F2Pool

Basics

• Founded: April 2013

History

• Chinese mining pool that has been persistent in mining BTC since the beginning (a notable exception since many pools have come and gone again)
• From this post (9-2019) by Bitcoin.com:

"History: F2pool is China’s oldest bitcoin mining pool, and the second largest BTC pool in the world today after BTC.com. It also operates the third largest ethereum mining operation. As the Bitcoin Wiki explains, the F2pool was once known as Discus Fish on account of its coinbase signature of 七彩神仙鱼 (Discus Fish), the nickname of one of the operators. Today, F2pool captures 12.38 EH/s on the BTC network, 50.36 TH/s on LTC and 21.42 TH/s on ETH. The pool also provides Android and iOS apps and a range of tools including mining revenue comparisons.

In 2014, F2pool controlled 25% of the BTC network and 31% of the LTC, leading to fears that it could launch a 51% attack."

• Signals SegWit
• Was part of the Chinese miners that signed a statement that they want 8MB blocks. Signatories included the large mining companies BTCChina, Antpool, Huobi, and BW.

Controversies

• Got named in a research paper (5-8-2022) which highlighted F2Pool’s block timestamps being artificially altered to improve ETH mining rewards.

• F2pool mentioned on Wechat (6-2019) that it was observable from hashrate distribution that withholding block attacks are happening a lot.

Mining Stats

• Also has a mining pool directed to Sia but had 0.0% of the hashrate as of 8-2019.
• Coins mined: BTC, LTC, ETH, ZEC, SCC, SC, DASH, XMR, DCR, XZC, AION.
• Is 25% (17-7-2020) of the Handshake mining power.

Team, partners, etc.

• Chun, Wang; admin/operator and co-founder (Was part of Hong Kong consensus and is the founder of Stake.fish)
• Discusfish; co-founder
• Is listed as a 'Cooperative Partner' on the website of Monero Classic (9-2019).
• Zircuit; mentioned a founder was part of their Mainnet Round (22-7-2024).