{ "episodeId": "SLP348", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "nick_hansen_luxor": { "name": "Nick Hansen Luxor", "role": "guest", "tag": "NICK" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.45, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today for episode three hundred and forty-eight, my guest is Nick Hansen. He is CEO and founder of Luxor Technology, and Nick joins me to talk about the Bitcoin mining scene, some of the narratives around Bitcoin mining, energy use and proof of work, as well as this concept of demand response, which will be important. It going forward, as well as ESG, the narratives around this, the China ban, what was the impact of that, as well as Intel coming into the mining game, and at the end we talk a little bit about hash rate derivatives, what are they and what's the relevance for Bitcoin miners. And of course, this show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, so this is the easy way to purchase Bitcoin and also learn about Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin makes all kinds of resources available for free for customers, and even if you're not a customer, you can get free copies of books such as Inventing Bitcoin Or twenty one Lessons by Gigi. You can get that, for example, swanbitcoin dot com slash free book. Go there and you can sign up, you put in your email, you get the book for free. Swan Bitcoin also makes it really easy to give gifts to your friends and family, whether it's birthdays or weddings or something else. Go to swanbitcoin dot com slash gift and gift them the world class education and customer service provided by Swan Bitcoin. Lend at Hoddle Hoddle is a peer to peer Bitcoin backed lending platform where you can lend or borrow stablecoins globally and anonymously Sign up in just thirty seconds and borrow stablecoins without any verification. Deal directly with other people and the users control collateral together throughout the whole deal, with all interest paid at the end. Now on the other hand, if you have stablecoins, you can earn extra by lending them out. You are issuing overcollateralized loans and the full interest is guaranteed. Lend at HodlHodl. Lend and borrow stablecoins on your terms at your desired interest rates. There are no hidden fees, the terms and conditions are transparent, and users control the keys in the deal in escrow. Go and check it out, the website is lend dot h o d l h o d l dot com. Brains are a Bitcoin company through and through, and they've got some of the most unique and cutting edge projects in the mining industry. First off, they've got Brains OS Plus. This is firmware for your ASIC machine, so you can install this aftermarket firmware on your machine, and it will help you with automatically optimizing your miner performance to get you more hash rate for your electricity bill. So if you're a miner that wants to get more sats for your buck, make sure you check out Br OS Plus. On the website, you can see which models are supported, and don't forget, if you point your hash rate towards Slush Pool using Brains OS Plus, you get zero percent pool fees, so that's really cool. And they also run an analytics and insights page, so go to insights dot brains dot com. That website is brains with two eyes dot com. And now onto the show with Nick. So Nick, welcome to the show. Hey, how you doing? Thanks for having me. So Nick, you're working with Luxor, you're the CEO, obviously. do You got into Bitcoin mining?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "03:02", "start": 181.78, "text": "Yeah, sure. so myself, previous to building Luxor, I was a lead member of technical staff at Salesforce, working on Einstein, effectively, that's their AI offering. So imagine something like Alexa but for Salesforce. Always been interested in crypto, was mining Bitcoin in, with, with GPUs back when you could do such a thing in my basement, mostly as a hobby, just, you know, really interested in the tech, trying to understand what this thing was. there were, you know, this was around the Mount Gox time, I think the entire market cap of all crypto in the world was something like ten billion dollars, if, if even that. And, you know, I was just mostly playing around with different wallets and installing things, and then got wrecked and took a little, took a little siesta from, from all of it, and then really came back hard in, in twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen, working on some projects that I was really interested in, and around that time met my, one, one of the original founders of Luxor, Eddie." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "04:00", "start": 240.02, "text": "Bitcoin even, but we, we met on GitHub, found each other on Slack and then just started building, what is Luxor today. We started building an altcoin pool, because it was a lot less, scary to build than a Bitcoin pool. Bitcoin min-mining is, is, was quite large to us, as two guys just working nights and weekends. And so we, started building this altcoin pool and then over time, just realized we kind of have a knack for this, started, finding product market fit in" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "04:30", "start": 270.02, "text": "Ecosystem, which is, you know, now much more than a mining pool, we do ASIC, ASIC brokerage, we do, we provide hosting services, managed mining, you know, all sorts of things that we do now outside of just the pool. So at this point, we're, we're really considering the pool just a feature of the broader ecosystem, and I think you can see that, play out in a lot of other areas of, you know, of mining as well, you know, Foundry and all those, they, they don't even we, we, we are known for being a pool, but, but now we're, you know, quite a lot more than that. You know, we're a team of forty now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:07", "start": 306.6, "text": "Excellent. And so maybe if you could just spell out some of the different service offerings there, because obviously, as you're known as the pool, you've got the hash rate index, you've got equipment procurement, you've got mining advisory, could you just spell out some of those just for people?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "05:19", "start": 319.15, "text": "Yeah, certainly. So mining pool, pretty basic, I think everybody knows what mining pool is. And Riot and all these companies bu-buying up machines while they plug into a mine pool and, we, we manage those. And so the next step from there is, is procurement. So we, we, you know, naturally interact with a lot of miners, interact with sellers of, of mining machines and interact with, with buyers of mining machines, and so it's a natural fit for us to, you know, facilitate that trade, help people get machines from wherever they need them. Usually, usually we're brokering, new machines, As one of our new product lines, and, you know, we've had great success with it, q-qua- we launched it in quarter four of last year and helped procure almost twelve thousand machines. so it's really, really exciting to get that off the ground in the first quarter. And then, you know, m-m-m-mining advisory. So, you know, a lot of people are trying to deploy into mining right now, but have never mined. Usually it's energy people. we'll get into energy shortly," }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "06:23", "start": 383.0, "text": "but, people that, you know, Through, doing some sort of, you know, stranded capture, whether that's, you know, plugging into a grid area that they have access to, all sorts of different, ways that we can come in and assist, f-from that perspective, and that's more than just, procuring machines, that's actually getting like containers and transformers and plugs and all of the stuff that you need and then helping them get it set up. so those are some of the big ones that we're working on, and then hash rate index is And, and see the data that we have to share, you know, two of the most popular, metrics that we have are, are the, the hash price index and the rig price index. So hash price is the value of a tera hash, tera hash at any point in time. we really kind of started pioneering this idea in twenty twenty, and that's when, that's what we built hash rate index for, was to start displaying this idea of hash price and, and get people familiar with it and see that it's volatile and changes over time and it" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "07:30", "start": 450.02, "text": "Which is, you know, the value of mining machines as they change over time. Our product officer Guzman has spent a ton of time, finding data sources for that information, aggregating it, figuring out a, a very accurate way of, of calculating what that metric is, and then we bucket it by efficiency. So, you know, we've got effectively like an S19 bucket, an S17 bucket, an S9 bucket, and each of those have different prices throughout the day, and we draw really interesting insight from that. So like for example, the S Efficiency bucket actually a, a, a appreciated in price much more than the S nineteen did during the last, big pump, you know, late last year. So I was really interesting to see that, and we, we think that was because it was, you know, that's one that has come up over the, the, what do I call the break-even curve in a lot of places. So, anyway, those are, you know, some of the product lines that we're working on, you know, we're also, you know, the, Using it as, as a way to fund your operation. that's something that we're, you know, we're gonna be spending a lot more time on in twenty twenty-two." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:37", "start": 517.12, "text": "That's great, and I think one thing that came out from what you were saying as well is the difficulty of actually getting good numbers on some of this, and of course, some of this comes into the energy conversation that we're having around Bitcoin and that comes up around, oh, look how much energy Bitcoin mining is using and what's the carbon emissions of that and should we be using proof of work and of Challenge then becomes how do you educate people who aren't familiar with this? So what's your view, Nick, of the Bitcoin energy debate, as it were, and sort of the current state of play of education of the broader world out there, obviously outside of our Bitcoin world?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "09:17", "start": 556.53, "text": "Yeah, so there, yeah, there's, you know, there's obviously two classes of people that we have. We have, you know, folks that are really into Bitcoin and understand this, and then people that just kind of see what the media feeds them around, you know, CNN or whatever is gonna say that Bitcoin And, and understand, a lot of the intricacies there. So, you, you, we can do a little bit of simple math, very basic, rudimentary math, to kind of come up with, we, we know exact-- we, we can tell you, I can't tell you exactly what the, amount of energy that the Bitcoin network uses, but I can tell you the amount, the abs-absolute minimum amount and the absolute maximum amount that it uses. So, the way that we can do that is we can use the lowest efficiency machine that Usable on the network today, which is the S nine, and we can basically work backwards from the network hash rate and determine that it's around eighteen gigawatts. If every machine on the mining, on the Bitcoin network right now were an S nine, we'd use about eighteen gigawatts, which is not that much. And then if every machine were the latest gen, meaning like an S nineteen J Pro or, you know, the most efficient miner that exists today, it would use about six gigawatts. So somewhere between six and eighteen gigawatts, I don't know" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "10:23", "start": 622.98, "text": "Itself generates something like ninety gigawatts itself. That's the entire network, you know, that, that's all of Tex-- that's just Texas. You know, we're, we're, we're just a drop in the bucket. But I don't like that argument because we, we need to make that drop much larger. We need to become a much larger portion of the bucket to continue to secure this network and, and so the, the next step in the argument is saying, well, okay, so you don't really use that much energy, but, but you want to." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "10:53", "start": 652.98, "text": "Use more. So the, the natural next argument would be, okay, well, you don't, maybe you don't emit that as much carbon as, as we think you do today, but you will eventually. But right now, the cheapest sources of energy are generally the cleanest. Using, flare gas capture, your, your cost is effectively zero, and, and in some cases, you get paid, to take off that extra gas, a-and that is removing carbon that would have otherwise been, not technically removing carbon, but it's using that energy that would have This isn't in ERCOT, you know, ERCOT is very, very clean. natural gas, wind and solar make up the large proportion of its, of its energy production, and by providing load to that network or that grid, the Bitcoin network is able to make that grid much more robust and able to make it, you know, survive some of these events like we're seeing now, which is a good segue into kind of, you know, what's happening today in, in Texas." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:46", "start": 706.49, "text": "Yeah, of course. And so this is coming up today as well because of what happened last year With some outages. So just for listeners who aren't familiar with what happened last year, could you just give the background on that? Yeah, so last year," }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "12:02", "start": 721.5, "text": "Texas had a unprecedented cold, cold snap, meaning it got much colder than, than it generally gets, and their grid wasn't able to support it. So people were, were without power, and in a place like Texas, that means a lot of people, that aren't used to cold weather don't have the, aren't prepared for it, being succumbing to, or I guess Basically what was happening is that grid was not able to support that demand for energy. So this demand for energy was, was coming, which was, you know, to heat homes and, and, you know, to keep lights on and, and do all the things that, that people do when they're, when they're cold. The grid wasn't able to. So fast forward to a year, or fast forward a year, where, where they're getting ready to go through another very big cold streak here, but we've had a whole year of, of some of the biggest mining companies In, in the idea is that you'll be able to produce a bunch more. So say, you know, the idea is like, let's say Houston on any given day needs, fifty megawatts, well, during this cold snap, they need a hundred and fifty. Well, you can't build out A hundred and fifty megawatts for a single city because you don't have anywhere for that extra hundred to go when the, the grid isn't needing it, right? So it, it's effectively wasted. And so what, what Bitcoin miners will come in and do is they will provide that demand, that base load, which is like Bitcoin mining is this, this type of base load has never existed, i-in the world until today. This like economically incentivized base load that has effectively zero turnoff cost other than the opportunity cost, and it's also instantaneously, So you can turn it up and down almost inst-effectively instantly, you know, a few seconds here and there. But this, this idea that when Houston or some city in Texas gets very cold and needs a extra hundred megawatts, well, now- You'll buy it and Lancia and all of these great mining companies that have been building out in Texas will just turn off their power, their, their Bitcoin mine and let that energy flow through to the city and bolster the grid. There, there could be times in the summer when it's hot and people need all the air conditioners turned on, that this works just as well. So the idea of building these, these, de-- it's called demand response, these demand response centers, really bolsters the grid and gives Bitcoin mining a phenomenal story to tell to the market." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:20", "start": 860.23, "text": "And To how much of that is a factor, right? Because I could understand where maybe somebody might be listening, they might be a bit more skeptical and saying, \"Well, you know, how much is that? How important is that really?\"" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "14:31", "start": 871.3, "text": "the demand response part? Yeah. Well, we're, we're gonna find out. So you're, you're right. So a lot of critics would say that it's actually, it, it's somewhat, it's somewhat of a double-edged sword for the critic here, because they're saying, \"Well, Bitcoin uses a lot of energy,\" but" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "14:52", "start": 891.89, "text": "Mining, Bitcoin mining may, may be one of the slower moving, areas of the sector because it takes a long time to pour concrete, build buildings, plug in machines, get them from China, all that stuff. So we only had a year to build out, you know, hard to say exactly how much capacity they built yet, but they're, maybe, maybe a gigawatt over the year, but we're gonna find out soon whether this is gonna work out or not. you know, there've already been press releases from, from Rodeum" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "15:20", "start": 920.23, "text": "and to the grid and to people's homes, we'll see if it's enough this year." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:26", "start": 925.71, "text": "Yeah, and it also comes down to what is the cost of energy at this time, at this incredible peak demand time, and I think that's part of this whole argument, right? Because the argument is that during these times of incredible demand, the price of energy or electricity is gonna shoot up so much, so that, that these Bitcoin miners have an incentive then to, it's rational for them to actually turn off and say, \"Look, I'm just gonna take that money that- That income for turning off rather than leaving my mining going. Right, exactly." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "15:56", "start": 956.27, "text": "That's, so that's actually a really good point. So they get paid, to, to cur-t, it's called curtail, they get paid to curtail, in, in some cases, you know, they're, they're contracted to take a certain amount of energy, but they also, that means that in, in sometimes, it, there are times when it is pro- beneficial for them to shut off because they'll get paid to curtail. The problem that As Bitcoin, as we reach more of an equilibrium in the price of Bitcoin and the marginal cost to produce Bitcoin, I believe that that will become a much, a much narrower band. But right now, you know, I think, I think Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin miners could be profitable up to, you know, forty or fifty cents, I, I don't know that off the top of my head, but some, you know, some number that is much, much higher than the average, you know, I think here in, in Seattle, I pay, twelve cents a" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "16:52", "start": 1011.89, "text": "Very profitably, just here in my house, with current market conditions, but I know that won't be the case forever because there are places that are purpose built in doing this type of demand response, consumption that will, that will, you know, eventually beat out my miner. And in that case, then we start getting to a point where the value of the hash rate and the value of the energy start to become a little bit more e- in equilibrium, and then it becomes a lot closer to the shutoff point. So, you know, say the, the, the price of energy It goes from whatever they pay, I probably, I don't know, four or five cents, you know, then it goes up to, you know, twenty cents, then they're, they're gonna shut off. But I'm, I'm very happy to pay twenty cents to keep my household, warm. My, my incentives are much more external than purely profit driven." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:38", "start": 1057.68, "text": "Yeah, that's a good point there. And some of that also comes into this question of cost to mine. Now, of course, there's, there's so many variables that go into that, and cost of electricity, and then what's my break-off point or so on. And I've seen others comment that just because of various conditions today, given the energy prices, given the availability of the mining equipment, the current network hash rate, that a lot of the even publicly listed miners have actually a cost to produce Bitcoin that's quite a lot lower than the current market price of Bitcoin, which is call it thirty-seven thousand dollars as we speak today, some of these miners apparently their cost to produce is something like Ten thousand or fifteen thousand dollars per coin in that range, right?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "18:26", "start": 1105.73, "text": "Yes. Yeah, a hundred percent. So, so we, we, you can go look at the public filings and see exactly how much these guys are, are mining for, but, you know, on average, I would say that some of the best miners in the, in the country, at least in the US, are probably somewhere in that like seven to eight K range that they're able to mine, but they do have to amortize the cost of their, you know, the cost of capital over that, over the lifetime." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "18:48", "start": 1127.97, "text": "So" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "18:52", "start": 1131.95, "text": "Or nine K or whatever it happens to be, let's just say they make thirty K a coin in revenue, they, they also end up having to pay, they have to pay for their machines and for all their infrastructure. So there is a, a lot of, amortization of, of CapEx that a lot of people miss, but, you know, at its very base, yeah, there's a, a lot of thick revenue to be made there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:09", "start": 1149.04, "text": "And I'm curious, and I imagine listeners are also curious, what might be the reason for that? Could it be, so" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:22", "start": 1161.95, "text": "As the market demand is, or as much to basically serve all that market demand. Is that part of the reason why t-there's that disconnect?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "19:30", "start": 1169.86, "text": "Yeah, so, well, there's, there's a lot of re- So one, yeah, it's definitely been harder to get machines than before. The, the, there's no, nobody would a-argue that. the number of machines getting plugged in now is, vastly lower than the demand, and that's because they just can't produce enough. But, and I'm gonna get blown out in the comments for this, But hash rate follows price, and, and that's what we see here. So hash rate isn't, you know, price generally moves a lot faster in, in, in one direction or another than hash rate. And when we see these big pumps of in price, especially, you know, we've gone, let's just say we went up, you know, effectively, four or five x from the, the twenty seventeen slash eighteen high, you know, hash rate hasn't followed that trend yet, and we're getting, we're getting there, we're definitely catching back up, the And, you know, the, the, the marginal pr-price to produce Bitcoin is going to come up, and either the price of Bitcoin goes down or the marginal price just continues to rise up to that level, where it becomes only profitable to mine for the most efficient miners, which is what we saw, you know, summer of twenty twenty, that was the, the record low for, mining profitability, and we saw actually the first time, I, I think that, that may have been the first time, at least in my, my history, that we saw So the difficulty actually dropped a couple of times because miners were dropping off the network, it was no longer profitable to mine, and that was one of the first times we ever saw that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:59", "start": 1259.46, "text": "Yeah, so it's, it's a range of reasons, and I guess as you were saying, so because that's, that's one of the arguments, right? So the argument is, does price track hash rate or does hash rate track price? And I'm, I'm actually with you, I think it's more like, you know, hash rate is following price, but it's like a lagging sort of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:22", "start": 1281.89, "text": "Right" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "21:22", "start": 1282.03, "text": "there, where, where if, if you had more machines in compa- well, right now we're actually, I think we're mostly cap-capacity constrained, meaning we don't have enough gigawatts in the world, available to plug in. You know, we, we maybe we seg-segue into the, the mining band in China because that was, you know, there was a lot, a lot of energy in China, that came offline and those plugs are no longer available to plug in, so we have to either rebuild them here or elsewhere," }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "21:48", "start": 1307.87, "text": "to, to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:52", "start": 1312.17, "text": "And so put in other words, it's that at the time of the China ban, so call that halfway through last year, I think it was around July, August or so of twenty twenty-one, and we were talking about literally hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin mining machines that were being unplugged in China, sent overseas, and plugged back in. But as you were saying, the constraint in that case was also around what we might call rack space, that there's not enough buildings and racks and everything lined up where you can actually physically go and plug in. And all of those machines, so maybe that was where one of the scarcities was, at least at that point in time. Is that what you're getting at?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "22:27", "start": 1347.3, "text": "Yeah, so we," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:28", "start": 1348.1, "text": "we did the math, we found that" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "22:29", "start": 1349.28, "text": "at a minimum, there were six hundred thousand machines came offline during that time, because you could see the hash rate drop and you could estimate, and then you could, then you could do a little bit more estimation and figure out like how much actual power that is to build out, and I'm, I'm very surprised at the human ingenuity that was put into" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "22:52", "start": 1371.89, "text": "Exactly, like you said, all those machines came offline, the-- and the problem wasn't that people didn't want those machines, it's just that they didn't have nowhere, they had nowhere to plug them in, and, and there's, it takes a long time to build out these facilities." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:04", "start": 1383.58, "text": "And what of the question of gorilla mining? So I see there were a couple of news articles about this of people who are still in China and potentially they are using some means of masking or hiding their use of the power and potentially using, say, a VPN to VPN to other countries, and then Actually, it's still back in China." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "23:23", "start": 1403.17, "text": "100%, yeah. So we learned about this, and that was, I, I think that's one of the biggest, one of the biggest contributing factors to getting back to the hash rate that we are today, is that people were figuring out ways, you know, our, our Chinese counterparts in, in, in Bitcoin mining in China, they're clever guys, they're gonna folks, they're clever folks, they're gonna figure out where, you know, some way to keep the, get those miners plugged back in, they're either gonna You know, oh, there's gonna be a, a federal inspection of the grid now, so you gotta get out of here. And so they would like move and then come back when it was, you know, when it was safe. And, you know, I've heard of that. And then, like you said, guerrilla mining, where they're, you know, they're so far off the beaten path that they're not worried about, you know, inspections or anything like that coming through, and, you know, either seizing their machines or, or, you know, finding we'd love to see it, we'd love to see it, and I, I really hope that, you know, they can continue to do so. Also heard a little bit of news through the grapevine that they may be-- I don't wanna say unbanning mining, but they may be, or, or maybe they'll be unbanning it, but adding a, an additional tax, which, you know, I'm not, not a huge fan of, of adding a tax, but if we can get down the path of getting China back online, I, I do think it Various places in the world, and they, you know, they're gonna stand up to the federal government if the federal government in, in the United States told Texas to turn off, they, they would just give them the finger and, and continue to do so. But that doesn't mean that it's not a possibility, right? So what, what that means is it d-- it doesn't really matter where the machines are located, I don't think that they are all going to forever be insulated from, you know, some sort of external power having, influence over them. So" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "25:22", "start": 1521.93, "text": "In, you know, Central America, ten percent in South America, fifteen percent in China, you know, five percent in Kazakhstan, et cetera, all around the world, so that way it doesn't really matter, you know, Kazakhstan shuts down, five percent comes offline, just gets moved somewhere else and, and no big deal. And we've seen that for sure happening now, but I do, I am a little concerned with how much we're getting here in the US, you know, we, you know, we, we always marketed ourselves as North, you know That, you know, North American mining is going to dominate, you know, the conversation over the next decade, but I didn't want it to be like this. I wanted it to be because we could compete, out-compete, our Chinese counterparts, and, and, you know, our global counterparts, but, but not because their governments, shut them down." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:06", "start": 1565.74, "text": "And on that topic of inter-country competition as well, because there was different-- there were different views that I saw. Some people were saying, \"Yeah, look, it's how great as it" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:19", "start": 1578.67, "text": "is that There, but perhaps from the overall point of view of Bitcoin as the decentralized project, distributed project, that's where this argument of actually it's better if it's distributed out around the world." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "26:33", "start": 1593.24, "text": "Yeah, I would say, you know, I, I was, I was as happy as anybody to hear, you know, you know, my, my company directly profited and, and, you know, a lot of American companies directly profited from this happening, but, you know, my, my, my personal view on, you know, Bitcoin as a project is that, you know, The, you know, the fewer machines in a single place, the more machines we can get, the better, and then don't put them all in the same place. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:58", "start": 1617.68, "text": "Yeah, and I, I think I agree with you there. and with the aspect around regulation and the public perception of that, what do you believe are the best ways forward? Do you see it as education? Do you see it as Bitcoiners have to get involved in the political game and if, even if they don't want to?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "27:14", "start": 1633.97, "text": "Yeah, yeah, I think, I think we're gonna see a, Whether we like it or not, American politics crafts a lot of the global, a lot of the global conversation, and so I think we one hundred percent need to have a, have a Bitcoin, Bitcoin party, whether that's one of the parties that exists today, I, I'd prefer it not be, for it to be a new party or somebody that's, you know, able to come in and, you know, really disrupt what's happening here. I, I do know that if we do get a Bitcoin-denominated party over the long term, it'll be" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "27:52", "start": 1672.25, "text": "his football team, I, I think they'll be one of the best funded football teams over the long term because they're denominated in Bitcoin. I, I think that this is, you know, this is the path forward for us. This is how we craft the conversation. We get a political party that is, Bitcoin denominated and then start having those conversations, bring em to, bring em to the White House, bring em to Congress, even your local, even your local, governments. You know, it all starts local and then filters up, and I think," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:22", "start": 1701.87, "text": "Moment. Compass Mining is the world's first and largest online marketplace for Bitcoin mining hardware, hosting and ASIC reselling. Bitcoin mining is only getting bigger and so is Compass Mining. Compass is adding over two hundred and eighty megawatts worth of hosting capacity this year alone with Mordecom, that's over six times Compass's current hosting capacity, meaning more people can mine Bitcoin. So with Compass, anyone can mine Bitcoin. Start mining your own Bitcoin by visiting compassmining dot io today. Now, if you're thinking about upgrading your Bitcoin security to multi-signature Unchained can help you, and in doing so, you can eliminate single points of failure. It might help you sleep at night. So with Unchained, you can bring two hardware wallets to the website and create a vault for free, and Unchained will be that third key, the cosigner for you if you need them to be. Now, if you need assistance with this, they have a concierge onboarding program. So this concierge onboarding program can include hardware wallets if you need them, and it'll include a video call and some ongoing support to get you set up, as well" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:22", "start": 1761.89, "text": "CoinKite is the website, go and select the concierge onboarding program and use the code Livera for a discount on your program. CoinKite dot com are the creators of my favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet, the Coldcard, and there's a new one coming out, it's the Coldcard Mark IV. So in a recent episode with NVK, I spoke about it with him, and there's all sorts of new features coming, like NFC, a faster processor, more RAM to handle bigger transactions, and, you know, the Coldcard supports all kinds of different features. You can use it in BIP85, you can use SeedXor, you can use the address explorer feature to search and check that you are receiving into your address. There's just all kinds of features you can use, so go and explore. And I particularly like that new video that dropped, they've got that on the documentation page that teaches you how to use your cold card. So go to CoinKite dot com and use the code Livera to order your cold card with a discount. Back to the show. Right, because the way we all see it, we're all bullish on Bitcoin, and as we've agreed, price is going to go up, and if hash rate follows price, then necessarily there's gonna be a lot more Bitcoin mining machines that get plugged in, and this conversation is only going to become more and more important and larger in the broader political world, whether we like it or not. And so that also brings that question then of whether Bitcoiners should be trying to make the argument, and I'm curious your view on this, should Bitcoiners be trying to make the argument of, \"Oh, look Look, it's n-not that much carbon emissions or it's lots of renewables, or do you see it more like it should just be made on the, the principled argument of, you know, even if it was one hundred percent fossil fuel mining, it would still be worth it." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "30:59", "start": 1859.44, "text": "I think we could try to make that argu-argument, I don't know if it would land. And being pragmatist, I would prefer to just take the easiest path to acceptance, and if that happens to include an ESG narrative, I'm happy to, I'm happy to, go But a hundred percent, even if we're all coal powered, one hundred percent dirty, I think that the value that Bitcoin brings to humanity and the globe is worth the cost, because I, I don't think that there's been an innovation in the last decade that will, that will change the planet more than Bitcoin, i-i-what it brings to people, from a, from a inequality perspective, from an equity perspective, allows you to actually own something without anybody's intervention that has no cost. So I do agree with you that I think that there is, there's really no Or there's no price that you can put on this thing, but I do think that it's a lot easier to tell the story that Bitcoin doesn't use that much energy and is green in, in all of these different ways. So, that's the way that I would like to tell the story, just because I think it'll be an easier one. But I think long term, we, we can tell the story that doesn't matter the, the price." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:02", "start": 1922.19, "text": "And so the hope also is that those of us who see Bitcoin as this money of enemies or money for anyone to use, we" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:17", "start": 1936.7, "text": "Give that potentially there might be more censorship coming down the line, whether that be whitelisting, blacklisting, other kinds of, you may not participate unless you are X, Y, Z or X percent level of renewable, right?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "32:30", "start": 1949.96, "text": "Yeah, that's def- I mean, that's, it, it is a slippery slope, but I think that every slope that we live on is a slippery one, and so we have to figure out where it is we're gonna stake our foot, you know, and stop, stop the slipping. I think countering to a, you know, an ESG narrative in" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "32:47", "start": 1966.66, "text": "We're in, we live in a world of compromise where we, you know, we have to, you know, we, we live in a world where, not everybody's gonna agree on everything, and so if you can, you know, if you can get a majority to agree with you on one thing, try to use that majority to your advantage. And I, I do, I do think that over the long term, people will come around to this idea, especially as they start to own Bitcoin and Bitcoin just becomes more ubiquitous, you know, I think, I think adding things like In that regard, I think it's just about getting a critical mass of people interested and involved, and from there they'll all view the value of Bitcoin is, it doesn't, how do I, I don't wanna say price, 'cause that's the, the price of Bitcoin, the price you have to pay for Bitcoin to exist, the value that you get from it is, is vastly more, is orders of magnitude greater." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:35", "start": 2014.65, "text": "So thinking now about Bitcoin mining hardware, I'm sure you would have seen the recent news around Intel getting into the Bitcoin mining rig production and creation game. So I'm wondering I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that or any, ideas on where that's going. Will they be competitive with the current, competitive Bitcoin mining manufacturers?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "33:56", "start": 2035.74, "text": "Yeah, so we have heard a little bit about those machines. So I think that the, I think that the consensus is right now that they'll probably fall somewhere between-- so the, the S19 XP is the latest revision, is the latest version of the, the Bitmain miner. It's their, their pinnacle machine, which is coming out, you know, supposed to come out in Q3, hearing that it's" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "34:17", "start": 2056.66, "text": "Their current model is the S nineteen J Pro, which is like their most efficient one. We think that it, it seems like the Intel is gonna fall somewhere in between those two, so it's gonna be a really competitive option, and really now all they have to be able to do is, is compete on price, price of the machine. If they can produce a machine that is lower cost per terawatt, per tera hash than, than the S nineteen XPU or the S nineteen J Pro, then they certainly will be competitive, people will buy the machine." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "34:47", "start": 2086.78, "text": "So I definitely think the Intel machine will be competitive. There, a couple of their prop-- or a couple of their barriers right now will be, one, producing at scale, right? So, I think Intel, you know, if there's anybody out there that can produce at scale, it's probably Intel, so they may have that one covered. You know, we've seen some other pop-ups come around that haven't been able to produce any meaningful number of machines. they produce a machine that's marginally competitive, maybe competitive with the latest gen, or maybe the previous gen Chip space, which I think Intel should be able to do, no problem, right? They should be able to get, enough capacity in those, in the foundries, you know, to produce enough chips. So I, I think that they'll definitely bring a, a machine to, I think their machine is gonna come to market, it's gonna be competitive, and I, I think that they've got, you know, if the first run is even close to competitive, this, you know, that means the second one's gonna be really good. So I think this is great for the space" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:47", "start": 2146.66, "text": "How will this change the game of hardware procurement? Because as I understand today, you sometimes you have to go through a partner, and I know obviously with Luxor, you have, hardware equipment procurement and advisory services. So what does the current state of play look like for somebody who's trying to, purchase mining equipment from Intel? Well, I mean, just in generally, and then maybe we'll talk a little bit about what it looks like if, let's say, the market gets bigger and bigger." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "36:13", "start": 2172.87, "text": "Okay. Sure. Yeah. So, so, so buying machines right Definitely, it's, it's an interesting space. So in general, you, you know, there's a couple ways you can buy machines. You can buy futures orders, meaning you buy, say, I wanna buy a, a delivery of, of machines in Q3 of, of twenty twenty-two. I need to buy a minimum amount and they get delivered over each of the months during that, during that quarter. Let's just say, let's use a, a round number, let's say fifteen hundred. I buy fifteen hundred machines. Usually they'll come in batches Well, it's because it's very, very different for every order, and that's what the, the Luxor service is here to provide, is like clarity on how dif- many different levers there are in this equation. So you buy these futures orders, you buy the machines, well, you have to put up sixty percent of the order price. So right now, that's like, you know, you're looking at, let's just say around fifteen million dollars if you wanted to buy fifteen hundred machines, probably gone down a little bit since the price of Bitcoin's gone down, but still, you It provides you a level of security, and make sure that, you know, those machines, you know, that, that, that money is actually going somewhere and is actually gonna result in machines. So then, once you put down your deposit, then within thirty days of your order, starting to, to, to be completed, so it would be within one month of the start of your quarter, you'll put down another twenty percent and then twenty percent upon shi- to, to get them shipped. So that's how futures order generally works. That's not always the case," }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "37:44", "start": 2263.93, "text": "it's Sent upfront. So if I wanted to buy fifteen hundred spot machines, wire my fifteen million dollars to somebody and they start shipping them within ten days. And so that's another, you know, again, this is all very, un-unorthodox, you know, when you're producing, infrastructure equipment, you know, I'm, I'm certain that Dell and Intel, when they go buy their new servers for their data centers, have a little bit different process than that, but, you know, that's, that's happened, that's the world we live in. The mining So, you know, we kind of have to play by their rules. So Luxor comes in and helps you, a bit in that regard. And that's all for new machines. Buying used machines just opens a whole can of worms that can be all over the place. So especially if you're buying like previous gens, like S9 or S17, you end up losing a lot of machines because of, they get damaged in shipping or, or they're not good from the start. So, you know, Luxor provides a, a barrier there or a little layer of," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:47", "start": 2326.66, "text": "If you are not already well connected in that world, and potentially also if you are a smaller per-order person, order like doing on smaller orders, that's where maybe the value of having somebody to broker that for you helps more so. Whereas if you are a bigger player or you've already built those relationships, then you might be in a better position to just go it solo." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "39:06", "start": 2346.25, "text": "Yeah, certainly, like Marathon don't, probably doesn't need a broker. They, they go out, they buy, you know, a couple hun- they buy a hundred thousand machines, they go direct to Bitmain, probably get" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "39:17", "start": 2356.88, "text": "it doesn't even include like their secondary buyers in, in, in China that, you know, go out and buy machines straight, 'cause they have the relationship with the, with the manufacturer, they go, they buy, you know, say a hundred thousand orders, and then they resell them for a profit, a-and that's usually where most of the machines are coming from, is from these resellers. And so it's, it's a very, yeah, it's a very disparate world, very difficult to navigate, and, and so really what the brokers are doing" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:47", "start": 2386.7, "text": "And if you have any thoughts on how things change as the Bitcoin market and the mining market grows, does it then become a bit more like standard technology vendor relationships that exist today?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "39:56", "start": 2396.5, "text": "Yeah, hundred percent. I think we're headed in that direction. We're maturing as a market for sure, and I think that we're gonna continue to mature. It is a little bit layout, but yeah, I think we're headed in, in a direction where it becomes a lot more egalitarian and, and a lot more transparent as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:10", "start": 2409.65, "text": "Interesting. And I'm also curious as well if you have any thoughts around hardware Ago, because I guess I'm gonna say my understanding and you, you tell me if I've got that right. So in the earlier years of Bitcoin, because there was so much tech advancement happening so rapidly, the life cycles were much shorter. And then what's happening now, it seems, is that the life cycles are stretching out more, that you are potentially having, more and more years that you can use that machine. And so there are these circumstances where if you have very cheap power running on an S9 from twenty sixteen or seventeen, as you were saying, it's, it's still But if you're operating on expensive power rates, then you really need the more efficient, newest, latest, and greatest. So I'm curious, where do you see that going with hardware life cycles? Is it going to sort of lengthen further? Obviously, there's all these variables out there, but just if you had to speculate--" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "41:03", "start": 2462.85, "text": "Yeah, certainly. So, you hit the nail on the head. So the very, you know, early, early years of Bitcoin mining, we went from CPU to GPU to ASIC mining really, really fast. Like, by the time I got my GPU" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "41:17", "start": 2477.08, "text": "Butterfly Labs was producing ASIC mining machines. and by the time I, I went and bought one, I bought a jalapeno, the little cube, and by the time that thing showed up, it was obsolete. And so we were just plowing through the series. And so what, what was actually happening underneath the hood is like, they were probably producing chips that were, it's called a process, so they, they were fifteen nanometer chip, probably fifty-five nanometer chips, which at the time, I mean, any, almost anybody could print those, you know, it, Those chips, and that's where we're seeing we're kind of bumping up against that, that law. So now we're producing chips that are like five nanometer, and you can't really-- There, there's like a theoretical limit, they think that you can only go down to three, maybe two nanometer chips. so we're kind of bumping up against that hard limit, on, on the chip process. So as we were going from fifty-five to five, there was massive innovation, you know, that was, that was happening very, very quickly, and so that" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "42:17", "start": 2536.78, "text": "Like you said, those are still being used in production today from twenty sixteen to twenty, you know, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, those machines were produced. And then the S seventeen, you know, there's public companies that are basing their entire business model around the S seventeen series. The S seventeen series did have its troubles, it was, they used a different manufacturing process which caused it to be very delicate and breakable, but there are people that have built business models around fixing those machines and, and getting them at a discount and then fixing them and using them. and then the S nineteen, Or S nineteen could break, you know, at any time, but that generation, that series as a whole will probably last five to seven years just because of the, the marginal increase in efficiency is reducing to a point where, all I need to do is take my S nineteens and find a little bit cheaper pow- you know, I need to only find five to ten percent cheaper power to keep them on, where before I would need to go find power that is eighty percent cheaper to continue running my, my old, old machines. So one hundred percent, you hit the nail on the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:15", "start": 2594.85, "text": "head with, The series, because there are many, I guess, S nines and S ni- S seventeens and S nineteens. Could you just explain that for listeners? Why is there a difference between these? Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "43:26", "start": 2605.68, "text": "Okay. Yeah, that's a good point. So there's, you know, in the, what we call the nineteen series, there's like the S nineteen, the S nineteen J, S nineteen J Pro, S nineteen Pro, there's a T nineteen, there's all these different, models within that series. They all have a little bit different The chip in, you know, I'm using a MacBook here, the chip in this MacBook and the chip in a identical MacBook are gonna have different performance specs, very, very, you know, but, but it's gonna be very small. And they keep them all within a range, but doesn't mean they're gonna be exactly the same. And so that's why they have these different se- these different, models within a series. And so like the seventeen series, there's a T seventeen and S seventeen and S seventeen T, like, there's all these different series within the S Of the nineteen series is somewhere between, you know, thirty-two and thirty-six, sorry, thirty-six and forty-two, joules per tera hash and, let me see, I don't remember what the S seventeen is off the top of my head, but yeah, they're, you know, they, they fall within like an efficiency range and, and that's what we call them a series." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:33", "start": 2672.65, "text": "Excellent. And so when it comes to actually procuring them, I guess that, that's why they're sort of bucketed in that way, or that's the Which their, their equipment is more reliable and it can last longer or it's maybe easier to repair, like the, let's say the Toyota Camry or the Honda Accord of the Bitcoin mining world. Yeah, so the," }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "44:57", "start": 2696.82, "text": "the Honda Accord, the S nine is the Honda Accord. Not the fastest, not the prettiest, man, that thing's gonna run forever. Same with the Toyota Camry. So the S seventeen series, I, I alluded to earlier, had an issue with its manufacturing. So they used a different type of heat sink, actually, I believe it was A, during shipment, the heatsink would rattle loose and the machine, the, the heatsink is like a little thing that attaches to the chip and gets the, gets the heat out, and it would rattle loose and then the chip would just melt, right? So, you know, the same thing would happen to your MacBook or any other machine that has, a chip in it, has a heatsink on it, if that heatsink rattles loose, the chip's gonna melt. So that was happening to the S-17s, and, and they have Within series, you know, the S nine, it was, it was a really good series, there was not a lot of manufacturing defects with the S nines, and we're seeing the S nineteen are also really, really good, and now across, manufacturers, so, the S series, those are all, Bitmain machines, there's also, a brand called Whatsminer, and those What'sminer machines, we've seen have generally been very high quality, they, they, it doesn't seem like they Like the, the failure rates on those are really, really-- it's not really possible to put an exact failure rate on these things, it's all anecdotal, right? So it'd be like me asking my friends or, you know, talking to, you know, people about, you know, what, what kind of machines they use and how many failures they have, and, and there's so much nuance there because, you know, the, the machines running in a, in a mersed building versus machines running in a, you know, in an air-cooled facility out in the Like, like what the lifetime of a machine is." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:49", "start": 2808.92, "text": "And on this question of lifetime as well, I think that's the other argument that I've heard as well around this demand response. So bringing back to the demand response question, as I understand, when you-- it's just like with other, you know, if you, if you're running a car on the highway and it's just on all the time, that's efficient. But if you're in the, in the city and you're stop-starting all the time, it's not as efficient, it's less-- you know, it's gonna In Texas, as an example, are they going to see reduced lifetimes on their mining equipment? And, and is that going to be an issue?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "47:25", "start": 2845.24, "text": "Yeah, so, we don't know. First, first of all, I mean, anybody that says they know, for a fact, doesn't, because we, we haven't done this at scale for a very long time yet. So we're not a hundred percent certain, if we look at, you know, if we look at just chip technology as a whole, there shouldn't be any, you know, there Energy, as long as it stays cool, it should last just as long as it-- So in the case of lifetime, it's very difficult to say for a fact, but most likely not, it probably won't affect the lifetime of the machines. as for energy efficiency, no, I don't believe, I don't believe there's any, because it's, it's, it's actually, it's more like a battery, it's like a battery that is actually, it's actually more like a negative battery. You turn, you, you, if you, if you go around The hose around the facility, the energy just still goes into Houston, the facility powers down for a bit, and then when it's time to turn back on, the hose just flips back over. I don't, I, I don't think there's any major performance impacts to, to the efficiency of the machine, you know, the efficiency of the, the mining facility or, or, or anything like that. also, the curtailment periods are generally, I don't wanna say brief, but they're infrequent, you know, they, they don't, it's not happening like multiple" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "48:47", "start": 2926.66, "text": "Frequently. So that's, I, I guess that would be the answer to that question. But yeah, it's a great question, and I know that, you know, we're gonna have to get more data on this, and so I'd urge anybody that is doing demand response to try to keep as much data as you can and, and, and, you know, try to produce a, a valid, you know, a good report that we can use down the line." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:04", "start": 2943.99, "text": "And, I guess one other topic I was keen to touch on, as you mentioned earlier, Well, so maybe if you could just touch on some of that, like what kind of products do you see coming, in the industry for this?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "49:22", "start": 2962.26, "text": "Yeah, so, so I think the very first one is gonna be a physically delivered forward swap. What that means is, you know, I, I, you know, I, I have a bunch of machines that I wanna sell forward some hash rate for. So, I go and I sell forward a hundred, let's say a hundred petahash, that'll be, you know, on the order of a, you know, be a couple million" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "49:47", "start": 2986.68, "text": "Purchase that hash rate because they think they can get, they can get it at a discount, they can get Bitcoin at a discount by doing so. Then we think that as enough volume of these physically delivered forward swaps gets put on and occurs, then eventually you will need to hedge that risk. So if I'm, you know, if I've sold some of my hash rate forward and the value of that hash rate goes up, I've effectively sold, I've effectively shorted my hash rate, I can go and purchase what we call a cash settled future to hedge that. So if, you know, if I Is, you know, it, it will help me hedge out the value of my underlying production. We think those are two of the most important primitives for this space. I think there's gonna be a lot of different primitives that come down the line. There's gonna be like a forward future, meaning I sell forward hash rate that doesn't exist yet. So I say in, you know, I'll give you, I'll sell you a hundred petahash of hash rate that comes online May 1st, and I will sell it to you for three months. You know, you'll probably get On the value of the underlying, and then again, you can start building in really long futures for this and, and, and that sort of thing. So I think these are some of the very basic primitives that we'll need, and you can see this happen in pretty much every other commodities market, so oil, energy, corn, I mean, help pig, pig bellies all have futures markets and they, they, they also have, you know, physically delivered cash settled, all different types of products, and we're really starting to hone in on what the These forward contracts requires, a pretty, a pretty robust tech stack as well as the ability to do advanced like financial reporting and the ability to produce, some cogent model at the end that demonstrates, yes, this amount of hash rate was actually delivered and here's the result of that hash rate, in, in terms of Bitcoin or dollars." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:34", "start": 3094.21, "text": "Really interesting to think about. And maybe just as an example, just to make it real, so let's say I'm a potential, I'm a Bitcoin miner and I wanna do my forward planning and I re- I need some certainty in my And then I might go to you and say, \"Hey Nick, I wanna sell you my future hash rate,\" and you're, let's say you're a trader, you're taking the other side of that trade, and you're saying, \"Hey Stefan, okay.\" Give me a discounted rate on that future hash rate, and I'll pay you some money upfront for that privilege, and then I take that money and I'm going away and using that to build my mining farm, and that then is kind of the basis for this. And so that's kind of that first product" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "52:12", "start": 3132.02, "text": "you said. Exactly, yeah. And that's what we call a physically delivered forward swap. and the idea there, like you said, is, the buyer's incentivized, the trader, speculator is incentivized to do so 'cause they think they can get it at a discount" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "52:27", "start": 3146.99, "text": "Reinvested in infrastructure or buying new machines or unlocking a new project. I think this is gonna be one of the most exciting ways that miners can fund their projects in the future. You know, once we've got a more robust system, you know, somebody comes to, somebody says, \"Hey, I've got the ability to produce X amount of hash rate, I need this level of capital. Right now, they have to go get a very expensive loan or, or figure out how to raise capital for that. They could just sell it to the open market." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:48", "start": 3168.03, "text": "Really fascinating to see and I'm provider for that or will it be kind of a more decentralized model where there's, let's say, different Bitcoin mining companies who are offering this as a product or some kind of service like to match between the miner and the trader?" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "53:08", "start": 3188.06, "text": "So we view the first one, like we've seen this a bit already for, you know, there's some folks offering like a bespoke OTC product around this, like the ability to, you know, basically it's a, it's, you know, a one-off type of contract that's originated between two parties using a third party, intermediary, And, we've seen that, in the, I think right now the, the holdup that's causing them from breaking through to that next level is the ability to service the contracts, which, you know, requires a pretty large tech stack, which Luxor fortunately has the ability and the, expertise to build. So we're, we're on the track to building these things and, and really looking forward to, you know, to, to bringing these to market over the next, over the next, probably won't be twelve months," }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "53:57", "start": 3236.71, "text": "' Start to see something like this happen." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:58", "start": 3238.45, "text": "Well, I'm excited to see where that goes. I think we've, pretty much hit the time for this episode. So Nick, where can people find you online and, follow what you're, what" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "54:07", "start": 3246.96, "text": "you're doing? Yeah, so you can find Luxor at luxor dot tech. from there, pretty much all of our product pages are, are, available. you wanna, you know, yell at me for saying hash rate follows price or, or any of the other dumb things that I've said today, you" }, { "speaker": "nick_hansen_luxor", "time": "54:27", "start": 3266.75, "text": "Index. So come give us a follow, let's, let's chat about this. This is one of my favorite things to talk about. So, if you have something interesting, I'm certain that we can find, a topic to discuss. So really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:37", "start": 3277.08, "text": "Thank you, Nick. So what do you think about the Bitcoin mining narratives and demand response, as well as the general concerns around ESG? Just a reminder, if you haven't already, and you're enjoying the show, make sure you leave a review so that other" } ] }