Decentralization is bigger than any one entity

Proto kicks off partnership with The 256 Foundation with a meaningful chip donation

Today, we’re pleased to announce a long-term partnership with The 256 Foundation, a Nashville-based non-profit focused on developing and advocating for solutions that lower bitcoin mining’s barrier to entry–from educational resources to open-source software, firmware, and hardware solutions.

For some time, bitcoin mining has been trending toward centralization. Today, one company, in one country, controls the vast majority of the hardware market. Chip supply is dominated by a number of companies you can count on one hand. Even hashrate is largely controlled by a small group of increasingly powerful mining pools. 

Absent some shift, the trajectory of mining seems to point toward an even more centralized future–a reality that has the potential to undercut much of bitcoin’s promise as a free and open protocol. 

Decentralization is bigger than any one entity.

A centralized network is a weak network–one susceptible to being throttled, targeted, shut down in part or in full. Decentralization and network resiliency go hand in hand–the more miners and nodes that make up the network, and the more widely distributed they are, the harder it is for any one party to influence that network in a meaningful way. The more resilient the network, the better its future prospects–and the more likely it is for sound money to truly become the native currency of the internet and a more open and accessible economy.

At Proto, our mission from inception has been to decentralize mining and increase access to tools for builders, regardless of their size or location. We’ve already taken steps in this direction, releasing the first iteration of our mining development kit with a number of miners and builders, designing our own rigs to bring competition to a hardware market in dire need of it, and developing our own chips for eventual sale to anyone with the creativity and technical skills to dream up new mining applications. 

Implicit in all of this work is the certainty that network decentralization is bigger than any one entity–bigger than Proto, bigger than Block, bigger than any nation state. Bitcoin’s decentralized future is going to take a huge diversity of builders designing and optimizing machines for an untold number of use cases. 

That’s where communities like The 256 Foundation stand to play a vital role.

Giving builders the tools they need

Communities like The 256 Foundation see the problem of mining centralization with a similar clarity and urgency–and not as a foregone conclusion. 

Despite all existing limitations around access to hardware or chips or dominance in hashrate,  The 256 Foundation and its members have developed an inspiring diversity of new, small-scale applications for mining hardware–from heating home water systems, to low-power solutions, to open source projects aimed at lowering the barrier to entry and making mining possible for more and more people. And they’ve done all of this with little more than a stubborn attitude and the scraps of industrial mining.

We see in The 256 Foundation kindred spirits in our work to decentralize mining, and are excited to partner with them as they and the broader community iterate on designs of mining’s future. To aid in that effort, we’re pleased to donate up to 256K BZM2 ASIC chips to the foundation, to allocate to emerging mining projects as they see fit.

In the end, bitcoin’s decentralized future is up to all of us to define. And while industrial mining will certainly play an important role, communities like The 256 Foundation may ultimately determine the network’s enduring character and make meaningful contributions to its decentralization.