That almost nobody who points hashrate at us cares about anything this website cares about.

In eight years I can count on one hand the customers who have asked me a question about template construction, transaction selection, or censorship. It is not a purchasing criterion. It has never once come up in a competitive deal. What comes up is fee, uptime, payout timing, and whether a human answers at 3am when a site trips. That's the whole list.

I don't say that to dunk on anybody. I say it because it explains the thing people keep looking for a conspiracy to explain. Pool concentration isn't a plot. It's an absence of demand. Nobody is suppressing miner-selected templates. Miners aren't asking, so nobody builds it, so it stays hard to use, so miners don't ask. That loop has been running for years and it will keep running until somebody's revenue depends on breaking it.

The second surprise, smaller: how little of this job is cryptography and how much of it is plumbing and customer service. I thought I was getting into Bitcoin. I got into industrial ops with a payment processor attached.