OCEAN: Reconnecting miners with
#Bitcoin
Once upon a time, and not so long ago, miners had a much different and more direct relationship with Bitcoin than what they experience today. Miners would run nodes, build local mempools, source transactions, and create block templates. Then they would point their hash power to their own unique template and race against every other miner in the world to find the winning nonce. There was a certain satisfaction for miners knowing they were sovereign participants in Bitcoin, they had a say in what happened on the blockchain, and every once in a while their little mining machine would actually find a block. In other words, every miner no matter their size, got to cast their vote. All that’s been lost in the age of modern FPPS pools where pools have inserted themselves like a buffer between Bitcoin and it’s miners, paying miners like contractors for hire, and settling up with Bitcoin after the fact (sometimes keeping more than their fair share of the profits). The tradeoffs are not insignificant. Miners today are only doing a fraction of the mining process that they used to perform: hashing.
Our belief at
@ocean_mining is that for Bitcoin to be truly censorship resistant we need to give authority back to the miners, enabling miners to decide what goes into the blockchain, not the pools. We are on the trajectory to that end state and it is going to happen very soon. With our “path to decentralization” already underway, miners can mine without permission and receive bitcoins direct from the coinbase. What’s best, it’s completely transparent. Miners can see the work they’re contributing hash power to in realtime, and verify their splits after the fact. They can even see the Bitcoin address associated with the ASIC that found the block, because it’s all on the blockchain. This is a level of transparency that no other pool offers.
Just two days after launching OCEAN last November one of our miners found a block (Block # 819242). The winning miner was non other than Bob Burnett
@BTC_boomer from Barefoot mining (permission to disclose received). Bob commented to us that in all his mining experience, this was the first time he felt like a real miner, because he knew without a doubt that his ASIC found the block. It’s a subtle thing that produced a powerful reaction, and my suspicion is that this craving for sovereignty is something that’s important to many other miners. To prepare for what we hope to be an inevitable “tidal wave” of interest we’re going to be shipping out “my miner found a block” stickers with each apparel purchase on
ocean.xyz/merch. So when your lucky miner finds a block give him or her a pat on the back and reward them with this sticker.