Roger Ver’s Mining Pool Fights Accusations of ‘Centralization’, Hashrate Purchasing

Roger Ver’s launch of Bitcoin.com’s own mining pool has already gained its fair share of criticism.

Announced earlier Monday, Bitcoin.com Pool rewards miners 10 percent of the block reward as extra, thereby incentivizing them to support Ver’s favored Bitcoin Unlimited scaling solution.

Reactions have already included accusations of “centralizing” Bitcoin. When the pool was mooted last year, Ver’s payment premium plans led to suggestions he was artificially purchasing hashpower, something Ver denied.

Ver continues to argue passionately for Bitcoin Unlimited’s adoption over Segregated Witness, hereinafter SegWit, with the opposing camp continuing its efforts to the contrary.

He also continues to head off criticism of Bitcoin Unlimited, frequently citing failures in aspects such as the Bitcoin network’s current high fees.

Ex-BTCC COO Samson Mow even announced a personal bounty of 1 BTC which he would pay to anyone who could create code allowing for Segregated Witness to be adopted. Specifically, this would be via the so-called user activated soft fork, hereinafter USAF, a topic which is currently the subject of debate among SegWit’s proponents and the wider community.

USAF involves the entire Bitcoin economy - not just miners - selecting an activation date for the future and processing SegWit transactions. Miners would then have to agree, this potentially relying on existing majority support for SegWit as a scaling solution.