CoinGeek Miners Day recap

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The last week of November marked the inaugural CoinGeek Week, a four-day event including a three day conference and special “invite-only” pre-conference Miners Day on November 27th at the Mondrian in London.

The purpose of a standalone Miners Day was to bring together miners in the crypto space, emphasize their importance in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem and introduce them to key players in mining hardware.

nChain, the industry’s leading Blockchain development company, has always recognized the importance of miners and their ability to remain profitable on the chain they are mining on.  

“The Bitcoin SV project and its road map we think is critical to the success of Bitcoin because it really focuses on scaling to ensure higher volumes of transaction fees in the future to make up for block reward halving that is going to happen in two years”, nChain CEO Jimmy Nguyen told CoinGeek.com.

“The block reward cuts in half from 12.5 to 6.25 coins, so miners need to make up more value in the transaction fee component of their revenue instead of block rewards in order for the network to sustain itself and for miners to be profitable from mining, hardware manufacturers to be profitable, its all interrelated and it starts with the miners”, Nguyen added.

The Miners Day sessions kicked off with an inspirational speech delivered by CoinGeek.com Founder and Bitcoin SV pioneer Calvin Ayre, underscoring the importance of scaling and how the ability to scale impacts the mining industry.

“I personally believe that the only salvation for the mining industry is scaling”, said Ayre. 

“The only technology, the only platform out there that’s been proven to be able to scale – and has a scaling roadmap that’s real – is Bitcoin SV. So it is my personal opinion that the future of the mining industry itself is directly connected to the success of Bitcoin SV and that any miner that isn’t supporting Bitcoin SV is working against themselves”, Ayre explained to the audience.

A recurring theme throughout CoinGeek Week (and in the messaging leading up to the event) is that its time for Bitcoin to professionalize and grow up. The road to mass adoption comes along with a more business-focused approach and pioneers in the mining space such as Core Scientific and Squire Mining are playing their part to help this process along.

“One of the things we’re doing today is we’re bringing all of our expertise on high performance computing, enterprise grade servers, we’re bringing it all down to the crypto currency level to teach this industry how you go build systems at scale”, shared Kristy-Leigh Minehan, Core Scientific’s Chief Technology Officer. 

“How you go and build sustainable networks that Facebook runs on today, that Microsoft runs on today, that Amazon runs on today. And we’re applying all of that as it exists to Bitcoin mining and to SHA256”, she revealed.

“What separates us really is our focus on the enterprise space”, added Taras Kulyk, CEO of Squire Mining and CoinGeek Miner’s Day host.

“We really are looking at helping to build out the hardware for the network of the future. What we’re focused on for the design side is really an efficiency, making sure that the power consumption per terahash is really competitive, I would say world-leading”, he said. 

“Ideally, we’d like to be the Bitmain killers – that’s a bit aspirational right now – but really we’ve got the team in place in Korea, in Taiwan, really globally to really give us an advantage and gives us a good shot at that”, Kulyk added.

In addition to featuring leaders in the mining supplier space, CoinGeek’s Miners Day welcomed the miners themselves and facilitated an intimate atmosphere for networking and learning.

“I enjoyed today, I didn’t know what to expect from the Miners Day, but I come away pretty excited about the payment processing system for Bitcoin SV. In my opinion that’s something that’s been lacking as far as the whole crypto space”, shared Core Scientific’s Chief Revenue Officer Russell Cann.

“We’ve got to get it user-friendly to the individual users that don’t care about cypto if we really want to make it used worldwide”, Cann added.

“We’ve seen a lot of miners who want to make money by just what’s coming in every day. But I think its really important that miners think about the long term and when they start to do that the importance becomes not on the money that they make every day, but on the money that they’ll make in the future and the way that they do that is by defending the protocol”, Chris Ames of Mempool said. 

“So its really important that they make decisions based on what’s going to bring them money for years to come”, Ames added.

To close out the day, nChain’s Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Wright delivered a presentation highlighting the importance of compliance for miners and mentioned the risks that come along with mining collusion.

“Under the Proceeds of Crime act 2002, section 729, there’s an amendment that will come through in February next year here in the UK and that’s really, really interesting”, Dr. Wright explained.

“Without pay to script hash (P2SH), as a miner who colludes to have a double spend, the government will just put an order in and turn off your electricity. It won’t be everywhere, but it will be China, it will be the US, it will be most of the Western World that will end up doing this sort of stuff”, he said.