Pavel Moravec

Braiins began as a joint venture by Pavel Moravec and Jan Čapek, drawing on their experience in banking IT and software inside devices. Bitcoin.cz Mining Pool had a separate beginning: Marek Palatinus, known as Slush, founded it in 2010. A pool lets miners work together and share proceeds under its rules, rather than each waiting to find a block alone. Moravec became involved with this service later. He co-founded Braiins; Palatinus founded the original pool. [1]

In 2013, Braiins acquired a majority stake and took over the pool’s entire operation. The company’s history describes Moravec as leading Slush Pool while Čapek led development of Braiins OS, the firmware running inside mining machines. Think of the distinction this way: a machine must perform its calculations correctly, but the service above it must receive work from many participants, keep records and pay them under its rules. Moravec’s documented role focused on this operational side. Leading the team does not mean personally writing every part of its software. [1]

A machine and its pool need to exchange work assignments and results in a format both understand. These agreed communication rules form a protocol. Pavel Moravec, Jan Čapek and Matt Corallo contributed to the design of Stratum V2. Its official website credits an independent open-source community with its maintenance. A pool operator can therefore also help develop rules used by other companies and developers. Contributing to that design does not give him ownership of the entire standard or control over every program using it. [2]

Imagine a pool receiving a block reward and later sending participants their shares. BTC moves on the network, yet those miners may keep the coins they receive. Moravec pointed out this misunderstanding on 20 May 2020 in a comment reproduced by Braiins. In ordinary operations, he explained, the first spend of a reward often represents a pool payout. That transfer alone cannot establish a sale for crowns or dollars. Receiving an earned reward and deciding to sell it are separate events. [3]

Coin Metrics’ 2020 methodology starts with the coinbase transaction: the first transaction in a block, containing the reward for mining it. The name has no connection to the Coinbase exchange. Its recipients are labelled 0-hop; the 1-hop set includes those addresses and addresses that have received a payment from them. A hop means a step along the money’s path. This helps trace the usual route from pool to miner, but is not a reliable directory of people. Solo mining, different wallet structures and incorrectly included non-mining addresses can distort the result. [4]

A miner may sell some bitcoin to pay for electricity or simply move it to another wallet they own. Coins might also be transferred into custody as collateral for a loan, serving a purpose other than a sale. In a Braiins interview, Karim Helmy of Coin Metrics discussed the development of loans and derivatives: contracts linked to the price of an underlying asset. This was not Moravec’s statement, nor proof of any particular transaction’s purpose. When a chart shows coins leaving, a “miner address” label alone is insufficient: establishing a sale requires more evidence. [3] [4]

In an April 2020 Braiins interview, Moravec described an opportunity in North America: generating electricity from surplus natural gas that would otherwise be burned without further use. Cheap power can change where mining makes economic sense. He also considered how equipment manufacturers outside China could improve local miners’ access to machines. This was his outlook at the time, not a present-day map of mining. To describe today’s distribution of hashrate, the network’s computing power, or available electricity prices, we need newer data. [5]

In the same interview, Pavel Moravec identified risk-management tools as an important next step for the industry. Miners pay bills in conventional currency while their income also depends on bitcoin’s price. Hedging with derivatives aims to reduce the effect of that uncertainty, for example by agreeing a price for a future sale. It does not remove all costs or the risks of the contract and counterparty. Moravec was describing a need for tools, not a guaranteed outcome for every miner. Other guests’ answers are not his statements; it matters who is speaking. [5]