The future of Bitcoin mining, with Hector Diaz and Alexander Raffin — 07/27
On July 27th, our community manager and content creator, Hector Diaz, joined GAINS Associates’ CEO Alexander Raffin to discuss Titan’s project, vision, and future. In this recap, you’ll find the most important highlights. You can watch the full video here.
About GAINS Associates
GAINS is a decentralized, transparent VC community that has been around the crypto space since 2017. Their main focus is to provide a platform for small investors to collaborate and combine their capital to create pools for better investment opportunities.
Additionally, they organize events with different blockchain and cryptocurrency companies, educate the general public about the industry, and maintain communication channels in which community members can engage in enriching debates and discussions.
If you’re interested, make sure to visit their website and learn more.
What is Titan
Alexander invited us to learn more about Titan and what we are building, so naturally, that was his first question to Hector. As you may know by now, we’re creating a peer-to-peer, decentralized, trustless platform for cryptocurrency mining power trading. “Essentially, it’s a DEX for hashpower. People will be able to buy and sell cloud computing in the form of hashrate. We’re creating the first decentralized marketplace for that,” explained Hector.
Now, if you’re new to Titan like Alexander was, you’re probably wondering how that would work — particularly, how miners would benefit from a platform like this. “On the miners’ side, it gives them better access to a larger market,” clarified Hector. Basically, through our protocol, miners could enjoy more revenue stream by offering their computing power to people who want to mine cryptocurrency but don’t have experience with mining or the required infrastructure or equipment. “As a miner, you can now have a new source of income by settling this cloud compute hashrate through our DEX.”
Furthermore, on the investors’ side, “it enables them to buy and sell hashpower at a reduced risk, and it provides additional opportunities for the entire mining industry,” added Hector. By effectively commoditizing computing power, traders can create byproducts from it, like financial derivatives, futures contracts, as well as services for lending, custody, and over-the-counter trades.
What makes Titan different?
We know other projects offer tokenized hashrate or cloud computing services for mining, and so does Alexander. Which is what drove him to his next question: what makes Titan different from them?
“In traditional cloud computing, you’re trusting the company to pay you out in those monthly rewards when you buy a cloud mining contract,” explained Hector. “We’re creating a layer zero that sits between the retail investor or consumer and the mining farm itself. We are the in-between layer that’s the decentralized, trustless protocol.”
Although Titan is the company building it, the protocol itself is decentralized and requires no third parties. Miners and investors can do business without trusting each other. Smart contracts guarantee the security and legitimacy of the trades.
This is an entirely new concept. As Hector stated, “We’re the first ones to create something truly decentralized compared to when you purchase it directly from a mining corporation.”
Titan’s all-star team
When Alexander was curious about “who’s going to make this happen,” Hector had the arduous task to introduce Titan’s vastly experienced team members in just a few words. However, he did a great job.
Ryan Condron
Ryan is Titan’s CEO and co-founder. He was a software engineer for over fifteen years, CTO of multiple startups, and ran his own software company for more than five years.
Matthew Roszak
Matthew is the co-founder of Titan and Bloq’s chairman. He’s also a founding partner of Tally Capital — a private investment firm focused on blockchain and digital assets.
Jeff Garzik
Titan co-founder along with Ryan and Matthew, Jeff created one of the first software tools for CPU mining before co-founding Bloq as well. He also spent five years as a Bitcoin Core developer.
The future of the mining industry
A debate that has gained popularity in the last few months is whether proof-of-work is sustainable in the long term and will still be around in the next five or ten years. The discussion, mainly started by the environmental concerns and Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake, should be seen from different angles.
As Hector pointed out, there are three main factors that one should consider with cryptocurrency mining:
- Cheap electricity: Most of a miner’s profit margin gets eaten up on electricity bills, so the mining industry constantly looks for affordable energy sources. “As a miner, you’re always incentivized to find the cheapest form of electricity. And that’s typically from renewable resources.”
- Government regulations: With all the controversy after China’s mining ban and other countries imposing higher tax pressures on crypto-related activities, miners must find a crypto-friendly country to mount their mining operations. Favorable regulations and policies reduce friction and make the process more straightforward, which is a great advantage.
- Stable infrastructure: Friendly legal frameworks and cheap electricity cannot be fully capitalized without the proper infrastructure to support mining operations, like a stable power grid or reliable internet connections.
How NFTs can disrupt decentralized mining
Who are Titan’s competitors and what similar projects are they building are hard questions to answer. As we said before, Titan is the first organization to create a decentralized protocol like this. And NFTs play an essential role in it.
While other companies offer hashpower tokens that entitle their holders to a share of their mining revenue, acquiring hashpower through our protocol goes beyond periodic payments. It enables purchasers to control, re-direct, and mine with it effectively like if they owned the mining hardware themselves.
They might as well do, remotely and through NFTs. “We’re going to be pegging the physical miners to NFTs, and then those NFTs are going to be sold in a smart contract,” Hector explained. So there’s a physical asset — the mining hardware — and the digital asset — the NFT that represents it.
As Hector said, through our platform, users will be able to buy, sell, and trade hashrate associated with those NFTs, which will contain its pegged miner information. This also opens up a range of new possibilities like remote management or fixed-period miner lending.
To learn more about this topic, please visit our NFT article.
Why it’s essential to decentralize crypto mining
We’ve seen drastic changes in the cryptocurrency and particularly in the Bitcoin mining landscape this year. ”After the China ban, the hashrate dropped a lot, which presented a lot of opportunities for miners in other countries, but it was also a wake-up call to show us how centralized all the mining was in China in the first place,” expressed Hector.
“A project like ours is going to truly decentralize the mining hashrate capabilities and allow it to be distributed across the world. It’s also going to be the first kind that’s going to be approachable for a retail investor,” he added.
With our protocol, mining investors will no longer have to worry about the infrastructure, the equipment, the facilities, or the energy. All requirements will be purchased or borrowed through a smart contract and secured by the network itself. Here’s where the Titan native token comes in, as it ”is going to be used to secure the network and to pay for transaction fees within the ecosystem.”
Thank you, GAINS Associates!
We sincerely appreciate Alexander’s invitation and the chance he gave us to talk about our project and the fascinating topic of cryptocurrency mining.
As we always say, we value the crypto community above everything else and are grateful for every chance we get to interact with them and join the conversation.
Make sure to follow Titan and GAINS on Twitter if you haven’t yet, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’ve got any questions or doubts.
Until next time!
The Titan Team
Titan is actively working to optimize mining and make proof-of-work cryptocurrencies more accessible and democratic. Make sure to subscribe to our blog and visit our links below if you want to learn more.
