The Looming Censorship War with Jan Capek

My guest today is Jan Capek, Co-founder and co-CEO of Braiins. Braiins is the preeminent Bitcoin mining software company. Braiins offers a full-stack software solution by providing miners with everything from state-of-the-art mining firmware to a best-in-class mining pool. Braiin's is the company behind the legendary mining pool, Slush Pool. Slush Pool was the world’s first mining pool and continues to be an industry leader in transparency and innovation, with more than 1.25 million BTC mined since 2010. Braiins is also is the developer of Stratum V2, a next generation protocol for pooled mining with a focus on quality improvements including reduced data loads, empty block elimination, hash rate hijacking prevention and the Braiins OS / OS+, autotuning mining firmware, which boosts the efficiency of mining hardware with cutting-edge firmware that is natively integrated with Stratum V2 and mining software written from scratch in Rust language. At Braiins Jan, focuses on building out infrastructure architecture for Slush Pool where he aims to bring pool infrastructure to scale, build out more robust security, DDoS mitigation, and infrastructure configuration management, and provisioning. He also focuses on building the Braiins systems providing custom development consulting services in the following areas: applications for FreeRTOS and NuttX environment, embedded Linux BSP's, and infrastructure configuration management. If you are interested in learning more about the mining industry you have to listen to this conversation, Jan shares an immense amount of knowledge and details about Bitcoin and the mining industry. In our conversation, we cover the Braiins and Slush's history of innovating in the mining industry, scaling a Bitcoin mining company, the impact of ASICs, decentralizing the Bitcoin Network, and much more. Jan discusses how he got into Bitcoin and shares the origin story of Braiins and Slush Pool. Jan goes into depth about his experience bootstrapping Braiins into the first professionalized Bitcoin mining company. We go on to discuss the evolution of mining hardware and the impact of ASICs on the industry. We had a very thoughtful discussion about the dangers of blacklisting Bitcoin addresses and how there are censorship resistance redundancies within the Bitcoin Network. Another major discussion point in our conversation was the possible ramifications of Bitcoin's hardcoded rules coming into conflict with regulatory and legal institutions. We finish our conversation by discussing the importance of decentralizing manufacturing supply-chain for Bitcoin mining. Please enjoy my conversation with Jan Capek.

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