TK

Everyone, including @saylor, will stay quiet until public pressure forces them to talk. That's what happened with quantum. The security budget is next. @natgmi

Bitcoin miners are done pretending. Hash price fell from $440 to $36 per petahash; @Binance Pool walked away, and public miners are building AI data centers instead. The big voices stay quiet. EP337: We ask a mining pool insider what actually saves Bitcoin's security budget.👇 Bitcoin Mining Has a BIG Problem! | Interview w/ Nick Bain  @WhiteBit  | TBR#337 Bitcoin miners are getting squeezed, and almost nobody with a big audience wants to say it out loud. We sat down with Nick Bain, head of business development at WhitePool, the mining pool run by @WhiteBit, to talk about what it actually looks like from inside a pool right now. Nick has been in Bitcoin mining since 2019, from merge mining at Jax Network to brokering energy for miners and AI data centers, and he gives us the numbers straight: hash price was about $440 per petahash at the 2021 peak and sat around $36 the day we recorded. We get into what the security budget really is, why more hash power does not automatically mean more security, and where Bitcoin's value comes from in the first place. Nick shares a story from Mining Disrupt about a public mining executive who wanted to 51% attack Bitcoin SV and short it, and the only thing that stopped him was how it would look. We talk about why miners are practical businesses, not marketers, why the public miners are pivoting to AI, and the TSMC agreement that keeps new ASICs flowing even when demand is weak. Then we lay out the four fixes on the table: make Bitcoin infinite, tax holders, merge mining, or a second token paid to miners. Nick walks through why Dogecoin is worth more per block than Litecoin, its own mother chain. We disclose that we helped launch @natgmi, and we explain how it is tied to Bitcoin's bits field, why its emissions fall as hash power rises, and which pools are already distributing it. The part that stuck with us most is how fragile the safeguards are. If ethics is the only thing between a large miner and a profitable attack on a smaller chain, incentives are doing all of the real work, and those incentives are shrinking every four years for Bitcoin itself. Hash rate charts going up and to the right hide that, because cheaper, more efficient machines can add hash power without raising the cost of attack. What we keep coming back to is that every holder will eventually have to pick a path. Either the supply changes, holders get taxed, fees somehow show up on chain, or Bitcoiners accept a second asset that pays miners. None of those choices are comfortable, and that is exactly why the people with the biggest platforms keep avoiding the conversation. YouTube 🔗 youtu.be/khL_UezM4Jw