"Someone gave me this," Bitcoin Mechanic said as he walked on stage at Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale, holding up the object he had just been handed and asking the room what he was supposed to do with it. Then he got to his point: the profit calculators miners rely on, and the payout model almost every pool uses, hide a cost that most miners never check.
The session was recorded at Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale, March 25–27, 2025. Bitcoin Mechanic spoke for Ocean, the mining pool that launched in November 2023. Bitcoin traded at $87,393 on the first day of the conference; today it is $81,514. His case does not depend on the price: it is about how pools turn the randomness of block discovery and transaction fees into a product they sell to miners.
Where the calculator number comes from
He opened by polling the audience. How many owned a miner? How many had typed their hashrate into an online profit calculator to see what they would earn? And how many had asked where that number comes from? His suggestion was to do the maths yourself: take the network difficulty, your hashrate and how often you could expect to find blocks, and work out what you should be paid. By his count, about three of the roughly 70 people in the room had done it, and those three were mining on Ocean.
The point, he said, is that what comes out of the blockchain is not what a miner is paid on an FPPS pool. FPPS, full pay per share, is the dominant payout model and where most miners go by default. The name sounds good: who wants to be paid partially for their shares? His argument is that the model is something else.
The insurance product inside the pool
But, really, what FPPS is, it's an insurance product, and it's a very expensive insurance product.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 3:11
He explained it with rain. Suppose all drinking water came from rainfall, and someone guaranteed you water even through six months of drought. Whoever sold that guarantee would charge a lot, because they are on the hook even when nothing falls from the sky. That, he said, is what FPPS pools promise. And bitcoin cannot be created out of thin air: "You actually need to mine them. And if you don't mine them, they don't exist." Anyone promising to pay out a finite supply of coins that has not been found yet, he argued, will charge heavily for it, and that has been costing miners a lot of money.
They're telling all of you guys on FPPS pools, we're going to give you Bitcoins even if we don't find any blocks.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 5:42
He traced why the problem has grown. Between 2009 and 2012 a block paid 50 bitcoin with almost no fees, so a miner could predict earnings from hashrate and difficulty and could tell whether a pool was short-changing them. Each halving cut the subsidy, to 25, then 12 and a half, six and a quarter, and now three and an eighth, and transaction fees, which are random, became a larger share of revenue. Blocks do not arrive every ten minutes on the dot, and each carries a different amount of bitcoin. Three or four pools, he said, have told miners not to worry about that variance and pay them consistently no matter what, which makes those pools a middleman between the chain and the miner, and a very profitable one.
Bob Burnett's 40-miner test
Ocean does not use FPPS: its miners are paid only when the pool finds a block. That makes life harder for miners, he said, but Ocean's conjecture at launch was that they would end up earning more. Barefoot Mining was the first to agree to mine on Ocean. Bob Burnett, whom Bitcoin Mechanic called a legendary Bitcoiner who goes by Boomer BTC and a former CTO of Gateway Computers, mined with Ocean from the start and found its first two blocks.
Burnett ran a test with 40 identical miners: ten on Ocean and ten on each of three other pools. Bitcoin Mechanic did not name those pools, saying only that they are well-known FPPS pools. The machines sat in the same container, on the same network and electricity, under the same conditions, to control for as much as possible.
And after his first year, he earned 30% more on Ocean than the next best pool.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 9:55
Against the worst of the three pools, Ocean came out 35% ahead. Bitcoin Mechanic said he was not trying to overstate it: Ocean's payout model, TIDES, pays out in a way that lifted first-year returns somewhat above a long-run level, "but not that much more." In his words, Ocean should have yelled about the result a lot louder than it did.
Volatility as revenue
His framing borrows from bitcoin's price. An investor who can live with years where bitcoin drops 85% can also see large gains; one who cannot will pick something steady like the S&P 500 and give up that upside. Mining works the same way, he argued. A miner who can sit through two hours without a block, then see five arrive in ten minutes, keeps a source of revenue that an FPPS pool otherwise keeps for itself.
Volatility is your friend.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 7:33
He named the pools he had in mind for the close: Foundry, Antpool, F2Pool, ViaBTC, and the pools he described as proxies or sub-pools of Antpool, naming Braiins and Luxor among them. Miners on any of them, he said, are leaving a lot of money on the table. He invited the room to the Ocean booth, number 351, to hear why.
Variance is basically a source of revenue in Bitcoin that a tiny group of actors have taken for themselves.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 6:40
This is a pool operator's case for his own pool, and the comparison is one miner's study as Bitcoin Mechanic described it, not an independent audit. The next Mining Disrupt is March 22–24, 2027, in Irving, Texas.