Governments Learned to Mine Bitcoin. Now They Want the Pool.

Oman just told every licensed bitcoin miner in the country to plug into a single government-run pool. Read it beside the rest of the year and a pattern snaps into focus. Kazakhstan runs an accredited national pool and now takes a tithe of its miners’ output. Russia has banned mining in some regions and pushed it into others. Bhutan mines bitcoin with its own hydropower. Pakistan earmarked two gigawatts for mining and data centres. El Salvador breaks ground on geothermal to power more hashrate. The posture has flipped: governments that once threatened bitcoin miners now want to own them.

The appeal is obvious and, on its own terms, rational. Mining turns stranded gas, spare hydro and surplus solar into a liquid, exportable, dollar-denominated commodity. It creates jobs, seeds a sovereign reserve, and drags a gray industry into the light where it can be taxed and watched. A state sitting on cheap power and thin export options would be strange not to notice.

Steelman the state

The strongest case says none of this harms bitcoin. Hashrate is hashrate; a machine defending the network defends it whether a ministry or a Texan owns it. A pool is only a coordinator, and miners can leave one for another. Newer plumbing — Stratum V2 — lets individual miners build their own block templates, so even a big pool can’t easily dictate what goes in a block. Regulated mining beats banned mining, and a country that mines bitcoin has an interest in bitcoin surviving. All true.

Where it breaks

The break is one word: mandatory. A voluntary pool is a service a miner chooses and can abandon in seconds. A national pool that miners are required to join is a coordinator you cannot leave without leaving the country. That is the precise capability bitcoin was built to deny anyone — the power to compel hashrate and, with it, a say over which transactions get mined. Stratum V2 blunts a pool’s control only if miners actually run it; a mandate can simply write the terms it wants.

The risk is not the flag painted on the containers. It is concentration — by geography and by pool — assembled one national mandate at a time. Each state pool is small against a 900-plus-exahash network. Ten of them, coordinated or merely correlated, are a bloc. Bitcoin’s censorship-resistance has never rested on good intentions; it rests on the fact that no single party can point the guns. Compulsion is the whole game, and a mandate is compulsion by another name.

So watch the right number. Not how many governments mine bitcoin — that is fine, even healthy — but how much of the world’s hashrate any one entity can be ordered to route. Oman’s pool is a rounding error today. The template it copied from Kazakhstan is the thing to keep an eye on.

This is opinion. It builds on the Beacon’s reporting on Oman and Kazakhstan and the cited sources. Hashrate figures are estimates. Nothing here is financial advice.