Major mining groups face connectivity issues amid Chinese mining crackdowns

Because it is important: Some of the major cryptocurrency mining pools, including Binance Pool, F2pool, and ViaBTC, reported large outages as of early Saturday morning. According to official Telegram channels and numerous Reddit threads, the group outages appear to have been largely caused by ongoing DNS issues. While the problem is not limited to the three groups mentioned, they represent more than 35% of the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network.

An alleged attack on various chinse cryptocurrency mining pools caused widespread connectivity problems for users around the world as recently as Saturday morning. Alejandro De La Torre, a cryptocurrency consultant and former vice president of the mining group at Poolin, noted that connectivity issues appeared to have been targeted and primarily affected Chinese groups and miners.

De La Torre believes that the problems, many of which are DNS related, may be the result of a DNS poisoning attack courtesy of the Chinese government in response to the country’s recent report. prohibitions about cryptocurrencies and mining. This type of DNS manipulation can result in anything from domain name resolution failures to traffic being redirected to fraudulent sites. His speculations are fueled by the largely Chinese targeting base of the attack and the timing when it relates to the country’s recent crackdown on cryptocurrency mining.

According to btc.com, The Binance Pool hashrate is down more than 14% in 24 hours. F2pool and ViaBTC were also affected, with traffic dropping from 7% to 8% in both groups. Hash rate drops refer to the processing power that a miner or pool contributes to the overall network of a specific blockchain. A hash (h / s) is the specific function that meets the requirements of a blockchain to solve an encrypted calculation. Mining speeds for some coins, such as Ethereum, are measured in megahashes per second (Mh / s) or 1,000,000 computational hashes per second (h / s). Bitcoin, on the other hand, is measured in exahashes per second (Eh / s). This significantly higher value equals one quintillion h / s. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 h / s for anyone wondering how many zeros are in a quintillion.

Most of the affected groups have informed their users about DNS modifications that will help prevent further interruptions. Using a VPN to bypass telecom restrictions was also a recommended solution by the group’s providers.

Image Credit: Bitcoin Image by Dmitry Demidko; mining farm image from Genesis Mining