the public.
