BTC Sessions
They Bet Everything On An Existential Crisis | Bob Burnett & Nacho Pauls
- Bitcoin's first hard fork tested mining decentralization in practice, causing Ocean's hash rate to drop from 40 exahash to 23 before recovering, revealing the difference between rented and owned hash rate.
- Template centralization remains the core technical problem; hash rate distribution among pubcos has improved from 38–40% to approximately 28%, a positive shift.
- Ocean was the only pool that allowed miners to choose their own stance on BIP-110, maintaining non-KYC operations and consistent payouts throughout the chain split controversy.
- Regulatory and operational barriers (FPPS mandates in Canada and Finland, risk-averse CFO mindset, lack of knowledge) slow adoption of variable-payout pools despite higher long-term returns.
- Leadership transitions: Jason Hughes becomes CTO, Bob Burnett becomes chairman; Luke DeWolf and Mechanic departed amicably to pursue different directions, reflecting normal growing-pains as Ocean scales beyond its early phase.
- Client diversity crisis: Bitcoin Knots discontinuation removes a major alternative to Core; three to five competing full-node implementations are needed long-term, modeled on how the PC industry standardized USB, PCI, and Bluetooth through collaborative standards.