Bitmain - ASIC producer and cryptocurrency giant - extracted 42% of all blocks found in the Bitcoin network in the last week. BTC.com and AntPool, owned by Bitmain, now account for 26.6% and 15.3% of the network hashrate respectively.
Bitmain has a big advantage over the competition because it produces and uses its own products in the mining process. The company produces specialized integrated circuits (ASICs) that are able to extract Bitcoins at a faster rate than high-end GPUs (GPUs).
It also runs mines where miners can combine their efforts and ultimately reduce mining costs, as well as offer mining services in the cloud, which allow miners to rent mining capacity from mining farms remotely.
With the help of its ASIC excavators, Bitmain also extracts Bitcoin Cash because Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash operate on the same algorithm. If Bitmain stopped Bitcoin Cash mining and instead used 100% of its resources to dig Bitcoin, theoretically it could reach about 45% of Bitcoin's total hashate.
It is very close to 51%. Theoretically, this would give Bitmain the opportunity to perform a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network in order to censor transactions or double expenses. This makes many people in the cryptocurrency space quite nervous - a number often associated with the loss of decentralization and invariance.
In the end - there does not seem to be any reason to worry that Bitmain will perform an attack even if it exceeds the 51% threshold, because the company could potentially lose more than to gain.
Let's now take a look at the Bitcoin technical picture at the H4 time frame. The market has been testing the weekly pivot area at the level of $6,223 for several hours, but the bulls did not manage to move higher above the technical resistance at the level of $6,519. This is why the local support at the level of $6,090 was broken and now the price is going lower towards the swing low at the level of $5,742. It is worth to keep an eye on the market behavior around this level.