Unidentified Miners, F2pool Lead All-Time Bitcoin Mining Rankings: A Comprehensive Review of Bitcoin’s Historic Block Discovery

Since the inception of the Bitcoin blockchain by Satoshi Nakamoto, the network has diligently processed in excess of 800,000 blocks. An examination of data from 99 distinct mining pools, spanning the previous 14 years, reveals that unidentified mining participants discovered 28.37% of the network’s total blocks. Trailing not far behind, F2pool secures the second position, having found just slightly more than 10% of all the blocks since 2009.

Unknown, F2pool, and Antpool Lead the Pack in Terms of Number of Bitcoin Blocks Mined

Over the last year, Foundry USA has emerged as the prevailing bitcoin (BTC) mining pool, uncovering 15,767 blocks from a total of 53,703 block rewards since August 12, 2022. Although Foundry has consistently led among large mining pools in recent periods, it ranks ninth in all-time statistics, with a tally of 25,946 blocks as of block height 802,854.

The top position is occupied by unidentified miners from 99 diverse pools, as identified by btc.com, with unknown miners, including Satoshi and early miners, having found a cumulative 227,800 blocks, or 28.37% of the total. F2pool commands the lead as an identified pool with the most blocks mined since 2009, having discovered 80,364 blocks, approximately 10.01% of the total.

Following closely, Antpool ranks second to F2pool and third overall, with 75,829 blocks, or 9.44% of the total. The subsequent ranks are filled by Btc.com’s mining pool (39,996 blocks), Braiins Pool (39,647 blocks), and Viabtc (33,194 blocks).

The now-inoperative Btc Guild is in seventh place, having found 32,935 blocks since 2011 before officially shutting down in June 2015. Despite its inactivity for over eight years, Btc Guild’s contributions remain noteworthy. In eighth place, regarding all-time blocks discovered, stands Poolin with 27,236, while Foundry occupies the aforementioned ninth place with its 25,946 blocks.

Following Foundry is Ghash.io, which commenced mining in 2013 and officially halted operations on October 24, 2016. Though it hasn’t mined in years, Ghash.io’s 23,083 blocks substantially outpace the 11th place holder, Bitfury, a mining pool that, while absent in the past year’s hashrate, has found a total of 19,513 blocks all-time.

Data indicates that a tally of 11 pools total have mined fewer than 50 blocks. Moreover, approximately 19 pools have mined fewer than 100 blocks, while around 80 pools have extracted more than 100 BTC block rewards. To date, 92.64% of BTC’s total supply, or nearly 19,455,124.32 BTC, has been mined into circulation. Furthermore, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has been adjusted 397 times since the first adjustment at block height 2,016.

Currently, BTC miners are committing a staggering 387.62 exahash per second (EH/s), translating to 387,620,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second (H/s). A mere two days after Bitcoin made its debut, the hashrate hovered around 948,000 hashes per second, or 948 kilohash per second (KH/s). This data reveals that the total hashrate fortifying the BTC network has ballooned by an astonishing 40,888,185,654,008,340% since the inception of the blockchain.

What do you think about the block statistics per pool over the last 14 years? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.