{ "episodeId": "SLP578", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "skot": { "name": "Skot", "role": "guest", "tag": "SKOT" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:12", "start": 12.17, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, brought to you by Swann dot com, the best place to buy Bitcoin. Joining me today is Scott, and he is known for his work on Bitaxe, and we're gonna talk a bit about Bitcoin mining and open source, and, I think this is a really interesting project. So first of all, Scott, welcome to the show. Hey, Stephan, thank you so much for having me." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "00:33", "start": 33.08, "text": "I'm excited to be here. This is like one of the most amazing, like, legendary high signal podcasts, so it's cool to like, be a part of that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:41", "start": 40.91, "text": "Oh, hey, well, thank you, I appreciate it. And, yeah, I've seen you, you've been doing some really interesting stuff, and I thought, you know, listeners need to hear about it. So, do you wanna just, you know, take a minute, give us a bit of your background? I know you've Sure." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "00:57", "start": 56.89, "text": "Yeah. So, let's see. I, I'm an electrical engineer by, you know, that's what I went to school for. been, you know, messing around with electronics for quite a while now. But only s-in the last couple years getting into Bitcoin mining. So, yeah, this, this is like, it, it's a hobby that has turned into a profession now, which is pretty dang exciting. I get to wake up every day and do this. But, I guess I, I wanna talk a little bit maybe about like the idea of the permissionless Bitcoin and, and coming at that from like a hard, hardware point of view. So I was thinking about this this morning, kind of an interesting story when- When I was in, in high school, there-- I was in a kind of a smallish town, there was, you know, a couple radio stations, and they were, they're terrible, they never played the music my friends and I wanted to hear. So, you know, like you can imagine. and so I somehow, you know, went down this rabbit hole on the very, like, early internet and learned that there was these guys, and they were publishing plans for making your own FM radio transmitters. And it was, you know, it was open source and it was just out there. And some friends of mine, a good friend of mine and I, we, we just, we got those plans and we built our own radio station, like from scratch, like also kind of learning how electronics work, at the same time. And it, it was amazing, right? This is-- it's not illegal to have your own low power FM transmitter, and so that's where we started and just kind of like broadcast maybe like on the block kind of thing. But, you know, kind of digging into it more and more and realizing that the FCC in the United States isn't very friendly to people who want to, you know, take advantage of this public resource, which is the, the airwaves, and kind of- Meeting up with other people who are, who are doing really interesting things in that space, and just got really excited about this idea that I could like make electronics and, you know, have Like an empowering sort of thing to do with them, which at the time was, was music, and we had a community that was, sprung up around that which was just Really exciting. So I don't know, fast forward like several years and I was just like kind of brought back to that really amazing time with this Bitaxe project. It's like- There's no one doing small home miners in an open source way, and I don't really know how to do it, but I can just dive in and no one can stop me. So As a, I guess, a brief backstory on how, yeah, sure. And so, I mean, you were mentioning," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:48", "start": 227.69, "text": "I mean, it does tie into some of the, the ethos aspects of Bitcoin, this idea of a decentralized system, this idea of a, you know, you can run your own Bitcoin node and all these things. of course, there are, you know, there have been some criticisms and aspects that, you know, deserve some criticism in Bitcoin mining nowadays around, you know, people say, as an example, there's not that many competitive Bitcoin mining- Mining hardware manufacturers, there is a little bit of centralization in the-- at the mining pool level, so these are things that, you know, we, as Bitcoiners, if we, if we care about decentralization, we have to sort of, you know, take that concern seriously and, you know, I guess what, what you're trying to- Focus on here is mainly at the, I presume it's mainly at the manufacturer level, but also it has impli- impli- sorry, implications elsewhere in terms of how you set up that, this bit axe, and how you point it to a particular mining pool and, you know, actually contribute, hash rate to the network." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "04:50", "start": 289.99, "text": "Yeah, yeah, exactly. it's kind of interesting when you think back, you know, when Bitcoin started, right, the early days, Satoshi started it, there obviously wasn't many Bitcoin miners, and it was just people using CPUs to do it, you know, they kind of got into GPUs and then a little bit into FPGAs. That's when I first started hearing about it, right in there. But it wasn't a very, commercial endeavor. There was just- People kind of doing it, they were sharing designs amongst one another for, for software and how to configure their GPUs and FPU's, FPGAs, sorry. It was A lot more open, and you can see a lot of this stuff if you go on Bitcoin Talk and look at the people that were discussing this, you know, way back in the day. And that was sort of- When I first heard about it and kind of got involved, and I set up an FPGA to mine Bitcoin on my own, it was, you know, it was fun to dig into it because it was totally-- there was, it was open source, it was just out there, like anyone could just grab it and start messing with it. But I think- We saw a change when ASICs came around, 'cause those are incredibly expensive to build. A lot of people, or a lot of companies, had to invest significant resources to get that off the ground, and we kind of saw It, Bitcoin mining move away from, you know, from the plebs, from people who are just interested in doing this, towards like, \"This is a profitable business, you know, that's what we're mostly focused on is profit.\" It makes sense, there's, you know, a lot of profit to be made potentially. But it doesn't, it doesn't actually have to be that way, especially not anymore, like it's a pretty mature market. There's lots of, there have been lots of companies making ASICs. There's two major runs right now, but they're on, I don't know, like their tenth revision. So it's, it's, it's mature and- There are options now for people who are just interested in doing this to, to do it, and that, that's kind of what I wanted to do with the Bitaxe, was allow people to, to mess around with it. People like myself who're interested in electronics, people who are just interested in Bitcoin, who've heard about Bitcoin mining, want to try it. And open it, open it back up, and, and that sort of initial ethos of, you know, it's permissionless, the information's out there, do with it what you can." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:14", "start": 434.43, "text": "Yeah, so as you were saying, I think there is a-- and I don't wanna like criticize too hard, but there's a, there is an element of, let's say, mercenary kind of aspect, like what you'll find in certain elements of the industry, but at the same time, you can't, you know, it's like they're trying to be profitable entrepreneurs, so at the same Sort of can't fault them too much, but at the same time, there is sometimes a bit more of a closed ecosystem there, whereas, you know, let's say the, the ideal in the Bitcoin world is that it's open source, and maybe that's where I, I, as I understand some of your critique is as well. Do you wanna just explain a little bit of how you see that around, you know, the way some of the- The hardware isn't necessarily open or some of the firmware isn't necessarily open. Do you wanna just elaborate on that?" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "08:06", "start": 486.36, "text": "Right now, you know, besides the Bitaxe, which is still small, there's no open source Bitcoin mining hardware, firmware, or otherwise. We had briefly back in the day, we had open source firmware for the Ant miners from Brains. They discontinued that a couple years ago." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "08:25", "start": 505.47, "text": "There, there's just nothing. Bitcoin mining or Bitcoin itself is intrinsically open source, right? Satoshi said early on, \"I've developed an open source...\" Money. Excuse me. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:39", "start": 519.01, "text": "And," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:42", "start": 521.81, "text": "if it weren't- Sorry, just on that, would you mind explaining why, in your view, why is it that way? Is it just that it's gotten that competitive? Is there some special dynamic? Is it just that the, the costs involved? Do, do you have any idea why? Why has it gone" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "08:57", "start": 536.95, "text": "closed source? Yeah. Yeah, it-- I think it's, it started off because ASIC development, like the chips, is so capital intensive, right? Tens of millions of dollars, years, huge teams. Lots of risk associated for the companies doing this, and they, they just don't feel very inclined to share when, you know, they're putting up that much money. And That, that happens. We've, we've seen this in the PC industry where sort of the initial trailblazers are taking a lot of risk and maybe don't share as much. But as it, as things mature and as it becomes a little bit more commonplace, maybe more entrants in the market, then it, it makes more sense for these things to open up. But yeah, to answer your question, I think that it's, it's closed because of just the immense costs associated with ASIC development. And, I mean, another interesting side effect of that Is that these companies making ASICs and are, are, you know, they're laser focused on one target audience for their miners. I, I think they have to be in order to make their business case work out. But that audience that they're laser focused on is the, the large industrial miners. You know, I've got, I-- for your viewers watching, I've got some of these big miners behind me. They're loud, they're hot, they're purpose built for running in an industrial data center. And that, with a couple small exceptions, that is all that is made now is industrial miners, right? They're not for-- they're not for you, they're not for me, they are for large data centers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:36", "start": 635.92, "text": "Yeah, and as you mentioned, the some of the trade-offs that come with that, right? We're talking, we're talking about machines that are, that give out a lot more heat. These are machines that are a lot louder. These are machines that maybe the electricity, it's not-- your house isn't rigged up for that, right? So you need, you need special equipment or special, you know, electrical, to deal with it. and then the cost As well can really, of, of course, that can, you know, you know, wax and wane along with, you know, Bitcoin bull and bear markets, but that can also put it out of range, let's say, of the, of the everyday hodler, let's say. Yeah. So" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "11:14", "start": 674.08, "text": "I would argue fully out of range. Like, you know, you're talking thousands of dollars for the latest machine, and you-- if you're in North America, you can't plug it in. In other places in the world, you're probably not gonna have a high enough current Not to mention the heat and the noise that you have to deal with." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:30", "start": 690.29, "text": "Yeah, so it's, it's like we've-- Now, some of it, you know, at least in terms of manufacturers, we're starting to see, as an example, Block is coming out and they're saying, \"We're gonna do a, a, a mining, machine,\" and they're looking to do three nanometer, and they're, you know, a very big company who can afford this kind of cost, and it's, you know, this is like a multi-year project. I know there I think they're backed off on that idea. I know, there are other new or other competitors as well like Bitdeer and others who are gonna talk about this kind of thing, but it seems that, you know, the number of open source ones is limited." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "12:13", "start": 732.68, "text": "It's, I mean, they're, they're nonexistent right now. Their, you know, Block seems to, be signaling that their, their whole device as well as their ASIC is gonna be open source. I'm not exactly sure what the plan is there, but I think we'll- We'll find out when it comes out. I've been talking with those guys a lot, several people at Block have reached out that they are, are fans of the Bitaxe project. I think, you know, we, we kind of align there. So I fully intend to use their open source ASIC to make a Bitaxe type home miner when, when it's ready. But You know, the Jack Dorsey has, has been described to me as having, you know, very deep pockets and a very low time preference and, and committed towards, Bitcoin and specifically Bitcoin mining. And this is fantastic. I mean, this is, this is what it takes to sort of spearhead this, this whole industry, which I think is incredibly important. So very grateful for that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:16", "start": 795.78, "text": "So do you wanna now go to Bitaxe and give us a bit of an overview, you know, what is the Bitaxe? What was your-- I mean, I guess it's kinda clear that what your goal was to make an open-source Bitcoin miner, but if you could just explain." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "13:29", "start": 809.21, "text": "Well, actually my initial, initial goal wasn't to make like an open source home miner. I, you know, I, I've been messing around with electronics for a long time, got into Bitcoin, and was like, \"Oh my gosh, electronics and Bitcoin, two, two great tastes. I wanna, I wanna play around with this.\" And so I literally just went searching for open source designs. For ASICs and found absolutely nothing, so I was like, \"Oh gosh, I'm gonna have to start from scratch.\" So I, I got myself an S9 and started work on reverse engineering it, 'cause there's, there's very, very little documentation out there. It's not meant to use the, the chips on their own for anything. So that worked. Reverse engineering it, just poking at it, you know, oscilloscopes, logic analyzer, figuring out how it works. Actually, also figuring out more in depth how Bitcoin mining works for myself. And, you know, then the, the S17 chip came along and that started to become affordable and it was actually the chip itself was available, for-- on the repair market for people who are repairing these things. So I could, from, from China, order like a couple bare chips. Carefully measured the chip, you know, made my own data sheet essentially for the chip by measuring it, trying to back out what the pin connections are for this chip based on looking at the, the Antminer. And, and basically put together a, like a rough, what we call it, a breakout board. It's like just the pins that come out, and you try and hook it to a computer or something else to try and figure out how it works." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:04", "start": 904.32, "text": "So, I mean, just to be clear, I guess, i-is this kind of, you're trying to reverse engineer the boards? Is that kind of what you're doing, or not really?" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "15:13", "start": 912.59, "text": "Yeah, totally. I mean, there's no other option, right? There, there's no A lot of times electronic parts on the market have data sheets where they clearly explain, you know, what voltage goes here, what these pins do, like what the mechanical parameters are. There's, there's nothing like that for these chips. They aren't available Anywhere on the open market, they're only for ant-miners. So yes, reverse engineering it is essential. And to be clear, I'm, I'm not the only person doing this. When you think about third-party firmware for AMP miners like Brains, Luxor, Epic, there's several of them. These people all reverse-engineered the chips and the protocol as well, because they have to make their own firmware to communicate with it. So I kinda did what they did, I just went a little bit different direction where instead of making a commercial firmware to run on AntMiners, I take one chip out of, S19, for example. An S19 has like three hundred and twenty chips on it. I take one of those chips out and have it on my own circuit board that has its own power supply and, can operate independently of the AntMiner, the rest of the AntMiner circuit." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:30", "start": 989.99, "text": "Interesting. And that's actually interesting, I know this is like a common, misconception, people call it an ASIC, right, the whole thing, but actually what you're referring to is actually those three hundred and twenty chips." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "16:42", "start": 1001.64, "text": "Yeah, that's right, that's right. And this, it's not like a Bitcoin term, ASIC. It, it's an electronics industry term. It stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit, and it does refer to the chip. in this case, the application that it's specific to is Bitcoin mining. Yeah, it's shot to the integrated circuit, is just a miniaturized circuit. So yeah, when, when, certain people are talking about ASICs, they're referring to the chips, but it has come to mean sort of the whole machine." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:09", "start": 1029.13, "text": "Yeah. Okay. And so, I guess- You know, obvious upfront questions that most people will have is they'll say, \"Well, is this efficient? Is it-- like, is the everyday person just gonna mine at a loss?\" You know, if you could explain a little bit on, of your thoughts on this idea as to, you know, why should a person do this? Is it, is it only for the hobbyist or maybe ideological reasons, like you care about the decentralization of the network, or is it, you know, can you actually be a profitable miner doing this? Sure," }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "17:39", "start": 1059.04, "text": "sure. So the chips that we're using, the latest Bitaxe, which is our sort of third ma-major, revision, uses the chip out of the S21 that was just announced in, or just started shipping in January from Bitmain. So we have that exact same chip. So we have the exact same efficiency as an S21. That's like seventeen point five watts per terahash. So that's We get that same efficiency. Now we have a dramatically lower hash rate, total hash rate than an S21 because we have one three hundred twenty-fourth of the chips. So we're at like, we're at the max hash rate that a single chip can do, which happens to be about three quarters of a tera hash, seven hundred and fifty giga hash. So The, the upside there is that, you know, I've got one running on the desk right next to me, and you can't hear it, because it uses 12 watts, like the same as a cell phone charger. You're never gonna ever notice this on your power bill, 'cause you don't really, probably don't notice cell phone chargers plugged in on your power bill. It's not hot, it's not loud. You can basically plug it in and forget about it if you want. It also has a little screen on it so you can see if you're lottery mining, like how close you got to solving a block. But to answer your question, and a lot of people ask me this question, is Is it profitable? Unlikely. You know, it, it's, it's extremely unlikely given the like residential setting that you're gonna make any serious Bitcoin. But we haven't, we haven't changed the efficiency here. We're still dealing with the same efficiency as every miner. So like, you, you didn't pay very much for this, you have a tiny hash rate, so therefore you don't get any significant rewards, right? If we had changed anything there, then we would be onto something and could- Probably revolutionize the market. It, but in the-- it's important to, to remember in this sort of residential setting, you probably couldn't be profitable on any miner that you have. You could get a bunch of S-nineteens and put them in your basement, but if you're paying ten, fifteen cents a kilowatt hour You're just not gonna be profitable, not to mention all the other infrastructure things you have to set up to run those miners. Okay. So then why would people do it? There's a lot of reasons. There's a lot of reasons, and I'm still finding out what they are, which is pretty cool. I think a lot of people are interested in Bitcoin, like they're genuinely interested in Bitcoin, and they have heard about Bitcoin mining or they're interested in trying Bitcoin mining. And they wanna do it at home, and they wanna play with it. that's the Bitaxe is, is a very low barrier to entry towards trying out Bitcoin mining. And the success of this project so far, which has been kind of blowing my mind, is showing that there's a, you know, a significant, or at least a, apparently significant group of people that are, that are interested in doing this. So there's just that pure curiosity aspect, like, \"I wanna try Bitcoin mining.\" Like, you know, there, there's, there's other products on the market where you can try this too. There's Geckoscience USB sticks that you can get. There's, Futurebit makes the Apollo and the Apollo 2, which are, are bigger home miners that also have a node in them. So you can, you can get those things. I would say that they kind of- Are in different target audiences, like the, the Apollos, you know, near a thousand dollars, so it's a little bit more of a commitment to get started, and the, the Gecko Sign Sticks require a little bit more technical know-how to run. So, there's, there's that. I think that market is bigger than I had ever imagined, but this isn't like change the world size hash rate. And I think that there's an interesting, there's an interesting power, I think, that this home mining has Where you can just get this thing and, and the lower the cost we can get it, the better. So it's not gonna break the bank. You can get it, you can plug it in, and you can forget about it. And it, it doesn't have any additional costs, right? You just, you just plug it in. And if enough people do that, then it does Play a significant role in decentralizing the hash rate and, and, and securing the censorship resistance that Bitcoin is so famous for. And I think there's a growing number of people that are interested in doing that, like Yeah, I'll, I'll plug in this, you know, a hundred and fifty dollar thing, maybe fifty dollar someday thing to, to play, to, to help out Bitcoin and to, You know, see if I can protect this, this, very, I don't know, powerful thing that we have in Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:53", "start": 1373.36, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKite dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices, such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can Do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Btcd Desktop or Nunchuk, as a few examples. Now you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices, such as passphrases. You can use xPub or, my favorite is multi-signature. Now if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the- The device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins, especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away, they are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code livera to get a discount on your cold card. This show also brought to you by mempool dot space, the leading Bitcoin and blockchain visualizer. I use it all the time when I'm checking transaction fees and trying to understand what is the state of Bitcoin's mempool. You can search transactions, historical as well as unconfirmed ones, and also see a great way to visualize things across the Lightning Network, Liquid, mining, and so much more. Also, for those of you with an enterprise, they offer a mempool dot space enterprise program. So for those of you as- Part of that enterprise program, you might wanna get increased API limits, and you might wanna have increased access to the team in terms of feature requests. You might wanna have special branding in terms of how your custom instance of mempool dot space looks. So to sign up for that, go to mempool dot space slash enterprise. And now back to the show. Great. And so could you just, for people to give them an idea, what does it look like to actually set one up? Like, what's, what are kind of the steps, like, you-- let's say you are able to order one, or you're, you know, if you're really into it, you make one, how do you actually set it up? How do you kind of point it to a pool and actually do the mining with it?" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "25:23", "start": 1523.41, "text": "Sure. Yeah, yeah. I just have one, one third reason why people might wanna run this that we should talk about real quickly, the other aspect is lottery mining, which means you are running it, solo, you're solo mining, and there's a, there's a bunch of different ways you can do that, but solo mining means you're not a part of a pool, and so you are mining with the very remote chance that you will win the full block reward, meaning, you know, that's Over a hundred thousand dollars, depending on the Bitcoin price, but I was, I was actually looking at the odds in the California state lottery. They have like Powerball, and they draw like five balls, and The odds of you getting, I think it's four out of five balls and collecting that like four out of five prize is like one like eight million or so, which is not good odds, but That's also your chances of solving a block with a Bitaxe every day. So if you run it for a whole day, you have like a 1 in 8 million-ish chance of solving a block. And it also happens that the, the prize money is about the same, of course, depending on the, you know, the which having we're in, but the price of Bitcoin, but it, it's, it's similar, it's in a similar ballpark. So there's a lot of people that play the lottery, a lot, a lot of people that play the lottery, and this also kind of feeds into that ability. And the cool thing is, you just leave it plugged in, and you're, you're essentially buying a lottery ticket every day." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:55", "start": 1615.24, "text": "That's pretty cool in a way Hey, I could brand this like-- and actually sell it as like a lottery miner product and kind of sell it like that. And I mean, who knows, right? Maybe if they make it really easy for the user to do that, I mean, it could be funny." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "27:14", "start": 1634.02, "text": "That's what we intend to do, is make it really easy to, to do. And maybe we should-- that is a good segue into how you set the question. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:22", "start": 1641.63, "text": "how-- what does it look like when you actually set one up?" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "27:24", "start": 1644.39, "text": "Sure. So you can, you can, all the, the design files for the Bitaxe are open source. You can go to my website, bitaxe dot org, and I've got it all in there. So if you are technical, maybe you've done some electronics soldering before, you can download it all, you can get your circuit boards made in China for actually very little money, you can order your parts off the internet, we have the full list of everything you need to order. I actually have A how-to document on there of like tools that you need to buy to actually solder this together. And lots of people have done that. It's pretty cool. Even some people that have never soldered anything together before, they have built themselves a bit axe. And that's- That's pretty rad. That's like very, I guess self-sovereign mining, 'cause you're like, \"I built this thing from scratch, right? Just try and stop me.\" That You know, that's a subset of people that are willing to take on that big project. So if you're not into that, you can also go to bitaxe.org and I have a thing called the Legit List, and I, I have- There are over a dozen sellers on there at this point, and these are sellers that respect the open source license, meaning they give credit back to the project, they haven't modified it, et cetera. There's just like a short list of rules. But I have a dozen sellers on there. You can go there, you can find one that's in your country, we have them. All around North America, Europe, Australia, China, yeah, and so you can go there, find one, you know, check out the prices, see, see what works for you, and just buy one. And so from these sellers, you will get a, a Bitaxe in the mail. It's totally assembled in the box with a power supply, so it's totally ready to go. I can actually got one right here for people that are watching, like this thing is It's not big, I'd say. It's kind of like Raspberry Pi size, you know? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like Raspberry Pi size. It's got a fan on the top and a heatsink and a little display, and it's, it's a bare circuit board. Some of the sellers will sell you a, a stand like this is a cool little stand so you can put it on your desk. Some people sell it in like an enclosure so you don't have to look at the circuit board if you're not into that. But that's what you'll get. You, and, you know, depending on your region, you'll get an appropriate power supply that is compatible with your outlet, and it's- You know, this is like standard wall outlet thing, like cell phone charger, so you can plug it in anywhere. You'll plug it in, and the first step is to get the Bitaxe onto your Wi-Fi network. It, it only operates on Wi-Fi. you can't do Ethernet like a lot of the bigger miners, we kinda just made that decision 'cause it's, it's easy, everyone's got WiFi. On the screen, it will show you a, WiFi network to join. So you take your cell phone or your computer or whatever and you join that Wi-Fi network that's actually created by the Bitaxe. And in most cases, in most cases, this seems to be somewhat of a standard, especially on, on, mobile products, is a screen will pop up Immediately, as soon as you join that Wi-Fi network. And the purpose of this screen is to then type in your Wi-Fi credentials for your home network, so it can connect to your Wi-Fi. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:50", "start": 1850.09, "text": "Exactly. That's similar to like the block clock and stuff, yeah." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "30:54", "start": 1853.75, "text": "It's a really common paradigm in like IoT products. yeah, so if you've set up a block clock or, I don't know, like a Wi-Fi doorbell or a light or anything, this will be very familiar for you. Type in your Wi-Fi, network name, password. You can actually at that point, you can configure it with the Stratum pool that you wanna use, and your username and password and some other operating parameters, or you can just do that later. But the, the point is you hit save and it will then restart and join your network. And it actually is configured by default so it can start mining right then if you want, but the prudent thing to do is to then it will show you an IP address on the screen which you can type into your browser once you're, you know, back on your network, and that will pull up the full Bitaxe dashboard. We call it XOS, and it will show you all your mining stats. If, if you've ever logged into an Antminer dashboard, it's, it's very similar. On there you can see how well you're doing, you know, what your best difficulty is, all the temperature, fan speed, all that good stuff, and you can configure your stratum information. We use just vanilla Stratum v1, so you can connect to any pool that you want. All the pools support Stratum, and so you can type in any of them that you want. And that's it, you're kind of off and running. It'll just keep on doing that, forever, and it, you know, it has a little display on the front, so it'll-- you don't always have to connect to the dashboard to see what's going on with it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:39", "start": 1959.08, "text": "Yeah, that's pretty simple. And so then, yeah, so then you're away, and so then you can, you can lottery mine or you can point it to, you know, a pool, hopefully, a pool that's not one of the proxy pools, let's say. But we'll get into that maybe later. But, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of the overall, you know, intent with your running, you know, you're running this Bitaxe project, I presume there are other contributors as well, but is the idea that you're going Like, is there a commercial intent that you're gonna make this into a commercial project, or is it just gonna be sort of this, you know, like, is it a not, not-for-profit project? Like, what's your intent, or how, how, how, how are you gonna keep it sustainable as well? So" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "33:21", "start": 2001.08, "text": "I, I have been extremely fortunate. I was awarded an OpenSATS grant at the beginning of this year. the OpenSATS team was amazing, and I think they instantly recognized that this open source project is fantastic. And so, yeah, I got a grant to work on this. I actually, it worked out that I was able to quit my full-time job and move to working on the Bitaxe. So I've got, you know, a year, under this grant to do everything that I can, to get the Bitaxe and follow-on projects up and running. So that's-- it's sustainable for now, having me just- You know, publishing everything open source. There's a number of other people that, like sellers and actually manufacturers that have spun up their own businesses surrounding this. So I don't, I don't manufacture any of them myself. Like I've built a couple by hand on my desk for testing and R&D, but I don't manufacture any of the ones for sale. So that's, that's all handled by other people that are, that are for-profit enterprises. And that seems to be going really well for them. I mean, at least right now, Bitaxes are selling like crazy, so manufacturers, I think, are doing really well, which is awesome. But as far as the, as far as the future, there's There's so many interesting options to, to work on. The, the Bitaxe just has one chip, it's really low, hash rate. I think And we, we've got the plans out there if you go and look. There's a, a product that's almost done called the Bitaxe Hex that actually has six chips on it and it should be three tera hash That's a little bit bigger, a little bit hotter, a little bit more expensive, but we're gonna sort of put out a, you know, a selection of different miners to go after people that have different goals for home mining. I think there's, and then of course, going after different chips, different ASICs. I think, I've been working with Block, they have, we have a couple things going on there. I would really like to move to their ASIC, you know, if that makes sense. And then there's a couple interesting follow-on projects that just sort of fell out of this that I think will be really beneficial for the community." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "35:47", "start": 2147.36, "text": "one of them, which is kind of cool, is a replacement, control board for AntMiners. This would be fully open source, just drop it into your AntMiner, it would have custom firmware on it, and- It'd be the first of its kind, but this is something because we've already reverse engineered these chips, we did what a lot of the other control board makers and firmware makers have done already, so it's not, a stretch to make our own control board. In fact, I've got a prototype of one right here. It's, so that's coming. It's kind of a side project, but I think that that would be pretty useful, especially for people that are trying to use these ant miners in different situations like heat reuse or stranded energy. They are, in my opinion, suffering under this firmware that's just not meant for their application. So I'm hoping that putting this out there can enable Some of these cool new applications." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:46", "start": 2206.21, "text": "Interesting. And so that could mean from a sovereignty perspective of owning, of kind of controlling what the machine does. Maybe in other cases it's like a overclocking or underclocking use, perhaps." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "36:58", "start": 2217.55, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's a cool, pleb miner like, he punks movement of, of a bunch of people that are doing really neat stuff, you know? They're heating their house, they're heating their like marijuana grow operation or their greenhouse, they're, they're doing all kinds of stuff. And so having a- The actual control board hardware that you can modify, I think, opens up a lot of different options. Like you could attach a thermostat to it, you could put a screen, a touch screen on it, you could have it work on Wi-Fi, right? Like It's such a bummer to get a, I, in my opinion, to get a, a space heater and then have to plug it in via Ethernet. So this kind of opens up, I think some, some cool options there. And this is just- Sort of a side thing from what we've discovered, from the, from the Bitaxe project. And I, I've, I've been saying \"we\" a lot. This, I'm just the instigator now of this project. It has grown. We have a- A group called the Open Source Miners United that has grown to like, I don't know, twenty-five hundred members, and lots and lots of smart people have joined, including early on some people who joined who were instrumental in getting the Bitaxe to where it is today. So I'm, I'm using \"we\" a lot now, 'cause this, this is a group effort." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:14", "start": 2294.44, "text": "Awesome. And so the idea, you mentioned that there might be different chips or, or rather, different forms of the Bitaxe that come with maybe more chips. So- Yeah. In your, I guess, in your idea, is your idea that there might be people who just wanna kind of run one and they just get like the smallest version, and there are others who might otherwise wanna run multiple of these, and so that's for them, that's where you get the six chip version, or what's the idea there?" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "38:43", "start": 2323.16, "text": "I just today this guy posted a picture, he's got like, I think like 19 BitAces, they're like mounted on his wall in his house, and he's just got this whole farm of them going. So some people are, are really, really into it. It starts to make a lot less sense practically to have nineteen bit axes when you could have, a bigger machine that has a few more chips and, and you could just run that So yeah, it's-- and then there's people who are like, \"Well, you know, like, the Bitaxe is great, it's nice and quiet, but we could, we could double it or we could six-axe it and it still wouldn't break the bank or be too hot, and so we wanna have-- options for those people. And there's, the way that these chips are set up on the hash board is they're all actually connected in serial, serial, like with power and data, like chained together. And so I was very interested in uncovering, reverse engineering how that works, 'cause on the Bitaxe we just have one, so it's the only one in the chain, it's a lot easier. But kind of unlocking This design of these multi-chip miners and how they chain, how the chips are designed to be chained together was the goal with the Bitaxe Hex, and of course, we're releasing that all out there. And, this, this guy on, Open Source Miners United, he's, he's like, \"Oh yeah, I know how to do this,\" and just jumped right in. He's got a sixteen chip miner he's working on called the OXAX. All publishing it open source. It uses like the heat sink and fans from, like servers, like server computers. It's got it on there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:24", "start": 2423.97, "text": "It's super cool. Yeah, fascinating. And so I guess coming back to why people would do this, right? It comes back to, as you were saying, The kind of hobby use, the low barrier to entry, the people who want to lottery mine, this kind of, those different, use cases, let's say, or reasons to do it, and then, I guess- You were kind of touching on some of this before around the idea that what if you had a million people doing this? What if you had millions of people around the world doing this? Could you just elaborate on what, what would that mean at least in proportion to the current, you know, network size? If" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "41:03", "start": 2462.95, "text": "you, one tera hash, or, oh, sorry, one exa hash is a million tera hash. So for round numbers, if we had a one tera hash bid-ax, which I think we're gonna, we're gonna have here pretty soon. That would be one million bit axes to equal an exa hash. And if you have one million bit axes mining, they're solo mining, at current network difficulty, that means that one of those bit axers would solve a block and get the full block reward every four days. Which is kind of amazing. Like, once we have someone, you know, like one person a week solving a block and getting the full block reward, I think that sells the next million. but You know, I, I tell people an individual Bitaxe is insignificant, you have no chance. But we're not just selling one, we're gonna get lots of these out there, 'cause they're so cheap, they're such a low barrier to plugging one in and running it, that we're gonna get lots of these out there, and- You know, if we have five million of them, let's see, what is it right now? We're at, we're at five hundred and fifty-three x a hash. I got my little dashboard on my desk here. So I mean, if you round up, that's like one percent" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:20", "start": 2540.18, "text": "of the network." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "42:21", "start": 2541.46, "text": "Yeah, five million of them, that's one percent of the network. And It would be interesting, I think it would be very interesting to see what happens when we have, you know, one percent or more Miners on the network who don't care at all, they don't care what the hash price is, right? They're not gonna unplug, they've probably forgotten about it. Like, what does that do to the market dynamics of mining when you have so many people that aren't doing this for a for-profit business? That it's just inconsequential how much it costs them to run or if they're losing money or making money? I think that, I think that changes the market dynamics a lot, and it'd be very interesting to see sort of what the rest of the network does in light of, of those competitors. And the, the, the other benefit to, you know, having these completely distributed decentralized miners is that they're kind of like immune to regulation, right? It's like no one's gonna notice if you're running one of these Bitaxes in your house. It's very unlikely you're gonna shut down. And adding more and more to the network requires, it requires zero infrastructure cost, which is actually a really big deal, you know, in talking with some of the- The bigger miners, you know, they're, they're struggling to get these transformers that they need. They have incredibly large facilities, they have huge staffs of people, and all that is on top of- Relatively thin mining profit margins. So it's a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:56", "start": 2636.36, "text": "very interesting dynamic. I'm, I'm" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "43:58", "start": 2637.62, "text": "definitely" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:58", "start": 2637.88, "text": "excited to see" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "43:59", "start": 2638.82, "text": "what happens." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:00", "start": 2639.57, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. The lead sponsor of this show is Swan Dot Com, and Swan has a mission to onboard millions of people into Bitcoin. I also work at Swan, helping on some educational content for the team. Now, the team have also put out a new version of the Swan Bitcoin application, which is available on your smartphone, whether it's Apple or Android. Now This app has a really fast onboarding experience. It's now just a few minutes to go from zero to Bitcoin. So if you are standing there with your family or friends and you might have been having trouble trying to get them onboarded, well, try this now. Recommend Swan Bitcoin, and you can do this while you're standing next to them. They can click through, and most of them will be able to set up and do this in just a few minutes. Also, the team at Swan have rolled out a new promotion. There are zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys. So This is a great way to go from zero to Bitcoin and in a guided and managed way. So, reminder, go to your app store or Play Store and search Swan Bitcoin to get onboarded with Bitcoin today. This show also brought to you by Nomad Capitalist. Nomad Capitalist is a leading provider in terms of offshore tax and lifestyle strategy planning and implementation. They can help you go overseas and legally lower your taxes. As many of you know, I grew up in Australia, but I left. I was sick of it. in terms of the taxes and the COVID tyranny and all these other things. And so that's why I left, and now I live in Dubai. But that's not necessarily the place for you. You have to think exactly what works for you, for your family, for your business. And Nomad Capitalists have worked across dozens of different countries. They've helped people get passports, residences, bank accounts, and all kinds of other things. And importantly, it's not just about choosing one place, it may be multiple places, and it may be also about making the pieces fit together in terms of how your business As an individual, Nomad Capitalists have helped many, many people in terms of going overseas, and if you're interested, go to nomadcapitalist dot com slash apply. This is applicable for people with a net worth above one million US dollars. That's nomadcapitalist dot com slash apply. And now, back to the show. The other thing I'm curious to get your reaction, as a miner, obviously a lot of miners are thinking, like, in simple terms, they're thinking about hash price and hash cost, right? But what? What traditionally happens, you know, every bull cycle, is you kind of, at least historically speaking, what's normally happened is you had the halving, kind of miners kind of bled out a bit, and then after that, you sort of saw this crazy bull run, and at that point, the price went up harder than what the network could in terms of catching up. So there's almost this sweet spot to kind of be a miner, right? And at that, in that sweet spot zone, you have, you had people turning on like really old machines, like old S-nines and things. let's say a world where there's a lot more Bitaxe users, maybe in a bull cycle, you kind of see all these people kind of switch on as, you know, lottery miners, let's say, and because, you know, hey, the, the price is running to the moon. it might be a short term effect, right? Because that, that kind of real hype cycle might, might only go for, let's say, six to nine months, but, maybe that-- there'd be like all this hype, and there'd be all these people who are If they're not strictly speaking profitable, but they're at least kind of relatively in the sweet spot." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "47:27", "start": 2847.07, "text": "We-- There's a couple pools now that have enabled Lightning payouts. Right, like Ocean. Yeah, yeah, Ocean and, Brains did, and it was trouble, it was tough before with a small miner because it would take you forever to get to the minimum payout. So I'm seeing people just now tweeting about, \"Oh, you know, I'm, I'm getting like...\" Several sats a day, which obviously right now isn't worth much, but if Bitcoin does what we all hope it's gonna do, maybe that will be worth something. So, yeah, I think like you said, exactly, like there might-- the hype cycle comes. We're definitely gonna see people kind of just eep into Bitaxes and plug 'em in. I think the difference is that they're not gonna unplug 'em because, you know, after that hype cycle It's not like they're making any less money or it even matters. It, it, they're just gonna forget to unplug." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:17", "start": 2896.58, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I mean I would say there's a few things here, like, because some people might just kind of, I mean, depends what you've got plugged in, right? Like, you might kind of be like, \"Oh, I need that plug for something else, I'm gonna take that out.\" Or, and w- there is, I mean, I would say one thing, there is, as I'm sure you're probably aware, in the tech world, it's known as the, the one percent fallacy, right? So this kind of idea of like, you know, people come" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:49", "start": 2929.3, "text": "Thinking, so I, I would be a little cautious on that, but at the same time, I, I think it's a cool ideological idea, right? Like if you are kind of ideologically believing in Bitcoin as a decentralized thing and maybe a bit of fun, a bit of a hobbyist kind of thing, and as you said, there seems to be a market demand for this thing, so, you know, you can't really argue with that. So, you know, I certainly want to," }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "49:13", "start": 2952.68, "text": "yeah, I certainly want to get all of those people, right, that you just" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "49:19", "start": 2959.32, "text": "And we're not, we're not in that one percent effect that you mentioned, right? It's, it's completely decentralized project, right? So it's not like any, any one person going after it. So there's, I think there's a lot of different motivations for why people are selling these and why people are buying them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:35", "start": 2975.35, "text": "Yeah, totally fair. And yeah, like I said, not, not like putting the project down or anything here. Like, I think, I think it'll be a cool thing. No, no, no," }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "49:43", "start": 2982.94, "text": "it's a big task" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "49:48", "start": 2988.14, "text": "It's doable, but that's big. But like selling, I think, Alex Gladstein just tweeted the other day, he's like, \"Let's sell a, let's sell a hundred million Bitaxes, one in every household,\" and it's like, I mean, that would be amazing, but that is a very, very" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:02", "start": 3002.19, "text": "big task. Right. And so in terms of once you started to get to some of those bigger numbers, I guess as you're saying, you're having to repurpose the existing ASIC, you know, mining rigs that are out there, you're kind of taking it apart, like you said, to take those three hundred and twenty or however many, And so are there gonna be kind of natural thresholds that you hit there? or, I mean, I guess the other thing I'm thinking about is those, as you said, the legit suppliers, those guys are probably making profit, so there'll be a lot of people who jump into that and be like, \"Hey, I'll buy, I'll buy this one big mining rig, machine, split it up into these parts, manufacture bit axes and sell those, and there's a pretty good profit margin for that. So maybe there's an incentive for people to do it." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "50:52", "start": 3052.33, "text": "It's, especially with the, we, the new BitX which we call the Supra, the only place to get those chips is actually to buy an S21 and disassemble it. And so all the current sellers of BitX Supras are just Buying brand new S21s, never plugging it in, and unsoldering, I think it's three hundred and twenty-four chips out of it, which is wild, which is wild. It won't be that way forever. They do come on the secondary market eventually. Yeah. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:21", "start": 3081.29, "text": "out, out of curiosity, how much, like just for, you know, rough numbers, how much does an S21 cost, and then how much does a Bitaxe Super cost roughly?" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "51:31", "start": 3091.14, "text": "I think an S21 right now is like four thousand dollars. Let's see, four thousand three twenty-four. So that means you're getting the chips at twelve dollars and thirty-four cents each. And a Bitaxe, Supra is gonna be between a hundred and fifty and two hundred bucks." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:53", "start": 3112.71, "text": "Nice, yeah. And of course, you gotta think about, it's not just like that profit margin, obviously, you gotta think about labor and other parts and, you know, sure, there's a lot of other parts that go, that go into it as well. But I mean, it sounds like a pretty healthy profit margin, and I could imagine, like a lot of Bitcoin people might just buy one for fun, right? Like they might, if the, if they're, if it's They might easily, they might just decide, \"Hey, I'll just buy one just to play" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "52:16", "start": 3136.01, "text": "around.\" It was, it was really cool. I got to go to Nashville last week and go to Bitcoin Park for their Mining May meetup, which was super awesome. but there, there was this guy there I'd never met before, and he's like, \"Oh yeah, I just bought, I think 25 Bitaxes, and he had them in his backpack, and he was just selling them to people for Bitcoin at the, at the meetup, and he sold out.\" So obviously this was, you know, everyone there was into mining at a Bitcoin event. But yeah, I mean, hey, why not?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:47", "start": 3167.3, "text": "Like if you have Bitcoin events near you and there's no one else selling Bitaxes, hey, go for it, right? I'm sure you'd probably make some good sales." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "52:55", "start": 3174.74, "text": "Yeah, yeah, he, he was selling them for a great price too, but he was still making money. So I, I actually wanna start in the future pushing that even more, like people who, you know, are at, wanna be the Bitaxe dealer at their, Yep, I think that's a great way to get, get them out there in people's hands and-- And you know, for some people it might" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:15", "start": 3195.07, "text": "even, I mean, look, people come to Bitcoin for their own reasons, right? I, I was already a libertarian, I was already anti-central banking and all this other stuff, but there might be other people who are more, let's say, engineering, hobby-minded, and they kind of actually get into Bitcoin from that, like maybe someone sells them a bit axe and now they become into Bitcoin, right? So there's kind of different ways," }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "53:37", "start": 3217.34, "text": "Yeah, I hope it's a, I hope it's a good gateway drug for those people, right? Next thing you know, they're just like buying racks of S21s. That'd be great too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:47", "start": 3226.79, "text": "Right. It could be like an onboarding pathway for people. so let's talk a bit about, the mining pools aspect. Now, for listeners, you might, you know, if you've seen my recent episode with Steve Lee, we spoke a bit about the mining pool centralization, I would say, on Bitcoin X, people like 0xB" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:07", "start": 3246.94, "text": "Raising the, the alarm on this point, basically the understanding, you know, as I would say it, there's a bunch of pools that are kind of proxying, you know, to Antpool, and so that does represent a, a centralization concern. I'm curious if you have any thoughts around that." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "54:26", "start": 3265.6, "text": "I don't like it at all. It shouldn't be centralized like that. I think it's, it's a huge, risk for Bitcoin because these, these big entities are sitting ducks for regulation. You know, they're, in some cases, publicly traded companies, they're not going to be able to, Resist or do something else should the regulators come and say, \"Oh, hey, no mining transactions from Stefan anymore.\" The, they wouldn't be able to, to change. So I think, I think there's a big risk there. they have big targets painted on their back. Right now, no problems. Or limited problems, I should say, but no guarantee that that's always gonna be the case in the future. And mining pools, you know, they, they choose what transactions get processed, what, what transactions get allowed. And right now, we're, we're not in a good situation because, Foundry, I think, has like thirty percent and Antpool and their proxies have, I think, like forty percent, something like that. This is- This is the work that Mononat did, that pie chart that people have seen, but that's a large percentage under a very small number of entities controlling it, so I don't think that's good That's really, really not good. The, the whole idea with mining was that people were supposed to be selfish and financially motivated. They would just take the highest paying transactions and include them And of course, why, why would they do any funny business, right? Just sort by price and take the highest paying ones because we're miners and, you know, we have, electricity bills to pay. But Bitcoin mining has very low, margins. It's a tough business, I think any of the big miners will tell you, it's a very tough business And so we've seen things like FPPS, which essentially kind of smoothes out your payments, it's, it lowers the variance on your payments. we've seen things like that come into play that just blur the lines a little bit on that just purely profit motivated, Goal of Bitcoin miners. And so now we have, you know, FPPS pools doing out-of-band transactions and like kind of funny business with What, what transactions they include. And I think that's all trying to like eke out a little bit more money from, you know, trying to create some, some more money for the miners to, to attract them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:07", "start": 3427.22, "text": "And I'd also just, remind listeners, for those who haven't seen my recent episode with Hafsa from Swan, he's the CIO of, Swan and also the head of Swan Mining. He's pointed out they've been doing some tests on some of the different pools, and it's not what you would necessarily think, right? Like sometimes it Even around the halving block, the recent halving block which had a lot of transaction fees, he was saying that, some of the payouts were actually very different to what you would expect. And so just because somebody is marketing as FPPS doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna- Get all the payouts that you theoretically should be getting, and so that's kind of another point that, let's say, the industry is sort of discussing and kind of arguing back and forth on that aspect. so we'll see what happens there, but I think, I think the, the take home point really is to try-- just to make sure you're pointing your hash rate, you know, if you're able to, to a different pool, and ideally a Stratum v2 pool if you can. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the whole Stratum project and, where you see that going?" }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "58:14", "start": 3494.18, "text": "Yes, absolutely. I think we are in this situation where there's not enough pools to choose from, right? Like kind of what I was saying before, like if the miners- Suspect something going on that they don't like, they should be able to change to a different pool, and, and this is all centered around what transactions are being included in the, in the block template. So the problem is those pools are going away, so they have less and less options and less and less ability to actually get a tr- a different, block template. Stratum v2 Is great, right? That on a very high level, that allows you to make your own block template. If you're a big miner, I think that's absolutely fantastic. So you could, you could have some of the benefits of FPPS or some of the other strategies, where, where you have this lower variance, but If the pool doesn't care, you can, you can make your own templates, you can include whatever damn transactions you want, which is definitely in the Bitcoin ethos, I think that's, that's huge. Everyone should switch to that if they can. I kinda wonder, you know, would or could Antpool even realistically support Stratum v2 and letting their clients make their own block templates, right? Like, they run their own transaction accelerator, so how they gonna get those blocks in? But I think it's a, it's an excellent development. I'm, I'm excited to see, Spiral, providing grants to people. I've been in talks with- BlueMat and, Plebhash and some of the other people working on SV2 to get it working with the Bitaxe. In fact, there was a, a demonstration at BitDev's in Nashville where I just was, where, a guy named Brian was-- had got, a proxy set up, SV2 proxy, and had his Bitaxe pointed at it, and he was showing it right there at the, at the BitDev's, which was super cool. But it can totally work I think there's still a lot of complexity associated with actually running Stratum v2 Right? Like if you're just a miner at home, you have to have a node, that is creating those, I forget the technical word for it, but it's, it's creating those, transactions for you. And so that's an additional, software concept that you have to set up And if you're a home miner and you have a node, you could actually just solo mine to that node on your own with Stratum v1 and you'd be making your own transactions as well. So it's not super useful in that case. But yeah, if you wanna be a home miner and you have the technical ability to set up a node and set up your, your SV2 proxy, and you wanna pool mine. Yeah, Stratum V2 is great for that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:10", "start": 3670.93, "text": "Yeah, and I think that's maybe another area where, hopefully, if the industry cares enough about it, they might sort of make a bit of noise at the manufacturers and try to get them to support SV2 with their firmware and, at device, sort of have the right- set up for that. but I know there are people in the industry who see it like maybe they're not as jazzed or excited about SV2 as, let's say other people are, and, so, you know, there, there might be a little bit of resistance there, but, and, and to be clear, it's not a silver bullet, again, it's, it's more like, i-it helps, but it's not, you know, at the end of the day, the pool can still reject that and say, \"No," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:54", "start": 3714.94, "text": "The idea, or at least the idea I've heard from Matt Corallo, is this idea that if the pool rejects your block, then now you know, now you know you need to switch pools, right? So at least there's kind of that element." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "01:02:08", "start": 3728.64, "text": "Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of, talk lately about empty blocks and, some of the guys from, CKPool, which is a solo mining pool, and Ocean talking about this, like, why empty blocks happen. And it, it all comes down to this delay when a new block comes out and the pool broadcasts out the sort of first work for the miner to work on. And, I was having a discussion with another Bitaxe developer about this, but- Does having to negotiate your block template with the pool just add additional latency here? That, that seems like it's gonna make this problem even worse. So I think there's still some things to be" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:50", "start": 3770.13, "text": "ironed out maybe, yeah. But I, but I also know there's kind of other benefits too, like it has encryption so that you're less likely to get hash rate hijacked. So it's kind of like, you might make that trade off of like, \"Yeah, I don't wanna get stolen from,\" so effectively stolen from from the hash rate." }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "01:03:06", "start": 3786.02, "text": "Yeah, and it's, it has a binary, file format. Right now we use just ASCII, Stratum is all in ASCII, so there's a lot of overhead associated with that. So this could be useful for small miners that have limited processing power on board to deal with that, or maybe not over the best internet connections, having to do with that, that lower total bandwidth. Yeah. So, but I mean," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:28", "start": 3808.52, "text": "bottom line, I mean, you can still point to an independent pool, right? Even if they don't have SV2, at least if they're independent and then don't, they're not doing this proxy business, then at least that's something. Or if you point to Ocean and you choose the template that ha-- you know, choose your, whatever template you, you're interested in, then, you know, that's at least better, right? So Yeah," }, { "speaker": "skot", "time": "01:03:49", "start": 3829.45, "text": "yeah, I think, you know, we need a lot more pools. We need a lot, lot more pools. I think there wasn't a lot of push in that industry to get more pool software out there. CKPool has had an open source solo mining pool available forever, like ten years or so, but I think it was kind of fell behind in development and wasn't super popular. I know Futurebit has revitalized that and has that available on their miners, but just recently, one of the core Bitaxe developers launched PublicPool, which is a solo mining pool, but it's, it's actually very easy to self-host It's a, single-click install on Umbrel, so you can just, you know, install Umbrel, which is probably one of the easier nodes to install, and then single-click installing your own solo mining pool And then build your Bitaxe and point it at it, and now you're sort of top to bottom self sovereign. Oh, that's cool. So I wanna, I wanna see like a lot more projects in that vein so that like anyone who has- And even smallest remote interest in mining, you know, with an independent pool can just make it happen without too much Too much stress." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05:09", "start": 3909.07, "text": "Fantastic, well, I think that's a great spot to finish up here. just listeners, make sure you check out bitaxe dot org. All the links are in the show notes as always. And, Scott, thank you for joining me and, keep up the great work out there. Thanks so much for having me, this was awesome. I hope you enjoyed the show, if you did, make sure to give it a thumbs up and share it out there with your family and friends. Check out my website at stephanelivera dot com, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }