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Hmmm.

Well both F2pool and Braiins use Antpools block template. But you should be able to configure it yourself to any pool you please.

Are you sure that f2pool uses antpool's template? Got any evidence?

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That literally says that it makes their own templates?

Yet, the F2Pool templates show no similarity to any of the other pools. However, it is known that F2Pool runs its own nodes and builds its own block templates. It’s expected that F2Pool templates don’t match with, for example, AntPools templates.
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Hmmm. Looks like you're right. For some reason I always thought they were part of the proxy. Thanks for pointing that out.

https://stratum.work/

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Knowing all 3 major Chinese pool COOs (and others) personally, it's become kind of a pet peeve of mine when I see people group f2pool, antpool and/or viabtc in the same "container" even though there is no direct evidence. From what I gather talking to these people (I don't claim to know every deal they make - am not an insider) they are competitors, but of course they're not enemies.

The closest evidence I've seen of collaboration is when mono found coinbases for f2pool and antpool/binance going to the same target wallet (that looked to be a FPPS insurer, not sure what ever came of that investigation to be honest.) Maybe in the near future when I feel like traveling again I'll ask f2f to at least try to understand what happened there from their perspective.

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150 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 23 Apr 2025

Yeah right.

I did see people conflate ViaBTC but for some reason I always thought F2pool was part of that group.

IMO this is good news as it means Antpools friends are all smaller pools so they aren't anywhere near 50% of total hash rate.

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I did see people conflate ViaBTC

ViaBTC gets grouped because of Jihan's relations with them, even though he's no longer with Bitmain. It's not based on any direct evidence I've seen though and ViaBTC has been doing their own things.

this is good news as it means Antpools friends are all smaller pools

To my estimate they're often smaller than (equal to on a really good day) Foundry.


Even though there's not a close-to-50% issue that I have seen real evidence for, there's definitely a pool (block template) centralization issue; there has been for over a decade. Hopefully, Ocean will open source DATUM fully (not just the client-side) and with some pool operators working on stratumv2... there's hope.

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Yeah, I was just curious if they run their own pool the way Bitmain does, but I guess it would make sense that if they’re slinging other folks’ pools, they must not.

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Not if their default is F2pool.

Running a pool is a different business model to making hardware

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