Mining is social.

Think I have one of these saved somewhere.

Few devs in crypto move like @HardhatChad. Watch this and you'll see why. Doc asked him what time has to do with becoming a true store of value, and he answered with a range almost nobody in crypto carries. He started with the community. Dialed in enough to know two and a half years of holding @ORE came with real ups and downs, and he shoulders that weight to push this thing to the next level. Then he pulled back to what a moat actually is, all the way up to gold and its 10,000 years. Then he closed through Hal Finney, the first person to ever receive a Bitcoin transaction, tying a founding voice of the whole story right back to the original question. Very few, if any, answer with that kind of elegance. Our piece is simple. Time is the only thing in crypto that proves you're here to stay. Years of ups and downs and still rising is what gives people that sleep at night conviction. 804 days in for ORE. The Lost Tapes: Deep Cuts From the Mine. 📼

Which @ORE player are you? People have always gone to extremes to earn yield on a scarce asset. Bitcoin holders learned it the hard way. They handed their coins to Celsius, BlockFi, and a dozen platforms for a few points of yield, then watched it vanish overnight. They weren't wrong to want it. The setups they trusted to deliver it were the problem, because none of those contracts were immutable. You gave up your keys to a company, and that company could change the rules or blow up on a Tuesday. ORE flips that. You earn yield on a hard capped supply of three million, on an immutable contract with no admin key, so nobody can rewrite the rules or pull the rug. You can keep it private, shielding the transaction so you're not doxxed for earning. And you can hold it in a wallet that's started building in quantum resistant properties, not on some company's balance sheet. That stack of features is the first of its kind. It answers, almost point for point, the things people have spent years worrying about with Bitcoin. So we built a way to explain how the yield actually works, because plenty of people, us included early on, never fully got it. We'll break it down the best we understand it, through three characters. Each one shows you which player you are in this ecosystem. Brunson buys ORE off the open market. Already refined, liquid, ready to go. He holds it, bets on price, and that's the whole game for him. No yield, no homework. His edge is that simplicity. He isn't leaning on the yield machine to keep running, he just owns the asset on conviction and stays fully liquid. Solomon is Brunson who took the leap and said, "I want my money working." He stakes his ORE. As long as miners are active, Solomon gets paid, and he takes that yield, puts it right back, and lets it compound. Compound interest is one of the most powerful forces in finance, and that's exactly what's running here. It mostly sits around 15 to 20%, and it can climb toward 25% when mining's heavy. The wild part is how little it asks. All Solomon needs is people mining every day who want to play the game, and there's no holding period. Then there's Fred, and Fred has two layers. He can buy off spot and stake the whole thing like Solomon if he wants. But to actually mine, he shows up with SOL and goes to work. He's making fresh, unrefined ORE. It's not the finished version of itself yet, it isn't liquid, but it's real ORE, and staying unrefined is exactly where the benefit lives. This is the game some are calling entertainment finance (shout out to @mattytay for the name). You bet on blocks and try to hit the motherlode, and every winning move puts more unrefined ORE in your pocket. Read that the right way though. This isn't gambling, it's strategy. You're playing position, not pulling a lever. The engine is the exit fee. Anyone who leaves, anyone who refines their unrefined ORE to make it liquid, pays 10% on the way out. That 10% goes straight back to everyone still holding unrefined ORE. The patient get fed by the ones cashing out, and the system breathes on its own. That "yield," the unrefined payout, has sat anywhere from around 60% to over 100%, and it's even touched 140% in rare stretches. It all hangs on activity though, so when nobody's mining or refining, it could potentially fall to zero. But we haven't seen that. Honestly, what we've seen so far is crazy ROI, and there's real room to cook here if you've got the right strategy to earn uORE. Now the balance, because this is the part most people miss. The unrefined payout only works if people actually exit. If hold culture gets too strong and nobody refines, fewer people pay that 10% exit fee, less flows back to the uORE holders, and the payout slows. Scarcity can pull people deeper into that corner. Only three million ORE will ever exist, so if people start treating it like the next Bitcoin, they stop trying to sell and just stack uORE, mining hard to pile up more. That's why it needs a healthy balance between the ones cashing out and the ones holding on. That balance is what lets it run at its best. Every player shares one risk. If the mining stops, the whole thing dies. No miners, no flywheel. That's why Fred is the most important person in the room. Without Fred there's no Solomon, because there's no mining flow to pay the stakers. And no Brunson either, because there's no working market left to buy into. The miner is the engine, and everyone else is downstream of him. The only reason you even get to pick a player is that the network's busy enough right now to give you the choice. One honest distinction, since people mix these up. Solomon's staking yield comes from mining activity, a slice of what the miners generate routed to the stakers, so more mining means more for Solomon. Fred's unrefined payout comes from the opposite direction, from people exiting and paying that 10%, which builds up how much your unrefined stack returns. There's a real debate over which is better long term, and I'll leave that to you. Both carry an upside and a catch, and people have made real money on each side. Strip it all down and you land in the same place every time. Without Fred, none of it exists. And you don't have to be just one. Most people end up a blend, holding a little, staking a little, mining a little, leaning toward whatever fits how they're wired. The mix is the strategy, and you get to move between them as you go. So. Which player are you? -The Wisemen 👁️

Smart contracts should make business more transparent, secure, and reliable; not less.

The Lost Tapes 01: Deep Cuts From the Mine. feat. @HardhatChad of @ore. The conversation the timeline needed. Store of value. Privacy. DeFi. Mining. Quantum. A @Wisemenmentors Production

Definitely the protocol can get smarter about how it uses revenue. There are some experiments under development, coming very soon in v4. At the same time, protocol revenue should be managed by the protocol. It should not managed by a hot wallet with single user or team making ad hoc discretionary decisions about its use, timing, and size.

Trust is everything