Skot, creator of the Bitaxe mini ASIC line and who promotes open source Bitcoin mining, projected this May 21 that the acceleration of development in Bitcoin mining is going to become absolutely vertical. “It’s going to go crazy,” he said in an interview published by the MARA Foundation, where he predicts exponential growth in the development of software and hardware for the sector.
Skot’s projection summarizes his central thesis: open source is coming to mining in the same way it came to the rest of the protocol, although he is doing it late. This will allow thousands of developers, small miners, and companies to contribute with improvements, optimizations, new features, and creative solutions. From that logic, Bitcoin mining is the only layer of the protocol that was left out of that standard, without a technical reason to justify it.
This is one of the main objectives of the 256 Foundation, the non-profit foundation of which Skot is one of the most prominent promoters. The idea is to bring the firmware, the software layer that connects the miner hardware with the pool and the Bitcoin network, «to that entire range of miners, from home mini ASICs to industrial equipment.”
The mechanism he describes is modular: “we can create these open source building blocks so that people can take and make a water heater… and that is fundamental decentralization.”
For skot, “innovation is basically built on open source… it is the fundamental point because it is permissionless.”
In other words, it aims to bring to mining the practice that Any developer can take the code, modify it and build on top of itwithout asking anyone’s permission. From that logic, Bitcoin mining is the only layer of the protocol that was left out of that standard, without a technical reason to justify it.
«Bitcoin itself is an open source project… In Bitcoin Core, node implementations, wallets… they simply do not question it. “So I thought this was ridiculous, why isn’t (mining)?” noted during the interview.
Proprietary firmware, one more centralization in Bitcoin mining
Skot also warned that ASIC manufacturers’ proprietary firmware represents a counterparty risk that mining operators often ignore. Although it is a long-standing problem in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The proprietary firmware is what decides which address to send the hashrate to, controls the electrical configuration of the chips and determines which instructions the equipment accepts or rejects. Whoever controls it can, in theory, redirect the computing power of a machine without intervention of its owner.
If I were a large mining company and I wanted to reserve the right to exercise control over all of these machines, I would do it through the firmware… If you don’t control that firmware, I think it’s a huge counterparty risk for your entire operation, regardless of the size..
Skot, creator of the Bitaxe mini ASICs.
For skot, the problem has an additional dimension that makes it difficult to justify. Both Bitcoin Core, node implementations and wallets are open source software by convention, while mining is not. And, according to the developer, there is no technical reason that explains this exception.
It is for this reason that the 256 Foundation’s answer to that diagnosis is Mujina, an open source firmware compatible with Antminers control boards that eliminates dev fees (commissions hidden in proprietary firmware), enables full control over fans, voltage and overclockingand supports Stratum V2, the protocol that returns the construction of blocks to the individual miner.
In this context, the debate about firmware in Bitcoin mining is not new and is still open. The novelty is that it is beginning to have alternatives with its own name, although its adoption on an industrial scale no public evidence yet.