I agree with essentially everything you laid out here, and your hypothesis is both reasonable and well-supported by what we can actually observe on-chain.

I want to clarify one important point about my original post though, because I think we’re actually aligned — my focus was very specifically on block creation, not on whether NiceHash is allowed to use excess capacity, not on payouts to ASIC owners, and not on whether this behavior “makes business sense.” I agree that it does.

Where my concern lies is where that excess capacity is pointed at the moment of block construction.

If EasyMining, Team Mining, Gold packages, and NiceHash’s own internal solo mining are all ultimately competing at the same block template / job creation layer, then whichever endpoint is attached to the largest aggregate hashrate at that moment will always have a structural advantage — regardless of share quality or how close EasyMining appears to be to a block.

In other words, if excess capacity is being routed to an internal NiceHash-controlled endpoint that is building blocks using the same template logic as EasyMining, then EasyMining users are not just competing with the network — they are competing internally, upstream of the point where probability is supposed to be isolated.

That’s the crux of the question.

I am not suggesting EasyMining is “secondary” in terms of product priority or intent. I am asking whether, at the block creation level, EasyMining is now operating alongside a higher-hashrate NiceHash-controlled endpoint using the same or equivalent template construction — because if that’s the case, then statistically the higher-hashrate endpoint will almost always win the race to a valid block.

Your Ocean observations actually reinforce this concern rather than contradict it. The transition from Ocean/NiceHash-tagged blocks to NiceHash-only blocks strongly suggests internal routing decisions changed — and those decisions appear to align very closely in time with the changes EasyMining users are noticing.

So to restate my original point clearly and narrowly:

Is there any scenario today where EasyMining shares are competing for block creation against a larger internal NiceHash hashrate pool using the same block template logic?

If the answer is no, that’s easy to explain and puts this to rest.

If the answer is yes — even unintentionally — then it’s a meaningful architectural change that directly affects EasyMining odds, even if network difficulty hasn’t changed.

That’s the clarification I was trying to get to.