Circling back around to this, as it's been eating me up. I think I'm going to really let these thoughts congeal and give them their own post, but here's the quick and dirty.
Last week I had an hour-ish call with a proprietary mining company, picking their brains about getting machines down to Mossel Bay. They were really helpful and generous with their time. They even brainstormed ideas for me that wouldn’t benefit them at all.
At the end of the day, they behaved exactly as you're describing. But here's how that looks with these guys (and honestly every helpful group I've spoken with). The CEO pulled up his software and showed me all of their sites, what's being done, and how the payouts work. He's running script and Equihash rigs that pay him a mix of bitcoin, doge, Zcash, and USDC, which covers the hosting. A L9, on script and an S21 Pro, screaming loud, burning hot, and requiring a hole in the wall, on SHA-256 were about a penny apart in daily profit. His advice for me was to skip mining bitcoin altogether and go for the altcoins. Miners that are home-friendly (read: good for decentralization), are altcoins. Go with them and the pool can convert to bitcoin for payouts. The operations director then told me that they're just more "open minded" then guys like me and other maxis. She's living out your point above, and it's basically led her somewhere else entirely.
If "miners follow their interests" is our security model, then what's going to be secure are altcoins priced in dollars. If we follow incentive as defined above, we all end up mining Doge. I'm not saying its any safer to rely on martyrs. I'm saying the incentives aren't currently aligned. If Foundry begins censoring transactions, these guys lose nothing, because they're already cashing out USDC (which I'm also convinced is basically a CBDC after the Genius act, but that's a whole other rant). The home miner loses a ton though! That's not altruism, it's real skin in the game. Of course it only matters if the home mining world is contributing enough to actually build blocks on top of one another, and I don't think we'll get there even if everyone is running three bitaxes. A decent percentage of bitcoiners running s19s is a different story.
When I told them unequivocally that I'd die on the bitcoin-only hill, they were still gracious with me. So, again, these were on the nicer end of proprietary miners that I've met. That said, it was abundantly clear which of us would scramble to switch pools when the whitelist memo shows up and which of us wouldn't even read it...
Circling back around to this, as it's been eating me up. I think I'm going to really let these thoughts congeal and give them their own post, but here's the quick and dirty.
Last week I had an hour-ish call with a proprietary mining company, picking their brains about getting machines down to Mossel Bay. They were really helpful and generous with their time. They even brainstormed ideas for me that wouldn’t benefit them at all.
At the end of the day, they behaved exactly as you're describing. But here's how that looks with these guys (and honestly every helpful group I've spoken with). The CEO pulled up his software and showed me all of their sites, what's being done, and how the payouts work. He's running script and Equihash rigs that pay him a mix of bitcoin, doge, Zcash, and USDC, which covers the hosting. A L9, on script and an S21 Pro, screaming loud, burning hot, and requiring a hole in the wall, on SHA-256 were about a penny apart in daily profit. His advice for me was to skip mining bitcoin altogether and go for the altcoins. Miners that are home-friendly (read: good for decentralization), are altcoins. Go with them and the pool can convert to bitcoin for payouts. The operations director then told me that they're just more "open minded" then guys like me and other maxis. She's living out your point above, and it's basically led her somewhere else entirely.
If "miners follow their interests" is our security model, then what's going to be secure are altcoins priced in dollars. If we follow incentive as defined above, we all end up mining Doge. I'm not saying its any safer to rely on martyrs. I'm saying the incentives aren't currently aligned. If Foundry begins censoring transactions, these guys lose nothing, because they're already cashing out USDC (which I'm also convinced is basically a CBDC after the Genius act, but that's a whole other rant). The home miner loses a ton though! That's not altruism, it's real skin in the game. Of course it only matters if the home mining world is contributing enough to actually build blocks on top of one another, and I don't think we'll get there even if everyone is running three bitaxes. A decent percentage of bitcoiners running s19s is a different story.
When I told them unequivocally that I'd die on the bitcoin-only hill, they were still gracious with me. So, again, these were on the nicer end of proprietary miners that I've met. That said, it was abundantly clear which of us would scramble to switch pools when the whitelist memo shows up and which of us wouldn't even read it...