Oddbean

Ocean with yet another underwelhming announcement. Datum is Stratum v2 but no e2ee and binary data transfer. It might be quicker to adoption due to it's simplicity but they're resources could have been better spent working on Sv2, IMHO.

Pools are centralized trusted third parties at the end of the day. Ocean needs a good narrative to convince miners to switch pools, as there are already quite a few well-capitalised pools offering guaranteed and consistent FPPS payouts. I don’t think diversity of pools is a bad thing, but the narrative that Bitcoin would be more decentralized if everyone mined for ocean (or any other pool for that matter) is simply not true. Decentralized = many small independent pools (offering PPLNS payouts because they are more sustainable and incentive compatible) The only way we achieve that decentralization of hashrate long term is if more pools like Ocean pop up and miners use them. But Ocean isn’t decentralizing hashrate by offering this new service, its decentralizing hashrate through its very existence by offering miners another pool to use to reduce their payout variance.

Everyone will tell you to run your own node. My bitaxe costs less than my node and uses about the same amount of electricity. An s9 is even cheaper these days. Mining is still seen as elite. It shouldn't be. Currently doing both, mining is less hassle and costs less than running your own full LN node. Hash because you are helping secure your savings not for a profit incentive. Once we fix that narrative and point people to entry level miners we can make progress distributing hash power. Instead we keep telling everyone they need the biggest newest miner to profit or don't bother and the ones who buy an s21 will probably still lose at residential prices unless they are using the waste heat. Plus they are out millions of sats when they finally give up.

Mining pool game theory for censorship resistance is non-trivial. Your bitaxe or army of bitaxes will not stop compliant pubcos and pools from orphaning your blocks filled with blacklisted transactions. For that you need substantial hashpower (+30% of global hashrate) to ensure non-OFAC compliant transactions are able to be settled. That means big international miners cooperating to resist censorship, and big pools resisting censorship. It’s not as simple as virtue signalling with a desktop toy if you are actually considering the ramifications of state censorship of the base layer. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=312668.0

It isn't just my "desktop toy." It it's about changing the culture until everyone is running them to secure the network and not just for an immediate profit motive, the same way everyone should run a node. That will drive down profits and force some of those bigger players to shut down too. Bigger hodlers should hash more, I just used the bitaxe as an entry level example. If you have 1 bitcoin I think you should at least run a node and 1 bitaxe, minimum. How much per month should you be willing to spend to secure a larger stack? It scales up from there. If you have 100 coins I think a much larger hashrate is appropriate. Any losses should be thought of as the recurring security cost of keeping your life savings secure. That other security first coin some people like to bring up is hopelessly unprofitable to mine at any electric cost and any CPU efficiency. That is because everyone mines as a matter of course. Bitcoiners could take a lesson. Mining isn't a thing you do for a profit motive. It is more of a civic duty, like picking up trash in the local park.

The majority of hashrate mines for profit. It’s not about what should be, but about what is. It is the case that most large miners are energy arbitrage plays, or ways to mine shareholders in public markets. Pubcos will absolutely remain compliant, or else they can’t use the ATM to mine their shareholders. That means complying with OFAC sanctions regulation. I love the bitaxe movement and it enables individuals like you and me to participate in the mining ecosystem, but the problems of censorship on Bitcoin are far bigger than what any of the bitaxe miners can actually solve. I agree that it should be a norm, but I also see the reality that it isn’t a norm, and changing behaviour en masse is extremely challenging. The elites needed to use many PR tricks to scam the sheeple into injections and mask wearing. That level of behaviour change requires a massive propaganda campaign, which is something not in the budget of an open source movement. The state has already broached the plan of a feather fork and high level policy circles are talking about it. Bitaxes don’t solve this—it’s an absolutely real threat to base layer censorship resistance, and the tornadocash/samourai wallet trials are setting the precedent to enable the state to fuck the pools and the miners so hard that they mine compliant blocks. The way we overcome this is +30% of global hashrate distributed across many small and non-compliant pools to make it more difficult for policies like this to be enforced. Bitaxes can be a part of this for sure, but they will be a small part of what needs to be hundreds of exahash to overcome this scale of an attack. https://youtu.be/jiNo-T71FLk?si=gPrEzu75Gn6c9Pfw

"Miners and pools validating transactions from sanctioned addresses are potentially guilty of strict liability sanctions violation" — Carole House (Former Director for Cybersecurity and Secure Digital Innovation in the White House). From the video above. They are waiting for the right time to strike because hashrate is currently incentivised to aggregate further. It’s not about if, but when.

Were the PR campaign for more distributed civic mining instead of always for a profit motive, you and me and anyone else we can convince of the importance. I'm pointing it out to you. I've posted on nostr about it before even doing the math for how much hash you need for your % of hash to equal your % of all coins held. I brought it up at the last in person meetup I went to. The commercial miners won't ever stand up to the gov when the rubber hits the road, they are infrastructure dependant. It has to be distributed at the device level so the government simply has too many targets to effectively engage with forcing compliance. Then the individuals can change pools at will or even solo from their own infrastructure like some of the people in meshtadel are working on.

https://i.nostr.build/CklohF3LvcDJQL4U.jpg nostr:nevent1qqsfj93huklrfyqj64pepcqllwnry2v9jgcry00zulk459788fsayfqpz3mhxw309ucnydewxqhrqt338g6rsd3e9upzp57hgyjdm76mm3sm3uvdzlpnxkamf7x8zxp2xhhzwv22fxjwk7caqvzqqqqqqy0kx2zc