picture a snowy county that pays forty plow drivers by the mile. each driver owns the truck, buys the fuel, and keeps what the miles earn. one fall the county floats a plan. hold back one tenth of every driver's pay and put it in a fund. the fund buys better routing software for everyone. better software sounds good. so the meeting fills up with talk about the software. which vendor, what features, who runs it. i would start the meeting somewhere else. forty drivers are about to earn a tenth less per mile. which of them can carry that, and which ones park the truck? the driver with the new plow and the short route in town will be fine. the driver with the old truck and the long dirt roads at the edge of the county was only just covering fuel. take a tenth and those roads stay white. the county ends up with nicer software and fewer cleared roads. bitcoin has its own version of this. computers around the world compete to add the next page of transactions to bitcoin's record. that work is called mining, and each page is called a block. the miner who adds a block is paid in new coins made for that purpose. that payment is called the subsidy. every few years, on one network or another, someone proposes sending a slice of a payment like that somewhere else. to the people who write the software, or to a treasury, which is a shared pot of money that a group decides how to spend. when i read one of these plans i ask two things first. who gets paid less? and what do they stop doing after that? miners pay for machines and electricity out of that payment. the ones with the thinnest margins switch off first. fewer machines running means less work protecting the record. the other side has a fair point and i want to give it room. shared software is hard to fund. everyone depends on it and no single miner wants to pay for it alone, so the people who maintain it often work for free. a small cut for them could be money well spent. that could be right. what would change my mind: a network that redirects part of its reward, pays its developers for several years, and keeps its miners and its computing power the whole way through. bitcoin's subsidy has gone to the miner who found the block since 2009. i read any plan to move it as a plan about who gets paid. if this put the drivers back in the room, Zap ⚡

picture a town library run by three hundred volunteers. each one owns a cart and spends the weekend shelving books. the work is spread across the whole town. now picture four people in a back office who choose every book the library buys. three hundred people do the lifting. four people decide what ends up on the shelves. i think bitcoin mining has the same shape, and i watch the back office more than the carts. mining is the work of adding new pages to bitcoin's record of payments. each page is called a block. a miner is anyone running machines that compete to add the next block, and the winner earns new bitcoin. one miner alone might wait years to win. so miners join a pool. a pool is a group that combines its machines and shares what it earns, so each member gets paid small and steady. the machines stay with the miners, in garages and warehouses in many countries. the pool does one job the miners hand over. it picks which payments go into the block. so my claim is this. ownership of the machines is spread wide, and the choosing sits in a few rooms. over the last few years, the two biggest pools have often found about half of all blocks between them. picture one scenario, and i am labeling it a scenario. somebody wants certain payments kept out of the record. they would have a short list of offices to visit, far shorter than a list of every miner. the pushback is fair. a miner can point machines at a different pool in minutes, and pool operators know it. there is also software that lets each miner build their own block while still sharing rewards with the pool. and a pool that skips payments leaves those fees for the next pool to collect. i hold that pushback loosely for one reason. many miners borrowed money for their machines, and steady pay from a big pool is how they cover the loan. leaving costs them something. what would show me wrong: the share of mining power where the miner picks the block contents growing year after year, until the back office has little left to choose. i run machines myself, so this one is close to home. when i size up a pool, i ask who picks the payments before i ask about the payout. if this showed you the back office, Zap ⚡