Donate demo

One of our core business lines is about supporting bitcoin development. In the past, mining was dominated by the Chinese. They built the equipment. They had all the hashrate. They had all the machines. They had 70% of the hashrate. How could we pull this into the United States? One of the things we did along the way was launch a pool. Today we have about 30% of the hashrate flows through our pool.

We kicked off a conversation in I think Austin in May of 2023 and asked hwat we could do to support the bitcoin network or bitcoin developers. Who makes the money in this space anyway?

What are the long-term- we're not worried about this month or next month but more like the next 5 or 10 years to really support this ecosystem. I think htis is a really challenging topic. It gets dicey really fast. I was part of bitcoin back in the block wars days. I don't think people understand how crazy it can get. We don't want that to come back. It will become contentious again at some point.

What we wanted to do was create an opportunity for miners to support developers. We created a Donate feature where 100% of all the donations from the miners go directly to the non-profit. Pool members can allocate a portion of their earnings to go to donating developers.

Mining is an $11 billion business. 30% of that runs through our pool. What if the miners all got together and all wanted to support developers to push code that only helps those miners? Is that a good idea? Is that a good thing to have done? That makes me nervous. Instead of trying to between the miner and a developer, we said let's put these non-profits in the middle and they have several years of experience of dealing with developers now and have a good model.

So charities are able to onboard to the pool and the Donate product. They have to go through approval processes. We have a platform to match miners and non-profits.

We are commiting 0.2 BTC to each of the first 5 charities that sign up. I am happy to report that one of them is onboarded here.

What about donating hashrate and pledging future hashrate on that and getting a tax deduction on it? That's another idea. What about doing that through nicehash or something like nicehash?