Bitcoin Mechanic opened his talk at Mining Disrupt Miami 2024, held June 24–26, 2024, with a chart of the network's hashrate split by mining pool and a question for the room: was anyone happy with what it showed? Speaking for Ocean, the pool he works with, he argued that Bitcoin mining has drifted into the same trade the rest of the economy made with Amazon and Uber. Both are cheap and convenient, he said, until the day you can no longer use them, and by then nothing is left to fall back on.
The session took place when the price of Bitcoin was $61,272. Today, on October 20, 2026, the price is $81,859. The pool shares in this story are the ones he gave on stage in 2024, not current figures.
Amazon, Uber and Zero Redundancy
He began with Amazon: almost anything, delivered next day or even same day in a big city, and cheap. Then Uber: one app on your phone and a ride anywhere, at any time. His own account stopped working the first time he came to Miami, in 2021. He tried to hail the yellow cars with taxi signs on the roof, and each one turned out to be a private car. As he told it, Uber had put the taxis out of business, so without the app he could not get anywhere.
The lesson he drew was about priorities and incentives. People come to rely on centralized services because they are efficient. Everyone buys almost everything from one store, which solves commerce and leaves no redundancy at all.
So this is not how you build resiliency.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 2:31
Bitcoin, he said, is not about optimizing for efficiency. It is about redundancy: something that can look unnecessary at face value but lets a system last. He saw the pull toward efficiency creeping into mining, and said that is what creates some of the problems the industry may face.
Two Pools, Both Permissioned
On his chart, Ocean was the orange slice. Foundry sat at the top, where it had been for a long time, and much of the rest belonged to a group he called AntMain, meaning Bitmain's pools and Bitmain-affiliated pools. That group, he said, was a lot bigger than it should be. Most people only worry when one share nears 51%, he argued, but many problems appear well before that number.
So the two biggest pools you see here, which overtly account for more than 50% of the network, both require permission.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 3:52
He compared it to a world where you cannot take a taxi without a passport, and where the only store left is Amazon and you need government ID and a credit card to use it. Without those, you cannot travel or take part in the economy. Mining that requires permission, he said, puts a permissioned layer on top of an otherwise permissionless system, and that is not how Bitcoin should work.
Why Ocean Launched
Ocean launched the previous November, he said, for no reason other than that Bitcoin needed it. The industry had grown lazy and complacent about this part of the system, and problems the team had thought were theoretical turned out to be real and already present.
He came to mining as a holder and node runner and found the mining world alien. Two sayings that every Bitcoiner learns, he said, had not crossed over into it at all.
The first is, not your keys, not your coins.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 5:42
That one was learned through years of exchange failures: he cited the collapse of what was once the biggest exchange in the world, which lost the bitcoin of hundreds of thousands of people, and Quadriga, the biggest exchange in Canada. The second saying is don't trust, verify. A wallet only reports what something else tells it, he explained, and the only way to know you hold coins is to run a node and verify the network's full history yourself. If everyone has to ask a third party whether they even have coins, he said, the 21 million limit stops meaning anything.
Who Gets Paid When a Block Is Found
Whoever finds a block decides where the newly created bitcoin goes. In every case on his chart except Ocean, he said, the pool pays itself and then works out some way to pay the miners hashing with it. When Foundry finds a block, the new coins go to Foundry.
Ocean, when it finds a block, 90% or so of the newly created coins, the minute they exist, are in the pockets of the miners that helped solve that block.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 8:15
Ocean never touches those coins, he said. That is how the pool applies not your keys, not your coins.
The Price of Certainty
For don't trust, verify, he turned to FPPS, the payout model that most of the other pools on his chart use. He called it unverifiable. The pool looks at the blockchain and at a miner's hashrate and asserts, by its own formula, how much the miner is owed. The claims made for the model, the exceptions to those claims and the way it works in practice each get worse, he said.
From a miner's side, FPPS is as easy as Amazon or Uber: point your hashrate at the pool and sats come back. But nobody knows when the next block will arrive, and a pool that promises to pay no matter what is turning that randomness into certainty. He called that a very, very expensive service to offer.
So much so that miners are now, thanks to the existence of Ocean, saying we can take on that variance.
Bitcoin Mechanic · 10:27
Mining with Ocean means waiting for blocks before getting paid, which he likened to shopping at mom-and-pop stores instead of buying everything on Amazon. Miners who can afford that extra disruption remove the middleman between themselves and the network and, he argued, can make much more money. He was not asking anyone to do it out of the goodness of their heart, he said. Ocean's job, as he described it, is to record which miners are mining, set how the next block's reward must be split, and, if the pool finds that block, have the money already in the miners' pockets.
Bitcoin is about disintermediation and not trusting middlemen, he said. Cutting them out of mining returns it to how Bitcoin was supposed to work in the first place.
The First Block
Out of time, he closed by crediting Bob Burnett of Barefoot Mining with finding Ocean's first block in early December, a few weeks after launch, on an S19 XP. Burnett was about to consign that machine at the Ocean booth, and Bitcoin Mechanic said he did not yet know whether it would be auctioned or given away.
Mining Disrupt returns March 22–24, 2027 in Irving, Texas.