If we are going to give money back to people as the crypto ecosystem proposes, then we have to be careful from the very genesis of money.
It seems like crypto arrived a little out of time, let's say, a little early. Politicians, manipulators of world information, corporations, and people in general are just waking up to the incontrovertible reality that the Internet, in addition to communicating to all of us across the planet, also created a new class of assets, aka digital assets, Internet money, which the dinosaurs, poor guys, cannot want to believe or understand. It's like the meteorite came to them without warning them. When all the politicians and corporate officials were celebrating because the Internet made their job of manipulation very easy, a Japanese comes and invents Internet money for them. At first they took it as a nerdy game, but after ten years, they realized they were in the oven, and now they're a little scared.
But it is also fair to recognize that even the most fanatical defenders of Bitcoin still do not fully understand how this complex ecosystem works, and that they have entered it only attracted by the possibility of getting rich in the short term, just as it was for them announced on social networks. Very few BTC maxis know what the problem of Byzantine gerals is about, not to mention the mining process, which is responsible for making new BTC available so that they can be purchased.
The international financial establishment has ensured over the last 100 years that ordinary people do not understand how a central bank works, how money is created, what a banknote printed by a central authority is, what inflation is and why it appears, what a fractional reserve is and how this strategy endorsed by governments helps banks get rich with the money that people deposit in them, how banks relate to governments and, in what scandalous way, when they do bad businesses, are bailed out by complicit governments. In general, this entire criminal network, made sure that people believe that asset prices are the result of the free play of supply and demand, when reality indicates that the entire financial system is absolutely manipulated by a few operators, who make people believe that there is an economic cycle of ups and downs, Bulls and bears. The truth is that the financial establishment is not only not interested in people knowing how the enrichment network that they set up for themselves works, but they also ensure that people do not have the opportunity to think critically and discover it.
People candidly deposit their hard-earned money in banks, accepting ridiculous interest. Banks run giant, high-risk deals with the money people deposited, and governments, if those deals go wrong, bail out the banks with money issued by a central bank, or collected through the taxes payed by the people, the same ones who deposited their money in the bank to earn peanuts. As long as people do not understand that their money is actually a debt that the bank owes them, everything will continue wonderfully for the bankers.
Unless one is a total moron, one would have to understand this nauseating process of frontal theft in our own faces.
I said more than once that one of the great achievements of the last ten years was to have installed in ordinary people this issue of embezzlement and betrayal that the international banking and financial system means, and that little by little, the new generations are understanding how their parents and grandparents were fleeced by a group of criminals backed by unscrupulous politicians.
But beware. We know that the way to solve this cancer of humanity is the decentralization proposed, for example, by Bitcoin and PoW, but we must not be blind and not realize that Bitcoin was not born perfect in 2009, that even today it is far from being perfect, and that there are still things that can be questioned about BTC such as the dubious failure of censorship resistance that revolves around the centralization of minnig pools.
Bitcoin mining provides a very valuable service to the ecosystem and is a very sophisticated detail of Satoshi Nakamoto's design. By doing his/her job, a miner secures the network and receives a payment from that same network he/she protects. This work (PoW) consists of the validation of a block containing transactions made by users, which includes several technical processes, among which the so-called hashing stands out. The hash function is primarily responsible for solving a block after millions of attempts. That is, hashing is very necessary to secure the network. But it is not the only thing necessary. Many machines connected to a node make it more likely to find the number that solves the block, but there are other things too, besides providing hashing to the ecosystem. The miner must run a node to be updated with the most recent state of the blockchain, build a new block, verify the validity of the previous block, find unconfirmed transactions and choose the ones that will leave him/her the most money, create a payment transaction and multiple merkle three for these transactions, and only then start hashing to find the solution to the block. When someone finds the solution, the miner must get on the new block, leave the transactions that are now on the blockchain and start with a new template. There are many things to do! Not just hashing!
An ASIC machine can only hash. All other tasks are delegated to the pool. The miner is then subrogated to the pool. He/she is an employee, a simple hash supplier. He/she is not an entrepreneur. He/she does not generate his/her own money, but rather receives a salary. Although he/she could be a King/Queen, he/she is a lackey who pays his/her electricity bill so that the pool keeps most of the profits. By delegating all tasks, he/she became another cog in a Wall Street corporation.
As a consequence, mining pools are a necessary part of the Bitcoin network. Solo mining, (the entrepreneur in his/her cave), is an infrequent and random process, with highly unpredictable payouts, which makes planning an investment in a mining machine quite risky. The profits that a single miner can receive are sporadic and uncertain. Satoshi Nakamoto's romantic vision of a miner is not exactly what reality is showing us. Bitcoin mining is fundamentally a probabilistic activity. There is no guarantee that the next block will be resolved. A mining pool can help reduce that uncertainty.
A mining pool decides which block to propose to a miner. When the miner turns on his/her ASIC he/she receives a pool template that shows him/her the transactions he/she can work on. It is the mining pool that orchestrates all the work. The miner, in this scheme, is actually a mere hash supplier. In the pooling mechanism, the one who does the work and who truly decides which transactions enter the next block is the mining pool, which is then responsible for distributing the opportunities to whoever is likely to provide hashrate. Pooling in the BTC ecosystem is a centralized hashrate concentrator.
Pools have a much larger share of the network's hashrate, so they are much more likely to mine new blocks more frequently and at a more predictable rate. When a pool discovers a new block, it receives the prize allocated in the protocol in BTC, in addition to the transaction fees paid by the users who generated those transactions. Mining pools can then provide a relatively stable income to small participants, who, in return, pay a percentage of their income to the pool. This is how new BTC are minted, and the credibility of the Bitcoin network is ensured. The process involves solving cryptographic equations that require enormous amounts of computing power. Miners use hardware specially designed for this task, known as ASIC, which stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuits. This hardware uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm to carry out the process. Gone are the days when you could mine with a laptop. ASICs are infinitely more efficient than a common computer, no matter how powerful it is.
So, the question is, where was the entrepreneurial spirit romantically dreamed of by Satoshi Nakamoto? Did circumstances take over the ecosystem, taking it to the familiar terrain of Wall Street? Is that why even today there are bank employees saying that Bitcoin is rat poison, or a venereal disease, and that if they were in government they would make it disappear? How are they going to make it disappear? Did they not understand anything about how it works?
But the problem exists. Bitcoin mining has become a highly centralized industry, not only because of the capital necessary to set up a mining farm, but also because of the high dependence on single miners to be coordinated and be able to play the game. Pools, by holding miners' funds in custody, have the ability to decide on miners' withdrawals and force them to act in some way. Larger pools require miners to do KYC and may act, for example, under government obligation, to censure a miner for any issue.
There is a clear danger that the Bitcoin network will be left in the hands of a few mining pools. Logic would indicate that in the next halvings the remuneration they receive for mining a block will not have the expected return and that they will then tend to leave the business. But we cannot be sure of this, because behind the large mining pools are the whales of Wall Street and high-ranking employees of the banking industry, that is, vampires and sharks trained to suck blood for many decades. Theft professionals who don't want competition. Notably, these failing corporate employees use as their main argument that the Bitcoin network serves drug traffickers and money launderers. It seems like a joke. That is the business of the banks of which they are employees, and of course, they do not want competition.
This is a problem that the entire community should be aware of, mainly to know what is the main issue that Bitcoin core developers are working on today.
Each bitcoiner must recognize their responsibility in this issue, conveying it and raising awareness of the process that those responsible for the system are currently in, to know that they are fighting a just cause. All attacks on BTC are, in reality, a remote-controlled missile that has the objective of destroying a threat that is known to be impenetrable, to defend the foundations of the current financial system. That is why it is about taking responsibility for each of us who want money to be produced and used by the people, without intermediaries and without censorship. It's about becoming entrepreneurs, not corporate employees.
It is necessary for developers to find a way to make mining more like an entrepreneurial venture than a corporate mining pool. Each individual who adds value to the Bitcoin network is responsible for its improvement. Miners, developers, hardware manufacturers, entrepreneurs, vendors who accept payments to sell their products and services, all must become aware of the decentralization revolution. Savers who save in Bitcoin also add value by reducing the supply in circulation and making the asset more scarce. Satoshi Nakamoto's vision was based on his payment system allowing each participant to work unknowingly for the other participants. This is a gem of game theory. Bitcoin must be operated by the users, and also the users must be the sole owners, without any intermediary. The economic model of Bitcoin is that of the circular economy, in which each participant can occupy, sometimes simultaneously, several places throughout the process, being an investor, miner, user, saver, and, owner of his/her shares, recycling them into the ecosystem, and then, choosing for himself/herself what to do.
Although the responsibility lies with all of us, the leading role in solving this problem today belongs to the developers and their investment partners.
Let's look at some examples of the current struggle of core developers seeking to perfect BTC mining and the PoW network, in which we can clearly see the search for a return to the romantic entrepreneurship proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in his legendary white paper.
1) Stratum V2
https://stratumprotocol.org/
Stratum v2, the most popular mining software for Bitcoin miners, has finally released one of its most anticipated update, which could increase the decentralization of Bitcoin. This update to the protocol that manages the work of the pools, allows each miner to have the possibility of choosing the group of transactions in a block. Now it will not only be the pool that assembles the block, but it also divides the workload among all the miners. The pool, although it would concentrate mining power of thousands of miners around the world, would not have the ability to censor transactions. In this case, the new update gives each user the power to choose which transactions to mine.
https://ocean.xyz/
Ocean aims to redefine the Bitcoin mining process by prioritizing decentralization and miner autonomy. Ocean is non-custodial, transparent and does not require KYC. Ocean's non-custodial nature means that the pool never retains the miner's payout, significantly reducing the risks of confiscation. Ocean directly pays the miners the prize received for the block.
3) Future bit
https://www.futurebit.io/
FutureBit announced its Apollo II, apparently a revolutionary device for the entrepreneur who wants to mine from home. It is an adaptation of an ASIC with an intuitive and modern design, ideal, apparently, for the entrepreneur who wants to mine his/her own money. The device includes Apollo OS 2.0, which features a personal mining pool integrated within the device itself. This allows any individual to easily engage in the solo mining process directly from their Bitcoin node, regardless of his/her technical knowledge and experience, offering him/her the concrete opportunity to mine an entire block. This in itself is a great challenge to the industry, currently dominated and centralized by pools, as stated above.
Pools today represent something like the centralization of decentralization. Let's go to them!
CONCLUSION
I remember the first day I flew alone. My instructor took the microphone of the plane and informed the tower that the student was flying alone for the first time, without having previously informed me. A primordial terror took hold of me. I started saying I wasn't ready. My instructor told me that then he was going to inform the tower that I was a coward, and that I better find another hobby, because flying was not for cowards. Aha. Those were the words I needed to hear. I took off and completed the assigned task, and then arrived at the club to toast and receive my private pilot diploma. There, a pilot with many hours of flying told me something that I would never forget: “When you are alone up there, you realize that the only one who can safely deliver that machine that weighs more than air to the earth, it’s you. That's personality."
In the midst of the confusion generated by the genesis of the crypto ecosystem in the last decade, and on the way to establishing a new world financial order, in these times it has come to confuse Anarchy with Libertarianism, and in its most extreme, with the incredibly so-called “anarcho-capitalism”, which is a contradiction in terms, as I already expressed in a previous post.
Libertarians are an extreme of liberalism and are constituted as the new bankers. Anarchists are those who accept the rules of nature and repudiate the linear system of capitalism. Libertarians defend pools as a product of the “freedom of the markets,” and we anarchists know that, in reality, pools are the freedom of whales.
Just like what happens with a plane and a pilot, the only ones who can end the current system of financial plunder are us.
Very powerful forces are using the media to finance a campaign against Bitcoin and crypto. This undoubtedly occurs because Bitcoin is a real threat to the establishment, not a nerd joke. People, for the first time in history, are learning, and very quickly, what money is, the criminal way in which it is generated, and the criminal way in which its value is controlled.
My vision is that of millions of entrepreneurs generating their own money and being their own bank, with hardware and software connected to the Internet, without censorship, without permission, without borders, without intermediaries. That requires personality, which we hope the kids being born today will have in abundance.
The goal is a society in which the concept of property is redefined, and where the true ownership of each individual is that of the private key to access their own BTCs. Of course, in a scheme like this, access to all your personal information could be incorporated into your private key, through protocols like Ordinals and Inscriptions, what we call digital identity. Never again will any corporation control personal information.
That would be a true entrepreneurial way of life.
Thank you for reading! Decentralize yourselves as much as you can, and much more! Work for yourselves, not for others. When you work for someone else, they pay you what YOUR POSITION is worth, when you work for yourself, they pay you what YOU are worth. No one achieves financial independence by working as an employee. Live long and prosper!
Never forget:
As usual, none of the things written in this post are financial advice and are not intended to replace personal research. My sole intention in writing this post is informative. Several of the things discussed here could be wrong, so in no way can this post be construed as financial advice, and in no way should it replace your own research.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them down below
You can also contact me at [email protected]
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LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardosaporosi/
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