Ocean's Jason Hughes On Why BIP 110 Is Losing The Miner Vote

Jason Hughes, VP of Development and Engineering at Ocean Mining, joined the show to walk through where BIP 110 actually stands with miners, and to push back on the idea that Ocean has picked a side.

NEITHER FOR NOR AGAINST

Hughes was direct about his own position on the proposal. He said he wants miners on both sides of BIP 110 to be able to make their own choice, and that his work building Ocean's DATM software exists specifically so miners can be sovereign over what they mine rather than deferring that decision to him or to Ocean.

Hughes has argued publicly that BIP 110 lacks measurable consensus, with node signaling running in the 7 to 15 percent range and hashrate support under 1 percent ahead of the mandatory signaling window. He has put the odds of the proposal succeeding at under 5 percent, while warning of chain-split risk if a minority of hashrate ends up enforcing it against the will of the majority. On the show, he repeated that he is not predicting an outcome, just pointing at the numbers as they stand.

WHAT OCEAN ACTUALLY CHANGED

Hughes addressed the backlash Ocean received after switching the default template on its Stratum endpoints toward BIP 110 signaling. He said the criticism conflated two separate things: Ocean still offers both a BIP 110 and a non-BIP 110 endpoint, and switching the default only reflected where the majority of DATM hashrate had already moved at the time, based on thresholds the team had set in advance. No miner is forced onto either path, and any miner can still template their own blocks entirely through DATM regardless of what the pool defaults to.

He also pushed back on the idea that Ocean speaks with one voice on the upgrade. He said the company's board, its employees, and its most visible figures do not agree internally, and that disagreeing publicly with a colleague has never been a fireable offense at Ocean.

THE BIGGER GOAL: MINING DECENTRALIZATION

Beyond BIP 110, Hughes laid out Ocean's core pitch: a non-custodial pool where miners build their own block templates through DATM, see exactly who gets paid before they even turn on their hardware, and receive payouts directly rather than trusting a pool operator to redistribute funds after the fact. He said Ocean has now mined over a thousand DATM blocks and has grown its share of network hashrate into what he called a reasonable percentage, evidence that miners are choosing that model when it is available to them.

He was blunt about the state of the network today: a small number of entities, potentially as few as two, currently have enough concentrated hashrate to censor transactions if they chose to, which he called a dynamic Bitcoin was never designed to tolerate. Whether more of the industry follows Ocean's approach, or whether mining centralization becomes the wake-up call Hughes says he hopes never arrives, is the part of this story still being written.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.