Over 15,000 people, mostly small miners, are part of the Braiins (Slush Pool) ecosystem.
In 2010, the first Bitcoin (BTC) mining project was set up in Prague, Czechia. It was called Bitcoin.cz, and it was very simple. Founder Mark “Slush” Palatinus decided to move on to other projects, such as making the world’s first cryptocurrency hard wallet, Trezor. This is what happened soon after. As a result, Braiins, a company that does embedded Linux development and research, took over the mining pool and changed its name to match.
Fast forward to today. Braiins (Slush Pool) has become one of the biggest Bitcoin mining pools in the world, and now it has a lot of power. People now use the space, and its total hash rate is between 5% and 8% of the total Bitcoin network hash rate. There are now more than 15,000 people in the space. In order to make money, the company only makes money with Bitcoin. It charges a 2% fee for the mining firmware that it sells. Kristian Csepcsar, the chief marketing officer for Braiins, talked to Cointelegraph about why people keep using the world’s oldest mining pool even though there are so many other options out there.
People talked about why firmware is so important in the process, and Csepcsar used Texas’ grid balancing to show why. He said, “You start the mining machine when there’s a lot of electricity in the grid, but you might have to turn them off in milliseconds when there’s a lot of demand from homes.”
“Now imagine a big farm of 60,000 machines; it’s very hard to regulate them without the aid of firmware, which solves the problem easily.”
However, it’s not just the new technology that’s enticing new miners to join the Braiins mining pool. It’s also about how the company thinks. Many other mining pools want to support as many forks of Bitcoin as possible because it’s a good source of income and is good for business. When the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork took place in 2017, we didn’t want to change our mining pool because it was just a fad.
The truth is, Braiins does not mine any other digital currencies than BTC today, just like he said he did. People think that Braiins has a lot of digital money, but that’s not true. Csepcsar says that:
“Nobody expected Bitcoin to succeed that quickly. So we were selling a lot more initially [when the price was very low] to fund operations. In addition, there was a hack of the cloud service early on that resulted in 3,000 BTC stolen. So like, we’re not sitting on Satoshi level wealth.”
During cryptocurrency bear markets, when prices of digital currencies can fall 70% to 80% in a short amount of time, Csepcsar said that the company stays strong.
“The good thing is that we started early. All the co-founders were already far enough in their careers to have money from their previous job in big tech companies. We’re Bitcoiners, and we don’t believe in numbers going up forever. There are always going to be crashes. And so we prepare for that.”
In addition, Braiins has never taken money from venture capitalists or outside investors. A group of people who like crypto say that centralised institutions, like security regulators, should step in and control the volatility of digital currencies. This way, investors and businesses could plan for slow and steady (but still controlled) growth. When Cointelegraph asked him about this, he said: “But not me.”
“Imagine if we traded Bitcoin the same as the NASDAQ, eight hours a day, Monday to Friday instead of 24/7. Bitcoin is growing fast like an exponential technology, and we want it to remain that way. Restrictions make everything slower and less efficient.”
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.
