Decentralizing Bitcoin Mining With Bitcoin Mechanic

Welcome back to The Mining Pod! This week we are joined by Bitcoin Mechanic, arguably the face of Ocean Pool. Ocean launched in November 2023 with a lot of hope, excitement and promise, even getting a node from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey with an investment. The Ocean Pool team promised to decentralize Bitcoin mining through novel block template options for individual miners, a new payout structure called Tides and, to much criticism, the filtering of Ordinals and Inscription projects natively. 

In this interview, we go through what happened over the course of 2024 with Ocean Pool, how its attracting hashrate, revisiting the ‘spam’ problem, block template construction and the future of Bitcoin in regards to MEV and future soft forks.

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

02:08 Bitcoin Mechanic bio

05:26 Start9 & node runners

06:43 What's Ocean?

08:20 Who is Ocean different?

13:25 Block template centralization

22:27 Closed Source firmware

23:55 Ocean Biz Dev

25:03 How to attract miners?

34:56 PPLNS vs FPPS

45:03 Why would a miner switch?

49:39 How big is the market for hobbyist miners?

56:36 Corporate pools

59:31 Corporate MEV

1:03:04 Template construction

1:13:01 OPCAT & the future of BTC

Published twice weekly, "The Mining Pod" interviews the best builders and operators in the Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining landscape. Subscribe to get notifications when we publish interviews on Tuesday and a news show on Friday!