Mysterious Entity Dominates Bitcoin Block Distribution with Over 24% of All Blocks

Bitcoin's block distribution has an interesting twist - nearly 30% of blocks mined since its launch have been captured by three mining pools, but there is also a mysterious entity holding over 24% of all blocks. The unknown miners are comprised of two groups: solo miners and small operations that didn't identify themselves in the coinbase message, as well as Bitcoin's earliest years when pooled mining did not exist.

Antpool ranks second with 109,004 blocks mined, or 11.35% of all blocks discovered, while F2pool comes third with 98,148 blocks, around 10.22%. Foundry USA, the Digital Currency Group subsidiary that now leads in current hashrate share, ranks fourth on the all-time block list with 72,569 blocks, or 7.56%.

The historical record of older pools is also significant - ViaBTC, founded by Haipo Yang in 2016, has mined 52,116 blocks, 5.43%, while Braiins Pool, formerly known as Slushpool, the world's oldest continuously operating public pool, has produced 41,969 blocks, 4.37%. BTC Guild and Ghash.IO also played a notable role in Bitcoin's history.