13 May 2026
114. Open Source Wins in Vegas: $100k Boost, DoomAxe Demo, and Telehash #4 - E114
In this week’s catch-up, Skot, Tyler, & econoalchemist sit down with each other after a whirlwind couple of weeks and get the full down low from the Vegas conference—panels, debates, demos, and a surprise $100,000 grant win. They dive into the spirited on-stage debate over open source mining, why chip closed-ness doesn’t invalidate open source hardware, and how community-driven, transparent tooling remains our North Star. Highlights include Schnitzel’s battery-powered “DoomAxe” portable miner (yes, it plays Doom), rapid-fire integrations with Proto Fleet, and a Mario Kart tournament that filled a 3,000,000-sat prize pot. They also share details on winning MARA Foundation’s community vote and how the funds will extend runway for the four core open-source pillars: Ember One Hashboard, Mujina firmware, Libre Board control board, and HydraPool—plus the crucial work of storytelling, docs, and community building around them.
256 Foundation unveils the revamped 256foundation.org website and a self-hosted Discourse forum for discoverable, scam-resistant support and collaboration (forum.256foundation.org), along with Mujina dev calls to channel contributor energy productively. Then they preview Telehash #4 in Austin—hashrate donors, Wrigley’s new Block Party event for pre-buying solo hash, and fresh “loyalty” gamification on the HashDash (dash.256f.org). The hosts cap it off with home-mining lore, solo-block luck stories, and a nod to running your own node. No pod next week during TEMS, but they’ll be live for Telehash #4 and back on the 27th.
[00:00:00] Unknown:
Gentlemen, welcome. Pod two fifty six number 114. It's been a couple weeks.
[00:00:06] Unknown:
It has.
[00:00:08] Unknown:
There's a lot that's been going on and this is actually the first time I've had a chance to sit down with either of you in recent days. So I'm going to be learning about all the goings ons just in real time with our audience here from you guys. Some stuff has happened. Yeah. First of all, how are you both doing? Doing pretty good. Yeah, Doing pretty good. And I feel like it's been a whirlwind the last couple of weeks. Can't can't believe It's been going crazy. I can't believe it's only been two weeks. There's been so much going on. You guys look like absolute rock stars at the conference. Maybe that's a good place to start. Sad that I missed it, but really happy that you guys were able to show up in full force and represent the foundation
[00:00:54] Unknown:
and get everything done that you guys got done. So, yeah, tell me about it. What was the conference like? We dove right into it on on Monday. Right, Scott? We kind of well, first, we all got there on Sunday and we're able to see each other in the evening, which was fun. Immediately, hung out, had a couple drinks, had a team dinner. Then Monday, we had our panel about open sourcing the mining stack, which was probably my favorite. I think we crushed it. I'm waiting for that video to go live. They haven't posted it yet. Yeah. Was that on the Energy stage. Energy stage? Okay.
And then and then we won a $100,000,
[00:01:27] Unknown:
and then we did one more panel. Just like that? Wow. Yeah, just like that. Awesome. Tyler, you did another panel. I know I did another panel too in there, right? Yeah.
[00:01:36] Unknown:
Yeah, it flew by and there was a heat pump panel in there as well, which was a good time. Appreciate the support. Saw you guys in the audience. Then Scott had some fun panels with some banter back and forth with some people that have different opinions. Yeah. I was on the the home mining panel
[00:01:54] Unknown:
moderated by Tatum, which was cool. It was Leo from Kanan, me, and Avril from Altair. It started off That's an interesting lineup. It started off very civil, but I don't know. Avril and I were kinda sitting next to each other on the other side from Leo and Tatum. And, yeah. It started off very civil. I guess the recording will be up at some point, but It was epic because Leo had no idea what was going on. He, he you know, in our pre sort of, like, introduction email that we did before the panel, he was like, great. You know, we're gonna talk about all this home mining stuff. And then I don't know. Avril and I just didn't get into it until we did on the stage. But, you know, I, of course, had to bring up my open source take on the side of home mining, and Avril is is not a fan. So we got into it a little bit.
[00:02:49] Unknown:
You know, as someone who's been kind of on the outside of that debate, I've obviously clicked on a couple Twitter threads, but I'm not following it religiously. What it felt like from the audience perspective for me and a couple of the other guys that were there is just the disagreement seems to be like, open source doesn't work when you're trying to get the cheapest dollars per terahash. That's not my driving north star. I'm just gonna make the cheapest miner for your desktop, blah blah blah. People want good products. And it and it seems to miss the point a little bit, which is the open source building blocks are references so that we can, you know, shatter the glass ceiling here and redefine the whole ecosystem, not so much that you can get $5 off per terahash. I eventually think it will lead to that, but it seemed to me, Scott, I don't know, like the panel was kind of you guys were kind of talking past each other in that sense. He didn't really get what you were trying to say. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I take like
[00:03:37] Unknown:
the freedom angle of it in that, you know, to have property centralization, it requires things to be open source and not controlled by a single entity. And it's really a freedom angle. And I think Avril seems to think that you just can't make money with open source, and he's a hardware seller. He's not a manufacturer. He's a he's a hardware seller.
[00:03:59] Unknown:
I just think that that's a little bit shortsighted. Well, lot of these guys will mention that the chips aren't open source, and so your whole argument is void because the chips aren't open source. How do you
[00:04:09] Unknown:
refute that? What's the way you walk through that to someone who may make that claim? I mean, it really doesn't matter. Right? It doesn't matter. You know, this is kinda what I was saying on stage is that the the source for the two fifty six Foundation projects, the source for Bitaxe is open. It's out there. You can go and look at it. You know? Yes. The ASIC, the chip itself is not open source, but there is no, like, requirement that it be open source, you know, all the way down to the atomic level. That's just obviously, that would be ideal, but doesn't, you know, it doesn't invalidate the fact that the source for the hardware is out there and that provides, you
[00:04:49] Unknown:
know, substantial level of freedom for everyone who's involved. I've got a comment here because I've I've spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to explain this to Avril in various chats. And he's one of these, I've noticed that he's one of these guys that despite new information absolutely will not change his opinion. And no matter what kind of information I've presented to him, he walks away from our arguments with the same opinion he walked in with, which has been really frustrating for me. And it's sad to hear that he went on stage sputtering these same arguments. So, you know, at a high level, what I've tried explaining to him is that words matter and words have definitions for a reason. And there is a definition for open source hardware.
And if anyone wants to read along, they can go to shwa.org/resources/opensourcehardwaredefinition. And in there, the Open Source Hardware Association has defined what open source hardware means. And I'm not gonna read everything here, but just a couple sentences I do wanna point out for listeners is that the definition of open source hardware includes that the hard, and I'm quoting here, the hardware source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it. Ideally, open source hardware uses readily available components and materials, standard processes, open infrastructure, unrestricted content, and open source design tools to maximize the ability of individuals to make and use hardware. End quote. But it goes on to say and explain that it's going to be next to impossible for integrated circuit manufacturers, chip makers, you name it, to open source their components.
And so the fact that the component itself is not open source does not negate the fact that the design for the hardware, which has a closed source chip on it, is in fact open source. So open source hardware can in fact have closed source components on it. The components themselves do not need to be open source, the design of the hardware needs to be open source. And that is factual, that is objective. No matter how you look at it, it does not change. Words have definitions for a reason, and open source hardware is no different. Well said. Yeah. Yeah. Mean, I think they make it pretty clear.
[00:07:24] Unknown:
And, you know, to be fair, the Open Source Hardware Association is just one group that's advocating for open source hardware. You know, they have these definitions for what they certify as open source hardware. I think it makes a lot of sense. But, you know, I think what is required for open source is to have the source, right, be open. I think Avril just he doesn't like this project due to I don't know what, and he's just kinda looking for things to to try and discredit it, which, you know, whatever.
[00:07:56] Unknown:
Open source hardware versus open hardware. That was a nitpick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you were kinda saying or correct me if I'm wrong here. Like, what's the difference? The source is there. Yeah. I don't know. He wants to discredit it for whatever personal reasons. Doesn't think it's gonna can work. But Well, it didn't get any of us down. We still had a great time in Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. Vegas was Vegas was amazing.
[00:08:18] Unknown:
It was it was such it was so crazy. Right? Like, there's so many people there. So many people were fired up on mining and two fifty six projects. You know, Schnitzel brought the Doom Axe, which was so cool. It was so cool. He, like, put that together in basically the week leading up to the show, and it is a it's a box. It's a battery powered box that he three d printed and designed. Inside, it has a LibreBoard control board running Mugena, running HydroPool, it's connected to a Bitaxe that serves as the miner. The whole thing's battery powered. It has a screen on it that shows Dee's amazing dashboard.
It has a bunch of LED lights, and it has another little smaller screen that shows a bunch of, like, stats about, like, the battery life and everything else. And then And it could play Doom. In true hacker fashion, if you, like, push the button he's got a little joystick next to it. If you push the button, I think it was, like, five times, it launches Doom, and you can play Doom on it. And the LEDs show you your, like, your your life and ammo supply in the game. And so he was running around with this thing, showing it to everyone, and people were just going nuts for it. And it was so cool because it was battery powered.
It was connected over WiFi, I think, to a hotspot he had running in his pocket. And, you know, you could just see the whole stack running right there, like, in his hands. It was really, really cool. And we're we you know, it brought up a lot of interesting discussions about how how easily it is to use AI tools to build this stuff. Right? Because the source is out there. Right? So now you can point your your agents at the source and be like, I wanna add this. And it just rapidly iterate on it, and that's how we got all this stuff going in such a short amount of time. So while Well Well, it's like We were go ahead. It's it's not a you know, this isn't like a device that's for sale or practical. Right? You only get a couple hours out of the box. Even though people ask how much it was. Yeah. People were like, where can I buy it? And I don't think it's for sale. But the the cool thing it was just a demonstration of like, look. Now you can take all these tools that are out there and open source, and you can put them together and add your rad stuff on top, whatever that may be, in like a record amount of time. Well, so much so that Schnitzel added Proto Fleet at the Proto booth live with the Proto team in a matter of minutes. Yeah. Yeah. You should talk about that. That was really cool. So Proto released their their source for Proto Fleet, their miner management software, and they were talking about that at their booth. It was a cool booth, by the way. They all the block companies were together. It kinda they called it a block party. They all looked like little houses on a street corner kind of. And the the mining one was a garage, which was quite fun. They had all the workbenches and tools and some literature linking to the the GitHub repo for Protofleet. And Mugena is not a default supported firmware in Proto Fleet, BrainsOS, LuxOS, Bitmain, What's Minor firmware out of the box? And so Schnitzel brought the DumaX over there and chat with Caleb. Shout out to Caleb at at Proto
[00:11:13] Unknown:
who leads the Fleet development. And they got Mugena, I think, like, when I say they, Claude code or some some vibe coding agent help, got Mugena baked into a fork of Fleet as a viable firmware so you can and then he started running it on the DumaX in conjunction with the HydraPool. Yeah. And showing the On the screen. Yeah. Proto Fleet dashboard on the display that's on the device. Just got it up running so quickly. Well, and then he saw that the BITX has too low of a power consumption to be recognized in fleet. So it's a very low resolution, obviously, bid axe power draw. And so he already submitted a PR to fix that live from the booth. Oh, cool.
[00:11:57] Unknown:
So cool. It's incredible. This is how we work. The amount of innovation that's occurred, like, just a couple, maybe three years ago at Mining Disrupt. You might remember someone walking around with a s nine in a backpack, and it was mining live while they were walking around the demo floor. You know, closed source hardware, running closed source firmware, mining to a closed source pool. Fast forward a couple years, and we've got Schnitzel walking around with a new and improved sleek, quiet, battery operated device in his hand, running open source hardware, open source firmware, mining to a self hosted instance of HydroPool. It's just incredible.
[00:12:39] Unknown:
So proud of everything you guys were doing out there. Yeah. He had a he had a full full node running on the box too, running on LibreBoard. Right? He had the SSD in there and everything. Didn't he use some AI help to, like, vibe code the dimensions of his three d printed case as well? I mean, he built that thing in, like, eight days or something. Yeah. That was that was really cool. Like, even the, you know, the mechanical design of the box, I think he he vibe coated it all and three d printed it out. It was really slick. The speed of development is absolutely going astronomical.
[00:13:12] Unknown:
It was really fun. Yeah. I would say I had a blast at Vegas because I didn't waste any time trying to talk to the Chinese miners. So that made it much more enjoyable. But, yeah, we we were keeping busy. We also talked about open source mining on HRF's Freedom Go Up stage, which was the coolest stage in the conference. Right by the entrance, all the best folks in the game talking about freedom tech and human rights. It was it was fantastic. And Wonklue got to join us on that one. It was it wasn't recorded officially. Someone recorded it from the audience and put it on YouTube, and I shared it on X. Oh, really? A little spicy. So if you wanna check that out It get a little spicy. Yeah. We got into the the sins of Bitmain and
[00:13:53] Unknown:
While everyone was holding a Bitmain goodie bag. Yes. Yes. The the, like, official, you know, when you check-in, like, goodie bag that everyone got was, like well, it said Bitmain on it, but it was, like, the shittiest bag. It was It was a trash bag. It was a trash bag, and it came sealed, and it had a handle at the top, but the only place where you could open it was at the bottom. It was just It was kind of like a tamper proof bag. I was like, what? Who designed this thing? Like, what was in the bag? You couldn't hold it if you'd Like a Rubik's cube and some knickknacks.
I just was like, we put this bag together. Because, like, you couldn't hold it by the handle if you'd opened it because you had to open it on the bottom. It was just and it said Bitmain on it. But, yeah, I thought that was funny.
[00:14:37] Unknown:
What do what do you think that says about their firmware? I don't know. Their firmware is also closed like the bag.
[00:14:43] Unknown:
Yeah. Sealed and it doesn't work very well. D plus plus and her friend at Avento Brianna put together an amazing Mario Kart tournament that the two five six foundation team competed in. And then the top four, I wanna say, time based contestants, so the four fastest competitors throughout the week were able to go do the finals on the main stage on the last day, which is so cool. Did you get to watch it in the in the large rooms, Scott? I know Ryan went over there. How was that? We're we're up in the in the front row. You know, I had to sit through a little bit of,
[00:15:17] Unknown:
what's his name? That guy who AfroMan? AfroMan. Yeah. We had to sit through a little bit of that. That was actually really terrible. But, then we got to see the the final race, the final Mario Kart race. And Dee and Brianna did a talk, like, on the main stage, and then the whole race was projected behind the contestants up there. It was really cool. It was really cool. And they have a they have, like, a lightning address posted and a pot, you know, for the winner. And it it went up to, like, 3,000,000 sats, like, right away. It was really cool to see everyone sending a bunch of Bitcoin. So people for the audience were adding to the pot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was going up really fast. It was really exciting. It was a crazy race. It was on, like, Rainbow Road, right? So super hard. There was apparently the the finalists there was one guy, I forget his name, that I recognized from he was the winner at TabConf for the Mario Kart competition. And then another guy, apparently, that was a winner from another Other pros. Race. Yes. These guys are really good. Really good. But, yeah, it was a cool race. It's rainbow roads, so they're falling off the sides all the time. I won my bid axe from one of the races we did. Shout out to Abundant Minds in SoloSatoshi that helped me get that. Got it got it up on the hashtag. Yeah. Was so cool. They had tons of you know, they were set up Dee and Brianna were set up in the, like, the lobby area with a, you know, cool place where basically anyone could go and race and try and qualify.
[00:16:40] Unknown:
But there was a bunch of prizes that went along that that it was really cool. It was really, really cool. They do a nice job. And then I think the big news, Eko, is we we had a great time working with the Mera Foundation and being a part of that competition, the community competition to try and win and successfully win the $100,000 contribution to the foundation to support open source mining development through our developers. So Yeah. So that was exciting. That's huge. For people that are listening that may not be familiar, what is the Merit Foundation?
[00:17:10] Unknown:
What was going on with the giveaway and what is $2.56 going to do with that money? Yeah. So on the first day of the conference,
[00:17:18] Unknown:
Fred Thiel, Merit's CEO, announced the Merit Foundation. My understanding is it's an initiative to support Bitcoin ecosystem projects that they deem important to keep Bitcoin true to its open source ethos and spread education, a bunch of different efforts. Would you say that's right, Scott? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. It's pretty cool that they're putting this together. Yeah. Very cool. And to and shout out to Isabelle, our friend Isabelle. She's now leading the Mera Foundation. So we were we were working with her throughout the conference, but they kick started the foundation by announcing a competition saying, hey, you, the community, why don't you vote on one of three projects to win this initial contribution of a $100,000 that we will support to that project? So the two five six foundation was up against Satanet.
That's Obi's project for ISP in Africa. I'm going off the dome here, so I'm trying to remember. That's right. Yeah. It's it's satellite Internet to sort of underserved areas like Bitcoin backed. Super cool project. Definitely. And then another one is Liber Dade Satoshi. I
[00:18:22] Unknown:
I'm butchering it, Scott. Help me out. I think that's right. Liber Dade Satoshi.
[00:18:27] Unknown:
Which is Bitcoin education in Latin America. Yes.
[00:18:32] Unknown:
Another awesome project. Yeah. Yeah. It was I mean so, you know, Mera Foundation picked the three projects. Libreria de Satoshi. There you go. Libreria de Satoshi. Yeah. Mera Foundation picked the three projects, and they're all awesome projects. Right? You know, we were out there sort of campaigning for two fifty six to win. They're all, like, incredibly solid projects. And the the voting was was, like, neck and neck the whole time. It was.
[00:18:57] Unknown:
Yeah. It was keeping us on our toes for sure. It was suspenseful watching for sure from home because
[00:19:03] Unknown:
it wasn't just like a short and sweet voting block. It was like over multiple days. I think like two or three days. Right? Yeah. I think two days at least, maybe two and a half days. And we kept passing one another. It was, you know, was neck and neck for a while. At first, like, I think two fifty six was in the lead pretty early on. I'm like, oh, yeah. We totally got this. And then the next time I checked, we were behind we were in dead last. I'm like, oh my god. So it's a roller coaster. But Mera was great along with the other projects. They made pins for all the projects so people could get some little tokens to to flag who you had voted for at the Mera Foundation booth. And Scott and they were able to do some quick just word on the street style interviews
[00:19:42] Unknown:
with Diego there who is helping film some content. And then I think you have a a more in-depth interview coming out soon, Scott, with Merra Foundation TV that was announced. Yeah? Yeah. I did a
[00:19:52] Unknown:
a conversation with Isabelle for MFTV, which, yeah, I guess they're releasing soon. Looks like she interviewed a bunch of Yeah. People, a bunch of, you know, big shots in the industry. So that was pretty cool. I'm looking forward to that coming out. Yeah. And overall,
[00:20:09] Unknown:
it's awesome to see a large organization like Mera spin up the Mera Foundation. And a lot of this credit goes to Isabelle, one of our our proudest champions is they seem to get what we're building towards and the importance of an open source mining stack, which is really nice to hear. It was really fun working with them. What's the plans with that 100 k? Just At like a high level, nothing. You don't have to like Yeah. High level? Dollar for dollar line item. Continue funding the developers of our four core pillar projects. So number one, Hashboard, Mogino firmware,
[00:20:43] Unknown:
Libra control board, and Hydro Pool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we still have more fundraising to do. This isn't sort of, you know, this doesn't we're not set for good here with that amount, but, it does give us a big boost that we're gonna use to fund those projects and, get the next revisions of them out there, increase adoption, build the community around it. But really the, people working on these projects, Jungly, Schnitzel, and Ryan and myself, we're working really hard on this stuff. They're big projects,
[00:21:16] Unknown:
but they have a ton of potential, and there's just so many things to do. So having a little bit more runway to get those things funded is is gonna be huge. Yep. That's great. I'm so happy the two fifty six Foundation was able to, one, participate in that, get recognized by the Mara Foundation as doing important work. And I mean, the fact that the two fifty six Foundation won and now has some more money to extend that runway, like you said, it's just, it's great. That's what I think should be happening. Obviously, I'm biased, but it's just great to see this all coming together and watching the foundation grow. I mean, you both just took board seats just a couple months ago in February. You know, we've got more large
[00:22:01] Unknown:
dollar supporters coming to the table and it just really seems like, you know, there's no ceiling here for the foundation and that the momentum feels significant and it's a good feeling. And one thing I wanna add a little bit of color to is aside from all the very hard work that all the developers are doing, the laborious engineering that goes into electrical engineering, software engineering, etcetera, to build these building blocks into the open source pillars that we want the community to take as reference designs, as the de facto open source Linux kernel of a mining firmware implementation.
That's not just engineering. There is a story to be told here. There's a community to build. There's an ecosystem to build. There's eventual working groups that we're probably going to have. There's there's going to be people that have to test this in in certain mining deployments and and provide feedback. Right? And so this is the importance of the foundation kinda telling the story to the community at large, all types of Bitcoin miners across the planet, really, to get to that eventual point. It's a bigger task at hand than just making some software and saying, okay, it's done. Right? Yeah. That's that's a really good point. I mean, there's so many other things that go on. I mean, I know well, both both you guys have done just a ton of work on getting this foundation
[00:23:19] Unknown:
set up and running smoothly and making sure that, you know, all this stuff gets in front of people, that people are aware of it, that people who are interested in it can figure out, you know, what's going on and getting get involved. Yeah. There's there's a ton of stuff that I've seen you guys working on that's been just phenomenal. The website, the new website we launched right before.
[00:23:41] Unknown:
I was just gonna say that speaking of community support and engagement, Tyler, you busted your ass on redesigning the website. And I think you launched that the day before or day of the conference. Yes.
[00:23:54] Unknown:
Talk us through the website and the forum. That goes back to well, thank you for teeing me up, guys. But this goes back to build the community platform, the ecosystem so that regardless of your entry point, be it a newcomer to Bitcoin mining, someone that's got 10 megawatts and is trying to understand how an open source building block can solve a particular problem for them, etcetera. Something like a website and a community forum and a dedicated group chat and links to all the repos and clear clear explanation of the mission and the vision and and progress. So embedding PRs into the website in one cohesive ecosystem, I view that as really important. Even as even the little things like a newsroom where we can put out little press releases, like, when we do have the success of winning a competition like the Marrow Foundation started and getting that $100 so that it adds credibility to the organization. It shows organization.
It shows cleanliness. We got our stuff together. Right? And I think it's really helpful to bring us to the next phase of whenever anyone arrives here, they're going, this is exactly what I thought it was or this isn't what I thought it was. And that makes so much sense. And so that was really my goal with the website, bringing the whole ecosystem together across all the different projects, the projects on our GitHub repo that we support, the ecosystem projects, I call them that aren't perhaps funded directly right now through our core four pillar projects, but broader under more broadly under our umbrella, as well as our community events like the Telehash and the podcast that we do each week and the newsletter that Eco writes up. It's all now on one domain. You can find it all. So that was the goal there. So cool. And the forum too. Talk will you go in-depth on the forum? Because I know
[00:25:34] Unknown:
originally we were trying to do like Telegram, but that's got some problems. Then my confidence in Telegram just kind of plummeted when Pavel was arrested in France and they strong armed him into essentially giving the French government a backdoor or all government a backdoor. So I don't know. I mean, it's not like we're doing anything sensitive on Telegram but still it's just I don't think that's the best place for community support because a lot of newcomers who may not be very familiar with that platform are, like, ripe for the scammers.
So I think, you know, moving to this discourse based forum is
[00:26:11] Unknown:
good for a number of reasons. But please go ahead. Yeah. And and I'll also throw Discord into that mix alongside Telegram where they've made some questionable decisions on their platform with identity verification for accounts and whatnot. But really the thought here is if you're a contributor to the open source projects, you're gonna know and love GitHub, and you can contribute there with pull requests and comments and discussions natively in GitHub. But the thought here with the forum as well, what if I'm not a contributor yet, but I just wanna learn perhaps how to where to start? How do I set this up on my start nine? How do I set this up on an Umbral? What do I need to do if I want to ask a question about a specific component? Where do you guys order it? Things like that. Just tips. That's where we wanted a forum, a good old fashioned forum like like you're buying like you're trying to find a solution to a problem on a twenty year old pickup or whatever.
I mean, and Discourse is a great platform for that. It's it's self hostable, so we're self hosting it. We have sovereignty in that regard, and it organizes different topics into topics or posts into categories. So we have a general category for general questions, and then we have categories for each of the the four core pillar projects as well as one for ASIC RS that Brett is contributing a lot to. So we've already had a good amount of sign ups. I've seen 30 plus folks sign up. We integrated a a calendar into it so you can see all the upcoming events like the telehash and the podcast. Ryan had the first Mugena developer call, which was fantastic bringing a handful of folks up to speed on Mugena. We should talk about that, by the way. But the forum is really your one stop shop where you should go if you have a specific question and you want to be able to come back to it and not lose it in a long telegram channel chat.
[00:27:51] Unknown:
And I'm excited about I think that's, this is really important for discovery too. Right? A lot of people just do like a web search or maybe they ask an AI agent. Right? And this stuff is going to be, is going to be cataloged by those search things so they can they can find it. There's a lot of people who that's just not how they operate, right, is to join a you know, they wanna find out some more information, they join a telegram group and, like, ask the questions or scroll way back. I think this will get people involved
[00:28:19] Unknown:
much more and and much more like specifically too. Right? If they, you know, Google a particular problem they have, and that's something that we're talking about in the community, they're gonna find it right away. Yeah. And I'm still dialing in the knobs there. I'm not, like, like, long time Reddit mod with all this experience. Right? But there's, like, a million options in Discourse from how many vote or how many posts someone has to see before they get the next level of permissions, and then they can type more or whatever. So please give us feedback. There is a category in there called site feedback if you run into a quirky issue.
But we have enabled things like mark mark is solved. I enabled that plugin. So if someone asks a specific question and then five replies later, someone has the perfect answer, us as moderators can come in, mark it as solved, boom, done, and it kinda closes that topic so that it doesn't just turn into a big garbled mess of discussion. So these are the kind of features that I think will be really helpful as the community grows. If you haven't checked out the new website, you can find it at 256foundation.org
[00:29:19] Unknown:
and the forum is forumfoundation.org. And they both look great, feel great, way way better than the original website despite as much as hard as I tried to make a website. I am not a web developer. AI got really good, Eko. You and me both. Yeah. AI got really good. And, yeah, it just it just works. It does what it's supposed to do. And I think it helps communicate the mission and the vision of the foundation a lot better than than I was able to capture on the original website. So I do appreciate that Cause communication is key and that's what the website is there for. And yeah, don't, you know, telegram messages aren't web searchable.
Right?
[00:30:00] Unknown:
And that's like you pointed out, another great feature of this forum is that people can stumble into it from just general web searches. Mhmm. I feel like stuff that I Google, you know, comes up all the time on Bitcoin talk, and, you know, I think that's a lot of people get into it that way. You know, that that forum is is kind of a mess and sort of all over the place and lots of shit coinery and stuff. So hopefully, this can this can be grow to be, like, a really good resource for people who wanna find out about this stuff and get involved. And I have one
[00:30:32] Unknown:
comment to make too if any of our haters are listening. We don't have to dive into it too much, but this is the kind of stuff that takes real thought and effort and time and is not just purely spent on vibe coding some firmware to your liking and keeping it closed source to yourself and then ship hosting on the Internet about how you solved it better, cheaper, faster, and we're a bad steward of funds. So I got into my own little Twitter beef rabbit hole that we don't have to go into, but it was my first experience with it, which is shocking because I'm a pretty opinionated guy.
So it was due at some point, but that's my two sats there. We've all been there.
[00:31:13] Unknown:
Sometimes, you know, you can't make everybody happy. You know, some people just like Avril, no matter what information you give him, he walks away from the argument with the same opinion as he walked in with. Other people, you know, no matter what you tell them or what you show them, they're always just, they formed these weird opinions that are not accurate and there's no way to change their mind. So it is what it is, man. Should we talk quickly about Dev Call? Yeah. Let's let's hear about this Mugena Dev Call. So the next one is Monday.
[00:31:46] Unknown:
We're gonna do one the day before the telehash. Ryan did schedule that. That's on the calendar on the forum. But the first one, what would you say, Scott? We really had maybe a dozen or so folks on there getting brought up to speed. Ryan articulated his vision for Mugena,
[00:32:02] Unknown:
what he's currently working on. We all walked through introducing ourselves and perhaps some features or problems or challenges we wanted to solve or overcome with an open source firmware like Mugena? Yeah. I thought it was really cool. You know, was the first one, so it was sort of establishing like what this Dev Call is all about. And I think Ryan did it, you know, he did it perfectly. He ran a great call. I mean, there's obviously a bunch of people there. And we talked about, you know, how to contribute, sort of the flow of development. Like if you have a new feature, how do you kind of get it out there? And then how do you get it merged?
How do you how do you get it tested? And then then ultimately merged, which is really important. I think it really helps to to kind of set up these these goals and obviously the their their policies, but obviously they can change, but to, like, kind of set up some framework for how this is done early on because, you know, there's gonna be a lot of people who are interested in this, who are interested in working on it, especially now that you can vibe code things so fast. So, like Yeah. How do we how do we harness all this amazing energy towards a, you know, towards a productive goal? And I thought that was great to get that all out there on the Dev Call. Yeah, it's no small feat in the AI world to maintain a clean repo. Yeah, no small feat at all.
Mugene is so new, It's it's gonna be it is going to be such a big project with so many different facets targeting all kinds of different miners, all sorts of different functionality. Right? Different end goals of the user. Right? Do you wanna have this be a part of a big fleet and where you're just optimizing for hash rate, or is this gonna go in a controller for a water heater? Right? There's a lot of different facets. So I think Ryan has done a great job of kinda modularizing everything to make it so that it can operate in all these different modes without being just this, like, clown car of, like, spaghetti code. I'm good at adding spaghetti code. I mean, I always wonder what the the agent what kinda code the agent is writing. Hopefully, it's it's good. It's gotta be. It's gotta be. It works. It works. Totally works. And now we're gearing up for telehash number four Yes. Happening next Tuesday down in Austin, which we're the most organized we've ever been. Yeah. Been crushing it, like, you know, making sure that all the people with Hashrate out there are aware of this, getting everyone, like, you know, aware of the date, how to how to contribute.
[00:34:25] Unknown:
It's pretty cool. It's all Rod, man. He's keeping me on my toes, giving me my giving me my seven 7AM
[00:34:31] Unknown:
phone call from Rod. He waited till 7AM. You're lucky. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are there any
[00:34:37] Unknown:
confirmed hash donors that you guys can talk about? Yes. We've had some great supporters.
[00:34:44] Unknown:
Wilson Mining, they are awesome. And I wanna say Indiana. The Cornfield Miners, they've got a a hosting company, and they sent out a news blast to their customers, which is awesome. And I think they have some hash rate themselves, so they'll point our way. Compass mining is gonna point us some HashRate. Electron Energy, nice hash. Brain's HashPower is in the works, and we've been working with Wrigley as well. Wrigley was another one of those HashRate rentals that was popular during Telehash three.
Evan over there at Wrigley, Jungly and I had a call with him. They have this really cool feature called a block party, which is effectively they are productizing Telehashes in a sense, meaning one of the services they offer is signing up to rent Hashrate on a specific day. They call them block parties. And on that day, all of that Hashrate will be rented at the price you you paid for it, and it all gets turned on to SoloMind. So it's it's a way to kinda sign up for this block party to chance your sliver of a solo mind block that would be distributed amongst your share of that that contribution.
But we worked with Evan to get a specific event on their website for the telehash, the fourth telehash. If you go to blockparty.wrigley.io/256foundation, you can actually buy your hash rate now in advance, and it will turn on during the eight hour window on May 19, which is gonna be sweet. Oh, I gotta check this out. That's a pretty slick setup. I imagine
[00:36:13] Unknown:
Megawatt, the guys that won the $2.56 Foundation, their first block Yes. At Telehash number one. Imagine they're gonna be there. They also had the highest
[00:36:23] Unknown:
difficulty at Telehash two. Yeah. That's right.
[00:36:27] Unknown:
Yeah. They they I think they've shown up for every Telehash in a very big way. I wouldn't be surprised if they're there again, even if we haven't been in direct communication with them about it. Shout out to They're aware. Either I've been messaging them. Yeah, shout out to them. Have you? Okay, good, good.
[00:36:43] Unknown:
Shout out to them. Those guys are awesome. As well as SaaS Mining. Shout out to SaaS. They're going to send us some hash. I know the operation Bitcoin guys are as well in that community. Hopefully the heat punks turn up for it. But yeah, we've got some we've got some big dogs lined up. It's gonna be exciting. But the good news right now, I was just on the Wrigley page. This is so cool because so blockparty.wrigley.io/256foundation. I can buy a petahash for the full telehash duration, eight hours, for 22,000 sats.
Jeez. It's like $17 for a petahash. Man. So we just need a thousand people to do that, and that's an exit hash. There we go. Tell your friends. Oh, that's so cool. We should we should hype that. That's a good deal. Yeah. We will hype it. Evan literally pushed this live earlier this morning. So We should talk is the first announcement of it. The we should talk about loyalty.
[00:37:39] Unknown:
This is pretty cool. This is why you might wanna, you know, rank your hash rate for the entire eight hours. So on the hash--.256f.org
[00:37:49] Unknown:
that the amazing d plus plus put together, we used and launched for Telehash number three back in January. If you've been a listener of the pod or a Telehash number three viewer, you saw this gamified dashboard for our solo mining HydroPool instance where because hydro pool is open source, we don't have the need for an actual Bitcoin address to be the username. You can use your your Noster NPUB Twitter handles, bunch of fun stuff. And there is a difficulty leaderboard that's been in there for a little bit that logs the highest difficulty of a user and worker. But now we had the idea, Zhengli and team, to add a a loyalty leaderboard that is summing your total hashes.
And so it's a way to see effectively how long you've been contributing hash rate to the Hashdash. That way you can't just turn on a home assistant automation to only enable them during live pod two fifty six recordings like Dylan. You will be exposed for that kind of behavior. So Exergy's been outed a little bit, but luckily, we've got some other miners that have been longtime supporters. So the loyalty leaderboard is live at the bottom of the page. That's great. Because the idea is that you could, like, get lucky, hit a high difficulty,
[00:38:59] Unknown:
right, and show up on that leaderboard right away. But this way, it kind of gives viewers more insight because you can only get on the loyalty leaderboard by accumulating hashes.
[00:39:14] Unknown:
Is that right? Yes. Love it. Now I think there's some some nuances that we were discussing internally about when this resets, if your miner goes offline, if you have a worker that goes offline. Do we hold your your total hash sum for a rolling amount of days and then reset it in case you turn it back on? I think that'd be interesting because I know a lot of folks have heating systems that are intermittent to maintain their spot and not just fully reset, but we'll see. I got asked it from the podium. Yeah. You did. No. Yeah. Fourth came in. Shout out to Tesserae.
They they're a Kansas City architecture firm that is they were a big supporter of the Hepunk Summit and actually had that workshop upstairs. They're very interested in helping push the needle forward for checking off boxes so that they can integrate Hashrate into
[00:40:03] Unknown:
commercial buildings, which is so cool. That's cool. So you think we'll we'll set it up so that the loyalty, is just like for the telehash, like it's just for the eight hours of the telehash? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, mean it'd be fun to
[00:40:18] Unknown:
clean slate it and be able to actually rank who had the most hashes in the eight hour window. Yeah. Yeah. Why not gamify it? I mean, you got a any gamification
[00:40:28] Unknown:
edge you can do, I think, is helpful. I mean, look at how Dylan reacted. Yeah. We've got half a petahash now.
[00:40:37] Unknown:
That's true. Yeah. Dylan's got three hun That's amazing. They're trying to keep his spot on the loyalty leaderboard.
[00:40:46] Unknown:
So is there a there's like a meetup page for the telehash if people wanna learn more. Right? This is the day before
[00:40:54] Unknown:
the Texas and Energy Mining Summit, if I recall correctly. Yeah. So try and keep things easy to find. If you just go to foundation.org/telehash, the meetup will be linked on there. Perfect. As well as the instructions and the hash dash and a little write up about all three of our previous telehashes and those takeaways as well. I mean, there's six days till the telehash.
[00:41:17] Unknown:
Number four, never hurts to practice. So if anyone wants to get started early That's right. You can visit -.256f.org and find all the connection instructions there and try it out. Just make sure it works. Couple extra hash for, you know, the next week just to make sure things are working. No big deal. Yeah. What's the website for oh, we don't we don't look at the chances, solo chance. Right? We don't. Don't tell me the odds. Don't tell you the odds. Yeah. But what's the total network hash rate?
[00:41:47] Unknown:
984
[00:41:48] Unknown:
ex a hash. That's a lot. While we're on the dashboard, should we do some shout outs? Yeah. How do we shout them out? Only loyal people? Yeah. Maybe. I mean, we got the top 10 most loyal hashers. Yeah. Let's do it. In first place, Exergy.
[00:42:05] Unknown:
Legends. In second place, Tesserae. Third place, Canadian Hash and Coin, followed by Scott nine thousand. Fax seven seven seven. D plus plus Dylan just nixed out eco for seventh place, eco in eighth place, followed by myself and Zarka Sehash. Let me take a peek through some of the worker names, though, because I'm sure there's some funny ones. Cornminers, wonder where those are, probably in a cornfield. I hope so. Test bench. Some Bittax Turbo touches. Those are always cool. Some Nerdax q plus pluses.
Bunch of Bittaxes. War is gay from average Bitcoiner. Nice. Pisandy proof of print Bittax one and the fish tank axe. Did you guys see? That just made me think of Pazandy's filament dryer, his next project that he was working on. Yeah. He got featured in Tom's hardware with it, didn't he? Yeah. He did. It's pretty cool. I think it's based on an Avalon Nano 3S, but he gutted the hash board out of the chassis that it came with and three d printed a whole a whole system and has the Canon API talking to a little screen. So right on the screen where you can set the temperature of the filament drying enclosure, it also shows you the hash rate all in one cohesive display. So it's really cool. That dude's a wizard. It's a really slick build. Yeah. He did a write up on heapunx.org if you're curious on our forum. Hardestblocks.org
[00:43:22] Unknown:
is also in there. That's a cool website. Oh yeah. They added a specific section for like home miners. I guess it's a little bit hard to That's cool. It's called open source blocks.
[00:43:35] Unknown:
Yeah, it's hard to How many have there been?
[00:43:37] Unknown:
He's got, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight on there. And he ranks them by the difficulty of the block that they got. It's pretty badass. He's got one, in April that was 21 times the network requirement for the the difficulty to solve a block. So Wow. Big overachiever.
[00:44:02] Unknown:
It's pretty cool. What was this I saw about GG mining two blocks with like a nerd QX or something? It was so it was a weird
[00:44:11] Unknown:
misunderstanding. PavlinX posted well, so PavlinX posted that GG had found two blocks in seven months with his home miners. But I think when we we dug into it, because I was like, that's insane. Like, first of all, it's insane that someone would home mine, like, solo mine two blocks in seven months. That is just ridiculously lucky. But yeah, there was someone on Noster who was like asking for the text of the Reddit post from the original person that did it. And Gigi posted it and it kind of looked like it was him. So it wasn't him. He was he was responding to someone Yeah. Copying and pasting the Reddit post text. Yeah. Reddit is super dumb and they don't let you connect if you're using a VPN.
Like any VPN, you just can't load the website, which is really stupid. So, yeah, he just copy pasted the text, but it was it was a post on Reddit from someone else who is just like the luckiest dude ever apparently. And seven months ago, solved a block with a nerd QX. And then just the other day, SoloMind another block with an Avalon Q, I think it was. Both of them to his self hosted, node running on Umbral. Was he the guy running public pool? Yeah. He was running public pool on Umbral. Dude, is this like you think this is all real? It's hard to know. It's really hard to know.
I mean, I guess he could, like, potentially sign a message with the address in the, like, Coinbase payout from both of them. That would prove it. Don't think he did that. Did he reuse the same address? Do you know? Well, I don't know. In the That's a good question. That is a good question. I should look into that. Do you know what the block numbers are?
[00:45:49] Unknown:
Let's see. I don't have it up. Let me see if I can find it. I don't mean to, like, derail the show, but I'm just super curious about this. That'd be insane. That would be insane. Let's see. Here, maybe we can find it real quick. While those guys are searching for that stuff, the $2.56 foundation is set up to receive donations via Lightning and also directly to our Bitcoin address. There's a number of ways to support the show. Hash rate is always a fun way to do it because if a block gets mined, the foundation gets the block reward to support open source Bitcoin mining development. So visit foundation.org to learn more there.
We can use all the help we can get. Yes. We can. I can't find it readily.
[00:46:33] Unknown:
Here it is. The the user's name is eight of space, like eight spelled out, and he found block. The the the first one was 920440, and the second one was 948146.
[00:46:51] Unknown:
So let's pull these up. 46 was the second one? Yes. It looks like that second one's only got one transaction,
[00:46:58] Unknown:
but it is public pool. So I don't think he reused the address, but. Yeah. Different address. Yeah. Both from public pool and Umbral. So, yeah. I mean, I I guess that would be the way for him to prove that it was him is that he has control over both those addresses. Right? You can, like I think you can just sign a message with He shouldn't do it. Address. Yeah. Mean I mean thing is, like, you know, there's nothing good is gonna come out of you,
[00:47:20] Unknown:
like, identifying yourself as the owner of Yeah. 6 and a quarter Bitcoin. Yeah. Don't dox yourself if you're listening to this show, but I'm just it's just so astronomically unlikely to even hit one block, let alone two in less than a year. I mean, how can you help but be a little skeptical? I mean, I hope it's true because it's amazing. And I would love I'm jealous. I wish that were me. But, dude, I hope it's real. It would just be nice to validate whether it's real or not because you never know. I mean, people say all sorts of crazy stuff, but I don't know. I guess there's really no reason to doubt that
[00:48:01] Unknown:
it's not true. I really like that whoever it was that mined these blocks was mining to their own node. I think that is the ultimate flex to do that, to mine to your own node, fully self sovereign, like no one can stop you. You're in control of the whole operation. If you're solo mining, that is absolutely the way to go.
[00:48:23] Unknown:
It's really cool. Yeah. And with, like, very, accessible hardware between the mining devices and the node and the software running on it. Like, this is I mean, you could probably spin up a very similar setup to what this guy had in a couple of hours, you know, minus the initial blockchain download. But Yeah. Yeah. It's getting easier and easier. Right? Like, with things like Umbral and Start Nine, Start OS,
[00:48:48] Unknown:
and then, you know, there's, I think, there's packages you can install that have public pool, CK pool. Like, it's just it's significantly easier to do now, which is is a win. I remember years ago trying to figure out how to do it myself, and it was not easy. It was really hard. Yeah. And the Avalon Q too. That's a
[00:49:08] Unknown:
that's a beast of a little machine. It's like 90 terahash. Yeah. Yeah. Just looks like a little desktop PC tower almost. There was
[00:49:17] Unknown:
you know, obviously this isn't verified, but he he was talking about his equipment. And it just he's got like this whole handful of minors he's talking about. He's got a three Nerd Q axes and three Nerd Axes, or maybe those are Nerd Miners. He's got this Avalon Q. Oh, he's got four Avalon Qs. He's got oh, and then he got six more Nerd Axes. He's balling out. So he has 500.
[00:49:46] Unknown:
Hey. It's worth it now, baby. Yeah.
[00:49:49] Unknown:
Dude's got a lot of Bitcoin in. And it's just it's so cool to to have all that and, you know, point it at your own
[00:49:56] Unknown:
your own node, find to your own node. I gotta run here, gents. Should we wrap up or do you want me to just drop? Sorry. I had something come up. We're a little over an hour, so I think we can wrap it up. I just wanna say if that is one guy who got both those blocks, I'm very proud of him for not reusing the same Bitcoin address. Smart move. Smart move. But yeah. We'll be doing this again next wait. Next Wednesday is the TAM the TEMS, the Texas Energy and Mining Summit. So I think we're gonna skip pod two fifty six next week.
[00:50:30] Unknown:
Correct? Correct. But we'll be live all of Tuesday. Well, yeah. The
[00:50:34] Unknown:
May 19, the two fifty six crew will be live from Austin, Texas doing telehash number four. So be on the lookout for that. And then we'll be back with pod two fifty six on Wednesday, the twenty seventh at what was it? Twenty one hundred UTC? Yes, sir. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for your time, you guys. It was really good catching up with you. If you're listening to this, you can find all sorts of information to learn more at 256foundation.org.
[00:51:04] Unknown:
Thank you, everyone. Let's go. Cheers. See you.
Gentlemen, welcome. Pod two fifty six number 114. It's been a couple weeks.
[00:00:06] Unknown:
It has.
[00:00:08] Unknown:
There's a lot that's been going on and this is actually the first time I've had a chance to sit down with either of you in recent days. So I'm going to be learning about all the goings ons just in real time with our audience here from you guys. Some stuff has happened. Yeah. First of all, how are you both doing? Doing pretty good. Yeah, Doing pretty good. And I feel like it's been a whirlwind the last couple of weeks. Can't can't believe It's been going crazy. I can't believe it's only been two weeks. There's been so much going on. You guys look like absolute rock stars at the conference. Maybe that's a good place to start. Sad that I missed it, but really happy that you guys were able to show up in full force and represent the foundation
[00:00:54] Unknown:
and get everything done that you guys got done. So, yeah, tell me about it. What was the conference like? We dove right into it on on Monday. Right, Scott? We kind of well, first, we all got there on Sunday and we're able to see each other in the evening, which was fun. Immediately, hung out, had a couple drinks, had a team dinner. Then Monday, we had our panel about open sourcing the mining stack, which was probably my favorite. I think we crushed it. I'm waiting for that video to go live. They haven't posted it yet. Yeah. Was that on the Energy stage. Energy stage? Okay.
And then and then we won a $100,000,
[00:01:27] Unknown:
and then we did one more panel. Just like that? Wow. Yeah, just like that. Awesome. Tyler, you did another panel. I know I did another panel too in there, right? Yeah.
[00:01:36] Unknown:
Yeah, it flew by and there was a heat pump panel in there as well, which was a good time. Appreciate the support. Saw you guys in the audience. Then Scott had some fun panels with some banter back and forth with some people that have different opinions. Yeah. I was on the the home mining panel
[00:01:54] Unknown:
moderated by Tatum, which was cool. It was Leo from Kanan, me, and Avril from Altair. It started off That's an interesting lineup. It started off very civil, but I don't know. Avril and I were kinda sitting next to each other on the other side from Leo and Tatum. And, yeah. It started off very civil. I guess the recording will be up at some point, but It was epic because Leo had no idea what was going on. He, he you know, in our pre sort of, like, introduction email that we did before the panel, he was like, great. You know, we're gonna talk about all this home mining stuff. And then I don't know. Avril and I just didn't get into it until we did on the stage. But, you know, I, of course, had to bring up my open source take on the side of home mining, and Avril is is not a fan. So we got into it a little bit.
[00:02:49] Unknown:
You know, as someone who's been kind of on the outside of that debate, I've obviously clicked on a couple Twitter threads, but I'm not following it religiously. What it felt like from the audience perspective for me and a couple of the other guys that were there is just the disagreement seems to be like, open source doesn't work when you're trying to get the cheapest dollars per terahash. That's not my driving north star. I'm just gonna make the cheapest miner for your desktop, blah blah blah. People want good products. And it and it seems to miss the point a little bit, which is the open source building blocks are references so that we can, you know, shatter the glass ceiling here and redefine the whole ecosystem, not so much that you can get $5 off per terahash. I eventually think it will lead to that, but it seemed to me, Scott, I don't know, like the panel was kind of you guys were kind of talking past each other in that sense. He didn't really get what you were trying to say. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I take like
[00:03:37] Unknown:
the freedom angle of it in that, you know, to have property centralization, it requires things to be open source and not controlled by a single entity. And it's really a freedom angle. And I think Avril seems to think that you just can't make money with open source, and he's a hardware seller. He's not a manufacturer. He's a he's a hardware seller.
[00:03:59] Unknown:
I just think that that's a little bit shortsighted. Well, lot of these guys will mention that the chips aren't open source, and so your whole argument is void because the chips aren't open source. How do you
[00:04:09] Unknown:
refute that? What's the way you walk through that to someone who may make that claim? I mean, it really doesn't matter. Right? It doesn't matter. You know, this is kinda what I was saying on stage is that the the source for the two fifty six Foundation projects, the source for Bitaxe is open. It's out there. You can go and look at it. You know? Yes. The ASIC, the chip itself is not open source, but there is no, like, requirement that it be open source, you know, all the way down to the atomic level. That's just obviously, that would be ideal, but doesn't, you know, it doesn't invalidate the fact that the source for the hardware is out there and that provides, you
[00:04:49] Unknown:
know, substantial level of freedom for everyone who's involved. I've got a comment here because I've I've spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to explain this to Avril in various chats. And he's one of these, I've noticed that he's one of these guys that despite new information absolutely will not change his opinion. And no matter what kind of information I've presented to him, he walks away from our arguments with the same opinion he walked in with, which has been really frustrating for me. And it's sad to hear that he went on stage sputtering these same arguments. So, you know, at a high level, what I've tried explaining to him is that words matter and words have definitions for a reason. And there is a definition for open source hardware.
And if anyone wants to read along, they can go to shwa.org/resources/opensourcehardwaredefinition. And in there, the Open Source Hardware Association has defined what open source hardware means. And I'm not gonna read everything here, but just a couple sentences I do wanna point out for listeners is that the definition of open source hardware includes that the hard, and I'm quoting here, the hardware source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it. Ideally, open source hardware uses readily available components and materials, standard processes, open infrastructure, unrestricted content, and open source design tools to maximize the ability of individuals to make and use hardware. End quote. But it goes on to say and explain that it's going to be next to impossible for integrated circuit manufacturers, chip makers, you name it, to open source their components.
And so the fact that the component itself is not open source does not negate the fact that the design for the hardware, which has a closed source chip on it, is in fact open source. So open source hardware can in fact have closed source components on it. The components themselves do not need to be open source, the design of the hardware needs to be open source. And that is factual, that is objective. No matter how you look at it, it does not change. Words have definitions for a reason, and open source hardware is no different. Well said. Yeah. Yeah. Mean, I think they make it pretty clear.
[00:07:24] Unknown:
And, you know, to be fair, the Open Source Hardware Association is just one group that's advocating for open source hardware. You know, they have these definitions for what they certify as open source hardware. I think it makes a lot of sense. But, you know, I think what is required for open source is to have the source, right, be open. I think Avril just he doesn't like this project due to I don't know what, and he's just kinda looking for things to to try and discredit it, which, you know, whatever.
[00:07:56] Unknown:
Open source hardware versus open hardware. That was a nitpick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you were kinda saying or correct me if I'm wrong here. Like, what's the difference? The source is there. Yeah. I don't know. He wants to discredit it for whatever personal reasons. Doesn't think it's gonna can work. But Well, it didn't get any of us down. We still had a great time in Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. Vegas was Vegas was amazing.
[00:08:18] Unknown:
It was it was such it was so crazy. Right? Like, there's so many people there. So many people were fired up on mining and two fifty six projects. You know, Schnitzel brought the Doom Axe, which was so cool. It was so cool. He, like, put that together in basically the week leading up to the show, and it is a it's a box. It's a battery powered box that he three d printed and designed. Inside, it has a LibreBoard control board running Mugena, running HydroPool, it's connected to a Bitaxe that serves as the miner. The whole thing's battery powered. It has a screen on it that shows Dee's amazing dashboard.
It has a bunch of LED lights, and it has another little smaller screen that shows a bunch of, like, stats about, like, the battery life and everything else. And then And it could play Doom. In true hacker fashion, if you, like, push the button he's got a little joystick next to it. If you push the button, I think it was, like, five times, it launches Doom, and you can play Doom on it. And the LEDs show you your, like, your your life and ammo supply in the game. And so he was running around with this thing, showing it to everyone, and people were just going nuts for it. And it was so cool because it was battery powered.
It was connected over WiFi, I think, to a hotspot he had running in his pocket. And, you know, you could just see the whole stack running right there, like, in his hands. It was really, really cool. And we're we you know, it brought up a lot of interesting discussions about how how easily it is to use AI tools to build this stuff. Right? Because the source is out there. Right? So now you can point your your agents at the source and be like, I wanna add this. And it just rapidly iterate on it, and that's how we got all this stuff going in such a short amount of time. So while Well Well, it's like We were go ahead. It's it's not a you know, this isn't like a device that's for sale or practical. Right? You only get a couple hours out of the box. Even though people ask how much it was. Yeah. People were like, where can I buy it? And I don't think it's for sale. But the the cool thing it was just a demonstration of like, look. Now you can take all these tools that are out there and open source, and you can put them together and add your rad stuff on top, whatever that may be, in like a record amount of time. Well, so much so that Schnitzel added Proto Fleet at the Proto booth live with the Proto team in a matter of minutes. Yeah. Yeah. You should talk about that. That was really cool. So Proto released their their source for Proto Fleet, their miner management software, and they were talking about that at their booth. It was a cool booth, by the way. They all the block companies were together. It kinda they called it a block party. They all looked like little houses on a street corner kind of. And the the mining one was a garage, which was quite fun. They had all the workbenches and tools and some literature linking to the the GitHub repo for Protofleet. And Mugena is not a default supported firmware in Proto Fleet, BrainsOS, LuxOS, Bitmain, What's Minor firmware out of the box? And so Schnitzel brought the DumaX over there and chat with Caleb. Shout out to Caleb at at Proto
[00:11:13] Unknown:
who leads the Fleet development. And they got Mugena, I think, like, when I say they, Claude code or some some vibe coding agent help, got Mugena baked into a fork of Fleet as a viable firmware so you can and then he started running it on the DumaX in conjunction with the HydraPool. Yeah. And showing the On the screen. Yeah. Proto Fleet dashboard on the display that's on the device. Just got it up running so quickly. Well, and then he saw that the BITX has too low of a power consumption to be recognized in fleet. So it's a very low resolution, obviously, bid axe power draw. And so he already submitted a PR to fix that live from the booth. Oh, cool.
[00:11:57] Unknown:
So cool. It's incredible. This is how we work. The amount of innovation that's occurred, like, just a couple, maybe three years ago at Mining Disrupt. You might remember someone walking around with a s nine in a backpack, and it was mining live while they were walking around the demo floor. You know, closed source hardware, running closed source firmware, mining to a closed source pool. Fast forward a couple years, and we've got Schnitzel walking around with a new and improved sleek, quiet, battery operated device in his hand, running open source hardware, open source firmware, mining to a self hosted instance of HydroPool. It's just incredible.
[00:12:39] Unknown:
So proud of everything you guys were doing out there. Yeah. He had a he had a full full node running on the box too, running on LibreBoard. Right? He had the SSD in there and everything. Didn't he use some AI help to, like, vibe code the dimensions of his three d printed case as well? I mean, he built that thing in, like, eight days or something. Yeah. That was that was really cool. Like, even the, you know, the mechanical design of the box, I think he he vibe coated it all and three d printed it out. It was really slick. The speed of development is absolutely going astronomical.
[00:13:12] Unknown:
It was really fun. Yeah. I would say I had a blast at Vegas because I didn't waste any time trying to talk to the Chinese miners. So that made it much more enjoyable. But, yeah, we we were keeping busy. We also talked about open source mining on HRF's Freedom Go Up stage, which was the coolest stage in the conference. Right by the entrance, all the best folks in the game talking about freedom tech and human rights. It was it was fantastic. And Wonklue got to join us on that one. It was it wasn't recorded officially. Someone recorded it from the audience and put it on YouTube, and I shared it on X. Oh, really? A little spicy. So if you wanna check that out It get a little spicy. Yeah. We got into the the sins of Bitmain and
[00:13:53] Unknown:
While everyone was holding a Bitmain goodie bag. Yes. Yes. The the, like, official, you know, when you check-in, like, goodie bag that everyone got was, like well, it said Bitmain on it, but it was, like, the shittiest bag. It was It was a trash bag. It was a trash bag, and it came sealed, and it had a handle at the top, but the only place where you could open it was at the bottom. It was just It was kind of like a tamper proof bag. I was like, what? Who designed this thing? Like, what was in the bag? You couldn't hold it if you'd Like a Rubik's cube and some knickknacks.
I just was like, we put this bag together. Because, like, you couldn't hold it by the handle if you'd opened it because you had to open it on the bottom. It was just and it said Bitmain on it. But, yeah, I thought that was funny.
[00:14:37] Unknown:
What do what do you think that says about their firmware? I don't know. Their firmware is also closed like the bag.
[00:14:43] Unknown:
Yeah. Sealed and it doesn't work very well. D plus plus and her friend at Avento Brianna put together an amazing Mario Kart tournament that the two five six foundation team competed in. And then the top four, I wanna say, time based contestants, so the four fastest competitors throughout the week were able to go do the finals on the main stage on the last day, which is so cool. Did you get to watch it in the in the large rooms, Scott? I know Ryan went over there. How was that? We're we're up in the in the front row. You know, I had to sit through a little bit of,
[00:15:17] Unknown:
what's his name? That guy who AfroMan? AfroMan. Yeah. We had to sit through a little bit of that. That was actually really terrible. But, then we got to see the the final race, the final Mario Kart race. And Dee and Brianna did a talk, like, on the main stage, and then the whole race was projected behind the contestants up there. It was really cool. It was really cool. And they have a they have, like, a lightning address posted and a pot, you know, for the winner. And it it went up to, like, 3,000,000 sats, like, right away. It was really cool to see everyone sending a bunch of Bitcoin. So people for the audience were adding to the pot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was going up really fast. It was really exciting. It was a crazy race. It was on, like, Rainbow Road, right? So super hard. There was apparently the the finalists there was one guy, I forget his name, that I recognized from he was the winner at TabConf for the Mario Kart competition. And then another guy, apparently, that was a winner from another Other pros. Race. Yes. These guys are really good. Really good. But, yeah, it was a cool race. It's rainbow roads, so they're falling off the sides all the time. I won my bid axe from one of the races we did. Shout out to Abundant Minds in SoloSatoshi that helped me get that. Got it got it up on the hashtag. Yeah. Was so cool. They had tons of you know, they were set up Dee and Brianna were set up in the, like, the lobby area with a, you know, cool place where basically anyone could go and race and try and qualify.
[00:16:40] Unknown:
But there was a bunch of prizes that went along that that it was really cool. It was really, really cool. They do a nice job. And then I think the big news, Eko, is we we had a great time working with the Mera Foundation and being a part of that competition, the community competition to try and win and successfully win the $100,000 contribution to the foundation to support open source mining development through our developers. So Yeah. So that was exciting. That's huge. For people that are listening that may not be familiar, what is the Merit Foundation?
[00:17:10] Unknown:
What was going on with the giveaway and what is $2.56 going to do with that money? Yeah. So on the first day of the conference,
[00:17:18] Unknown:
Fred Thiel, Merit's CEO, announced the Merit Foundation. My understanding is it's an initiative to support Bitcoin ecosystem projects that they deem important to keep Bitcoin true to its open source ethos and spread education, a bunch of different efforts. Would you say that's right, Scott? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. It's pretty cool that they're putting this together. Yeah. Very cool. And to and shout out to Isabelle, our friend Isabelle. She's now leading the Mera Foundation. So we were we were working with her throughout the conference, but they kick started the foundation by announcing a competition saying, hey, you, the community, why don't you vote on one of three projects to win this initial contribution of a $100,000 that we will support to that project? So the two five six foundation was up against Satanet.
That's Obi's project for ISP in Africa. I'm going off the dome here, so I'm trying to remember. That's right. Yeah. It's it's satellite Internet to sort of underserved areas like Bitcoin backed. Super cool project. Definitely. And then another one is Liber Dade Satoshi. I
[00:18:22] Unknown:
I'm butchering it, Scott. Help me out. I think that's right. Liber Dade Satoshi.
[00:18:27] Unknown:
Which is Bitcoin education in Latin America. Yes.
[00:18:32] Unknown:
Another awesome project. Yeah. Yeah. It was I mean so, you know, Mera Foundation picked the three projects. Libreria de Satoshi. There you go. Libreria de Satoshi. Yeah. Mera Foundation picked the three projects, and they're all awesome projects. Right? You know, we were out there sort of campaigning for two fifty six to win. They're all, like, incredibly solid projects. And the the voting was was, like, neck and neck the whole time. It was.
[00:18:57] Unknown:
Yeah. It was keeping us on our toes for sure. It was suspenseful watching for sure from home because
[00:19:03] Unknown:
it wasn't just like a short and sweet voting block. It was like over multiple days. I think like two or three days. Right? Yeah. I think two days at least, maybe two and a half days. And we kept passing one another. It was, you know, was neck and neck for a while. At first, like, I think two fifty six was in the lead pretty early on. I'm like, oh, yeah. We totally got this. And then the next time I checked, we were behind we were in dead last. I'm like, oh my god. So it's a roller coaster. But Mera was great along with the other projects. They made pins for all the projects so people could get some little tokens to to flag who you had voted for at the Mera Foundation booth. And Scott and they were able to do some quick just word on the street style interviews
[00:19:42] Unknown:
with Diego there who is helping film some content. And then I think you have a a more in-depth interview coming out soon, Scott, with Merra Foundation TV that was announced. Yeah? Yeah. I did a
[00:19:52] Unknown:
a conversation with Isabelle for MFTV, which, yeah, I guess they're releasing soon. Looks like she interviewed a bunch of Yeah. People, a bunch of, you know, big shots in the industry. So that was pretty cool. I'm looking forward to that coming out. Yeah. And overall,
[00:20:09] Unknown:
it's awesome to see a large organization like Mera spin up the Mera Foundation. And a lot of this credit goes to Isabelle, one of our our proudest champions is they seem to get what we're building towards and the importance of an open source mining stack, which is really nice to hear. It was really fun working with them. What's the plans with that 100 k? Just At like a high level, nothing. You don't have to like Yeah. High level? Dollar for dollar line item. Continue funding the developers of our four core pillar projects. So number one, Hashboard, Mogino firmware,
[00:20:43] Unknown:
Libra control board, and Hydro Pool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we still have more fundraising to do. This isn't sort of, you know, this doesn't we're not set for good here with that amount, but, it does give us a big boost that we're gonna use to fund those projects and, get the next revisions of them out there, increase adoption, build the community around it. But really the, people working on these projects, Jungly, Schnitzel, and Ryan and myself, we're working really hard on this stuff. They're big projects,
[00:21:16] Unknown:
but they have a ton of potential, and there's just so many things to do. So having a little bit more runway to get those things funded is is gonna be huge. Yep. That's great. I'm so happy the two fifty six Foundation was able to, one, participate in that, get recognized by the Mara Foundation as doing important work. And I mean, the fact that the two fifty six Foundation won and now has some more money to extend that runway, like you said, it's just, it's great. That's what I think should be happening. Obviously, I'm biased, but it's just great to see this all coming together and watching the foundation grow. I mean, you both just took board seats just a couple months ago in February. You know, we've got more large
[00:22:01] Unknown:
dollar supporters coming to the table and it just really seems like, you know, there's no ceiling here for the foundation and that the momentum feels significant and it's a good feeling. And one thing I wanna add a little bit of color to is aside from all the very hard work that all the developers are doing, the laborious engineering that goes into electrical engineering, software engineering, etcetera, to build these building blocks into the open source pillars that we want the community to take as reference designs, as the de facto open source Linux kernel of a mining firmware implementation.
That's not just engineering. There is a story to be told here. There's a community to build. There's an ecosystem to build. There's eventual working groups that we're probably going to have. There's there's going to be people that have to test this in in certain mining deployments and and provide feedback. Right? And so this is the importance of the foundation kinda telling the story to the community at large, all types of Bitcoin miners across the planet, really, to get to that eventual point. It's a bigger task at hand than just making some software and saying, okay, it's done. Right? Yeah. That's that's a really good point. I mean, there's so many other things that go on. I mean, I know well, both both you guys have done just a ton of work on getting this foundation
[00:23:19] Unknown:
set up and running smoothly and making sure that, you know, all this stuff gets in front of people, that people are aware of it, that people who are interested in it can figure out, you know, what's going on and getting get involved. Yeah. There's there's a ton of stuff that I've seen you guys working on that's been just phenomenal. The website, the new website we launched right before.
[00:23:41] Unknown:
I was just gonna say that speaking of community support and engagement, Tyler, you busted your ass on redesigning the website. And I think you launched that the day before or day of the conference. Yes.
[00:23:54] Unknown:
Talk us through the website and the forum. That goes back to well, thank you for teeing me up, guys. But this goes back to build the community platform, the ecosystem so that regardless of your entry point, be it a newcomer to Bitcoin mining, someone that's got 10 megawatts and is trying to understand how an open source building block can solve a particular problem for them, etcetera. Something like a website and a community forum and a dedicated group chat and links to all the repos and clear clear explanation of the mission and the vision and and progress. So embedding PRs into the website in one cohesive ecosystem, I view that as really important. Even as even the little things like a newsroom where we can put out little press releases, like, when we do have the success of winning a competition like the Marrow Foundation started and getting that $100 so that it adds credibility to the organization. It shows organization.
It shows cleanliness. We got our stuff together. Right? And I think it's really helpful to bring us to the next phase of whenever anyone arrives here, they're going, this is exactly what I thought it was or this isn't what I thought it was. And that makes so much sense. And so that was really my goal with the website, bringing the whole ecosystem together across all the different projects, the projects on our GitHub repo that we support, the ecosystem projects, I call them that aren't perhaps funded directly right now through our core four pillar projects, but broader under more broadly under our umbrella, as well as our community events like the Telehash and the podcast that we do each week and the newsletter that Eco writes up. It's all now on one domain. You can find it all. So that was the goal there. So cool. And the forum too. Talk will you go in-depth on the forum? Because I know
[00:25:34] Unknown:
originally we were trying to do like Telegram, but that's got some problems. Then my confidence in Telegram just kind of plummeted when Pavel was arrested in France and they strong armed him into essentially giving the French government a backdoor or all government a backdoor. So I don't know. I mean, it's not like we're doing anything sensitive on Telegram but still it's just I don't think that's the best place for community support because a lot of newcomers who may not be very familiar with that platform are, like, ripe for the scammers.
So I think, you know, moving to this discourse based forum is
[00:26:11] Unknown:
good for a number of reasons. But please go ahead. Yeah. And and I'll also throw Discord into that mix alongside Telegram where they've made some questionable decisions on their platform with identity verification for accounts and whatnot. But really the thought here is if you're a contributor to the open source projects, you're gonna know and love GitHub, and you can contribute there with pull requests and comments and discussions natively in GitHub. But the thought here with the forum as well, what if I'm not a contributor yet, but I just wanna learn perhaps how to where to start? How do I set this up on my start nine? How do I set this up on an Umbral? What do I need to do if I want to ask a question about a specific component? Where do you guys order it? Things like that. Just tips. That's where we wanted a forum, a good old fashioned forum like like you're buying like you're trying to find a solution to a problem on a twenty year old pickup or whatever.
I mean, and Discourse is a great platform for that. It's it's self hostable, so we're self hosting it. We have sovereignty in that regard, and it organizes different topics into topics or posts into categories. So we have a general category for general questions, and then we have categories for each of the the four core pillar projects as well as one for ASIC RS that Brett is contributing a lot to. So we've already had a good amount of sign ups. I've seen 30 plus folks sign up. We integrated a a calendar into it so you can see all the upcoming events like the telehash and the podcast. Ryan had the first Mugena developer call, which was fantastic bringing a handful of folks up to speed on Mugena. We should talk about that, by the way. But the forum is really your one stop shop where you should go if you have a specific question and you want to be able to come back to it and not lose it in a long telegram channel chat.
[00:27:51] Unknown:
And I'm excited about I think that's, this is really important for discovery too. Right? A lot of people just do like a web search or maybe they ask an AI agent. Right? And this stuff is going to be, is going to be cataloged by those search things so they can they can find it. There's a lot of people who that's just not how they operate, right, is to join a you know, they wanna find out some more information, they join a telegram group and, like, ask the questions or scroll way back. I think this will get people involved
[00:28:19] Unknown:
much more and and much more like specifically too. Right? If they, you know, Google a particular problem they have, and that's something that we're talking about in the community, they're gonna find it right away. Yeah. And I'm still dialing in the knobs there. I'm not, like, like, long time Reddit mod with all this experience. Right? But there's, like, a million options in Discourse from how many vote or how many posts someone has to see before they get the next level of permissions, and then they can type more or whatever. So please give us feedback. There is a category in there called site feedback if you run into a quirky issue.
But we have enabled things like mark mark is solved. I enabled that plugin. So if someone asks a specific question and then five replies later, someone has the perfect answer, us as moderators can come in, mark it as solved, boom, done, and it kinda closes that topic so that it doesn't just turn into a big garbled mess of discussion. So these are the kind of features that I think will be really helpful as the community grows. If you haven't checked out the new website, you can find it at 256foundation.org
[00:29:19] Unknown:
and the forum is forumfoundation.org. And they both look great, feel great, way way better than the original website despite as much as hard as I tried to make a website. I am not a web developer. AI got really good, Eko. You and me both. Yeah. AI got really good. And, yeah, it just it just works. It does what it's supposed to do. And I think it helps communicate the mission and the vision of the foundation a lot better than than I was able to capture on the original website. So I do appreciate that Cause communication is key and that's what the website is there for. And yeah, don't, you know, telegram messages aren't web searchable.
Right?
[00:30:00] Unknown:
And that's like you pointed out, another great feature of this forum is that people can stumble into it from just general web searches. Mhmm. I feel like stuff that I Google, you know, comes up all the time on Bitcoin talk, and, you know, I think that's a lot of people get into it that way. You know, that that forum is is kind of a mess and sort of all over the place and lots of shit coinery and stuff. So hopefully, this can this can be grow to be, like, a really good resource for people who wanna find out about this stuff and get involved. And I have one
[00:30:32] Unknown:
comment to make too if any of our haters are listening. We don't have to dive into it too much, but this is the kind of stuff that takes real thought and effort and time and is not just purely spent on vibe coding some firmware to your liking and keeping it closed source to yourself and then ship hosting on the Internet about how you solved it better, cheaper, faster, and we're a bad steward of funds. So I got into my own little Twitter beef rabbit hole that we don't have to go into, but it was my first experience with it, which is shocking because I'm a pretty opinionated guy.
So it was due at some point, but that's my two sats there. We've all been there.
[00:31:13] Unknown:
Sometimes, you know, you can't make everybody happy. You know, some people just like Avril, no matter what information you give him, he walks away from the argument with the same opinion as he walked in with. Other people, you know, no matter what you tell them or what you show them, they're always just, they formed these weird opinions that are not accurate and there's no way to change their mind. So it is what it is, man. Should we talk quickly about Dev Call? Yeah. Let's let's hear about this Mugena Dev Call. So the next one is Monday.
[00:31:46] Unknown:
We're gonna do one the day before the telehash. Ryan did schedule that. That's on the calendar on the forum. But the first one, what would you say, Scott? We really had maybe a dozen or so folks on there getting brought up to speed. Ryan articulated his vision for Mugena,
[00:32:02] Unknown:
what he's currently working on. We all walked through introducing ourselves and perhaps some features or problems or challenges we wanted to solve or overcome with an open source firmware like Mugena? Yeah. I thought it was really cool. You know, was the first one, so it was sort of establishing like what this Dev Call is all about. And I think Ryan did it, you know, he did it perfectly. He ran a great call. I mean, there's obviously a bunch of people there. And we talked about, you know, how to contribute, sort of the flow of development. Like if you have a new feature, how do you kind of get it out there? And then how do you get it merged?
How do you how do you get it tested? And then then ultimately merged, which is really important. I think it really helps to to kind of set up these these goals and obviously the their their policies, but obviously they can change, but to, like, kind of set up some framework for how this is done early on because, you know, there's gonna be a lot of people who are interested in this, who are interested in working on it, especially now that you can vibe code things so fast. So, like Yeah. How do we how do we harness all this amazing energy towards a, you know, towards a productive goal? And I thought that was great to get that all out there on the Dev Call. Yeah, it's no small feat in the AI world to maintain a clean repo. Yeah, no small feat at all.
Mugene is so new, It's it's gonna be it is going to be such a big project with so many different facets targeting all kinds of different miners, all sorts of different functionality. Right? Different end goals of the user. Right? Do you wanna have this be a part of a big fleet and where you're just optimizing for hash rate, or is this gonna go in a controller for a water heater? Right? There's a lot of different facets. So I think Ryan has done a great job of kinda modularizing everything to make it so that it can operate in all these different modes without being just this, like, clown car of, like, spaghetti code. I'm good at adding spaghetti code. I mean, I always wonder what the the agent what kinda code the agent is writing. Hopefully, it's it's good. It's gotta be. It's gotta be. It works. It works. Totally works. And now we're gearing up for telehash number four Yes. Happening next Tuesday down in Austin, which we're the most organized we've ever been. Yeah. Been crushing it, like, you know, making sure that all the people with Hashrate out there are aware of this, getting everyone, like, you know, aware of the date, how to how to contribute.
[00:34:25] Unknown:
It's pretty cool. It's all Rod, man. He's keeping me on my toes, giving me my giving me my seven 7AM
[00:34:31] Unknown:
phone call from Rod. He waited till 7AM. You're lucky. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are there any
[00:34:37] Unknown:
confirmed hash donors that you guys can talk about? Yes. We've had some great supporters.
[00:34:44] Unknown:
Wilson Mining, they are awesome. And I wanna say Indiana. The Cornfield Miners, they've got a a hosting company, and they sent out a news blast to their customers, which is awesome. And I think they have some hash rate themselves, so they'll point our way. Compass mining is gonna point us some HashRate. Electron Energy, nice hash. Brain's HashPower is in the works, and we've been working with Wrigley as well. Wrigley was another one of those HashRate rentals that was popular during Telehash three.
Evan over there at Wrigley, Jungly and I had a call with him. They have this really cool feature called a block party, which is effectively they are productizing Telehashes in a sense, meaning one of the services they offer is signing up to rent Hashrate on a specific day. They call them block parties. And on that day, all of that Hashrate will be rented at the price you you paid for it, and it all gets turned on to SoloMind. So it's it's a way to kinda sign up for this block party to chance your sliver of a solo mind block that would be distributed amongst your share of that that contribution.
But we worked with Evan to get a specific event on their website for the telehash, the fourth telehash. If you go to blockparty.wrigley.io/256foundation, you can actually buy your hash rate now in advance, and it will turn on during the eight hour window on May 19, which is gonna be sweet. Oh, I gotta check this out. That's a pretty slick setup. I imagine
[00:36:13] Unknown:
Megawatt, the guys that won the $2.56 Foundation, their first block Yes. At Telehash number one. Imagine they're gonna be there. They also had the highest
[00:36:23] Unknown:
difficulty at Telehash two. Yeah. That's right.
[00:36:27] Unknown:
Yeah. They they I think they've shown up for every Telehash in a very big way. I wouldn't be surprised if they're there again, even if we haven't been in direct communication with them about it. Shout out to They're aware. Either I've been messaging them. Yeah, shout out to them. Have you? Okay, good, good.
[00:36:43] Unknown:
Shout out to them. Those guys are awesome. As well as SaaS Mining. Shout out to SaaS. They're going to send us some hash. I know the operation Bitcoin guys are as well in that community. Hopefully the heat punks turn up for it. But yeah, we've got some we've got some big dogs lined up. It's gonna be exciting. But the good news right now, I was just on the Wrigley page. This is so cool because so blockparty.wrigley.io/256foundation. I can buy a petahash for the full telehash duration, eight hours, for 22,000 sats.
Jeez. It's like $17 for a petahash. Man. So we just need a thousand people to do that, and that's an exit hash. There we go. Tell your friends. Oh, that's so cool. We should we should hype that. That's a good deal. Yeah. We will hype it. Evan literally pushed this live earlier this morning. So We should talk is the first announcement of it. The we should talk about loyalty.
[00:37:39] Unknown:
This is pretty cool. This is why you might wanna, you know, rank your hash rate for the entire eight hours. So on the hash--.256f.org
[00:37:49] Unknown:
that the amazing d plus plus put together, we used and launched for Telehash number three back in January. If you've been a listener of the pod or a Telehash number three viewer, you saw this gamified dashboard for our solo mining HydroPool instance where because hydro pool is open source, we don't have the need for an actual Bitcoin address to be the username. You can use your your Noster NPUB Twitter handles, bunch of fun stuff. And there is a difficulty leaderboard that's been in there for a little bit that logs the highest difficulty of a user and worker. But now we had the idea, Zhengli and team, to add a a loyalty leaderboard that is summing your total hashes.
And so it's a way to see effectively how long you've been contributing hash rate to the Hashdash. That way you can't just turn on a home assistant automation to only enable them during live pod two fifty six recordings like Dylan. You will be exposed for that kind of behavior. So Exergy's been outed a little bit, but luckily, we've got some other miners that have been longtime supporters. So the loyalty leaderboard is live at the bottom of the page. That's great. Because the idea is that you could, like, get lucky, hit a high difficulty,
[00:38:59] Unknown:
right, and show up on that leaderboard right away. But this way, it kind of gives viewers more insight because you can only get on the loyalty leaderboard by accumulating hashes.
[00:39:14] Unknown:
Is that right? Yes. Love it. Now I think there's some some nuances that we were discussing internally about when this resets, if your miner goes offline, if you have a worker that goes offline. Do we hold your your total hash sum for a rolling amount of days and then reset it in case you turn it back on? I think that'd be interesting because I know a lot of folks have heating systems that are intermittent to maintain their spot and not just fully reset, but we'll see. I got asked it from the podium. Yeah. You did. No. Yeah. Fourth came in. Shout out to Tesserae.
They they're a Kansas City architecture firm that is they were a big supporter of the Hepunk Summit and actually had that workshop upstairs. They're very interested in helping push the needle forward for checking off boxes so that they can integrate Hashrate into
[00:40:03] Unknown:
commercial buildings, which is so cool. That's cool. So you think we'll we'll set it up so that the loyalty, is just like for the telehash, like it's just for the eight hours of the telehash? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, mean it'd be fun to
[00:40:18] Unknown:
clean slate it and be able to actually rank who had the most hashes in the eight hour window. Yeah. Yeah. Why not gamify it? I mean, you got a any gamification
[00:40:28] Unknown:
edge you can do, I think, is helpful. I mean, look at how Dylan reacted. Yeah. We've got half a petahash now.
[00:40:37] Unknown:
That's true. Yeah. Dylan's got three hun That's amazing. They're trying to keep his spot on the loyalty leaderboard.
[00:40:46] Unknown:
So is there a there's like a meetup page for the telehash if people wanna learn more. Right? This is the day before
[00:40:54] Unknown:
the Texas and Energy Mining Summit, if I recall correctly. Yeah. So try and keep things easy to find. If you just go to foundation.org/telehash, the meetup will be linked on there. Perfect. As well as the instructions and the hash dash and a little write up about all three of our previous telehashes and those takeaways as well. I mean, there's six days till the telehash.
[00:41:17] Unknown:
Number four, never hurts to practice. So if anyone wants to get started early That's right. You can visit -.256f.org and find all the connection instructions there and try it out. Just make sure it works. Couple extra hash for, you know, the next week just to make sure things are working. No big deal. Yeah. What's the website for oh, we don't we don't look at the chances, solo chance. Right? We don't. Don't tell me the odds. Don't tell you the odds. Yeah. But what's the total network hash rate?
[00:41:47] Unknown:
984
[00:41:48] Unknown:
ex a hash. That's a lot. While we're on the dashboard, should we do some shout outs? Yeah. How do we shout them out? Only loyal people? Yeah. Maybe. I mean, we got the top 10 most loyal hashers. Yeah. Let's do it. In first place, Exergy.
[00:42:05] Unknown:
Legends. In second place, Tesserae. Third place, Canadian Hash and Coin, followed by Scott nine thousand. Fax seven seven seven. D plus plus Dylan just nixed out eco for seventh place, eco in eighth place, followed by myself and Zarka Sehash. Let me take a peek through some of the worker names, though, because I'm sure there's some funny ones. Cornminers, wonder where those are, probably in a cornfield. I hope so. Test bench. Some Bittax Turbo touches. Those are always cool. Some Nerdax q plus pluses.
Bunch of Bittaxes. War is gay from average Bitcoiner. Nice. Pisandy proof of print Bittax one and the fish tank axe. Did you guys see? That just made me think of Pazandy's filament dryer, his next project that he was working on. Yeah. He got featured in Tom's hardware with it, didn't he? Yeah. He did. It's pretty cool. I think it's based on an Avalon Nano 3S, but he gutted the hash board out of the chassis that it came with and three d printed a whole a whole system and has the Canon API talking to a little screen. So right on the screen where you can set the temperature of the filament drying enclosure, it also shows you the hash rate all in one cohesive display. So it's really cool. That dude's a wizard. It's a really slick build. Yeah. He did a write up on heapunx.org if you're curious on our forum. Hardestblocks.org
[00:43:22] Unknown:
is also in there. That's a cool website. Oh yeah. They added a specific section for like home miners. I guess it's a little bit hard to That's cool. It's called open source blocks.
[00:43:35] Unknown:
Yeah, it's hard to How many have there been?
[00:43:37] Unknown:
He's got, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight on there. And he ranks them by the difficulty of the block that they got. It's pretty badass. He's got one, in April that was 21 times the network requirement for the the difficulty to solve a block. So Wow. Big overachiever.
[00:44:02] Unknown:
It's pretty cool. What was this I saw about GG mining two blocks with like a nerd QX or something? It was so it was a weird
[00:44:11] Unknown:
misunderstanding. PavlinX posted well, so PavlinX posted that GG had found two blocks in seven months with his home miners. But I think when we we dug into it, because I was like, that's insane. Like, first of all, it's insane that someone would home mine, like, solo mine two blocks in seven months. That is just ridiculously lucky. But yeah, there was someone on Noster who was like asking for the text of the Reddit post from the original person that did it. And Gigi posted it and it kind of looked like it was him. So it wasn't him. He was he was responding to someone Yeah. Copying and pasting the Reddit post text. Yeah. Reddit is super dumb and they don't let you connect if you're using a VPN.
Like any VPN, you just can't load the website, which is really stupid. So, yeah, he just copy pasted the text, but it was it was a post on Reddit from someone else who is just like the luckiest dude ever apparently. And seven months ago, solved a block with a nerd QX. And then just the other day, SoloMind another block with an Avalon Q, I think it was. Both of them to his self hosted, node running on Umbral. Was he the guy running public pool? Yeah. He was running public pool on Umbral. Dude, is this like you think this is all real? It's hard to know. It's really hard to know.
I mean, I guess he could, like, potentially sign a message with the address in the, like, Coinbase payout from both of them. That would prove it. Don't think he did that. Did he reuse the same address? Do you know? Well, I don't know. In the That's a good question. That is a good question. I should look into that. Do you know what the block numbers are?
[00:45:49] Unknown:
Let's see. I don't have it up. Let me see if I can find it. I don't mean to, like, derail the show, but I'm just super curious about this. That'd be insane. That would be insane. Let's see. Here, maybe we can find it real quick. While those guys are searching for that stuff, the $2.56 foundation is set up to receive donations via Lightning and also directly to our Bitcoin address. There's a number of ways to support the show. Hash rate is always a fun way to do it because if a block gets mined, the foundation gets the block reward to support open source Bitcoin mining development. So visit foundation.org to learn more there.
We can use all the help we can get. Yes. We can. I can't find it readily.
[00:46:33] Unknown:
Here it is. The the user's name is eight of space, like eight spelled out, and he found block. The the the first one was 920440, and the second one was 948146.
[00:46:51] Unknown:
So let's pull these up. 46 was the second one? Yes. It looks like that second one's only got one transaction,
[00:46:58] Unknown:
but it is public pool. So I don't think he reused the address, but. Yeah. Different address. Yeah. Both from public pool and Umbral. So, yeah. I mean, I I guess that would be the way for him to prove that it was him is that he has control over both those addresses. Right? You can, like I think you can just sign a message with He shouldn't do it. Address. Yeah. Mean I mean thing is, like, you know, there's nothing good is gonna come out of you,
[00:47:20] Unknown:
like, identifying yourself as the owner of Yeah. 6 and a quarter Bitcoin. Yeah. Don't dox yourself if you're listening to this show, but I'm just it's just so astronomically unlikely to even hit one block, let alone two in less than a year. I mean, how can you help but be a little skeptical? I mean, I hope it's true because it's amazing. And I would love I'm jealous. I wish that were me. But, dude, I hope it's real. It would just be nice to validate whether it's real or not because you never know. I mean, people say all sorts of crazy stuff, but I don't know. I guess there's really no reason to doubt that
[00:48:01] Unknown:
it's not true. I really like that whoever it was that mined these blocks was mining to their own node. I think that is the ultimate flex to do that, to mine to your own node, fully self sovereign, like no one can stop you. You're in control of the whole operation. If you're solo mining, that is absolutely the way to go.
[00:48:23] Unknown:
It's really cool. Yeah. And with, like, very, accessible hardware between the mining devices and the node and the software running on it. Like, this is I mean, you could probably spin up a very similar setup to what this guy had in a couple of hours, you know, minus the initial blockchain download. But Yeah. Yeah. It's getting easier and easier. Right? Like, with things like Umbral and Start Nine, Start OS,
[00:48:48] Unknown:
and then, you know, there's, I think, there's packages you can install that have public pool, CK pool. Like, it's just it's significantly easier to do now, which is is a win. I remember years ago trying to figure out how to do it myself, and it was not easy. It was really hard. Yeah. And the Avalon Q too. That's a
[00:49:08] Unknown:
that's a beast of a little machine. It's like 90 terahash. Yeah. Yeah. Just looks like a little desktop PC tower almost. There was
[00:49:17] Unknown:
you know, obviously this isn't verified, but he he was talking about his equipment. And it just he's got like this whole handful of minors he's talking about. He's got a three Nerd Q axes and three Nerd Axes, or maybe those are Nerd Miners. He's got this Avalon Q. Oh, he's got four Avalon Qs. He's got oh, and then he got six more Nerd Axes. He's balling out. So he has 500.
[00:49:46] Unknown:
Hey. It's worth it now, baby. Yeah.
[00:49:49] Unknown:
Dude's got a lot of Bitcoin in. And it's just it's so cool to to have all that and, you know, point it at your own
[00:49:56] Unknown:
your own node, find to your own node. I gotta run here, gents. Should we wrap up or do you want me to just drop? Sorry. I had something come up. We're a little over an hour, so I think we can wrap it up. I just wanna say if that is one guy who got both those blocks, I'm very proud of him for not reusing the same Bitcoin address. Smart move. Smart move. But yeah. We'll be doing this again next wait. Next Wednesday is the TAM the TEMS, the Texas Energy and Mining Summit. So I think we're gonna skip pod two fifty six next week.
[00:50:30] Unknown:
Correct? Correct. But we'll be live all of Tuesday. Well, yeah. The
[00:50:34] Unknown:
May 19, the two fifty six crew will be live from Austin, Texas doing telehash number four. So be on the lookout for that. And then we'll be back with pod two fifty six on Wednesday, the twenty seventh at what was it? Twenty one hundred UTC? Yes, sir. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for your time, you guys. It was really good catching up with you. If you're listening to this, you can find all sorts of information to learn more at 256foundation.org.
[00:51:04] Unknown:
Thank you, everyone. Let's go. Cheers. See you.
