Foundry Pool has nearing 40% of Bitcoin hashrate.
Foundry Pool is nearing the 40% network hashrate mark–an uncomfortable margin for many Bitcoin enthusiasts.
While an attestation to the Foundry team’s ability to bootstrap, grow and sustain a mining pool within three years, the percentage needs to come down for a few reasons. Chief among them being the type of clients Foundry services: public miners.
Yes, miners can point their hashrate elsewhere if Foundry does something distasteful. Also yes alternative pools could bootstrap in the event of a censorship attack on Bitcoin.
But it’s key to remember its not necessarily about the possibility of Bitcoin ‘dying,’ but rather its social guarantees withering on the vine as public miners cater to Washington DC mandates.
North American public miners history of appeasement to authorities and increasingly make up a large percentage of the network. Take, for example, Marathon’s infamous (and later recanted) transaction screener or DMG Pool’s Blockseer, which built ‘carbon-neutral’ Terra Pool along with Argo Blockchain. Add an increasingly hostile faction of the Democratic party toward Bitcoin’s energy usage and neutral settlement, and it’s not difficult to foresee attempts at mining mandates. Mandates which would hurt Bitcoin’s strong social guarantees.
There’s two threats worth paying attention to: confirmation times and feather forks.
First, the more hashrate Foundry or another mine acquires, the more confirmations everyone should wait for a Bitcoin transaction to settle, as Bitcoin developer and Casa CTO Jameson Lopp pointed out in the article that spurred this newsletter topic.
As Lopp puts it:
“The 6 block confirmation rule of thumb to achieve 99.99% assurance a double spend can’t happen (and assumes a 10% hashrate attacker) now requires 60 confirmations to achieve the same level of confidence.”
