The mining ecosystem recently welcomed a new miner to the fold, as Nourpool mined its first Bitcoin SV block on December 7, 2019. To learn how this mining pool came together and why they chose BSV, we reached out to them to learn more about the men behind the effort and the plans they have for the future.
Nourpool was conceived last August by Alan Fu, a former Microsoft data scientist, along with two friends who’ve been involved in Bitcoin mining since 2013 and shared the same ideals. “We all share the same belief that on-chain scaling is the only way for Bitcoin to grow, and we decided to run our own pool to participate in this important journey of Bitcoin,” Fu told us, noting that the idea to build the pool was conceived during one of the group’s regular meetups.
They decided on the Nourpool name based on a cryptic message consisting only of “nour” from one of Satoshi’s original accounts on the global network P2P Foundation forum. “We interpret this word as “light” in Arabian, as Bitcoin SV has brought light to the long-dark-and-suffocating world of Bitcoin,” Fu said. “We like ‘Nour’ and put it into our name, as ‘Nourpool’ literally means ‘pool of light.’”
They didn’t decide on mining BSV simply due to a survey of talking points; plenty of work went into the decision. Fu explained the decision making process:
“Since 2017 we have been doing detailed studies over the mechanisms of all the major cryptocurrencies and concluded that miners on all coins are either fed by a short-lived subsidy that has been grossly overvalued, or living off transaction fees that have been severely capped by scaling issues of the underlying platform, or both. Bitcoin SV however, with its to-be-removed block cap and elegant UTXO design, allows massive on-chain scaling. Combining real scaling capability with a stable base-layer protocol, we think there will be an exponential growth in the on-chain activities on BSV, presenting an enticing fee market for us miners.”
Nourpool hasn’t met much difficulty—technical wise—since mining that initial block on December 7. In the first two days of operation, they mined a total of 11 BSV blocks. But the future will have some issues to solve, Fu thinks. “The difficulty lies ahead as we need to prepare for rising transaction volume. There will be an iterative process of we discovering and resolving one bottleneck after another.” Fu also mentioned some challenges on the financial side of mining BSV: “As much as we believe that the market acceptance of BSV will surely improve over time, reality is that currently there are fewer derivatives and worse depth/liquidity for BSV market comparing to that of the Segwit coin, rendering fewer mining strategies available to us,” he shared.
All the same, the Nourpool team is gearing up for growth and will provide more for the greater community. “We will be expanding our own hash power in the next 6 months, and we also seek to connect our pool with more BSV miners,” Fu told us. “The goal is to surpass the 10% mark by halving next year. In the coming months we will also release a set of new services for both miners and application developers, please stay tuned.”
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