What do you think is the best solution to help lower the issue of centralization in Bitcoin mining? Some ideas I've seen floating around are braidpool, stratum V2 and most recently DATUM, but the two ideas I'd like to discuss are putting a Bitaxe in every bitcoiners home, or crowd funding development for an open source ASIC chip.

This statement is usually given as a positive. For this argument lets backflip and look at the negative (as in the people we DON'T like). I'm talking about well known bad actors like Bitmain who have consistently lied and deceived the Bitcoin community (their most recent scandal).

Bitmain is the dominant ASIC chip manufacturer with something like 90% of the market. They are also the dominant mining pool but like to hide it by using proxy pools to cover over the existential 51% attack. Personally, this bothers me and I'm surprised that it isn't discussed more. Most of the "IT'S AN ATTACK ON BITCOIN!" air time gets spent on all the ordinal/tokens stuff, but I think the Bitmain issue is much bigger. IMO it reveals something about large Bitcoin miners. That their top priority is their fiat profits.

So what can we do to minimize Bitmains dominance? We've been somewhat lucky with how it has played out so far. They lost a lot of money siding with Bcash during the blocksize wars. They also had internal struggles between co-founders Jihan and Micree Zhan, and had to lay off a lot of their staff. Yet they still dominate.

One argument I often see is to get every pleb on a humble Bitaxe. And maybe it's just the Bitcoin bubble we live in, but it seems to have taken off a bit. So like the title says, if we can set a high target of around 100 million bitcoiners solo mining, some things start to change. Solo miners start taking 10-20% of the total hash rate, and a few of us win a life changing amount of sats. It moves towards decentralizing mining again and makes it more difficult for a large government or powerful company to 51% attack the network. More solo mined sats, less KYC, more circular economies, less BTC on exchanges. It's a nobel path to strive towards.

On the downside, Bitmain still makes money from selling the chips used to make Bitaxes. Seeing the popularity of solo miners, they might even get in on the action (like Luckyminer) and start mass producing a cheaper and more efficient alternative to the Bitaxe. It's open source after all. For the idealistic pleb miner, they lose a negligible amount of electricity at home, as well as the cost of the hardware. Maybe it was still better just to simply buy the sats instead since almost everyone mining with a Bitaxe will never find a block.

The other option from the title is for funding and developing a competing open source ASIC miner. Jack Dorsey is backing a project currently aiming for a 3 nanometer ASIC chip. As I understand, this kind or research and development is VERY expensive with no guarantee of a competitive product ever making it to market. We saw the computer giant Intel diversifying into bitcoin mining in early 2022, only to shut it down a year later. Perhaps with $10 billion in R&D we can get a miner hashing an order of magnitude above current models.

As it can only be theoretical while this chip is still under production, all we can do is speculate on what this could do for decentralizing Bitcoin mining. Will it become something like a great equalizer allowing smaller more nimble companies to get a first movers advantage? Will making it open source bring down the cost of running a miner so that it will end up in all of our electronic devices scattered around the house? Or will Bitmain with all it's infrastructure simply use the chip and offset some of the other mining components with it's other businesses to again create the cheapest and highest hashing model?

I tend to think that the development of an open source ASIC chip would be the faster solution. I think it would stir up the mining industry in a good way. It would rattle expectations and larger companies will need to cut and change their ways. Of course we can never know how it all plays out, but having open source products and ideas have been aligned with Bitcoin from the begining.

The Bitaxe in every household can still help a lot, though I have some doubt. The main one being that it is generally understood that ideological mining is not how Bitcoin works. For most of us it is best bought P2P or earned through providing a product or service. If 100 million people bought sats instead of a Bitaxe we would have the $10 billion to invest seriously into an ASIC chip and even have some more sats left over for the next generation open source ASIC miner!

It is simply incentives playing out in a free market. The cheapest and most efficient mining product will dominate and rise to the top. The cheaper the electricity with a secure enough environment is an ideal place to mine.

I will say that for educating bitcoiners about mining, learning through experience with a Bitaxe or something similar is the way. I recently got a Nerdaxe (Bitaxes were sold out!) and it has given me a lot more insight into how mining works as it is learning through practice. For the education alone, it has been worth it and I often think about scaling up a bit. I hear it's a common next step.