Thank you for your answer. I get that this is the Bitcoin section and not Bcash, but I am particulary interested in the reasons why people have stuck to Bitcoin, in how far they have been willing for example to leave profit on the table due to ideological opposition to BCH, assuming they are maximizing profit in terms of Bitcoin, not in Bcash.

Hope this clarifies my reason for putting it here.

Hello all,

I am currently conducting research on the mining ecosystem as part of my thesis, and I am looking to get a deeper understanding of (inter alia) the relationship between location & size on the types of perceived risks, as well as on miner behavior with regards to switching chains.

I would be grateful if you could answer a questionnaire (see below, 9 questions, duration of around 3-4 minutes).

Thanks in advance!

Questionnaire
Q1: Where is your mining operation located (Country, state/province)?

Q2: Why did you choose this location?

Q3: What is the size of your mining operation (e.g. in terms of TH/s)?

Q4: What source(s) of energy does your mining operation use?

Q5: Are you participating in a mining pool? If not, why not?

Q6: Have you ever switched to mining BCH with your mining hardware. If yes, skip question 7

Q7: Considering that there have been occasions that BCH was 2-4x more profitable to mine than BTC (in terms of BTC), why did you decide to stick to mining BTC? More answers are possible.

- According to my/our estimations BCH was not more profitable than BTC
- I/We ideologically oppose to BCH
- I was/we were unaware of BCH’s relative profitability over BTC
- I/we did not trust any BCH mining pool
- To my/our opinion, BCH was not liquid enough
- There was not enough time to switch my/our mining hardware
- I/we do not closely monitor mining profitability of BCH
- Other, please specify:

Q8: What do you consider to be the biggest risk(s) to your mining operation?

Q9: What kind of difficulties/hurdles have occurred while running your mining operation?

Thank you for your answers!

I asked the same question on bitcoin.stackexchange.com, this could be the answer (from Andrew Chow):

"Some miners may be ideologically opposed to BCH and thus will not mine it or help it in any way. Others may be too lazy to switch their hash rate to BCH or do not trust any BCH mining pools so they do not switch. Yet others may simply have been unaware of these profitability spikes and were not available to switch their mining hardware to BCH. Given that the change in profitability was only for a very short period of time, some miners may not have had the time in order to switch their hardware, or the effort was not necessarily worth it.

Additionally, mining on BCH means that they would be mining a much less liquid currency. BCH does not have nearly the same trading volume as Bitcoin and mining BCH means that the miners may be stuck with a coin which they do not want and may even lose value compared to what they would earn with Bitcoin.

It is important to note that even if not all miners switch, some still did which you can see in the hashrate charts. This did happen fairly frequently as the EDA could be gamed so that mining on BCH briefly was more profitable than Bitcoin, and several miners did do this".

For those who were interested.

But, in that case, they would be mining BCH and then trading it for BTC. They were still able to gather more BTC by mining BCH and exchange it for BTC, instead of just mining BTC. Or what am I missing here?

Hello all,

From August 2017 until mid November (prior to BCH's hardfork with the difficulty adjustment algorithm) there have been some occasions (notably end of August, beginning of October and mid November prior to HF) where mining BCH was 2-4x more profitable than mining BTC. See: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/mining_profitability-btc-bch.html#1y

You would expect that in such cases, where mining one coin compared to the other is much more profitable, all miners would switch to the more profitable coin. However, this did not happen, even when BCH was 4x more profitable, there was still hashrate on the BTC chain (see: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-btc-bch.html#1y).

What could be a possible explanation for this? I am looking to hear a miner's perspective on this.

Thanks in advance!