Risks of Mining Pool Centralization | Jimmy Song, Center of Hash E008

TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

Marty Bent

Technology

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2025

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jimmy Song, author of Programming Bitcoin, discusses the importance of more miners participating directly in the peer-to-peer network and the risks of bitcoin mining pool centralization, including how centralization in mining pools could enable censorship of bitcoin transactions and how it might also enable changes to the network’s rules that would otherwise be far more difficult, ranging from scenarios that cover mempool policy (e.g. OP Return filter) as well as consensus changes, in both softfork and hardfork scenarios.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Jimmy, thanks for doing this.
0:05.0	Topic of the day is mining centralization, but before we get there, I want to quiz you.
0:13.0	Just went down the street to Coopers, got Briscuit. I want you to guess what the current price of briskip per pound is at Coopers.
0:24.2	It's downtown prime location.
0:31.2	Austin, which obviously, oh, yeah, obviously,
0:32.0	um,
0:40.1	very popular around here. I gonna guess 3299 3950
0:42.3	what
0:43.5	yeah
0:44.6	do you have any recollection we've been going to cooper's for a long time around bit
0:49.8	devs do you have any recollection of the earliest price you would have remembered
0:52.9	at cooper's well cooper's didn't open until like five years ago.
0:57.4	No, it's been at least 2018.
1:00.3	Okay, so seven years ago, something like that. Yeah. But I want to say like 2299 was maybe like
1:10.5	the earliest I can remember?
1:11.6	The lowest I saw when I started going there more frequently when I started Unchained, which would have been 2018.
1:16.6	Uh-huh.
1:17.6	1799.
1:19.6	Oh.
1:20.6	Yeah.
1:21.6	I remember when I first moved to Austin, I went to Rudy's. I think it was like 629 or something. Yeah.
1:32.7	This was 2012. It's just amazing. I've triggered a number of people carrying the torch on
	...

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