Luxor's Aaron Foster on the Growing Difficulty of Bitcoin Mining

Luxor's Aaron Foster Discusses Rising Bitcoin Mining Difficulty

The group's business development director, who spoke at this year's Consensus festival, claims that bitcoin miners are expanding their operations into bitcoin pooling, hashrate hedging, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

Tom Carreras | Edited by Benjamin Schiller on April 12, 2025, 7:52 PM

Key points:

• Luxor Technology offers services such as mining pools, hashrate derivatives and ASIC brokerage services to support miners.
• The company's Fully Pay-Per-Share (FPPS) mining pools provide miners with a guaranteed income by paying them a reward based on the shares they provide, regardless of whether they find a block.
• Luxor's hashpower futures contracts allow miners to sell their hashpower in advance, receiving Bitcoin upfront, which helps fund their growth and hedge risk.
• Aaron Forster will be speaking at CoinDesk's Consensus Festival, March 14-16 in Toronto.

Luxor Technology aims to simplify the process of Bitcoin mining. Therefore, the company has developed a number of products (mining pools, hashrate derivatives, data analytics, ASIC brokerage) to support both large and small miners in their activities.

Aaron Forster, Director of Business Development, joined the team in October 2021 and has seen the team grow from 15 to 85 people in three and a half years.

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Forster spent a decade in the Canadian energy sector before switching to Bitcoin mining, which is one of the reasons he will be presenting a paper on the future of mining in Canada and the U.S. at Consensus’ BTC & Mining Summit this year.

Stay tuned for full coverage of the Consensus 2025 conference in Toronto, May 14-16.

Ahead of the event, Forster shared with CoinDesk his thoughts on the transition of Bitcoin miners to artificial intelligence, the increasing complexity of the mining industry, and how Luxor's products help miners hedge various risks.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

CoinDesk: Mining pools allow miners to pool their computing power to increase their chances of winning Bitcoin block rewards. Can you explain how Luxor's mining pools work?

Aaron Forster: Mining pools are essentially aggregators that reduce the variance of solo mining. If you look at solo mining, it's like a lottery: you can turn on your machines and get a block reward tomorrow or in 100 years. But you're still paying for electricity during that time. At a small scale, that's not as critical because you're scaling your operation and building a business around it.

The most common type of mining pool is PPLNS, which stands for Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares. This means that the miner does not receive a reward until the pool finds a block. This also involves luck variance, so it is similar to the situation with an individual miner. However, this creates

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