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Bitcoin mining company Terawulf announced that it has launched the United States' first nuclear-powered bitcoin mining facility at its Nautilus facility in Pennsylvania. According to the company, about 1 exahash per second (EH/s) or about 8,000 bitcoin miners with integrated circuits are now connected to the network, and another 8,000 miners will be delivered shortly.

According to the company's press release on the Nautilus energization, Terawulf will receive a flat electricity rate of about $0.02 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the next five years.

The Nautilus facility is considered a milestone because it is the first bitcoin mining facility of its kind to receive 24/7 carbon-free power from Pennsylvania's 2.5 GW Susquehanna nuclear power plant.

Seven days ago, Mawson Infrastructure Group launched a mining company in Pennsylvania, after exiting Australia. In addition to the 50-MW Nautilus facility, Terawulf announced that it is expanding operations at its Lake Mariner facility in New York. This move will increase Lake Mariner's capacity from 60 MW to 110 MW.

Right before our eyes, the ultimate centralization of mining is happening in the US, which has already captured the lion's share of the world's hashrate. And the problem here is not only that the main mining pools are located in one country. A couple of years ago, the lion's share of mining pools was in China. The problem is exactly that there are no pools at all in the US.

Everybody used to worry about infestation of Chinese pools in bitcoin network, but most of Chinese pools were joined by miners from any part of the world, and there was only one purely Chinese pool. All the others were open to miners from any country. Now in the U.S. there is a mega concentration of miners in individual companies, without the ability to connect to their pools of third-party players.

Moreover, such collusion of large energy companies and nuclear power plants, belonging by a strange coincidence to the investment division of Goldman Sachs bank, raises suspicion that the most active in the cryptosphere bank wants to concentrate in its hands almost all bitcoin mining on the planet.

Thus, for example the CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) of the largest atomic miner in the USA was Kerri Langlais (https://investors.terawulf.com/governance/board-of-directors/person-details/default.aspx?ItemId=d5a6c25e-851c-4f78-b262-89d8fce4f070) and the company easily attracted the funding for the purchase of those 8000 miners. Again, by a strange coincidence, the previous 10 years Kerri had worked where would you think? You'd never guess: the Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs.

What's interesting is that the second centralized mining company that announced (https://news.bitcoin.com/mawson-infrastructure-group-launches-bitcoin-mining-operation-in-pennsylvania-exits-australia/) the use of nuclear power for bitcoin mining, Mawson Infrastructure Group, coincidentally has in its shareholders (https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nasdaq/migi/ownership) another great American bank noticed in interest in bitcoin projects, Morgan Stanley.

All in all, the genius decentralized Bitcoin project invented by Satoshi Nakamoto is becoming increasingly centralized, both in terms of owners of large wallets and bitcoin amounts, and in terms of capturing mining capacity. These worthy people with a strong interest in the asset, the world's big banks, are the shareholders of the Fed. And it is these people who forbid us (picking our nose) to own cryptocurrency.

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Discussion

Donafello 2y ago

Damn that power is what 3 of Elon’s factors produce. This what news needs to talk about. Eventually all the did will have to slow down as there will be to much good to talk about. I think #[2] is going to really surprise us all. This guy is a genius and if I wanted someone at the driver seat when it comes to Btc and decentralized fiancé this is my man. Go Jack. Let’s get those plug and play miners out there. Please make them really user friendly. I can assure you out of the 44million address holding more then zero balance 90% of them are people like me that work for a living and can’t get a node running of a miner. This has to be as plug and play as possible. I’m sure you got this

$elfish gene 2y ago

All will be done.The protocol is written in a very interesting way and there is no way to attack even having 99% on the pool)

$elfish gene 2y ago

The more I think about it, I'm not sure there is any safety risk. Some highlights (and I'm not recommending anything here, just observing and hypothesizing to try to understand what the real issues are, if any):

Mining is a competitive business. That means there will always be pressure to stay profitable. It pushes miners toward cheaper energy sources and other good things (which bitcoiners often cite), but it also means that miners who can't compete will constantly go out of business, just like in any other sector. This is inevitable, no matter how much money is thrown at miners in the form of commissions or rewards for blocks. The question is, would it be bad for Bitcoin if unprofitable miners went bankrupt?

"Increasing the hash rate" seems to be an oft-quoted expression of Bitcoin's security requirement, but is it really? Adjusting complexity works both ways. When Chinese miners stopped working, was it bad for security?

Centralization ensures efficiency, and so businesses of all kinds tend to optimize around centralization. There is little in the way of centralization in the mining industry. There are concerns that large mining pools are getting too big, leading to too many votes in selecting transactions for a new block. Hence, the V2 layer. However, allowing miners (instead of pools) to choose transactions only means that centralization lines will be drawn around the miners, not the mining pools, which does not stop centralization per se. The question is, is the centralization of mining harmful to Bitcoin? My knowledge is lacking on this, but it seems to me that as long as full nodes verify mined blocks based on their own consensus rules (which are NOT centralized), then who cares if the mining is centralized? Wouldn't nodes reject newly mined blocks if they don't meet network requirements?

In conclusion, at this point it seems to me that the root of any theoretical security problem lies not in the mining fees or centralization, but in the ability of complete nodes to reject blocks that violate Bitcoin neutrality. In other words, new blocks should only be accepted if they conform to the free market principle of including the most valuable transactions. A block that ignores transactions with market value should not be accepted. Again, my knowledge is insufficient, but if full Bitcoin nodes already do this, where is the supposed security problem with centralization? Despite all the concerns about the network, one government can take over the vast majority of mining as a network service without any problem, because the miners have to do what the "people" say with their validation of full nodes, right? (Then at least the government will serve the people the way it should.)

$elfish gene 2y ago

с помощью биткоина вас вспомнят.