Should Miners Form Councils?

In July 2021, with Bitcoin trading at about $32,125, a panel at Mining Disrupt Miami asked whether Bitcoin miners should form councils and whether doing so works for or against decentralization. The new Bitcoin Mining Council had just published its first data, and several of its members sat across from one of its critics.

Jaime Leverton, now a board director at Synteq Digital, described the council as a loose affiliation of miners that came together to promote transparency and education and to talk about the benefits of Bitcoin and of mining. Open to everybody, she said, and public. Taras Kulyk, co-founder and chief executive of Synteq Digital, gave the numbers: roughly thirty miners representing about a third of global hashrate, enough data to say something meaningful about the sustainable share of the power behind Bitcoin.

Tone Vays came as a node operator and a non-miner. To people like him, he said, the council was a step toward compromising on things many Bitcoiners do not want to compromise on, and a path toward strict regulation. His sharpest question was about pressure. Thirty percent of miners had joined voluntarily. What happens when it is seventy percent? How hard would the council lean on the rest to share information, including mining pools that should not share it?

Council members answered that nobody has to join and that anonymity was top of mind. One panelist said a good chunk of the data went directly to Michael Saylor, who anonymized it, and that requests for the list of submitters were being refused. Fred Thiel, chief executive of MARA Holdings, said he would have preferred to launch without the Elon narrative, simply as a group of miners focused on renewable energy.

On energy, the council drew its line at renewable plus nuclear. One panelist explained that more detailed per-miner data would make a leak easier to trace, so the first data set was deliberately blunt. Another offered an old expression: faith is trust without data, and trust is faith plus data.

Vays closed by naming his real fear: a council that becomes an authority figure and gatekeeper, regulatory capture, and rules eventually enforced on miners. He would rather see a rotating effort, with one company funding a three-month snapshot and another taking the next turn, than a standing body with permanent members. Leverton's reply was that there were no regular meetings, only a quarterly data collection, and a common set of facts to counter a tsunami of FUD. Bitcoin stood at $82,531 on October 16, 2026. The full story is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.