S13 E7: Nick Hansen on Luxor, Mining & Ordinals

As of March 2023, Luxor is the 6th largest Bitcoin mining pool – and CEO Nick Hansen appears to be helplessly optimistic about the future of the mining industry in the USA. However, as you’re about to learn from Nick Hansen himself, Luxor is first and foremost a software company that works towards optimizing ASICs to achieve better hashing results with the same energy consumption.

In this episode, we talk about the status quo of Bitcoin mining, to which extent it might be bad for the environment, and whether or not a return to home operations is still possible. Furthermore, Nick Hansen also explains why 2022 happened to be the worst year for Bitcoin miners.

Naturally, since the Luxor CEO had recently acquired OrdinalsHub, we also spoke about inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain and what kind of impact they might have in terms of scaling and adoption. This was, in fact, the elephant in the room: Luxor made history on February 1st 2023 at block height 774628, when the pool mined the largest block in the history of Bitcoin. Up to that point, the 4MB limit with SegWit was purely theoretical. But Nick Hansen’s early involvement in ordinal inscriptions, coupled with his willingness to allow private payments for transaction inclusion to take place, generated a moment when many bitcoiners panicked or at least began to worry about a potential attack on the network.

Ordinal inscriptions are responsible for making the Bitcoin fee market more competitive, as financial transactions need to do higher biddings for block space in order to become prioritized (while arbitrary data insertions via Taproot are the ones which register with low transaction fees). They certainly disrupt a model which used to be predictive and increase the miners’ revenue – something from which Luxor certainly benefits. Nonetheless, it’s necessary for a healthy and competitive fee market to develop in order to keep the miners running while the rewards get halved every 210.000 blocks.

If you’d like to learn more about inscriptions, then my previous interview with Casey Rodarmor will certainly come in handy.

Listen to Nick Hansen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & YouTube!

As always, my recommendation is that you don’t use these big tech platforms. They track you, they collect data about your behavior, and you never know when this information gets used against you. My suggestion is that you use this free player, which you can open in the Tor browser so nobody can know what your IP address is.

Not only that you get all the benefits from Spotify, but you also have the option to download the episode to your computer so you can listen to it offline whenever you want. Wanna jog in the morning while using your rugged iPod Nano or Zune? You can totally do that! Are you going to drive or commute through an area with poor internet signal? I got you fam, just download the episode to your device.

However, if you do prefer big tech platforms due to their convenience, then it would help a whole lot if you subscribed and left likes/comments/ratings. These soulless corporations enjoy ranking content according to your behavior, so they’ll make anything with more likes become easier to discover. I like to think that my conversation with Nick Hansen is educational and useful to a lot of people – so if you subscribe and leave likes, then you’re helping others stumble upon this recording a lot sooner.

I look forward to your feedback, as there’s a lot to unpack from this interview and the topics discussed range between hot and controversial. Not a single dull moment in Bitcoin!

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast Season 13 Is Sponsored By Wasabi Wallet, Cryptosteel, Bumbee & ShopInBit!

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