It's time to pull our own weight in hash
How it started
Back in July, I wrote up this post about my experience at the big Nashville conference. The TLDR is that most industrial miners don't put much thought into concerns about centralization when deciding what pool they mine with. This is a concern because the prevailing argument against centralization doomers has been that everybody will just switch pools if some pool starts to censure folks. This is clearly not true if those that control the hash aren't even thinking about such things.
The ensuing discussion was not encouraging. Here are a few observations from stackers.
I imagine that most industrial miners are hyper-focused on maximizing profit and are not really all that focused on doing right by bitcoin, i.e. protecting against 51% attacks, routing to the "best" mining pool based on "ethics", etc.
Mining is the industry for people who literally have no ideas. It is the industry where the product to be delivered and its quantity is pre-ordained for eternity. It is more basic than the business of logging or mining for talc powder. It is no more interesting than janitorial or waste management services, yet is able to draw frenzy from identitarian bitcoiners, who ironically, dilute how special the transition that is upon us is. The desire for a simulacrum of the thing is an attack on the thing and a detraction from those who desire it sincerely.
Miners are their for the profit, or else they wouldnt be doing it. Many people are in bitcoin to make a profit, not to see it become the currency it deserves to be.
There are others. Many of these comments have a tone of concern, which makes sense to me. Others seem to have a tone of, "boys will be boys. Let them play in the dirt. I like to do smarty-pants things." I'm not trying to pick on anybody's comment in particular, but the problem here is that these are the boys securing the network! This is like being an arborist who's really into leaf health because it's sophisticated and pretty, but not so much into root health. He may be sad to find his leaves looking a little sickly one day.
How it's going
"Users of bitcoin should be viewing miners as an adversary."
TLDR: bad
The above quotation is the inspiration for this post and a direct quotation from a mining hardware distributer I was speaking with this week. I've spent the last half a year researching ways to heat my house with bitcoin mining exhaust and the winds are starting to blow chilly again in my corner of the globe. I'm about ready to buy some equipment a bit beefier than my s9i fleet and have picked back up on conversations with sellers. The above quote came out after one particular seller had encouraged me to use a more affordable miner. I appreciate him looking out for my losses, but it expressed the same sentiment I keep hearing less bluntly everywhere I turn.
He said that if I was mostly concerned about decentralization, I should run a node. Well I do run a node, but blockchain validation is not the area I'm worried about centralizing. I'm worried about mining pool centralization. He went on to explain that it's just too competitive because industrial miners have been incentivized to buy miners that might not be profitable because they can depreciate them on their taxes. He reiterated that industrial miners are "fiat minded."
Enemy __________ the Gates
Let's explore this for a little bit.
What he was describing was not the enemy AT the gates. This is the enemy GUARDING the gates. If fiat minded people take over the lightning network, nodes can close their channels. If fiat minded people take over all of bitcoin development, nodes can ignore their changes. If fiat minded people take over stacker news, you can sell your cowboy credits to darthcoin. If fiat minded people are the ones securing the network, long term, the best case scenario is a hard fork in which the network looses a MASSIVE amount of hash rate (security), takes a massive blow in the eyes of the public, challenging the value proposition of bitcoin, and a competing "legitimate" coin emerges. That's the best case scenario. Am I wrong? I can think of some that are worse.
No Escape
After my post in July generated some noise, I shared it with a famous bitcoin influencer. I mentioned that this person is sponsored by one of the industrial miners that I spoke with at the conference. I asked if this person might consider having someone from the industry on to discuss what pools they contribute to and why. They wrote me back a one line response saying that they couldn't speak on behalf of their sponsor.
On one level, I get that. This person didn't want to implicate his sponsor in irresponsibility. On the other hand, since I haven't really heard any refutation of this concern, this guy either doesn't understand what I'm saying, or is fine having his adversary guarding his whole life savings.
I also applied for a research position at Foundry, sighting that post. Wait, what?! You may be thinking, "isn't Foundry the organization that you're most harshly critiquing here?" Sure, but they will be smote with the rest of us if they get to that level of power, because the whole value proposition of bitcoin collapses. They might be holding all of their wealth in fiat at that point, but the business model goes down with the network.
Pull your own weight in hash
Tabletop solo miners are awesome. I hope to get one when I have some disposable cash. It's not going to solve this problem though. As a badass bookshelf decoration, hopefully it will solve the problem of having a bitcoin conversation icebreaker with my cousin Mikey. But they're literally currently more expensive than an s9 (I see one for sale online right now for less than half the price of a Bitaxe), which has over fifteen times the hashrate. Admittedly, running the s9 also adds a coffee worth of expense to your daily routine, and the hardware comes from the central manufacturer of most bitcoin mining. ...but it's fifteen times the hashrate. If you can afford an s19, it's one-hundred times the hashrate of one of these solo guys.
Waste not, want not
AND, you can recycle the heat. My point is, let's wrestle with our adversaries this winter. Let's generate some real kick-em-the-teeth hash and motivate the manufacturers to build more real hash-producing miners for our homes. It's definitely in our best interest...and it's in the best interest of any honest industrial miner too!