Binance announced their mining pool just a couple days ago. This will shake things up.

They will be very competitive with the other exchanges offering mining pool services, so I think it definitely puts all mining pools on notice.

There's been days that F2Pool has lost 100 BTC in terms of having to pay miners without mining blocks themselves.

But over a long period of time and with a significant amount of network cash rates, those ups

and downs kind of even out.

Hello everyone.

Welcome to the fifth and final episode of CoinDDesk's Bitcoin-Having 2020 podcast series.

On this episode, I'm joined by Thomas Heller, the global business director at the largest Bitcoin mining pool in the world, F2 Pool.

At the time of this podcast recording, we are just under two weeks away from the Bitcoin

halving. And Bitcoin prices, last I checked before this show, is sitting right at around $7,700.

That's pretty close to $8,000. Thomas, do you think that Bitcoin prices will hit the $10,000 mark

as it did in February before the having event?

Christine, thank you for having me. Bitcoin price is one of the most speculated aspects of the

industry. I think that with only two weeks to go, it's very unlikely. They will hit the 10K mark,

but I think in general we're heading in the right direction. The price movement, you're right, Thomas, is very difficult to predict.

But the economics of Bitcoin are set in stone, or rather should I say set in code.

On this podcast show, we'll be going over the fundamentals of Bitcoin economics as it relates

to the activity of mining.

So to kick off our discussion, Thomas, can you tell me about your very first encounter

with Bitcoin mining?

And what was the turning point in your view, which convinced you to actually start

running machines to mine Bitcoin professionally?

...