The evolution of Bitcoin mining

This graph plots (1) the growth of aggregate hash rates (right-hand-side vertical axis, in log scale) starting from June 2011 to December 2018 and (2) the size evolution of all Bitcoin mining pools (left-hand-side vertical axis) over this period, with pool size measured by each pool’s hash rates as a fraction of global hash rates. Colors represent different pools, and white spaces represent solo mining. Over time, mining pools have increasingly taken over Bitcoin mining, but no pool ever seems to dominate the mining industry for long. The pool hash rates data come from https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/hashrate/6m?c=m&g=15&t=a and https://btc.com/, with details given in Section 4.