Daniel Keller opened his talk at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023 by listing what he would not discuss: immersion mining, mining rigs and Bitcoin in general. He said he had come into the lion's den, a room full of Bitcoin miners, to speak to the technologists in it about Flux and what he called proof of useful work.
The conference ran July 25–27, 2023, when Bitcoin traded at $29,125. Keller's question for the room was how to get more compute into the hands of the people and projects that need it, from AI developers to other large online services. His answer was a network that lets GPU miners take on paid compute jobs.
A network built to run before it was marketed
flux is the very first and largest decentralized compute Network that you've never heard of you've never heard of it and that's by Design
Daniel Keller · 1:45
Keller said the team kept quiet on purpose because it wanted Flux fully working first, and invited the audience to see it running at Booth 151. He named the sectors the network aims at: medical fields, research, cloud computing, VR and AR, media and entertainment, weather forecasting and simulations.
He tied the pitch back to the miners in the room, recalling the feeling of hitting a first block or watching a rig start hashing for the first time, and said proof of useful work would change mining in the same way.
it's changing the way that we mine forever it's no longer utilitarian it's actually very flexible most of this is configuration through Hardware
Daniel Keller · 2:38
Its own node network, and plans for a hundred thousand more
Keller said Flux had built a node network of its own, hosting applications, websites and cloud services on both the front end and the back end. The team was preparing to deploy more than a hundred thousand nodes on mining rigs around the world, so that people could put hardware they already own to work. He framed this as an answer to one of Satoshi Nakamoto's open questions: what to do with additional compute resources. "We're not saying that we're the next Bitcoin," he said. "We're saying we're the first Flux."
Configuration for useful work, in his outline, covers benchmarking, hardware specifications, tagging machines, task requirements and the ability to tune miners for a useful-work category. He described separate models for casual miners, meaning everyday people with home rigs, and for existing miners running ASICs or GPUs.
GPU-only by rule
Keller was firm that Flux would stay a GPU-mined coin. He said the project treats this as a way to protect decentralization.
we're ASIC resistant and we would immediately Fork the project if there was ever a detection of Asics and or fpgas
Daniel Keller · 4:13
He described the hardware bar as ordinary home equipment. A CPU and motherboard must support virtualization, including Intel Virtualization Technology and Intel's virtualization technology for directed I/O; the motherboard should offer PCIe Gen 3.0; the CPU needs at least four threads; and there are RAM and VRAM minimums. Flux's approach to GPUs, he said, is "run till death": an older 1070 Ti or 1060 Ti sitting around should still be able to take part. He linked that to the project's goal of being a carbon-neutral proof-of-work project, working toward carbon negative, with a carbon tracker on the Flux website.
"AWS on the blockchain"
Keller listed what the delivery system depends on.
really lies on several key points scheduler ensuring delivery Auto assignment of optimal tasks configuration distributed work validating work load balancing and isolating environment
Daniel Keller · 4:35
In his words, that makes Flux "AWS on the blockchain". He put the network at more than 13,000 nodes in just about every country, pointing sceptics to runonflux.io. A customer dashboard, shown at the booth, was running AI and modelling work at the time, along with a Minecraft server.
On storage, he described Flux Cloud and, beneath it, Flux Drive, which he called a decentralized Dropbox: data sharded over IPFS on the Flux network.
blockchain with flux ipfs sharded and in your pocket means there's no third party between you and your data
Daniel Keller · 5:47
How a miner switches to useful work
Keller walked through the economic model. A miner on Flux can mine any proof-of-work coin and move to useful work when jobs arrive. His example was a large AI project buying extra capacity through Flux: a rig mining Flux would be switched to proof of useful work and begin AI jobs, rendering or edge compute. A data center doing other work can also sit on standby for useful work. Pricing, he said, is based on task configuration, reward quantity and reward upon completion.
The dashboard lets an operator configure and benchmark workers, split them across tasks, and mine another proof-of-work project while waiting for useful work to become available. The benchmarking screen reports CPU, GPU and mining usage.
"Don't be evil again"
Keller closed on data control. He recalled that Google once carried a "don't be evil" motto and said it had since been removed from the company's code base. Flux's motto, he said, is "don't be evil again." He pointed to talk of central bank digital currencies, social credit scores and censorship of cloud compute as reasons to keep data and compute in users' hands, and invited the audience to meet the team at the booth.
He named the people behind the project, Jeremy, Davey, Nolan and Alex, and said this was not a flash in the pan, comparing it to first encounters with the internet and with Bitcoin.
When this session was recorded, Bitcoin traded at $29,125; on October 12, 2026 it was $83,900.