Jan Čapek, Cofounder and Co-CEO at Braiins
On episode 69 of LAB Radio, Braiins Cofounder and Co-CEO, Jan Čapek chats with your host Chris Groshong from Bitcoin2019. We finally got a chance to sit down and talk mining after meeting in January 2019 in Las Vegas.
We first get a run down from Jan about the history of mining and what's wrong with the state of things currently. There's no surprise when it comes to understanding the mysteries behind ASIC Boost were just the tip of the iceberg. The problem is now mining has become so commercialized companies go to great lengths to keep firmware proprietary and access to making modifications difficult.
Braiins has decided to take a different approach. An open source approach. They feel if you can't audit or make changes to the miners at the root level then you really don't own them. This is why they have released Braiins OS.
"Not your firmware, not your miner." -Jan Čapek
The Braiins team motivation comes from their desire to have standards around mining. They spent a lot of time reengineering the software because they were tired inferior products being put onto the market. They even named their replacement of 'CGminer' with a symbolic cultural name, 'RURminer'. RUR comes from a 1920's sci-fi play from fellow countryman Karel Čapek about a future with robots.
By launching BraiinsOS, the goal is to maintain a repository that stays up to date and helps maintain stable version controls. This allows anyone to download a copy and get started building their own mining rigs.
It became obvious to Jan and his team that the level of customization and quality of products being offered were not ready for Enterprise scale. However, the businesses that were trying to operate at Enterprise levels were being thwarted by lack of control and data insights at every turn. This is why Braiins exists and has taken over as the parent company that oversees the development of the open source BraiinsOS and Slush Pool.
In this episode Jan Čapek shares with us:
- What is the current state of the Bitcoin mining scene?
- Why they choose the name 'RURminer' for their firmware.
- Why they choose to write their codebase in Rust.
- The ASIC chip makers and the Foundry chokepoint
- How attacks on mining pools are much easier to mitigate
Further Reading and Resources:
Jan Čapek, Co-CEO at Braiins | LinkedIn | Twitter
Braiins | Website | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | GitHub | Medium | Telegram | SlushPool
