High-level meetings in Lugano, coordinating with the Red Team to put @ocean_mining DATUM Prime's server-side infrastructure through its paces ahead of its planned 2027 release. Find the bugs before the attackers do. 🛡️

Day 8 of Plan ₿ Week is in the books. The Cypher Tank finale kicked off at the finalists stepped up to pitch the Honey Badgers and fight for funding. We caught up with @mir_btc head of Cypher Tank, and with @giacomozucco one of the judges, to hear what it takes to win them over. At Plan ₿ Expo, the podcast recordings kept rolling behind the scenes, and we also met @Schnuartz from @SpecterDIY Today is the last day of Cypher Tank: who will take home the funding? 👀 Explore the full programme:

The distinction I'm highlighting is who controls block construction, not whether software does it. There's a fundamental difference between a pool operator constructing block templates for everyone and individual miners constructing and submitting their own templates. In the former, miners merely provide hashrate. In the latter, they exercise actual control over transaction selection. That's the difference between hashing and mining.

The distinction I'm highlighting is who controls block construction, not whether software does it. There's a fundamental difference between a pool operator constructing block templates for everyone and individual miners constructing and submitting their own templates. In the former, miners merely provide hashrate. In the latter, they exercise actual control over transaction selection. That's the difference between hashing and mining.

"Raw statistics"... lol. @mempool's "Avg Block Fees" isn't even a useful statistic at all, and neither is "Health". I wish they'd stop being stupid with both. For one, it's an average of percentages, not Bitcoin txn fees mined. And the percentage is based on what their node instantaneously is aware of when a block is mined, which is impossible for any pool to beat without out of band txns (like MARA). Case and point: I could mine an OCEAN DATUM block with 100 BTC of txn fees in it, and it would _still_ show the pool in the negative because it's not in any way whatsoever a measure of profitability, censorship, or anything remotely relevant at all for that matter. It's a bullshit stat. The "profitability" nonsense is easily debunked by looking at OCEAN's actual blocks, payout txns, and rewards at the per-miner level... all verifiable and transparent. The "censorship" stuff is bullshit as well. Case and point: If you include a block full of garbage that @mempool doesn't know about (4MB JPGs are an example), those displace all txns @mempool knows about, effectively "censoring" all the txns that "should" have made it into the next block.... but the stupid "Health" metric? 100%. lol. The "Health" is partly a measure of how different a block is from what @mempool expects, and partly complete nonsense because of exceptions like the above. And to be clear, displacing a txn is NOT censorship. Miners can mine what they want to mine within the consensus rules that everyone agrees to when they join the network. There is no requirement to mine any specific txn. Best example: I can choose to mine only txns that pay at least say, 100 sats/vB. I might not even turn on my miners unless there's a block reward high enough to justify it. Am I "censoring" txns? Of course not. I could go on a massive rant about these pointless metrics, but suffice it to say, the REAL numbers speak for themselves: more BTC in miners' wallets when mining on OCEAN vs FPPS pools.

Shinobi is joining Start9 as Chief Marketing Officer. Shinobi will reportedly spearhead effort to replace Knots with new Rust-powered @rbitcoin_org as the default alternative to Bitcoin Core on StartOS

Again OCEAN has no official position on BIP54, BIP110, or any other proposed consensus changes. Our mission is to maximize miner choice, not dictate which proposals miners should support. Whether a proposal improves Bitcoin is for the broader Bitcoin ecosystem to debate and ultimately decide. We're here to decentralize mining, not consensus.

Again OCEAN has no official position on BIP54, BIP110, or any other proposed consensus changes. Our mission is to maximize miner choice, not dictate which proposals miners should support. Whether a proposal improves Bitcoin is for the broader Bitcoin ecosystem to debate and ultimately decide. We're here to decentralize mining, not consensus.

@BitcoinBombadil @boomer_btc @Rob1Ham @coinjoined @ocean_mining An exploited timewarp attack (which BIP54 mitigates) could result in up to 6 blocks/sec, decades of subsidy mined in weeks, node resource exhaustion, network centralization, timelocks disrupted, funds potentially lost, endless reorgs, etc. This is bad for Bitcoin as money.

📣 We’re hosting a panel about Privacy, Custody, Risk, and Securing Corporate Bitcoin at the BFC Symposium. 🟠 Catch everyone on November 4 at Pakhuis de Zwijger during Bitcoin Amsterdam 🇳🇱

Day 9 of Plan ₿ Week is in the blocks! The grand finale of @cypher_tank is done! The finalists took the stage to win prizes from the Honey Badgers and secure funding. Stay tuned: applications for the next Cypher Tank will open soon! We also had a Red Team session with @Rob1Ham, and @coinjoined unboxed a bunch of Seedor goodies. @sbaaaam21 as always hosted this amazing Plan ₿ TV. Explore the full programme:

The “avg health” isn’t a measurement of profitability, it’s an indicator of how close your block resembles the default settings in Bitcoin Core. The other pools mostly use default settings which is why their health shows as 100% but OCEAN’s miners construct their own templates using DATUM and are therefore substantially more unique from the expected template. You could say that the lower the avg health score is, the more decentralized the pool.

Why point your Bitaxe at @ocean_mining ? 🌊 Because you're not just hashing. You're actually mining. ✅ More miner sovereignty: Choose your own block templates instead of blindly accepting the pool's decisions. ✅ Competitive payouts: OCEAN's TIDES rewards miners based on contributed work, including transaction fees, without FPPS middlemen taking a cut of fee upside. ✅ Decentralization: Help reduce the concentration of power over Bitcoin's block construction. ✅ No ideological restrictions required: Mine with standard Bitcoin Core policies and prioritize the highest-paying eligible transactions. Your Bitaxe might be small, but your contribution to decentralization isn't. Stop Hashing. Start Mining. 🌊