Paolo Ardoino wants AI to run Bitcoin mines. Who gets permission to act?
Tether announced commitments from 15 mining industry participants to build and maintain integrations for its open-source Mining Development Kit (MDK), which gives applications a common interface to mining hardware and systems. Its QVAC agent demonstrates using MDK, but the announcement provides no fleet capacity, hashrate share or measured savings. The reference agent pauses equipment-changing actions for human approval, yet the protections depend on deployment: v0.11 may use shared operator identity, direct command routes lack Kernel-side permission checks, and exposed Workers may accept commands from reachable peers. Newer code adds caller restrictions and roles, but published security guidance may not match it. Mines must verify their deployed version, establish user permissions across all command paths, assess hosted-model data exposure, and review updates; the announced integrations do not themselves grant control over MDK or mine equipment.
