Luxor Tech currently has over 8,500 miners and supports 15 cryptocurrencies.
Now the American mining giant is finally shifting its weight into the biggest mining task of all, Bitcoin.
According to a blog post on the subject, Luxor believes that the future of finance will rely on miners.
Big Mining Outfit Gets to Crypto Roots
Many in the crypto community advocate alternative blockchain designs. Proof-of-stake, proof-of-storage. Even “proof of space” (in the case of Torrent protocol creator Bram Cohen’s Chia).
All three have one thing in common: they claim to consume less natural resources than Bitcoin.
PoW purists argue that alternative designs ultimately consume similar resources, in different ways, when all of the data is crunched.
Luxor firmly believes in proof-of-work and mining as the way forward for crypto. In their various promotional materials, they make this much clear.
Luxor writes:
“The company was created because we truly believe that crypto will fundamentally change value creation & transfer in our future society (for the better). From the beginning, we have all thought of classical Nakamoto consensus (Proof-of-Work) as the only proven and tested mechanism for securing a decentralized platform. We revisit this debate as a team monthly, and our conviction in the consensus mechanism is still as strong today as it was back in 2017. This means the future of decentralized finance will require responsible guardians to efficiently harness energy to maintain the security of networks. We strive to be one of those responsible guardians.”
Supposing Luxor’s new pool is as attractive to Bitcoin miners as it has been on other chains, America’s largest “crypto” mining pool might find itself becoming the biggest mining pool in general.
Bitcoin Mining Industry Consolidating During Down Market?
Its Bitcoin mining pool will support the semi-controversial AsicBoost software:
“Our Bitcoin pool is AsicBoost compatible, allowing miners to improve the efficiency of their operations.”
The new Bitcoin effort will place pools around the globe, from North America to China.
Bitcoin mining has been undergoing a bit of an evolution in the last several months, with the likes of Matt Corallo developing things like “NiceHash” to improve results for both the network and the miner.
Mining pools are a crucially important part of the Bitcoin network. Mining pools ultimately make decisions, when there are decisions to be made, for the network.
For example, mining pools went against proposals which would have increased the block size of Bitcoin. Instead, Bitcoin later hard-forked into two versions, the other being Bitcoin Cash.
The massive reward involved in mining today, combined with the number of people chasing it, is a substantial part of the Bitcoin “security” you always hear about. Subtract the mining network and Bitcoin, in and of itself, is relatively vulnerable to parties who know what they are doing.
The value of the network is directly attributable to the reliability of the mining network. If Luxor is as successful as they think they will be, the pool will play an important role in all of cryptocurrency moving forward.
The opposite is just as likely, though, looking at it from a higher level.
