Elektron

In the age of AI powered technological threats, bitcoin mining poses a unique attack space. We've released a new white paper assessing pool threats to a healthy and decentralized Bitcoin network, but instead of starting from the code, we start from mining itself and assess the role of pooled mining.

Will mining pool centralization kill bitcoin?

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Block discovery is random, and one wait in twenty runs past half an hour.

Each hash is an independent try at fulfilling the difficulty. The math is an exponential decay, where the chance that no block arrives in the next t minutes is e to the minus t over 10.

At t of 30 that is e to the minus 3, about 5 percent.

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"Some pools pay better than others."

This is the superficial reading, and it rests on a misread of statistics: on any given day, two pools running different payout methods show different revenue numbers.

However, variance doesn't change expected revenue over time. Fees are really where pools differ.

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Some industries lobby hard to change the rules, but Bitcoin miners operate by the rules of the protocol.

The only way to earn is to do the work. That's the Elektron difference.

Who said it?

Bitcoin Talk, November 2010. The first mining pool launches.

1. The purpose: join small CPU miners so blocks come more frequently.
2. The cost: trust a central party.
3. Only the scale has changed.

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