All things have their humble beginnings; in 2010, the first Bitcoin (BTC) mining project was created in Prague, Czechia, and was simply called Bitcoin.cz. Soon afterward, founder Mark "Slush" Palatinus decided to move on to other ventures, such as creating the world's first cryptocurrency hard wallet, Trezor. As a result, Braiins, a company doing embedded Linux development and research, took over the mining pool and renamed it accordingly.
Fast forward to now, Braiins (Slush Pool) has grown to become one of the biggest Bitcoin mining pools. There are now over 15,000 users in the space, with its total hash rate accounting for 5% to 8% of that of the overall Bitcoin network. The company derives 100% of its income via BTC and charges a 2% to 2.5% commission from its mining firmware. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at Braiins, explained why crypto enthusiasts are still choosing the world's oldest mining pool after all these years, despite so many competitors available.
One of the first aspects discussed was why firmware is so critical in the process, to which Csepcsar gave the example of grid balancing in Texas. He explained, "You turn on the mining machine when there's a lot of electricity in the grid, but you might have to turn them off in milliseconds when demand is high from households."
"Now imagine a big farm of 60,000 machines; it's very hard to regulate them without the aid of firmware, which solves the problem easily."
But it's not just the technological aspect that's alluring novel miners to the Braiins mining pool. It's also about the ethos of the company. "Other mining pools want to support as many forks of Bitcoin and altcoins as possible because it's just business for them" said Csepcsar. "But we are not about that; during the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork in 2017, we decided to stay true to our central vision and not expand our mining pool."
