Hashrate Hearth: How many home miners does it take to screw in a freedom-bulb?
- The middle child of my Woody propaganda series
- Hashrate Hearth
- The Skinny
- Why
- And this morning’s news makes it pretty timely!
- Prove me wrong (please!)
TLDR: Check out this site that determines how much home mining it takes to dethrone the two companies that build most blocks.
The middle child of my Woody propaganda series
The Guitaxe got another big brother. While the little guy is great for learning, and his biggest brother hashes like a beast, the s9 version has a special super power. This space heater not only kills fascists, it’s moving into my neighbor’s garage. She’s “always cold” and I’m always trying to foist my hashrate’s power consumption on other people. It’s a match made in heaven. Woot! This is my first American home mining deploy.
This got me thinking, how many garages will it take?
Hashrate Hearth
Foundry and the AntPool mafia currently build 58% of bitcoin’s block templates. My new site explores how much home mining it will take to break that majority, and different ways we can get there.
The Skinny
First, you pick a goal and one machine and a gauge shows how many homes it takes to reach said goal. As of this writing, breaking the aforementioned majority takes 160 EH/s of new hashrate. That’s 800k homes with an S21, 1.5 million with a used S19j Pro, 12 million with an S9… or 133 million with a Bitaxe. Only about 106 million people currently own bitcoin directly. There’s also a slider for how much of that home fleet ends up in the US, because China’s 2021 ban showed where the hashrate sits is relevant too.
You can flip the chart between coinbase tags and who builds the templates. By tag, it takes three pools to make a majority. But if you go by builder (b10c’s research) it’s two. A setup comparison shows who determines the transactions in each case.
Plug in your home scenario and you get a daily ledger. There are presets for winter heat on grid power, midday solar surplus, and hydronic heat + solar, plus credit to the folks boxing this stuff up for normal people like Canaan Avalon, Heatbit, Hashrate House and Exergy. (I believe that Heatbit is making a big announcement in about twenty minutes, btw)
I included a scenario to explore the hashrate exodus to AI. Props to @optimism for calling my attention to how this might actually create more consolidation though. Then I include some action steps, but if you read my posts regularly, there are no surprises there. :)
It has beautiful, sloppily vibe-coded ambience. Make sure to turn the sound on. You’re welcome.
Plus, you don’t get the steam effects when the sound is off. Those are the breaks.
Why
Last week, @Scoresby asked me a question with presuppositions that grated pretty harshly with my experience in the last few years:
What value do you see home miners bringing that industrial miners do not bring?
Around that same time, I had a call with a proprietary mining company about getting machines down to Mossel Bay. They were kind, generous people, not banal shitcoiners. Their advice, after hearing my whole rant on the value of decentralization and censorship resistance, was still to skip bitcoin and mine altcoins. They argued that home-friendly machines pay about the same and the pool converts payouts anyway. If Foundry and AntPool start with some funny business, they lose nothing. The family saving in bitcoin loses a ton.
So here’s my answer. It’s not the machine. It’s which template is being hashed and who’s holding the bitcoin. That’s not charity. It’s defending savings.
And this morning’s news makes it pretty timely!
The HRF newsletter this morning just reported that Russia has announced that after July 2027, self custody is essentially banned for private citizens. That’s coming from the country hosting about a sixth of global hashrate. Currently, those kind of rules get enforced at exchanges. When somebody decides to enforce on-chain, won’t the cheapest place to do it be the handful of pools that build most block templates?
Prove me wrong (please!)
I’m still looking to lose this argument. In the meantime, let me know if your garage is getting chilly.
P.S. Russia announcement also inspired a whole new section in bitcoinisforcriminals.com. Updating it now.
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