Two more bitcoin cash mining pools have announced they will support the “Miner’s Choice” initiative, which urges miners to remove the dust limit and begin processing a set number of zero-fee transactions.
CoinGeek — which along with nChain devised the plan — on Thursday announced that mining pools ViaBTC and Bitcoin.com have agreed to join the initiative. CCN has been unable to independently verify the news, as neither had published an announcement or responded to our request for comment by the time of writing.
According to data from CoinDance, ViaBTC is the largest of the three mining operations — and the second largest bitcoin cash mining pool overall — with 12.7 percent of the BCH hashrate. Bitcoin.com - which is owned by former bitcoin evangelist Roger Ver — and CoinGeek add another 7.7 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively. The size of nChain’s mining operation was not immediately available.
In any case, Miner’s Choice now has support from more than a quarter of the total bitcoin cash hashrate, indicating that significant changes could soon be coming to the BCH network — the long-term effects of which remain to be seen.
As CCN reported, the proposal aims to spur mass adoption of bitcoin cash by allowing users to make transactions as small as 1 satoshi (0.00000001 BCH, roughly $0.00001) by removing the 546 satoshi “dust limit.” Additionally, it urges miners to process a set number of zero-fee transactions in every block.
The adoption of this proposal will inevitably increase spam in the BCH network — which is why the dust limit and mandatory fees were added to Bitcoin clients in the first place (and inherited by Bitcoin Cash) — but the plan’s backers believe it will also make bitcoin cash the cryptocurrency of choice for businesses seeking to implement microtransactions.
Additionally, proponents say that it will hasten the development of BCH-based tokens — called “colored coins” — which users will be able to send at almost no cost using 1 satoshi BCH transactions with zero fees.
Finally, they say that by processing a wider range of transactions, miners will create a more competitive fee marketplace that will benefit the ecosystem as a whole.
