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

The amount of uninformed people in the comments of this post is not surprisingly high. People have been indoctrinated to think Bitcoin is perfect and that the difficulty adjustment solves everything. The difficulty adjustment just maintains a 10 min block time, that's it. The security of Bitcoin is measured by the cost of attack not hash rate. Miners leaving the network increases centralization and reduces the cost of attack. Binance leaving alone isn't the issue, the issue is the trend of miners leaving the network as more halvings occur. Binance generating billions in revenue cant even mine Bitcoin altruistically, despite Bitcoin's importance. This is a notable data point for the altruism fans, that incentives is what drives behaviors, not virtue. You would expect that as the network grows in value, now at $1.6 T, the security infrastructure that secures it would grow, but instead we have less miners over time rather than more. The lack of understanding of simple math is a good indicator that Bitcoin can still fail on its mission. Humanity can fumble this ball by making Bitcoin infinite or taxing all Bitcoin holders. Don't let it happen, read the NATpaper @natgmi

Onchain continues to nuke but we keep going. We react to miners accusing ethereum:0x249130f5e2dd4cf278180c0df8273f3592ad1247 community of having misplaced priorities as well as discuss the potential threats AI progress has on crypto’s safety. Next week we will have @Hash_hopes from @prismassets on the podcast, prepare to be Prism pilled.👇 NAT Miners Dilemma | AI Breaking Crypto | Why Onchain Markets NUKED | TBR #335 We came into this one half dead, a full week of sickness between us, and the episode still turned into one of the densest we have recorded. We set the table with @token2049 week, the one year anniversary of the 10/10 CZ nuke hanging over the market, and the strange split screen of Bitcoin ripping 60 to 70 percent ahead of schedule while everything else bleeds out, complete with Benjamin Cowan publicly admitting he got the cycle wrong. The heart of the episode is the @CincoDoggos article fallout. Bobby backing out of the interview forced us to say out loud what we have been observing for months: the miner camp and the market camp are two different cultures, both necessary to Bitcoin, and they keep talking past each other. We walk through why "just start mining" misses the entire point of the security budget argument, what Ocean's one percent of hash power plus a lot of controversy actually bought in attention, and why the adoption arc for anything useful in crypto runs from ignored to hated to sent. We also pressure test @natgmi itself: the use case question, unit bias, and the honest four-future map for Bitcoin, decentralized, infinite, taxed, or state-secured. Then the back half goes somewhere we did not expect when the week started: @OpenAI's agent swarm reportedly solving millennium problems and now probing elliptic curve cryptography, with Justin Drake, @VitalikButerin, and serious cryptographers all circling the same alarm. We get into Quantus, the quantum-resistant Bitcoin competitor riding the fear narrative into VC wallets, and the counterintuitive take that these outside experiments are really just live tests of upgrades Bitcoin could eventually adopt itself. What ties the whole episode together is incentives. Miners dismiss @natgmi because their identity is proof of work, VCs fund quantum fear because fear converts, and a real quantum attacker would quietly read communications rather than torch a transparent ledger for headlines. Read the incentive, and you can usually predict the behavior before it happens, which is the entire reason the security budget argument exists in the first place. And underneath that sits the uncomfortable part we keep returning to: every path where Bitcoin survives by compromise, infinite supply, taxing holders, or a state backstop, is a path where it survives diminished. The scarcity and property tenets are not features on a list, they are the valuation. That is the case for taking the third option seriously while it is still cheap to do so, and it is why we will keep making this argument to people who are not ready to hear it yet. YouTube 🔗 youtu.be/bhF7XyCZzIU

Security underpins the value of your Bitcoin. How can I prove it? How much Bitcoin would you hold if the incentive to mine Bitcoin was just enough for only a few laptops to continue mining it? You would hold ZERO Bitcoin, that's the correct answer. This is where Bitcoin is headed, with every halving is exponential decay in miner revenue, which means the security of Bitcoin declines over time. Even in a "super cycle" scenario, you can not surpass exponential decay. ethereum:0x249130f5e2dd4cf278180c0df8273f3592ad1247 has over 60% of Bitcoin miner support, 60x more than BIP-110, remember that mess? Buying $1 worth of NAT increases Bitcoin's security by 6.5x. The more NAT you buy the more security of Bitcoin increases and a higher market cap ceiling for Bitcoin. This is just the math.