Parasite Mining Pool Strikes Again, Finding Its Second Bitcoin Block

A revolutionary bitcoin mining pool, designed to challenge conventional pay-per-share and lottery-style models, has achieved a significant milestone by mining its second block. The pool, known as Parasite Pool, operates on a distinctive hybrid model where the winning miner receives 1 BTC, and the remaining 2.125 BTC plus fees are proportionally distributed among all participants based on their shares submitted since the previous block. This approach has no parallel in mainstream mining and has sparked interest among home miners. The pool's second block, number 945,601, was mined on Friday, containing 7,398 transactions and 0.002 BTC in fees, with bitcoin trading at $76,213 at the time. The pool's design aims to provide a more equitable distribution of rewards, with no fees for participation and payouts routed through the Lightning Network. By securing bitcoin through a competitive cryptographic puzzle, mining pools like Parasite play a crucial role in the network's security and decentralization. The pool's founder, ZK Shark, also the creator of the Ordinal Maxi Biz NFT collection on Bitcoin, targets home miners with this innovative approach. Unlike traditional solo pools, which often result in the majority of participants never finding a block, Parasite's model splits the difference, preserving the lottery-style payday for the block finder while ensuring a steady flow of satoshis to participants between blocks. With its second block, Parasite has validated its proportional distribution mechanics, retaining hashrate through the 48-day gap between payouts. The pool currently operates at 52 petahashes per second, a fraction of bitcoin's estimated 1-zetahash network hashrate. As the pattern around solo and small-pool mining continues to gain traction, Parasite's model is being closely watched, with a potential third block in the next two months poised to further validate its approach.