Don't ask what bitcoin can do for you, but what you can do for bitcoin.
Over the last couple of years there has been a growing grassroots movement in the open-source mining community that is empowering individuals to contribute to the distribution of hashrate ownership and block production that is absolutely beautiful to see. Spearheaded by projects like Bitaxe, which is based off of open source designs for at home miners that are built by taking the ASIC chips from popular mining models typically used by industrial scale miners, putting them on consumer-sized hashboards that can be plugged into a wall outlet, and distributing to as many individuals as possible at very affordable prices.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating; the mining pool and ASIC layers of bitcoin are the largest centralizing forces at the moment. Nothing made this clearer than when it became apparent that many of the FPPS pools that were marketing themselves as independent actors were actually proxying into Antpool to leverage their large bitcoin treasury so that they could reliably pay out their customers. When you look at a pie chart of the bitcoin mining pools and their share of the network things look pretty centralized with Antpool and Foundry making up almost 50% of the hashrate. However, things are actually worse because a number of the remaining pools are actually being handed block templates and transaction prioritization lists directly from Antpool.
Now, this is definitely bad, but the nature of bitcoin mining is such that miners can trivially redirect their hashrate to another pool or decide to self mine if it ever becomes apparent that an individual pool is acting maliciously. However, we shouldn't have to depend on the broader mining industry to be reactive to such a scenario. It's much better to be proactive and try to prevent the network from getting to that state in the first place.
That is why the grassroots movement embodied by Bitaxe is so important. Instead of depending on mega-mines who allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to build out infrastructure, acquire mining machines and operate them, it would be much better to get affordable devices in the hands of millions of people who can collectively compete with the mega-mines. And I'm happy to report that it is early days in the resurgence of home mining, but the home miners are having some success. Since July 30th, 2024 there have been 3 blocks that were solo mined by individuals running a ~$200 Bitaxe from the comfort of their home.
Humble beginnings, but if the trend of individuals viewing Bitaxe's as reusable lottery tickets continues it isn't hard to believe that we could increase the number of individuals solo-mining blocks to one block per day within the next couple of years. If this were to materialize it would act as an incredible hedge against malicious pools.
The goal is to get millions of Bitaxes in living rooms across the world. If you have $175 to spare, are curious to learn how mining actually works, want to contribute to the distribution of hashrate ownership and would like to take your chance of winning a lottery that pays out hard money you should pick up a Bitaxe.
Bitcoin's timestamping capabilities are revolutionizing election security through their application in verifying election results. As Carlos from SimpleProof explained on our 600th episode, elections are uniquely time-sensitive events where the ability to cryptographically prove when documents were created is invaluable. This was successfully demonstrated in Scriven County, Georgia during the November 2024 elections, where final election results were anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain. The beauty of this approach is its simplicity – it doesn't replace traditional voting systems but enhances them by making tampering immediately detectable.
"I am convinced that without it, I may have gone to jail. It's very nice to have cryptographic proofs that can demonstrate and allow anyone to see that what you're talking about isn't made up." – Carliño
This protection extends beyond local vulnerabilities. As Carlos highlighted, even if state-level systems were compromised, county results remained independently verifiable through Bitcoin's immutable ledger. What's particularly encouraging is that this wasn't implemented in a tech hub with extensive resources, but in a rural county of just 15,000 people with a three-person election office. This demonstrates that Bitcoin-based election integrity isn't a distant future but an accessible reality today – one that could fundamentally transform how we secure our democratic processes.
Check out the full podcast here for more on Guatemala's election audit, OpenTimestamps protocol, and the vision of Bitcoin beyond financial speculation.
Michael Saylor Signals More Bitcoin Buys in Strategy Update - via X
U.S. Dollar Drops 363% Since 2000, Savings Need 14.5% Growth - Via X
Small Bhutan Leads World In Bitcoin Per Capita, 27x Above US - Via X
MicroStrategy Acquires 500k Bitcoin - Via X
ICYMI Fold opened the waiting list for the new Bitcoin Rewards Credit Card. Fold cardholders will get unlimited 2% cash back in sats.
Get on the waiting list now before it fills up!
$200k worth of prizes are up for grabs.
Ten31, the largest bitcoin-focused investor, has deployed $150M across 30+ companies through three funds. I am a Managing Partner at Ten31 and am very proud of the work we are doing. Learn more at ten31.vc/funds.
Final thought...
Betting on a six pack.
Get this newsletter sent to your inbox daily: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/
Subscribe to our YouTube channels and follow us on Nostr and X:
|
