Grin Network May Destroy Because of Chinese Miners

Cihat Öztürk
5 min readNov 30, 2021

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Firstly, if you are a Grin coin miner, you should read this article to the end because the future of the Grin network may depend on you.

The Grin network has been experiencing a serious decentralization problem for the past 1 year. Most of the miners are just mining over a pool.

As you can see in the chart above, more than 50% of Grin miners are mining on the pool.always.vip pool and none of the miners are aware of the danger because if they were aware of the danger, none of them would make a pool a central power.

Now let’s explain why this situation is dangerous with all the details.

History

When Bitcoin first came out, there was no concept of Pool mining and only Solo mining. Therefore, there was no problem of decentralization in network power because everyone was mining individually. After a while, pool mining was discovered by software developers other than Satoshi, and people switched to pool mining as they had the opportunity to get paid earlier. However, this revealed a very important problem.

Decentralization

If all miners minining on a single pool, all the power of the network goes to that pool manager. That’s why; All options such as 51% attack, protocol change, hard-forking are under the control of the pool creator because all POW(that is working with mining power) networks follow the path of the longest chain and if a pool or a group has more than 51% network strength, they have the right to change the Blockchain chain in any direction they want.

Solution

After this problem arose in the early years of Bitcoin, it immediately began to be established in other pools, preventing the concentration of power in one place. Pools with too much hash power warned people to mining in other pools and the problem was resolved. Today, no pool in the Bitcoin network has more than 18% network strength. Therefore, there is no centralized network strength and no danger in the Bitcoin network.

Source: https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoin

Grin

Grin network has been experiencing this problem for the last 1 year. The network is entirely in the hands of central powers.At first, most of the miners were on Goblinpool. With the shutdown of Goblinpool, most of the miners have switched to another Chinese pool, pool.always.vip.

Source: https://miningpoolstats.stream/grin

The pool.always.vip has a terrible mining hash power of 77.5% among the Grin pools. They have 62% network hash power across the entire network. This makes them a central danger because they have more than 51% power, the future of the Grin network is entirely at the discretion of this pool.

The main problems caused by this situation

Due to the centralized network hash power, there are a lot of problems with the Grin platform. I will list them one by one for you.

  1. The grin network can experience an attack at any time. This is entirely at the discretion of the pool manager. If an attack occurs, nothing will make sense as the Grin price will collapse.
  2. On the Gate.io exchange, for Grin deposits, we have to wait for 1000 blocks to pass, that is an average of 17 hours. Because Gate.io exchange knows that Grin has centeral of network power and so they protect the exchange against any 51% attack. This situation negatively affects both us Grin users, miners and the stock market.

3. It drives investors away. Grin has not been able to experience a full rise in the last 1 year. This is one of the reasons. Because no big investor wants to invest in a risky, insecure and centralized network.

4. It blocks the new exchange listings and also increases the likelihood of being delisted. Because no exchange dares to list an insecure and centralized network. For example, a comment for Grin, which is likely to be listed on Bisq recently. One of the users said in his first statement that he opposes the listing of Grin on Bisq because the Grin network has a central pool of power.

Source: https://github.com/bisq-network/growth/issues/205#issuecomment-963025987

Final
In summary, as it turns out, central Pool power in the Grin network negatively impacts almost everything.

Because;

  1. If you are a miner, the Grin price will not increase and your earnings will not increase for these reasons. If there will be an attack, the devices you bought by spending thousands of dollars will go your home’s warehouse.
  2. If you are an investor, all your investments can go to waste. One attack can ruin everything.
  3. If you have own a stock market, your stock market could suffer a huge loss when Grin is attacked.
  4. If you manufacture or sell Grin mining devices (ipollo, nhash), you may not be able to sell new devices. Because, who wants to mine on centralized network power. Or if the attack happens, who wants to mine Grin.
  5. If you are a Grin developer, you may not be able to develop something.

Therefore; If you are someone with a Grin connection and you want the benefit of everyone along with your own benefit, you should strive for the decentralization of the Grin network.

The table is below. Now you know everything.

Minexpert

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