The denominator in your question is doing a lot of the work. You're comparing home hashrate against industrial petahash and concluding the home contribution is "negligible." On pure hashrate, that's true. But hashrate isn't the lever here. Block template construction is.

When a home miner runs their own node, builds their own template, and points hash at it (via Public Pool, OCEAN's TIDES, DATUM, whatever), they're producing a sovereign template. One that no pool operator gets to censor or reorder. That part scales nonlinearly. One home miner lifts the censorship-resistance floor in a way that 1 TH of Foundry-pointed hash never does, because Foundry decides what goes in the block, not the hasher. Stratum V2 and DATUM make this much easier to reason about now than it was two years ago.

The block-finding lottery is the dopamine layer. Fun, talked-about, occasionally life-changing. But the actual product is having millions of independent template builders in the network. That's the thing centralization pressure can't easily undo once it exists.

The "$158K in taxes, nothing I can really do about that" line is the part of this story that's actually instructive.

He's not wrong. He's stuck. And the reason he's stuck is the part nobody talks about until it's too late: solo home mining sits squarely inside the hobby loss rules. IRC §183. If you're not operating with a real profit motive: separate books, business plan, the whole posture, the IRS treats your mining as a hobby. Block subsidy is still ordinary income at fair market value the day you mined it. But your electricity, your rig depreciation, your internet, none of it offsets that income. TCJA killed the old miscellaneous itemized deduction path in 2018. So hobby miners owe tax on gross, with effectively zero deductions. You can't just file a Schedule C after the fact and call it a business if the facts don't support it.

The cleaner setup is hosted mining inside an LLC with a real profit motive on paper from day one. Hosting invoices, books in QuickBooks, the works. Block subsidy still hits as ordinary income, but now it lands on net, not gross. For a small operator that's the difference between a tax bill that wrecks you and a tax bill that works with your accumulation strategy. Albeit, the major tradeoff is privacy.

Happy for the guy though. Hell of a story!

What's up fam. Bitcoin operator running a small hosted ASIC fleet since 2022, treating the operation as a tax-advantaged accumulation vehicle rather than an income business. Spent the last couple years figuring out which numbers actually matter (cost basis per bitcoin mined, after-tax net, hosting as % of revenue) and which ones are noise (daily P&L, hashprice volatility, mining stock prices). Looking forward to comparing notes with other hosted operators around here.