TLDR: Check out this site that determines how much home mining it takes to dethrone the two companies that build most blocks.
The middle child of my Woody propaganda series
The Guitaxe got another big brother. While the little guy is great for learning, and his biggest brother hashes like a beast, the s9 version has a special super power. This space heater not only kills fascists, it's moving into my neighbor's garage. She's "always cold" and I'm always trying to foist my hashrate's power consumption on other people. It's a match made in heaven. Woot! This is my first American home mining deploy.
This got me thinking, how many garages will it take?
Hashrate Hearth
Foundry and the AntPool mafia currently build 58% of bitcoin's block templates. My new site explores how much home mining it will take to break that majority, and different ways we can get there.
The Skinny
First, you pick a goal and one machine and a gauge shows how many homes it takes to reach said goal. As of this writing, breaking the aforementioned majority takes 160 EH/s of new hashrate. That's 800k homes with an S21, 1.5 million with a used S19j Pro, 12 million with an S9... or 133 million with a Bitaxe. Only about 106 million people currently own bitcoin directly. There's also a slider for how much of that home fleet ends up in the US, because China's 2021 ban showed where the hashrate sits is relevant too.
You can flip the chart between coinbase tags and who builds the templates. By tag, it takes three pools to make a majority. But if you go by builder (b10c's research) it's two. A setup comparison shows who determines the transactions in each case.
Plug in your home scenario and you get a daily ledger. There are presets for winter heat on grid power, midday solar surplus, and hydronic heat + solar, plus credit to the folks boxing this stuff up for normal people like Canaan Avalon, Heatbit, Hashrate House and Exergy. (I believe that Heatbit is making a big announcement in about twenty minutes, btw)
I included a scenario to explore the hashrate exodus to AI. Props to @optimism for calling my attention to how this might actually create more consolidation though. Then I include some action steps, but if you read my posts regularly, there are no surprises there. :)
It has beautiful, sloppily vibe-coded ambience. Make sure to turn the sound on. You're welcome.
Plus, you don't get the steam effects when the sound is off. Those are the breaks.
Why
Last week, @Scoresby asked me a question with presuppositions that grated pretty harshly with my experience in the last few years:
What value do you see home miners bringing that industrial miners do not bring?
Around that same time, I had a call with a proprietary mining company about getting machines down to Mossel Bay. They were kind, generous people, not banal shitcoiners. Their advice, after hearing my whole rant on the value of decentralization and censorship resistance, was still to skip bitcoin and mine altcoins. They argued that home-friendly machines pay about the same and the pool converts payouts anyway. If Foundry and AntPool start with some funny business, they lose nothing. The family saving in bitcoin loses a ton.
So here's my answer. It's not the machine. It's which template is being hashed and who's holding the bitcoin. That's not charity. It's defending savings.
And this morning's news makes it pretty timely!
The HRF newsletter this morning just reported that Russia has announced that after July 2027, self custody is essentially banned for private citizens. That's coming from the country hosting about a sixth of global hashrate. Currently, those kind of rules get enforced at exchanges. When somebody decides to enforce on-chain, won't the cheapest place to do it be the handful of pools that build most block templates?
Prove me wrong (please!)
I'm still looking to lose this argument (that we have a mining pool centralization problem). In the meantime, let me know if your garage is getting chilly.
P.S. Russia announcement also inspired a whole new section in bitcoinisforcriminals.com. Updating it now.
This should be in bitcoin mining territory
@k00b
Apparently @jasonb doesn’t know how to read
I don't believe that I'm welcome to post there. :(
I'm working on it! #lifegoals
Hm, that's actually not as bad as I thought. So between the low-homes (Bitaxes or whatever small stuff just for fun) and the more serious heatpunkts (100s of TH/s) or us aspiring heatpunks of 30-50 TH/s (#1470551), we only need about 20-30m people.
Plus, even less. Because most of us home miners are very price-insensitive, whereas the big, corporate guys are the first to be squeezed out... so once we get a few million peeps with heating devices (e.g., #1600253 or 21E in Europe) is gonna difficulty-adjust quite a lot of the big guys out of there
I know, right?!
Yup, I talk about this a lot with climate change obsessed normies. Bitcoin mining is actually the kind of thing, that if you do it yourself, and do it green, you're also making it harder for people to be profitable doing it dirty. So anybody that's still worried about mining boiling the oceans...should start mining at home. You can't do that with AI, EVs, video games, microwaves, remote control cars, or anything else. Do those on solar and you're net zero. Mine bitcoin on solar or with heating you were already going to use and your carbon negative.
nice one! Hadn't considered that... put your money where your mouth is sort of action
i got an avalon Q running in the living room, and nanoS' in each bedroom :) Keeps us from freezing at least hahah
Do you crank that Q all year, or just during the winter?
I live in the PNW so doesnt make sense in the summer. In the fall/winter/early spring, I basically have my thermostat set at 60 degrees, so if it gets really cold the furnace kicks on but otherwise the house is heated by the avalons.
Nice
Funny timing. Furnace just went out and HVAC guy can't get out to my house until Monday. ASICs to the rescue!
Awesome! I mean, sorry about your HVAC bill, but glad to hear you've got them space heaters from 2050 ready to go!
ahh, shite happens :) more corn to be cooked for the next few days
I was just told by my wife and daughter to keep my Q on standard, and not crank it to full power because it's too damned hot!
Anything above eco mode is unacceptable in my house but this weekend I think we'll be cranking!
Hell yeah!
Heatbit just made a new device called the Bitwater that's a water heater element that mines Bitcoin. They still make space heaters and an air purifier.
SN #1600253 mentions the Bitwater
Yup, pretty awesome, and it’s actually live on the site if you want to see how many of those it will take to make a difference in the network, depending on your goal.
Great post! Realistically there is probably a better shot with around 500k lunatics like you and me.
Two down! 500k is significantly less than 1% of all bitcoiners. I imagine that many lunatics might be a realistic number...
The switch will flip rapidly as soon as there are plug-and-play devices that offer real energy savings.
I think we’re close to that with space heaters already and perhaps we just got a lot closer with water heaters.
I love that water heater idea. I just might pull the trigger on the element replacement posted today.
We have a gas water heater, so it'll take a bit more effort for us to switch over.
Me too. Hashrate House has one that goes beneath a gas water heater, but I don't really have the sats to buy one right now. He's a really cool guy though and I hope to get his model when I can.
Wow! That's awesome. We would need to have some electrical work done before I could hook it up, but it looks very promising.
When I put in the circuit for my s19s, I called up an electrician buddy for a quote. He said he'd do it for the joy of seeing me suffer doing the dirty work. Then he'd do the smart person stuff for free. Joke was on him! The dirty work turned out to be a friggin' blast! So, if you got any electrician buddies, check with them first. ;)
I have an electric heater in my little snow bird/mini mining farm down south. I need to take a break from remotely monitoring my solar power setup down there at some point!
Yeah, really! Pretty exciting stuff!
The site is really fun! Great job. (But even more, I'm loving your adventures in making various bitcoin waste heat devices -- these are truly excellent.)
You bring up an interesting point for me: I don't think controlling template construction is part of the bitcoin threat model.
I am not yet convinced that control of the template is really that important.
I imagine an ultimate censor pool: >50% of hashrate mines blocks that are empty (except for their coinbase) and refuses to mine on top of anyone else's blocks. I think the Bitcoin response to such a situation is that users will have to increase the fees they offer miners for inclusion in transactions until hashrate defects from the censor.
It is highly unlikely any individual will be able to deploy enough hashrate to guarantee the inclusion of their own transactions. Rather, they hope to entice a large enough percentage of miners to include their transactions by offering juicy fees.
If the argument is that higher fees will not entice miners away from the censoring pool because such miners are ideologically motivated (ie owned by governments that want to censor), then, yes, this is a 51% attack, and it is a known vulnerability of bitcoin.
But, as far as I understood, the argument for why Bitcoin mining actually has a chance to remain decentralized is because energy is widely distributed around the world and so when bitcoin holders offer more btc in fees, there is a chance that more miners will come online (or switch pools because they are not under the jurisdiction of the censor).
I think it is a good thing that miners can build their own templates, but I don't think that is where the buck stops with censorship resistance. It seems to me that the fees users offer are the only real defense we have against a 51% attack.
Thanks! And yes, more wacky frankenminers are in the queue. :)
We agree on the 51% case. When a censor refuses to build on someone's blocks, fees and defectors will hopefully be the answer. No home miner will have enough hash to secure their own inclusion.
My worry is the more banal attack that doesn't even need 51%. Foundry and the AntPool group recieve a compliance mandate and simply leave certain payments out. Fees don’t fix that. First, the compliance is not for sale. No amount of fees covers a prison sentence or the company being shut down. Then second, the actual fee never reaches the ones doing the hashing. With an FPPS pool, the operator builds the template, so the mouth-wating fee goes to the party who's already said no at that point.
Fees are the signal, and constructing one's own template is how a miner can respond. Fees may determine who gets the uncensored blockspace, but its the miners who are building their own templates creating it. If all six of the biggest dogs comply, that’s like 6-7 blocks a day, room for only 5% of today’s transactions. Small guys already up and running is what makes your fee defense work without waiting months for the relocation or rebuilding of new hashrate.
There is a difference between a government demanding compliance from a pool and demanding compliance from all the hashers pointed at the pool.
In the case of Foundry, most of their hashrate seems to be coming from US based hashers, but even Foundry says they have non-US hashrate.
In a censorship regime, what stops the non-US hashers from going to a pool that will go after higher fees?
A pool like Antpool seems like it may have hashrate from a much wider range of jurisdictions. If China demands compliance with censorship, what stops Antpool hashers from jumping to new pools? For instance, I believe Coolbit mines with Antpool but has mining operations in the US.
Isn't it the case that a miner can also respond by switching pools?
For sure, and switching pools is a big response. But switching pools doesn't mean switching template builders. AntPool’s group includes pools a lot of us like, Luxor and Braiins for example, so lots of miners who “left” for them are still hashing AntPool’s templates (unless they’re using SV2 on Braiins with job declaration). That’s why I put the tag-vs-builder flipper on the site. The switch that actually changes who decides the payments is to a template you or someone outside the AntPool mandate builds.
Will industrial hashers make that switch? I don't know any that will. Marathon mined OFAC-compliant blocks in 2021 without even being asked to do so. I know they stopped because of public outcry, but that was for voluntary censorship. I don't know if they'd be so persuaded under strong coercion. At Bitcoin 2024 an IREN rep told me unapologetically that their hash was split between Foundry and AntPool and said “I don’t know” when I questioned him about a 51% event. US industrial miners are as much within OFAC’s reach as the pool is. Meanwhile fees are currently half a percent of what blocks pay out, so a few censored payments are a rounding error to an FPPS miner’s income, against the risk of the full force of the federal government.
Non-US hashers exiting to pools that build their own templates is what I’m rooting for. The benefit of home miners is they’re already there when something goes down, and their own payments are on the line. Again, maybe it's not someone's exact payment that they're going to mine, but it's that they're contributing hash that's in their favor.
This is a great idea, especially when matching the energy heat output from miners to other needs than just cryptomining. The one big draw back to this concept, aside from cost of electricity and proper wiring to handle the load, is that the damn ASIC machines are loud. From a basic consumer use aspect, the noise level off the hook, making the idea impractical.
Thanks!
On the noise, previously, I would have agreed with you. But I actually fixed this last week: #1596515
That's also why I can finally put this s9 even in my neighbors house. It's pretty dang quite with those P12 Pros on it.
Was that the right link or am I blind (could be the latter)? I don't see where you dealt with the ASIC noise from something like an S9 Asic. Anyhoo, the exact post doesn't matter; how did you muffle the noise?
replace the fans with P12 Pros https://www.arctic.de/us/P12-Pro/ACFAN00305A
There are even quieter options, but these you can find really affordably.
Copy, thx!
What value do you see home miners bringing that industrial miners do not bring?
etc. etc.
1&2. Yes, unequivocally. I'd also add that they're more nibble at switching pools because they're less of a big, centralized target.
My guess before reading: all of them.
@remindme in 24 hours