Employees work on bitcoin mining computers at Bitminer Factory in Florence, Italy.
Alessandro Bianchi | Reuters
Software used in bitcoin mining just got its first upgrade since late 2012, and a coalition of companies including payments giant Block (formerly Square) is trying to help push the open-source protocol forward to become an industry standard.
The move could help open bitcoin mining to more participants by supporting lower-quality internet connections, as well as improving security so miners get properly compensated for their work.
Bitcoin operates on a proof-of-work mining model, meaning that miners around the world run high-powered computers to create new bitcoin and validate transactions. Mining requires professional-grade equipment, some technical know-how, a lot of electricity and a special kind of software.
Rather than directly accessing the bitcoin protocol, the vast majority of miners today work through an intermediary protocol called Stratum, which facilitates communication between the bitcoin network, miners, and the mining pools that combine the hashing power of thousands of miners all over the world.
Miners use Stratum to submit their work and to collect a reward if they successfully complete a new block of transactions.
On Tuesday, a coalition of bitcoin developers is releasing version 2 of Stratum under an open-source license for the mining industry to evaluate and test.
It will take some work to convince the mining industry to adopt the new protocol, so Spiral — a subsidiary of Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block (formerly Square) — is teaming up with bitcoin mining company Braiins to launch a group to test and fine-tune the open-source software before they push mass adoption.
What the upgrade does
Steve Lee, the lead at Spiral, tells CNBC there are several significant benefits to the upgrade, including cutting down on the use of data.
Currently, it is common for each mining rig in a large farm to directly connect to a pool. This setup wastes a lot of energy. Lee says that Stratum V2 supports a proxy that aggregates all the connections and only establishes one connection with the pool.
The process of sending that data is also changing to a more efficient method.
“All told, much less data needs to be transmitted between miners and pools, and this could help miners in remote regions of the world with poor internet,” noted Lee.
The upgrade is designed to improve security, as well. Today, it is possible to steal hash rate from a miner, which can lead to some miners losing money. Hash rate is a term for the collective computing power of the bitcoin network. To resolve this, Lee says Stratum V2 introduces a standard security mechanism with authentication and encryption between miners and pools.
The version being released Tuesday is for initial testing, and in early November, a more robust version will come out that supports additional functionality, including job negotiation — a “feature that represents a historic shift in the censorship-resistant mechanics of bitcoin mining by replacing a pool’s responsibility of assigning work to miners with the ability for miners to select their own work,” according to a joint statement released by Spiral and Braiins.
There are orders of magnitude more miners than pools, so if miners select transactions it is far more decentralized than just a handful of pools, Lee explained.
“Working for industrywide adoption of the upgraded Stratum protocol is one of the most important developments in improving the decentralization and censorship resistance of bitcoin’s architecture,” Lee said.
As for timing, the pilot and integration testing will happen this fall, and next year, the upgraded protocol will likely see greater adoption once miners and pools are confident it is working well.
“I’d anticipate a gradual increase in hash rate in 2023,” Lee told CNBC. “Reaching 10% hash rate by the end of 2023 would be a great success,” continued Lee.
Lee added that it will likely take several years to see the latest version of Stratum replace the original.
“Miners know the benefits of upgrading to Stratum V2 very well, but pushing the entire mining industry over some of the remaining development and adoption hurdles is a big task,” said Jan Capek, co-founder of Braiins.
“Universal standards for running and building Stratum V2 and the efforts of this working group to push the industry forward will provide the momentum bitcoin needs to finally upgrade from a version of its mining protocol that was built a decade ago,” continued Capek.
Similar to the Lightning Network, which is a technology built on top of bitcoin’s base layer to make payments more efficient, there will be different implementations of Stratum V2. However, the open-source version released Tuesday will make it easier to collectively test out the technology. It will also ensure that the various projects can interact with one another.
Block jumping into mining
Tuesday’s announcement is part of Block’s larger push into the bitcoin mining industry.
On the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami in April, digital assets infrastructure company Blockstream and Block announced that they were breaking ground on a solar- and battery-powered bitcoin mine in Texas that uses solar and storage technology from Tesla.
Tesla’s 3.8 megawatt solar PV array and 12 megawatt-hour Megapack will power the facility.
Block is also independently working on a project to make bitcoin mining more distributed and efficient.
The idea of making the mining process more accessible has to do with more than just creating new bitcoin, according to Block’s general manager for hardware, Thomas Templeton. Instead, he says the company sees it as a long-term need for a future that is fully decentralized and permissionless.
“Mining needs to be more distributed,” Dorsey wrote in a tweet in October, when he first floated the idea. “The more decentralized this is, the more resilient the bitcoin network becomes.”
Toward that end, the company is solving one major barrier to entry: Mining rigs are hard to find, expensive and delivery can be unpredictable. Block says it is open to making a new ASIC, which is the specialized gear used to mine for bitcoin.
The project is being incubated within Block’s hardware team, which is beginning to build out a core engineering team of system, ASIC and software designers led by Afshin Rezayee.
Over the next two years, homebuilder Lennar is outfitting more than 1,500 new Colorado homes with Dandelion Energy’s geothermal systems in one of the largest residential geothermal rollouts in the US.
The big draw for homeowners is lower energy bills and cleaner heating and cooling. Dandelion claims Lennar homeowners with geothermal systems will collectively save around $30 million over the next 20 years compared to using air-source heat pumps. Geothermal heat pumps don’t need outdoor AC units or conventional heating systems, either.
Geothermal systems use the sustained temperature of the ground to heat or cool a home. A ground loop system absorbs heat energy (BTUs) from the earth so that it can be transferred to a heat pump and efficiently converted into warmth for a home. Dandelion says its ground loop systems are built to last for over 50 years and should require no maintenance.
Dandelion’s geothermal system uses a vertical ground closed-loop system that is installed using well-boring equipment and trenched back into the house to connect to a heat pump. The pipes circulate a mixture of water and propylene glycol, a food-grade antifreeze, that absorbs the ground’s temperature. A ground source heat pump circulates the liquid through the ground loops and it exchanges its heat energy in the heat pump with liquid refrigerant. The refrigerant is converted to vapor, compressed to increase its temperature, then passed through a heat exchanger to transfer heat to the air, which is circulated through a home’s HVAC ductwork.
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Daniel Yates, Dandelion Energy’s CEO, called the partnership with Lennar a “new benchmark for affordable, energy-efficient, and high-quality home heating and cooling.” By streamlining its installation process, Dandelion is making geothermal systems simpler and cheaper for homebuilders and homeowners to adopt.
This collaboration is happening at a time when Colorado is pushing hard to meet its clean energy targets. Governor Jared Polis is excited about the move, calling it a win for Coloradans’ wallets, air quality, and the state’s leadership on geothermal energy. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said that “ensuring affordable access to geothermal heating and cooling is essential to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, and we’re excited to be part of such a huge effort to bring this technology to so many new Colorado homes.”
And it’s not just about cutting emissions – geothermal heat pumps help reduce peak electric demand. Analysis from the Department of Energy found that widespread adoption of these systems could save the US from needing 24,500 miles of new transmission lines. That’s like crossing the continental US eight times.
Colorado is making this transition a lot more attractive through state tax credits and Xcel Energy’s rebate programs. These incentives slash upfront costs for builders like Lennar, making geothermal installations more financially viable. The utility’s Clean Heat Plan and electrification strategy are working to keep energy bills low while meeting climate goals.
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Polestar has removed the Polestar 2 from its US website header in an early sign of how new tariffs will restrict choice and competition for American consumers, thus increasing prices.
The Polestar 2 is Polestar’s first full EV – the original Polestar 1 was a limited-edition plug-in hybrid.
It started production in 2020 in Luqiao, Zhejiang, China, where Polestar and Volvo’s parent corporation, Geely, was founded.
Unfortunately, that interacts with some news that has been getting a lot of play lately: tariffs.
The US has been gradually getting stupider and stupider on the issue of tariffs, apparently determined to increase prices for Americans and decrease the competitiveness of American manufacturing in a time of change for the auto industry.
It is widely acknowledged (by anyone who has given it a few seconds of thought) that tariffs increase prices and that trade barriers tend to reduce competition, leading to less innovation.
It started with 25% tariffs on various products from China, implemented in the 2018-2020 timeframe. Then, in 2024, President Biden implemented a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, effectively stopping their sale in the US. These tariffs included some exceptions and credits based on Volvo’s other US manufacturing, which Polestar had used to keep the most expensive versions of the 2 on sale in the US, while restricting the lower-priced versions from sale. Nevertheless, they were a bad idea.
Now, in yet another step to make America less competitive and inflate the prices of goods more for Americans, we got more tariff announcements today from a senile ex-reality TV host who wandered into the White House rose garden (which he does not belong in). These tariffs do not include the same exceptions as the previously-announced Biden tariffs.
Apparently this has all been enough for Polestar, as even in advance of today’s tariff announcements, the company suddenly removed its Polestar 2 from its website header today.
The change can be seen at polestar.com/us, where only the Polestar 3 and 4 are listed in the header area. On other sites, like the company’s Norwegian website or British website, the car is still there. The Polestar 2 page is still up on the US website, but it isn’t linked to elsewhere on the site (we’ll see how long it stays up).
We reached out to Polestar for comment, but didn’t hear anything back before publication. We’ll update if we do.
It makes sense that the Polestar 2 would still be for sale elsewhere, as it only started production in 2020. Most car models are available for at least 7 years, so this is an earlier exit than expected.
So it’s likely that all of the tariff news is what had an effect in killing the Polestar 2.
Then again, this is also just the second day of a new fiscal quarter. Perhaps the timing offers Polestar an opportunity to make a clean break – especially now that the lower-priced version of its Polestar 3 is available.
Despite the lower $67.5k base price of the new Polestar 3 variant, that represents a big increase in price for the brand, which had sold the base model Polestar 2 for around $50k originally, before all of these tariffs.
Update: Polestar got back to us with comment, but understandably, it doesn’t say much:
Polestar is a three-car company and Polestar 2 is available for customers now. There are a select number of Polestar 2s in stock at retailers that can be found on Polestar.com, but Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 will be the priority in the North American market.
Volvo decided to build the car in Belgium and export it to the US, but now that new tariffs apply to the EU as well, maybe that low-priced, awesome, fast, small EV will instead stay in Europe instead of being shipped overseas.
This shows how mercurial tariff fiats from an ignoramus are bad for manufacturing, as they mean that companies can’t make plans – and if they can’t make plans, eventually, they’ll probably just write the country making the random decisions out of their plans so they don’t have to deal with the nonsense.
And we’ve heard this from every businessperson or manufacturer representative we’ve talked to at any level of the automotive industry. Nobody thinks any of this is a good idea, because it objectively is not. All it does is make business harder, make the US less trustworthy, make things more expensive, and overall just harm America.
Yet another way that Americans are getting screwed by this stupid nonsense. 49% of you voted for inflation, and 100% of Americans are now getting it. Happy Inflation Day, everyone.
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Lucid Motors (LCID) has now had six straight quarters with higher deliveries. The delivery record comes just as Lucid prepares to begin delivering its first electric SUV, the Gravity, to customers by the end of this month.
Lucid sets sixth straight delivery record in Q1 2025
Lucid delivered 3,109 vehicles in the first quarter, up 58% from last year and topping its previous record of 3,099 set in Q4 2024.
The company also produced 2,213 vehicles at its Casa Grande, Arizona, plant in the first three months of 2025, an increase of 28% from last year. Another 600 vehicles were in transit to Saudi Arabia, where they will be assembled at its new AMP-2 plant, Lucid’s first international manufacturing facility.
At this pace, Lucid will easily top the roughly 10,200 vehicles it delivered last year in 2025 at around 12,500. Lucid will likely see even more growth this year, with customer deliveries of its first electric SUV starting soon.
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During the Gravity SUV’s “celestial arrival” last week in NYC, Lucid’s interim CEO Marc Winterhoff said the EV maker is “nearly finished building all the vehicles that we wanted to build to put them into our studio and for test drives.”
Q4 2022
Q1 2023
Q2 2023
Q3 2023
Q4 2023
Full-year 2023
Q1 2024
Q2 2024
Q3 2024
Q4 2024
Full-year 2024
Q1 2025
Lucid EV deliveries by quarter
1,932
1,406
1,404
1,457
1,734
6,001
1,967
2,394
2,781
3,099
10,241
3,109
Lucid (LCID) EV deliveries by quarter 2023 to Q1 2025
Winterhoff added, “by the end of April, we will resume customer deliveries of the Gravity.” Lucid delivered the first models in December, but they were for employees, friends, and family.
Lucid calls the Gravity a “no compromise” SUV with a range of up to 450 miles, 120 cubic feet of interior space, advanced technology, and sports car-like performance. The Gravity Grand Touring starts at $94,900, while the Touring model will arrive later this year at $79,900.
Lucid Gravity Grand Touring in Aurora Green (Source: Lucid)
The new delivery record comes after Winterhoff told Fox Business last week that Lucid has seen a “dramatic uptick over the past two months” in orders from former Tesla drivers.
Currently, “50% of all the orders we have are from former Tesla owners,” Lucid’s CEO said. Winterhoff added that many are “looking for an option to not continue having a Tesla.”
Will we see the trend continue? Tesla announced earlier today that it delivered 336,681 vehicles in the first quarter, far less than the 390,000 Wall Street analysts expected.
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