In this lively episode recorded live on August 13, 2025 during the first night of the Proto Mining Rig launch event, we gather at an undisclosed location with a group of passionate Bitcoin enthusiasts, including Steven Wilson of Wilson Mining and Tyler Stevens. The conversation kicks off with the excitement of meeting online friends in person and the challenges of supporting the Bitcoin mining community. We delve into the intricacies of Bitcoin mining, discussing the importance of hands-on skills and the potential of integrating hash rate heating into homes and businesses. The discussion highlights the potential for Bitcoin mining to revolutionize energy use, with the possibility of converting a fraction of the world's heating energy into hash rate, thereby making Bitcoin mining more sustainable and integrated into everyday life.
We also explore the technical side of Bitcoin mining, with insights from Skot9000 on the development of the Ember One and Hydra Pool projects. The conversation touches on the challenges of creating open-source mining solutions and the importance of decentralizing mining operations. The episode wraps up with a look at the future of Bitcoin mining, emphasizing the need for open collaboration and innovation to break down centralization in the industry. The enthusiasm and dedication of the participants highlight the vibrant and evolving nature of the Bitcoin mining community.
[00:00:01]
Unknown:
Alright. We're at an undisclosed location with one or two Wilson brothers. One Wilson brother. You gotta put it right on the mic. The Chen. Eric could not make it. Yeah. Tyler Stevens and half of the Wilson brothers. How are you guys doing? Doing great. How about you? I'm doing excellent. I'm here with my friend,
[00:00:20] Unknown:
my good friend, Econo Alchemist. We got Cher, Mike. Thank you. Good to be here. Undisclosed location coming at you live.
[00:00:29] Unknown:
Dude, so we've we drove, two and a half hours to get here to wait. What? Did I just disclose the location? What's the radius? It's a radius. Maybe two and a half to 2,500,000. It's kinda like our followers. Yeah. Yeah. We have two point Depends on how fast your car is. That's right. Or maybe we flew. Right. That'd be cool.
[00:00:49] Unknown:
Dude, seriously, this is our first time seeing you live. It's my this is my first time, like, putting faces and and shaking hands with, like, everyone I talk to online, basically. And, like, you know, I feel like I know you guys all, like, really well because, like, you know, we've talked and then, like, you know, I watch all the content and stuff. So it's cool to, you know, have a place to finally, get to meet everybody.
[00:01:12] Unknown:
Here's the problem with me and Iko. We're, like, really good guys online. We're terrible humans in real life. Like, just
[00:01:21] Unknown:
bad people. It's like one of the first things I noticed. Yeah. In a way. When I got here, you already sent me on two errands to my room twice.
[00:01:30] Unknown:
Well, that's another thing. Iko and I need a lot of help. You know, when they take say, like, it takes a village to, support the two fifty six foundation? Right. It does take a village to support the two fifty six. It's always just space members helping out, but whatever. Oh, wow. Hey, so how was ETHDenver?
[00:01:45] Unknown:
You know, I didn't go, but I hear it was bad attendance. I hope it's dead.
[00:01:52] Unknown:
See, you know, I was gonna talk all nice that, you know, third spaces get along. We support our local meet ups. You come here, throw the shade, and give me my brass knuckles that you got in the the I'm just joking. Intuitively. Out to us. Dude, what are you excited what what are you doing here, by the way?
[00:02:08] Unknown:
I'm, me and Eric played a very, very small part in, helping with this Bitcoin miner and just mostly Eric giving his kind of thoughts and opinions on what he liked about the current miners, what he didn't like, what he wanted to see, and, you know, the new generation type stuff. And so, yeah, that's what that's what we're doing here. We were pretty excited to not only get asked to help the in the little ways that we did, but also get invited to to the event. We're probably far and away the smallest mining company here. No. But, yeah, it's definitely an honor to be I might have you beat on that.
[00:02:47] Unknown:
So
[00:02:48] Unknown:
in thirty seconds, who are you and what are you doing? What do you do? Yes. So I'm I'm Steven Wilson. I'm, one half of Wilson Mining. We're a very small hosting company based in Iowa. If you wanna mine Bitcoin and you don't want to deal with setting up everything or you don't have attractive power rates, you know, I'm the kind of guy that you come to to find a place to put your Bitcoin miner, and we're in charge of running it and managing everything. And you just, collect your stats in your wallet and go about your day and your life. Easy breeze.
[00:03:20] Unknown:
And so your brother's right now on,
[00:03:23] Unknown:
on the in the field right now, just He might be at the slaving away? He might be at the he might be at the site right now, plugging in miners. We had a we had delivery get delivered today, so he's probably there getting getting stuff plugged in. So good for him while I'm here hanging out and drinking or whatever. So that's one of the things, like, when everyone's, like, oh, I wanna get into
[00:03:44] Unknown:
quit my Fiat job and get into a a a Bitcoin job. Yep. But they're, like, there are no jobs for me. There's no jobs with my skill set or whatever blah blah. What do I what should I do? I'm, like, you know what? Go get a temp job. Go take a vacation week and go plug in miners. 100%. Go to, like, one of these companies, maybe Wilson Brothers or go talk to Guardrail Mining, and just go and learn how to plug in miners. Go learn the network engineering and go in learning all of that. Yep. It's just, like, amazing. Amazing. I don't know. What do you think?
[00:04:13] Unknown:
Well, yeah. I mean, the last thing you wanna do is just sit on your hands. Like, get out there and do something. Like, especially this younger generation, there's so many critical skills that are just dying with these older people, like like knowing how to turn wrenches, how to fix machinery, how to do things with your hands. Like, those are skills that are just, like, going away but are essential, and society will collapse if people don't start plugging in minors.
[00:04:42] Unknown:
Yeah. I would say that everybody Send tweet. Yeah. Everybody here is here because they just decided to start doing stuff in the Bitcoin space. So if you just start doing things and, you know, stumble around a little bit, you'll find your way. That's right. And on on those doing things real quick, that's where Tyler
[00:05:02] Unknown:
and I'm not trying to boost your ego, because I don't like you, and I don't wanna boost your ego. Yeah. Because you're not a good person. Right. Yeah. Yeah. However, I think you're on the cusp of starting and creating a like a billion dollar plus category. Straight up. Like, the heat reuse category, what was the crazy stat that you've always you talked about at the national energy mining summit in 2025, most recently in in Alaska.
[00:05:24] Unknown:
What's that 1% stat that you always like to reference? So a quarter of the world's energy is used for heat. And if 1% of that is converted to hash rate, at 27 joules per tera hash, so not even bleeding edge, It's two zeta hash added to the network. Okay. He's smart. In addition to the the 900 exahash already. So we have nine hundred nine hundred exahash. You could triple it with 1% of the heating industry.
[00:05:49] Unknown:
We can triple it with 1% of the heating industry. Yes. And the incentives align such that, you know, my grandmother, my wife, my brother, whoever uses even a washer dryer Totally. To convert 1% of that energy even.
[00:06:08] Unknown:
Yeah. And it, no longer Bitcoin's no longer wasteful, by the way, because everybody wants heat. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:16] Unknown:
And, well, and it it's just comfort heating. Right? It's not even, like, industrial applications
[00:06:21] Unknown:
or Yeah. If we crack that with some really hot chips, then the market is 50% of the energy used on earth.
[00:06:30] Unknown:
Wow. So tell me what the world looks like then if we get 1%.
[00:06:37] Unknown:
I think you're gonna have a lot of hash rate integrated into homes and businesses that this is where I get a little spicy immediately. There's no marketing part departments to pay. There's no PR or investor relations. There's no public shareholders. I don't wake up and look at the hash price. My hash rate heater is my water heater, and I don't think about it. And SAT show up, and it helps offset my heating bills and some blend of solar and battery technology, got a sovereign energy stack, micro grids. Everybody's heating systems are passively processing transactions for open money for all.
[00:07:11] Unknown:
And so I think the economics just completely flip. Right? Rather than and this is where I'm really interested. We were just joking. Not joking, but like, I'm serious about plugging in miners and learning that trade. Now think about, like, HVAC companies. Right? You have those service jobs. They're like, hey, I will give you this 10,000, $20,000 machine. And can we work out some rev share Mhmm. Where you split the first 80%, maybe a 100% of the Sats flow. Yep. I'll heat your house for basically free. Oh, yeah. Totally. And then all of a sudden after that, it's like 80%. Or if you have a savvy Bitcoiner that's like, hold up. Oh, no. Here's my Fiat. You take this. I'm gonna take the Sats, but I want you and incentivize you to maintain this. A 100%. So I'll give you 10% of the Sats flow. It was funny when we got our our boiler, which is just an m 64 Bitcoin miner in our building heating the floors.
[00:08:01] Unknown:
The plumber literally, on his own accord without us, started reaching out to Whatsminer in China, because he was so curious. Like That's hilarious. He came back to change a valve or something. He was like, yeah. I was on the phone with someone from their they've got like a a demo site in Houston, but the company's called What's Minor. And I was like, what? So they're I mean, they they want to your point, Rod. They love this. How can they out compete? How can they have that competitive edge? There's like a 100 plumbing companies in Denver. Exactly. And he was so eager to test it out. It's awesome.
[00:08:34] Unknown:
Yeah. So, and that's just one area. And think about, like, if you're a bit like, one of those trade Bitcoiners that's just like, I I don't care. I'm gonna go get like a small business loan, take out a 100, $200, and then incentivize the next wave of Bitcoiners to basically put these in their homes and create Sats flow across the board. You take depreciation on the asset. Yep. You then go get the Sats flow. Yep. Offset that revenue, the cap gains especially on that depreciation. Yep. I'm not a freaking accounting expert. Shout out to Toshi Pacioli. Yeah. Sure. They've, you know, god bless. Bless up. Do my accounting, please, perfectly.
[00:09:14] Unknown:
But I would think that would be a right you you probably play this game. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. How does it work? Yeah. That's that's the game that you that's the game that you play. Like, when you're making lots of money,
[00:09:25] Unknown:
Which I'm not, but go on.
[00:09:26] Unknown:
You know, you need some form of depreciation to offset your income. Otherwise, you just get killed. And, the way to do it is to find a, something that can spit out some form of income or Satsflow or anything to basically make money and take the depreciation. And that's the trick. That's the game. Like, it's not super complicated, but obviously, you need to be in a position, and to, one, have enough income, and, two, be clever enough to actually utilize, the assets that you're depreciating. Otherwise, you're just burning money just like you would send to the tax man. Like, you do need to be able to, like, you know, figure out how to use the assets correctly, but that's essentially how it works. You can do it all in year one now. Right? Yeah. You do it a 100% in year one. So you got a 100 k tax bill.
[00:10:19] Unknown:
You just buy a 100 k of Bitcoin miners, and you don't have a tax bill anymore. Well, it Yeah. It's like that. I mean, it's it's just like that. It's just like that if you were a traditional, like, kind of single focus miner. But I'm saying, like, I I forget what I had to pay for my new HVAC system. Yeah. And it just it was like a sunk freaking cost. When that guy I we needed it. The house was not cooling. But I'm still pissed giving him the money because I'm like, this is just an expense. Well, and they're incentivized for your system to break down. Right. So
[00:10:53] Unknown:
yeah. So they can do the maintenance, and they can sell you a new unit. Whereas, if it's generating Bitcoin and that's the money that the HVAC installer is earning, then they have every incentive to keep your system running
[00:11:08] Unknown:
so that they continue to earn the Bitcoin. And we're starting to play around with that with, like, home assistant and whatnot. Shout out to Brett Rowan at Upstream and Pie Asic. Dude, legend. We've built notifications already that, you know, right now, we just have, like, hash rate. But if it's not nominal or what we expect, maybe it's, like, one standard deviation out. So a big leap, like, we already get phone notifications.
[00:11:29] Unknown:
So you can totally do that. That that's the other thing. And it's, like, for them the systems guys, they're like, we wanna limit or reduce the number of calls we have to make to the house Totally. Because we want the SATs just to continue to come in. So their incentives are completely aligned in maintaining it to be operable. So
[00:11:48] Unknown:
And another thing that I've been thinking about in light of what was developing today with Google, I don't know if you saw this. Yeah. But they goo Hold that. Right? Yeah. So Google for anyone who didn't see, Google made an announcement that, non custodial wallet developers who are putting applications in the Google Play Store Mhmm. For example, like, samurai wallet. Any developers doing that would need to have a FinCEN money transmitting business license Yep. Which is really strange considering that two things. One, the prosecutors in both the Tornado Cash case and the Samurai Wallet case dropped the charge related to those projects not having the software license or the the money transmitting license.
So they dropped the charge. And the other thing is that FinCEN themselves explicitly stated that noncustodial wallets do not need a money transmitting business license. Right. So there was some uproar on social media, and then Google responded to the rage on Twitter and said that, noncustodial wallet developers do not need to have a FinCEN license, and they appear to be walking that back now. Which is which is kinda bad. But my point here is that, the the erosion is never gonna end, and the creep just keeps getting further and further. And the way that, both of these cases the language used in these cases, quote, unquote, to facilitate the transfer of funds by any and all means, could be applied to anyone who's just simply plugging in a miner. Mhmm. Anyone who's running a node, anyone who's building a wallet. So if there's a future where mining devices are distributed among millions of homes and businesses around the globe, like, good luck enforcing Yeah. You can't. Turning that hash rate off or controlling it. So
[00:13:49] Unknown:
Good transition into Ember Ones?
[00:13:53] Unknown:
Yes. You excited? Yeah. Where the hell are they?
[00:13:56] Unknown:
Okay. So update. So, we the February has been working very hard on a fourth version of the Ember One with the bit main chips. Scott has been traveling. Yeah. He's actually on his way here to this undisclosed location. Somehow he knows we're all here. So, he's been traveling the last couple weeks, but right before he left for his travels, he had just finished assembling a couple of prototypes of version four. And so there were some changes in between v three and v four. For example, Zach Baumsta contributed, reverse polarity protection circuit Mhmm. In case the the electricity is hooked up wrong. Yep.
And then there was, like, some TVS diodes that Scott put in there because he found out the hard way how to fry a USB hub that was connected to his Ember one, so he put a protection circuit in for that. So the the revisions there's enough change that we felt like it was necessary to build the prototype by hand and validate that design and comb through it before we start going into production. So as soon as Scott gets back home after visiting us here, I think he's gonna be able to finish validating those. He just got the first signs of life out of the a six before he went on his travels.
So when he gets home, he should be able to finish the validation process. And then after that, we're gonna do a very small batch, maybe a 100 or so units. And those are gonna be for testers and, developers to help start testing the Amber one hardware. And I think you're in the Telegram group. Yep. Right? Yeah. So you're you're on the list, and we're gonna see what happens. That's right. So soon. Two weeks.
[00:15:55] Unknown:
And these will be controlled just from people's laptops. Correct?
[00:16:00] Unknown:
Technically, yeah. You could control it, from your laptop. So we're gonna have to have, like, a, like, a testing firmware because Yeah. Mujina is not quite ready. If everything goes according to plan, what's gonna happen is, Scott will validate those prototypes. He's gonna ship one to Ryan, who's working on the Magina firmware. Yep. And then Ryan's gonna get, like, a very early version of Magina ready to release by the time the manufacturer finishes producing those first, like, 100 test units. So when those go out, we're hoping that, there's also gonna be, like, a simple version of Magina that you can grab off a GitHub and flash onto your Ember one. Sweet. So what's not in so Ember one, which I should distinguish it from the BitX. Like, the BitX is pretty much like a all in one unit. It's got your controller on it.
Your power supply is just your wall wart, and it's got your ASIC on it, your hash board. The Ember One is a hash board only. So there's Right. There's no control board. There's no power supply. The heat sink isn't included in this initial batch yet. The fan's not included. So that's why we wanna get it to testers and developers because they're the do it yourselfers that are gonna help us figure out, like, the best fans, best heat sinks, give us the feedback, best power supplies. And then we can have, like, reference, suggestions for all of those components before we start, like, taking it to the wider market.
[00:17:34] Unknown:
Amazing. What about, LibriBoard?
[00:17:37] Unknown:
Yeah. LibriBoard's not far behind. So I think I love him. Keep going. Yeah. By He's played my role because we're gonna get my, job. Hopefully, by October, we're gonna have the first version of LibriBoard in production. We should have it in production. We're getting really close. The steps now actually, I had to I had to cancel my meeting with Schnitzel today because we were traveling to this undisclosed location. It could be done. Yeah. It could have been it could be done. Yeah. I don't know yet. Schnitzel, is the LibriBoard done yet? Yeah. Let us know. Two weeks to but, yeah, I think I think basically where he's at is, you know, we we went back and forth with the community figuring out, like Scott.
[00:18:25] Unknown:
Oh, he did make it. Come on. Alright. Slide him in. Can we squeeze? I'll swap out for you. Yeah. I'll swap out. Dude, thank you, buddy, for coming. Dude, thanks, Steven. Come on in. Yo.
[00:18:37] Unknown:
We've got Scott 9,000 fresh off the airplane joining us.
[00:18:42] Unknown:
Yeah. It's here. You guys What's up, buddy? How are you? To see you guys.
[00:18:48] Unknown:
We missed you, man. Alright. We were just updating about your project.
[00:18:52] Unknown:
We're live. What's up? Where where's the oh, there's the camera over there. What's up? What's up, Twitter?
[00:18:58] Unknown:
So, dude, we missed you. Welcome back. We love you. Thank you. Love you guys too. All of you. Love everything you're doing. How's your trip overseas?
[00:19:09] Unknown:
Long. It's long. Yeah. I was just at, Baltic Honey Badger in, beautiful Riga, Latvia. Yeah. That's a cool place. Yeah. Really cool place. Great event. Fantastic folks out there. Had a great time. Good deal. And you flew straight here to this undisclosed location. I did. Straight here. Well And it was only two hours from you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everything is two hours radius from now. Two hours. Yeah. This undisclosed location is a geographical oddity. It's two hours from everywhere. Yep. It's two hours from Denver too.
[00:19:39] Unknown:
It's just So we were doing just updates on the projects, and, I know how excited you are to be here for everything that these guys have been, like, talking about. So, by the way, Tyler's gonna be our fourth man on the pod. Yes. I'm gonna we're gonna just keep bringing him in because he's a good he's better at me keeping you guys on the tracks and on the rails. So and he's also doing really cool stuff. You're a good good fourth man. Well, thank you. But, so without tomorrow, I still actually don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. I'm really actually excited. But I think something about more being on shore here in The US Yeah. More support for the Bitcoin mining community, more options, more competition Yes.
And more smiles from Scott. That's what I wanna see. This is what we need. I'm super fired up for this. This guy's I don't I don't know what's happening either, but I think it's gonna be good. And we're gonna do a podcast tomorrow. So this is the pre. This is the pre. We're gonna do the post tomorrow night as well. Sweet. So how are you gonna even sleep tonight?
[00:20:42] Unknown:
I don't I'm I'm not How could I? How could I sleep? This kind of news coming up? I mean, yeah. I dig around in all the boxes and all the rooms. Like, I'm coming from really far away. This this day today has been very long. Yeah. But it doesn't matter. I'm fired up. Hell yeah. Hell, yeah. So we covered the Libri board project. We covered,
[00:21:02] Unknown:
oh, yeah. Go. Oh, I wanna hear about Scott, let's hear from your perspective on number one. I tried Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Doing my best to kinda describe where we were at and told him how you got the first sign of life right before you started traveling and how were you still gotta finish validation once you get back home two hours from here.
[00:21:21] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Two hours from here when I get back home. I guess we talked about it a little bit before, but, like, the Ember one's got 12 chips, and they they all need to work. And hand soldering the chips for these prototypes is difficult. These are really fine pitch chips, And you need you kinda need to get them all right by hand. And so that's what I've been going through. And we just got the the v four rev boards back. And I decided, like, some kind of masochist, that I would use chips that I unsoldered from an s 19 j Pro to do this.
So when you unsolder the chips, there's just, like, flux and solder just, like, left on there, which does not make things easier. Are you making all these in your toaster oven? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, I I went ahead and had JLCPCB assemble all the tiny little ports on the back. But then I did all the parts on the front on my toaster oven. Because the front is where all the ASICs are. And JLCPCB doesn't have any of these ASICs, and they're certainly not gonna be unsoldering them. So I gotta do that. You kinda gotta do each side sort of all at once, because there's like a stencil that applies the paste. And if there's already some chips on there, it'll never work. So I was definitely sweating bullets when I first soldered it together, and it it didn't work.
It's like, oh, man. Did I screw up this design? Do we have a bunch of, like, coasters here? But then after, you know, perseverance, some encouragement from these guys, some moral support, We got it working. So the design works. We got, all the ASICs verified. That's what I'm here for. Moral support. Yeah. Well, it it it's challenging. It it makes you question everything you know. Like, can I actually solder? Like, can I do this? So it was good. It was good that, indeed the design works. And, now I have to go and verify the changes to the, voltage regulator that we have on the board. That's kinda the next step. That's what I'll do when I get back, you know, in two hours and, fire that up. There's not a lot of changes there. That that should be fine. But, you know, we'll test it top to bottom.
[00:23:25] Unknown:
What was that stuff you were sending messages about this week, Eco, for hydro pool testing?
[00:23:30] Unknown:
Oh. Oh, yeah. So, we got the the latest version of hydro pool is built from the ground up in Rust, and it's our own Stratum server implementation. So, Junglee, who's the developer on Hydropool, reviewed CK Pool's code. He did a review of, Datum. He did a review of Stratum v two, and he just wasn't really happy with any, existing popular implementation. And so he decided to build his own Stratum server from the ground up. And so that's what we're testing right now, just making sure that once this goes to main net, like, it can actually do what a Stratum server is supposed to do. So we're running it. We have a instance, online.
It's a signet. So there's, like, no actual Bitcoin at stake here. But if you go to, like, test.hydropool.org, you'll see instructions if you want to help us test it. And so what we're trying to do at this point is get as many types of different Bitcoin mining hardware and firmware versions to just give, like, five minutes of hash rate to the test server. So all you gotta do is point you know, change your miner's configuration file to point to the URL that's on the website I just named. You can put in any sort of vanity name you want for the username, and then just point it there for five minutes, and then you can switch it back to where you normally mine.
The reason we're doing that is because there's no, like, standard for Stratum v one. So we don't know how clients, Stratum clients, are gonna try to communicate with, the Stratum server, or, like, what order they're gonna put information in, or how this server's gonna react to what's coming in. So the only way to do this is to get as many different types of mining hardware with different firmware versions to try talking to us. And then we're tracking all the logs and seeing what breaks. And then that sends us back into the code base to figure out why things aren't working. So on the website, you'll see if your miner passed, you'll have a green dot.
If it failed, you'll have a red dot. If it disconnected, you'll have a blue dot. If it's pending, you'll have a yellow dot. So anything other than green may be discouraging to the user because they're not mining, but that's actually beneficial to us, the developers, because that has provided us the information we need in the logs to go, search for why that error occurred and then correct it. So the last, like, week or so, it's just been a lot of, like, back and forth, firing up miners, checking the logs, making changes, pushing the new server out there, and then, then, like, trying it over again. So
[00:26:32] Unknown:
if I'm gonna wear Rod's hat, how how he probably interpreted all that information is, are you, like, reverse engineering a handshake? Is that essentially what it is? Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Nice.
[00:26:44] Unknown:
Yeah. From something that doesn't have a spec? Like Yeah. Yeah. Just this you know, there's like a a bajillion machines out there all running this code. We don't know how they work because they're closed source. Well, they work, so don't worry about it. Well, they work with, yeah. Yeah. They work. Trust me, bro. They work. So, yeah. What could go wrong? Junglee did a, a really neat presentation in in Riga at Honey Badger about this. It was really cool too. A packed room on the, the elite cypherpunk stage, you know, so they don't record anything. But, like, legends in attendance. This was really neat. And, what I was impressed by was all this, test apparatus that got built. Like, that stuff doesn't just exist. Like, the whole, you know, the red lights and the green lights and like, having that is fantastic. This is the right way to go about this. Yep. I don't I don't know if anyone's done this before and it kinda shows. Yeah. Because, like, nobody gets to see the Stratum server logs to any of these pools. Like, if you're not running your own Stratum server, you never get to see the logs
[00:27:45] Unknown:
from these what what the what the server's getting from all these clients. So what Jungle has done is he's made those logs, like, downloadable from the test.hydropool.org website. And don't worry, no IP add addresses are included. He's gone through, and it'll show hidden where the IP address usually is. So that's not included in the public information. But Yeah. So for any other developers that are trying to work on this stuff, now they've got, like They can see the type of hardware, the type of firmware, and then the log file for what it looked like when it tried establishing that stratum connection.
And so they can take that and, you know, use it for whatever benefit they want.
[00:28:28] Unknown:
It was in working on the BitX firmware, we know we had these same kinda troubles. And I I would assume that anyone who's basically who's trying to develop a new miner or new stratum type service is going through this because it's so poorly documented. So I think, you know, once we once we kinda get this under wraps and then having it all publicly available as hydro pool is gonna be a fantastic benefit to the mining community the mining development community.
[00:28:53] Unknown:
Yep. Yeah. And I've got a newsletter coming out in the next couple days, and in there's instructions in there for helping us test hydro pool. And, what else was I gonna say? There's a support community on Telegram. So if you're, like, trying it out and you wanna, like, get in touch with the community, you can find us on Telegram. And, hopefully, after we get enough testers on there and we're confident in this Cygnet implementation, then we're gonna roll it over to Mainnet. And then we're gonna be looking for more testers to help us do that. But we wanna make sure that, like, before we do it, in the event one of the miners gets so lucky to actually find a golden nonce while testing on main net that it's actually gonna work and submit a valid block. So, like, right now, for example, this morning, I had my meeting with with Junglee, and we were working on, I noticed this strange issue with one of my minors that my best difficulty never went above a 100,000.
Like, a dead even 100,000. And I'm like, that's weird. Like, usually, it's like some random number, and it usually is higher than a 100,000. And so we discovered that the pool wasn't or the Stratum server wasn't, changing the difficulty for the miner appropriately. And so, you know, we uncovered a bug there, and it led him down a path to try and fix that. So it's just little little things like that. And it's actually, like, a pretty complicated, series of code that gets the strat like, to, like, count the shares, how much time, it takes, like, how you like, there's, like, a bias that gets added to that average and, like, a, exponential decay.
And then, like, you you would think the Stratum server would just, like, see the shares and then say, no. That's that's not, you know, these are coming in too fast. You need more difficulty. It it's it's really much more complicated than that under the hood, and everybody does it differently. So, you know, we're we're mostly following along with the way, CK Pool did their implementation. But it's all written in c, and Jungle is trying to do this in Rust. So it's not like a direct translation. And then also there's, like, different ways that we can approach doing very simple things, like how does a pool tell the miner what the threshold difficulty is for submitted shares?
[00:31:34] Unknown:
You seem like the the small details that Well, I mean, a, they can make or break a pool. Yeah. Right? Getting this just right. Because if you have to manage a bunch of clients, you can't have them all connect too fast. But if you have them all connecting too slow, you're not gonna be able to provide accurate, hash rate, on the dashboard back to the users. And then I think, you know, getting it right is one thing, but there's a lot of different people who have different reasons to do this differently. Right? And and tailoring it to what your pool's goals are and how many users you think you're gonna have and what you're trying to do, like, having all those fields that you can change and tweak this for your specific application, I think, is gonna be huge for people working on this stuff. Yeah. And speaking of which, like, why why are you interested in this stuff? Why what excites you about it from your field, Tyler? Me? Yeah.
[00:32:23] Unknown:
Well, I'll caveat by saying everything you just riffed on highlights how little I know about mining, in a good way. Right? Like, it's encouraging that we have experts in the room and the rabbit hole never ends. Specifically for me, if I'm trying to get home heating systems, I guess the first thing that comes to mind is the uptime is not high. So, I'm thinking about a machine that is ramping up and down, either in power, that's the smart way to do it. The dumb way to do it is to kill it on and off to control your heat supply. And how does that impact share windows and actually, like, I is FPBS technically the best way to get SATs, but that's not maybe perhaps the way I wanna go and build my company for, like, my mission and values. Right? And so these are all kinds of things that I need to get under the hood and perhaps a good discussion for, like, HeatPunk Summit twenty twenty six is, like, what is the pool answer for intermittent
[00:33:17] Unknown:
mining operations that are really just electric heaters? That's that's a really good a really good point is, you know, I think that a lot of the pools now are set up for miners that are they're just on twenty four seven. The hash rate is gonna be steady twenty four seven. And so, you can adjust that that share ratio and kinda you're just trying to hone in on what the miner's actual performance is. But once you hit it, it's not gonna change. So there might be a strategy for these intermittent miners where you can more quickly, get from zero to to that set point.
[00:33:48] Unknown:
And it's almost changing its its fingerprint all the time because if I want it 75 degrees in the house, maybe it runs at 5,000 watts. But if I want it 68, it runs at 3,000 watts. And it has a completely different hash rate. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a really good point. And it's if, like, if you wanna know that that machine is is there and connected,
[00:34:07] Unknown:
like, all the time, despite, like, what the share rate is. I mean, there may be some sort of changing interval where you're like, I want you to to send, these low value shares just consistently so that I always get them. But then there's this other, you know, interval in which you send the higher value shares so that you can more accurately calculate the hash rate.
[00:34:28] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm excited to test this stuff out. Yeah. Yeah. And, like It's it's a interesting control problem. Like, if you've got an HVAC company with miners out everywhere, like, you could spin up your own hydro pool Right. And, like, have them all, like, running the hydro pool. And it's because we're doing it, like, a one click deploy. And, actually, I was really happy to see that c k pool just released, like, a very simple deployment mechanism for his software. Did you see that? I did see that. I didn't get a chance to, like, look at it directly, but that was a cool development. Yeah. And it was it was validating for me to read his tweet because a couple of the things he said in there were the motivating factors behind HydroPull. One of them was making it simple for anybody to spin up, Bitcoin mining pool, and not just developers.
And then the other thing he mentioned in there was, like, if, like, something goes catastrophically wrong, or there's, like like, sweeping government crackdowns on Bitcoin mining, if it's simple to deploy and the code is out there and open, anybody could just pop up these new Bitcoin mining pools. It it would be completely unstoppable. That
[00:35:40] Unknown:
that was exactly what you said. That was really validating to read that of two fifty six's mission. Like, I think we're making headway, guys. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:35:50] Unknown:
Yeah. Because, I mean, this, doctor Khan Kallovis is like a titan in the space. And, I would venture to guess that a large majority of all Bitcoin mining pools today are running some version of his code. Oh, absolutely.
[00:36:07] Unknown:
So Absolutely. I mean, it was the only open source, example out there for the last decade. Yeah. I would say that nearly all. And then same thing on the mining firmware side with CG miner. Yeah. Yeah. Like, everything's built on that. Absolutely everything.
[00:36:26] Unknown:
So we riff we'll probably riff for another five minutes or so and then, hit the bar or something. But, and also Scott can get some sleep.
[00:36:35] Unknown:
But I I I can't I can't sleep. How am I how am I supposed to sleep? This is too tight. I know.
[00:36:40] Unknown:
It's kinda nuts. Like, let's talk more about the history. Like, how we're here. So, well, we did talk about a little bit about the history about and I think tomorrow night, we'll talk about what's to come based on some of these announcements. But I will say this, whether you're a larger company, like a proto and a block, or you're just a single dude that was, like, you know what, I wanna see this manifest in the world, and someone like you that's just been putting it together, and like someone like you that's, like, I think I can create and I when I said a billion dollar category, I think you can create a billion dollar business in a trillion dollar category. Like, this category is insane.
[00:37:18] Unknown:
I see. But, yeah. It is. Everyone's gonna mine Bitcoin whether they like it or not.
[00:37:23] Unknown:
Exactly. I actually agree with that because, you know, I I do think Bitcoin is truly opt in, obviously. Like, you would you like to participate in this open monetary network or not? Great. But when it comes to, like, heat reuse and Bitcoin mine I mean, the incentives are gonna be so hit you in the face that it's, like, I hate Bitcoin, but I love this machine that just, like, you know I
[00:37:44] Unknown:
I have to say something that's just on my mind because I finally, like, put it together in my head this week. What is the difference between, like, Bitcoin mining, heat reuse, like the Finland marathon project with 11,000 homes, and Hash Rate Heating, what we were talking about with an HVAC company? Bitcoin's the first time you can break up the data center, and it still works. And you get your portion of the rewards for your energy consumption. You can't break up OpenAI into a thousand water heaters. So sorry. What's a Finland project? Explain that. So Marathon has a a mining operation, full uptime, normal mining operation, but they also sell the heat. They have district heating. Kind of like, in The US, you think of that like a college campus or Disney World where the whole campus has a centralized heat source and they send it to all the buildings. Their whole town does that. And they're, you know, they'll scream from the rooftops, like, heat reuse, heat reuse, heat reuse. And I'm like, that's just a normal industrial Bitcoin mining operation where you send all the heat down a pipe and it gets split up. I'm talking about hash rate heaters in everybody's home.
And and you this is the first time you can break up the data center model Right. Because of Bitcoin's protocol and its properties, where you couldn't do that. I mean, you could heat a town off of NVIDIA GPUs,
[00:38:52] Unknown:
but you can't with Bitcoin. Yeah. But then if Put no house. If the if that central database goes down, the town is screwed. Correct. Whereas if there's one in every home, and then only one house is effective if if one goes down. Sorry. I get so excited over this. No. I wanna because
[00:39:09] Unknown:
the incentives align that you, like, actually help your neighbor. Meaning, like Right. I know how to fix this. I'm gonna go help it because I can get SatsFlow or just be a good neighbor and I just wanna help out. And it's it's
[00:39:21] Unknown:
amazing because it's a network. Right? It's a completely interconnected network. But unlike nearly other any other network, it's totally permissionless. Yep. If you wanna join, you just do it. And you, you know, what you contribute is going to be worthwhile for the Bitcoin network by the fact that all the nodes are are validating essentially. It's just such an amazing way to be decentralized to have this permissionless network.
[00:39:47] Unknown:
Totally. So, Tyler, will you join us tomorrow night too? Hell, yeah. Okay. Cool. Iko, cut Final thoughts? Yeah. Final thoughts, Scott?
[00:39:56] Unknown:
So, you know, I think some what brought us here was centralization in, hardware manufacturing, centralization in the closed firmware that ran on that hardware, centralization in where the mining how, like, 40% of the mining rewards are going to Kobo, centralization in the mining pools where we have, like, six mining pools controlling 95% of the global hash rate. You know? And we just thought there was a better way to do it, and that open source was the answer to that. And that's what made the two fifty six Foundation an actual thing. And, so I'm excited about where we're going, and I think, possibly, what we see tomorrow is going to really, accelerate the excitement and the development in breaking up all of this centralization that, the Bitcoin mining system has coalesced around over the last ten years.
[00:41:02] Unknown:
Well said. The openness of Proto to collaborate with this industry and the people focused on what you just outlined, Iko, is exactly what we need.
[00:41:11] Unknown:
Scott.
[00:41:12] Unknown:
Yeah. The the the willingness of Proto to collaborate, I'm I'm absolutely, honored and and stoked to be included in this. Right? Like, we just kinda started up from from nothing and to be, you know, included in this major event is absolutely fantastic. I think this is the way and, pretty excited about tomorrow. Yeah. I get Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. Speaking of major events, is there anything you wanna shill that's coming up next month?
[00:41:37] Unknown:
Me? Yeah. Oh, no. No. We'll talk about that later. This is their event. Come on. Stay tuned. Thank you, though. I appreciate it. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Time and time. Yeah. Exactly. But I appreciate that. The, I will say this. Proto took me and you on a absolute flyer. Like straight up. They're like, hey, we we wanna support you guys. What do you guys wanna produce? We're like, maybe a monthly email newsletter. They're like, done. We'll support it. And they like gave us free creative control. You know, we may have gone together a little bit outside, but it was good. And it's been great. And you just released the latest, newsletter. So if you go to 256foundation.org and, subscribe to the newsletter, it is awesome. I know Eco puts in a lot of work to make that to make that shine. I can't thank you guys enough for what you guys are doing. Straight up, Tyler, keep pushing it forward.
Scott, did I say this already? You're the freaking man. Keep keep crushing it, man. I know you're all over the place. My pleasure. My pleasure. You're building across the board. I wouldn't wanna be doing anything else. Heck yeah, man. Alright. Cheers. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Thanks.
Alright. We're at an undisclosed location with one or two Wilson brothers. One Wilson brother. You gotta put it right on the mic. The Chen. Eric could not make it. Yeah. Tyler Stevens and half of the Wilson brothers. How are you guys doing? Doing great. How about you? I'm doing excellent. I'm here with my friend,
[00:00:20] Unknown:
my good friend, Econo Alchemist. We got Cher, Mike. Thank you. Good to be here. Undisclosed location coming at you live.
[00:00:29] Unknown:
Dude, so we've we drove, two and a half hours to get here to wait. What? Did I just disclose the location? What's the radius? It's a radius. Maybe two and a half to 2,500,000. It's kinda like our followers. Yeah. Yeah. We have two point Depends on how fast your car is. That's right. Or maybe we flew. Right. That'd be cool.
[00:00:49] Unknown:
Dude, seriously, this is our first time seeing you live. It's my this is my first time, like, putting faces and and shaking hands with, like, everyone I talk to online, basically. And, like, you know, I feel like I know you guys all, like, really well because, like, you know, we've talked and then, like, you know, I watch all the content and stuff. So it's cool to, you know, have a place to finally, get to meet everybody.
[00:01:12] Unknown:
Here's the problem with me and Iko. We're, like, really good guys online. We're terrible humans in real life. Like, just
[00:01:21] Unknown:
bad people. It's like one of the first things I noticed. Yeah. In a way. When I got here, you already sent me on two errands to my room twice.
[00:01:30] Unknown:
Well, that's another thing. Iko and I need a lot of help. You know, when they take say, like, it takes a village to, support the two fifty six foundation? Right. It does take a village to support the two fifty six. It's always just space members helping out, but whatever. Oh, wow. Hey, so how was ETHDenver?
[00:01:45] Unknown:
You know, I didn't go, but I hear it was bad attendance. I hope it's dead.
[00:01:52] Unknown:
See, you know, I was gonna talk all nice that, you know, third spaces get along. We support our local meet ups. You come here, throw the shade, and give me my brass knuckles that you got in the the I'm just joking. Intuitively. Out to us. Dude, what are you excited what what are you doing here, by the way?
[00:02:08] Unknown:
I'm, me and Eric played a very, very small part in, helping with this Bitcoin miner and just mostly Eric giving his kind of thoughts and opinions on what he liked about the current miners, what he didn't like, what he wanted to see, and, you know, the new generation type stuff. And so, yeah, that's what that's what we're doing here. We were pretty excited to not only get asked to help the in the little ways that we did, but also get invited to to the event. We're probably far and away the smallest mining company here. No. But, yeah, it's definitely an honor to be I might have you beat on that.
[00:02:47] Unknown:
So
[00:02:48] Unknown:
in thirty seconds, who are you and what are you doing? What do you do? Yes. So I'm I'm Steven Wilson. I'm, one half of Wilson Mining. We're a very small hosting company based in Iowa. If you wanna mine Bitcoin and you don't want to deal with setting up everything or you don't have attractive power rates, you know, I'm the kind of guy that you come to to find a place to put your Bitcoin miner, and we're in charge of running it and managing everything. And you just, collect your stats in your wallet and go about your day and your life. Easy breeze.
[00:03:20] Unknown:
And so your brother's right now on,
[00:03:23] Unknown:
on the in the field right now, just He might be at the slaving away? He might be at the he might be at the site right now, plugging in miners. We had a we had delivery get delivered today, so he's probably there getting getting stuff plugged in. So good for him while I'm here hanging out and drinking or whatever. So that's one of the things, like, when everyone's, like, oh, I wanna get into
[00:03:44] Unknown:
quit my Fiat job and get into a a a Bitcoin job. Yep. But they're, like, there are no jobs for me. There's no jobs with my skill set or whatever blah blah. What do I what should I do? I'm, like, you know what? Go get a temp job. Go take a vacation week and go plug in miners. 100%. Go to, like, one of these companies, maybe Wilson Brothers or go talk to Guardrail Mining, and just go and learn how to plug in miners. Go learn the network engineering and go in learning all of that. Yep. It's just, like, amazing. Amazing. I don't know. What do you think?
[00:04:13] Unknown:
Well, yeah. I mean, the last thing you wanna do is just sit on your hands. Like, get out there and do something. Like, especially this younger generation, there's so many critical skills that are just dying with these older people, like like knowing how to turn wrenches, how to fix machinery, how to do things with your hands. Like, those are skills that are just, like, going away but are essential, and society will collapse if people don't start plugging in minors.
[00:04:42] Unknown:
Yeah. I would say that everybody Send tweet. Yeah. Everybody here is here because they just decided to start doing stuff in the Bitcoin space. So if you just start doing things and, you know, stumble around a little bit, you'll find your way. That's right. And on on those doing things real quick, that's where Tyler
[00:05:02] Unknown:
and I'm not trying to boost your ego, because I don't like you, and I don't wanna boost your ego. Yeah. Because you're not a good person. Right. Yeah. Yeah. However, I think you're on the cusp of starting and creating a like a billion dollar plus category. Straight up. Like, the heat reuse category, what was the crazy stat that you've always you talked about at the national energy mining summit in 2025, most recently in in Alaska.
[00:05:24] Unknown:
What's that 1% stat that you always like to reference? So a quarter of the world's energy is used for heat. And if 1% of that is converted to hash rate, at 27 joules per tera hash, so not even bleeding edge, It's two zeta hash added to the network. Okay. He's smart. In addition to the the 900 exahash already. So we have nine hundred nine hundred exahash. You could triple it with 1% of the heating industry.
[00:05:49] Unknown:
We can triple it with 1% of the heating industry. Yes. And the incentives align such that, you know, my grandmother, my wife, my brother, whoever uses even a washer dryer Totally. To convert 1% of that energy even.
[00:06:08] Unknown:
Yeah. And it, no longer Bitcoin's no longer wasteful, by the way, because everybody wants heat. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:16] Unknown:
And, well, and it it's just comfort heating. Right? It's not even, like, industrial applications
[00:06:21] Unknown:
or Yeah. If we crack that with some really hot chips, then the market is 50% of the energy used on earth.
[00:06:30] Unknown:
Wow. So tell me what the world looks like then if we get 1%.
[00:06:37] Unknown:
I think you're gonna have a lot of hash rate integrated into homes and businesses that this is where I get a little spicy immediately. There's no marketing part departments to pay. There's no PR or investor relations. There's no public shareholders. I don't wake up and look at the hash price. My hash rate heater is my water heater, and I don't think about it. And SAT show up, and it helps offset my heating bills and some blend of solar and battery technology, got a sovereign energy stack, micro grids. Everybody's heating systems are passively processing transactions for open money for all.
[00:07:11] Unknown:
And so I think the economics just completely flip. Right? Rather than and this is where I'm really interested. We were just joking. Not joking, but like, I'm serious about plugging in miners and learning that trade. Now think about, like, HVAC companies. Right? You have those service jobs. They're like, hey, I will give you this 10,000, $20,000 machine. And can we work out some rev share Mhmm. Where you split the first 80%, maybe a 100% of the Sats flow. Yep. I'll heat your house for basically free. Oh, yeah. Totally. And then all of a sudden after that, it's like 80%. Or if you have a savvy Bitcoiner that's like, hold up. Oh, no. Here's my Fiat. You take this. I'm gonna take the Sats, but I want you and incentivize you to maintain this. A 100%. So I'll give you 10% of the Sats flow. It was funny when we got our our boiler, which is just an m 64 Bitcoin miner in our building heating the floors.
[00:08:01] Unknown:
The plumber literally, on his own accord without us, started reaching out to Whatsminer in China, because he was so curious. Like That's hilarious. He came back to change a valve or something. He was like, yeah. I was on the phone with someone from their they've got like a a demo site in Houston, but the company's called What's Minor. And I was like, what? So they're I mean, they they want to your point, Rod. They love this. How can they out compete? How can they have that competitive edge? There's like a 100 plumbing companies in Denver. Exactly. And he was so eager to test it out. It's awesome.
[00:08:34] Unknown:
Yeah. So, and that's just one area. And think about, like, if you're a bit like, one of those trade Bitcoiners that's just like, I I don't care. I'm gonna go get like a small business loan, take out a 100, $200, and then incentivize the next wave of Bitcoiners to basically put these in their homes and create Sats flow across the board. You take depreciation on the asset. Yep. You then go get the Sats flow. Yep. Offset that revenue, the cap gains especially on that depreciation. Yep. I'm not a freaking accounting expert. Shout out to Toshi Pacioli. Yeah. Sure. They've, you know, god bless. Bless up. Do my accounting, please, perfectly.
[00:09:14] Unknown:
But I would think that would be a right you you probably play this game. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. How does it work? Yeah. That's that's the game that you that's the game that you play. Like, when you're making lots of money,
[00:09:25] Unknown:
Which I'm not, but go on.
[00:09:26] Unknown:
You know, you need some form of depreciation to offset your income. Otherwise, you just get killed. And, the way to do it is to find a, something that can spit out some form of income or Satsflow or anything to basically make money and take the depreciation. And that's the trick. That's the game. Like, it's not super complicated, but obviously, you need to be in a position, and to, one, have enough income, and, two, be clever enough to actually utilize, the assets that you're depreciating. Otherwise, you're just burning money just like you would send to the tax man. Like, you do need to be able to, like, you know, figure out how to use the assets correctly, but that's essentially how it works. You can do it all in year one now. Right? Yeah. You do it a 100% in year one. So you got a 100 k tax bill.
[00:10:19] Unknown:
You just buy a 100 k of Bitcoin miners, and you don't have a tax bill anymore. Well, it Yeah. It's like that. I mean, it's it's just like that. It's just like that if you were a traditional, like, kind of single focus miner. But I'm saying, like, I I forget what I had to pay for my new HVAC system. Yeah. And it just it was like a sunk freaking cost. When that guy I we needed it. The house was not cooling. But I'm still pissed giving him the money because I'm like, this is just an expense. Well, and they're incentivized for your system to break down. Right. So
[00:10:53] Unknown:
yeah. So they can do the maintenance, and they can sell you a new unit. Whereas, if it's generating Bitcoin and that's the money that the HVAC installer is earning, then they have every incentive to keep your system running
[00:11:08] Unknown:
so that they continue to earn the Bitcoin. And we're starting to play around with that with, like, home assistant and whatnot. Shout out to Brett Rowan at Upstream and Pie Asic. Dude, legend. We've built notifications already that, you know, right now, we just have, like, hash rate. But if it's not nominal or what we expect, maybe it's, like, one standard deviation out. So a big leap, like, we already get phone notifications.
[00:11:29] Unknown:
So you can totally do that. That that's the other thing. And it's, like, for them the systems guys, they're like, we wanna limit or reduce the number of calls we have to make to the house Totally. Because we want the SATs just to continue to come in. So their incentives are completely aligned in maintaining it to be operable. So
[00:11:48] Unknown:
And another thing that I've been thinking about in light of what was developing today with Google, I don't know if you saw this. Yeah. But they goo Hold that. Right? Yeah. So Google for anyone who didn't see, Google made an announcement that, non custodial wallet developers who are putting applications in the Google Play Store Mhmm. For example, like, samurai wallet. Any developers doing that would need to have a FinCEN money transmitting business license Yep. Which is really strange considering that two things. One, the prosecutors in both the Tornado Cash case and the Samurai Wallet case dropped the charge related to those projects not having the software license or the the money transmitting license.
So they dropped the charge. And the other thing is that FinCEN themselves explicitly stated that noncustodial wallets do not need a money transmitting business license. Right. So there was some uproar on social media, and then Google responded to the rage on Twitter and said that, noncustodial wallet developers do not need to have a FinCEN license, and they appear to be walking that back now. Which is which is kinda bad. But my point here is that, the the erosion is never gonna end, and the creep just keeps getting further and further. And the way that, both of these cases the language used in these cases, quote, unquote, to facilitate the transfer of funds by any and all means, could be applied to anyone who's just simply plugging in a miner. Mhmm. Anyone who's running a node, anyone who's building a wallet. So if there's a future where mining devices are distributed among millions of homes and businesses around the globe, like, good luck enforcing Yeah. You can't. Turning that hash rate off or controlling it. So
[00:13:49] Unknown:
Good transition into Ember Ones?
[00:13:53] Unknown:
Yes. You excited? Yeah. Where the hell are they?
[00:13:56] Unknown:
Okay. So update. So, we the February has been working very hard on a fourth version of the Ember One with the bit main chips. Scott has been traveling. Yeah. He's actually on his way here to this undisclosed location. Somehow he knows we're all here. So, he's been traveling the last couple weeks, but right before he left for his travels, he had just finished assembling a couple of prototypes of version four. And so there were some changes in between v three and v four. For example, Zach Baumsta contributed, reverse polarity protection circuit Mhmm. In case the the electricity is hooked up wrong. Yep.
And then there was, like, some TVS diodes that Scott put in there because he found out the hard way how to fry a USB hub that was connected to his Ember one, so he put a protection circuit in for that. So the the revisions there's enough change that we felt like it was necessary to build the prototype by hand and validate that design and comb through it before we start going into production. So as soon as Scott gets back home after visiting us here, I think he's gonna be able to finish validating those. He just got the first signs of life out of the a six before he went on his travels.
So when he gets home, he should be able to finish the validation process. And then after that, we're gonna do a very small batch, maybe a 100 or so units. And those are gonna be for testers and, developers to help start testing the Amber one hardware. And I think you're in the Telegram group. Yep. Right? Yeah. So you're you're on the list, and we're gonna see what happens. That's right. So soon. Two weeks.
[00:15:55] Unknown:
And these will be controlled just from people's laptops. Correct?
[00:16:00] Unknown:
Technically, yeah. You could control it, from your laptop. So we're gonna have to have, like, a, like, a testing firmware because Yeah. Mujina is not quite ready. If everything goes according to plan, what's gonna happen is, Scott will validate those prototypes. He's gonna ship one to Ryan, who's working on the Magina firmware. Yep. And then Ryan's gonna get, like, a very early version of Magina ready to release by the time the manufacturer finishes producing those first, like, 100 test units. So when those go out, we're hoping that, there's also gonna be, like, a simple version of Magina that you can grab off a GitHub and flash onto your Ember one. Sweet. So what's not in so Ember one, which I should distinguish it from the BitX. Like, the BitX is pretty much like a all in one unit. It's got your controller on it.
Your power supply is just your wall wart, and it's got your ASIC on it, your hash board. The Ember One is a hash board only. So there's Right. There's no control board. There's no power supply. The heat sink isn't included in this initial batch yet. The fan's not included. So that's why we wanna get it to testers and developers because they're the do it yourselfers that are gonna help us figure out, like, the best fans, best heat sinks, give us the feedback, best power supplies. And then we can have, like, reference, suggestions for all of those components before we start, like, taking it to the wider market.
[00:17:34] Unknown:
Amazing. What about, LibriBoard?
[00:17:37] Unknown:
Yeah. LibriBoard's not far behind. So I think I love him. Keep going. Yeah. By He's played my role because we're gonna get my, job. Hopefully, by October, we're gonna have the first version of LibriBoard in production. We should have it in production. We're getting really close. The steps now actually, I had to I had to cancel my meeting with Schnitzel today because we were traveling to this undisclosed location. It could be done. Yeah. It could have been it could be done. Yeah. I don't know yet. Schnitzel, is the LibriBoard done yet? Yeah. Let us know. Two weeks to but, yeah, I think I think basically where he's at is, you know, we we went back and forth with the community figuring out, like Scott.
[00:18:25] Unknown:
Oh, he did make it. Come on. Alright. Slide him in. Can we squeeze? I'll swap out for you. Yeah. I'll swap out. Dude, thank you, buddy, for coming. Dude, thanks, Steven. Come on in. Yo.
[00:18:37] Unknown:
We've got Scott 9,000 fresh off the airplane joining us.
[00:18:42] Unknown:
Yeah. It's here. You guys What's up, buddy? How are you? To see you guys.
[00:18:48] Unknown:
We missed you, man. Alright. We were just updating about your project.
[00:18:52] Unknown:
We're live. What's up? Where where's the oh, there's the camera over there. What's up? What's up, Twitter?
[00:18:58] Unknown:
So, dude, we missed you. Welcome back. We love you. Thank you. Love you guys too. All of you. Love everything you're doing. How's your trip overseas?
[00:19:09] Unknown:
Long. It's long. Yeah. I was just at, Baltic Honey Badger in, beautiful Riga, Latvia. Yeah. That's a cool place. Yeah. Really cool place. Great event. Fantastic folks out there. Had a great time. Good deal. And you flew straight here to this undisclosed location. I did. Straight here. Well And it was only two hours from you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everything is two hours radius from now. Two hours. Yeah. This undisclosed location is a geographical oddity. It's two hours from everywhere. Yep. It's two hours from Denver too.
[00:19:39] Unknown:
It's just So we were doing just updates on the projects, and, I know how excited you are to be here for everything that these guys have been, like, talking about. So, by the way, Tyler's gonna be our fourth man on the pod. Yes. I'm gonna we're gonna just keep bringing him in because he's a good he's better at me keeping you guys on the tracks and on the rails. So and he's also doing really cool stuff. You're a good good fourth man. Well, thank you. But, so without tomorrow, I still actually don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. I'm really actually excited. But I think something about more being on shore here in The US Yeah. More support for the Bitcoin mining community, more options, more competition Yes.
And more smiles from Scott. That's what I wanna see. This is what we need. I'm super fired up for this. This guy's I don't I don't know what's happening either, but I think it's gonna be good. And we're gonna do a podcast tomorrow. So this is the pre. This is the pre. We're gonna do the post tomorrow night as well. Sweet. So how are you gonna even sleep tonight?
[00:20:42] Unknown:
I don't I'm I'm not How could I? How could I sleep? This kind of news coming up? I mean, yeah. I dig around in all the boxes and all the rooms. Like, I'm coming from really far away. This this day today has been very long. Yeah. But it doesn't matter. I'm fired up. Hell yeah. Hell, yeah. So we covered the Libri board project. We covered,
[00:21:02] Unknown:
oh, yeah. Go. Oh, I wanna hear about Scott, let's hear from your perspective on number one. I tried Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Doing my best to kinda describe where we were at and told him how you got the first sign of life right before you started traveling and how were you still gotta finish validation once you get back home two hours from here.
[00:21:21] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Two hours from here when I get back home. I guess we talked about it a little bit before, but, like, the Ember one's got 12 chips, and they they all need to work. And hand soldering the chips for these prototypes is difficult. These are really fine pitch chips, And you need you kinda need to get them all right by hand. And so that's what I've been going through. And we just got the the v four rev boards back. And I decided, like, some kind of masochist, that I would use chips that I unsoldered from an s 19 j Pro to do this.
So when you unsolder the chips, there's just, like, flux and solder just, like, left on there, which does not make things easier. Are you making all these in your toaster oven? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, I I went ahead and had JLCPCB assemble all the tiny little ports on the back. But then I did all the parts on the front on my toaster oven. Because the front is where all the ASICs are. And JLCPCB doesn't have any of these ASICs, and they're certainly not gonna be unsoldering them. So I gotta do that. You kinda gotta do each side sort of all at once, because there's like a stencil that applies the paste. And if there's already some chips on there, it'll never work. So I was definitely sweating bullets when I first soldered it together, and it it didn't work.
It's like, oh, man. Did I screw up this design? Do we have a bunch of, like, coasters here? But then after, you know, perseverance, some encouragement from these guys, some moral support, We got it working. So the design works. We got, all the ASICs verified. That's what I'm here for. Moral support. Yeah. Well, it it it's challenging. It it makes you question everything you know. Like, can I actually solder? Like, can I do this? So it was good. It was good that, indeed the design works. And, now I have to go and verify the changes to the, voltage regulator that we have on the board. That's kinda the next step. That's what I'll do when I get back, you know, in two hours and, fire that up. There's not a lot of changes there. That that should be fine. But, you know, we'll test it top to bottom.
[00:23:25] Unknown:
What was that stuff you were sending messages about this week, Eco, for hydro pool testing?
[00:23:30] Unknown:
Oh. Oh, yeah. So, we got the the latest version of hydro pool is built from the ground up in Rust, and it's our own Stratum server implementation. So, Junglee, who's the developer on Hydropool, reviewed CK Pool's code. He did a review of, Datum. He did a review of Stratum v two, and he just wasn't really happy with any, existing popular implementation. And so he decided to build his own Stratum server from the ground up. And so that's what we're testing right now, just making sure that once this goes to main net, like, it can actually do what a Stratum server is supposed to do. So we're running it. We have a instance, online.
It's a signet. So there's, like, no actual Bitcoin at stake here. But if you go to, like, test.hydropool.org, you'll see instructions if you want to help us test it. And so what we're trying to do at this point is get as many types of different Bitcoin mining hardware and firmware versions to just give, like, five minutes of hash rate to the test server. So all you gotta do is point you know, change your miner's configuration file to point to the URL that's on the website I just named. You can put in any sort of vanity name you want for the username, and then just point it there for five minutes, and then you can switch it back to where you normally mine.
The reason we're doing that is because there's no, like, standard for Stratum v one. So we don't know how clients, Stratum clients, are gonna try to communicate with, the Stratum server, or, like, what order they're gonna put information in, or how this server's gonna react to what's coming in. So the only way to do this is to get as many different types of mining hardware with different firmware versions to try talking to us. And then we're tracking all the logs and seeing what breaks. And then that sends us back into the code base to figure out why things aren't working. So on the website, you'll see if your miner passed, you'll have a green dot.
If it failed, you'll have a red dot. If it disconnected, you'll have a blue dot. If it's pending, you'll have a yellow dot. So anything other than green may be discouraging to the user because they're not mining, but that's actually beneficial to us, the developers, because that has provided us the information we need in the logs to go, search for why that error occurred and then correct it. So the last, like, week or so, it's just been a lot of, like, back and forth, firing up miners, checking the logs, making changes, pushing the new server out there, and then, then, like, trying it over again. So
[00:26:32] Unknown:
if I'm gonna wear Rod's hat, how how he probably interpreted all that information is, are you, like, reverse engineering a handshake? Is that essentially what it is? Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Nice.
[00:26:44] Unknown:
Yeah. From something that doesn't have a spec? Like Yeah. Yeah. Just this you know, there's like a a bajillion machines out there all running this code. We don't know how they work because they're closed source. Well, they work, so don't worry about it. Well, they work with, yeah. Yeah. They work. Trust me, bro. They work. So, yeah. What could go wrong? Junglee did a, a really neat presentation in in Riga at Honey Badger about this. It was really cool too. A packed room on the, the elite cypherpunk stage, you know, so they don't record anything. But, like, legends in attendance. This was really neat. And, what I was impressed by was all this, test apparatus that got built. Like, that stuff doesn't just exist. Like, the whole, you know, the red lights and the green lights and like, having that is fantastic. This is the right way to go about this. Yep. I don't I don't know if anyone's done this before and it kinda shows. Yeah. Because, like, nobody gets to see the Stratum server logs to any of these pools. Like, if you're not running your own Stratum server, you never get to see the logs
[00:27:45] Unknown:
from these what what the what the server's getting from all these clients. So what Jungle has done is he's made those logs, like, downloadable from the test.hydropool.org website. And don't worry, no IP add addresses are included. He's gone through, and it'll show hidden where the IP address usually is. So that's not included in the public information. But Yeah. So for any other developers that are trying to work on this stuff, now they've got, like They can see the type of hardware, the type of firmware, and then the log file for what it looked like when it tried establishing that stratum connection.
And so they can take that and, you know, use it for whatever benefit they want.
[00:28:28] Unknown:
It was in working on the BitX firmware, we know we had these same kinda troubles. And I I would assume that anyone who's basically who's trying to develop a new miner or new stratum type service is going through this because it's so poorly documented. So I think, you know, once we once we kinda get this under wraps and then having it all publicly available as hydro pool is gonna be a fantastic benefit to the mining community the mining development community.
[00:28:53] Unknown:
Yep. Yeah. And I've got a newsletter coming out in the next couple days, and in there's instructions in there for helping us test hydro pool. And, what else was I gonna say? There's a support community on Telegram. So if you're, like, trying it out and you wanna, like, get in touch with the community, you can find us on Telegram. And, hopefully, after we get enough testers on there and we're confident in this Cygnet implementation, then we're gonna roll it over to Mainnet. And then we're gonna be looking for more testers to help us do that. But we wanna make sure that, like, before we do it, in the event one of the miners gets so lucky to actually find a golden nonce while testing on main net that it's actually gonna work and submit a valid block. So, like, right now, for example, this morning, I had my meeting with with Junglee, and we were working on, I noticed this strange issue with one of my minors that my best difficulty never went above a 100,000.
Like, a dead even 100,000. And I'm like, that's weird. Like, usually, it's like some random number, and it usually is higher than a 100,000. And so we discovered that the pool wasn't or the Stratum server wasn't, changing the difficulty for the miner appropriately. And so, you know, we uncovered a bug there, and it led him down a path to try and fix that. So it's just little little things like that. And it's actually, like, a pretty complicated, series of code that gets the strat like, to, like, count the shares, how much time, it takes, like, how you like, there's, like, a bias that gets added to that average and, like, a, exponential decay.
And then, like, you you would think the Stratum server would just, like, see the shares and then say, no. That's that's not, you know, these are coming in too fast. You need more difficulty. It it's it's really much more complicated than that under the hood, and everybody does it differently. So, you know, we're we're mostly following along with the way, CK Pool did their implementation. But it's all written in c, and Jungle is trying to do this in Rust. So it's not like a direct translation. And then also there's, like, different ways that we can approach doing very simple things, like how does a pool tell the miner what the threshold difficulty is for submitted shares?
[00:31:34] Unknown:
You seem like the the small details that Well, I mean, a, they can make or break a pool. Yeah. Right? Getting this just right. Because if you have to manage a bunch of clients, you can't have them all connect too fast. But if you have them all connecting too slow, you're not gonna be able to provide accurate, hash rate, on the dashboard back to the users. And then I think, you know, getting it right is one thing, but there's a lot of different people who have different reasons to do this differently. Right? And and tailoring it to what your pool's goals are and how many users you think you're gonna have and what you're trying to do, like, having all those fields that you can change and tweak this for your specific application, I think, is gonna be huge for people working on this stuff. Yeah. And speaking of which, like, why why are you interested in this stuff? Why what excites you about it from your field, Tyler? Me? Yeah.
[00:32:23] Unknown:
Well, I'll caveat by saying everything you just riffed on highlights how little I know about mining, in a good way. Right? Like, it's encouraging that we have experts in the room and the rabbit hole never ends. Specifically for me, if I'm trying to get home heating systems, I guess the first thing that comes to mind is the uptime is not high. So, I'm thinking about a machine that is ramping up and down, either in power, that's the smart way to do it. The dumb way to do it is to kill it on and off to control your heat supply. And how does that impact share windows and actually, like, I is FPBS technically the best way to get SATs, but that's not maybe perhaps the way I wanna go and build my company for, like, my mission and values. Right? And so these are all kinds of things that I need to get under the hood and perhaps a good discussion for, like, HeatPunk Summit twenty twenty six is, like, what is the pool answer for intermittent
[00:33:17] Unknown:
mining operations that are really just electric heaters? That's that's a really good a really good point is, you know, I think that a lot of the pools now are set up for miners that are they're just on twenty four seven. The hash rate is gonna be steady twenty four seven. And so, you can adjust that that share ratio and kinda you're just trying to hone in on what the miner's actual performance is. But once you hit it, it's not gonna change. So there might be a strategy for these intermittent miners where you can more quickly, get from zero to to that set point.
[00:33:48] Unknown:
And it's almost changing its its fingerprint all the time because if I want it 75 degrees in the house, maybe it runs at 5,000 watts. But if I want it 68, it runs at 3,000 watts. And it has a completely different hash rate. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a really good point. And it's if, like, if you wanna know that that machine is is there and connected,
[00:34:07] Unknown:
like, all the time, despite, like, what the share rate is. I mean, there may be some sort of changing interval where you're like, I want you to to send, these low value shares just consistently so that I always get them. But then there's this other, you know, interval in which you send the higher value shares so that you can more accurately calculate the hash rate.
[00:34:28] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm excited to test this stuff out. Yeah. Yeah. And, like It's it's a interesting control problem. Like, if you've got an HVAC company with miners out everywhere, like, you could spin up your own hydro pool Right. And, like, have them all, like, running the hydro pool. And it's because we're doing it, like, a one click deploy. And, actually, I was really happy to see that c k pool just released, like, a very simple deployment mechanism for his software. Did you see that? I did see that. I didn't get a chance to, like, look at it directly, but that was a cool development. Yeah. And it was it was validating for me to read his tweet because a couple of the things he said in there were the motivating factors behind HydroPull. One of them was making it simple for anybody to spin up, Bitcoin mining pool, and not just developers.
And then the other thing he mentioned in there was, like, if, like, something goes catastrophically wrong, or there's, like like, sweeping government crackdowns on Bitcoin mining, if it's simple to deploy and the code is out there and open, anybody could just pop up these new Bitcoin mining pools. It it would be completely unstoppable. That
[00:35:40] Unknown:
that was exactly what you said. That was really validating to read that of two fifty six's mission. Like, I think we're making headway, guys. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:35:50] Unknown:
Yeah. Because, I mean, this, doctor Khan Kallovis is like a titan in the space. And, I would venture to guess that a large majority of all Bitcoin mining pools today are running some version of his code. Oh, absolutely.
[00:36:07] Unknown:
So Absolutely. I mean, it was the only open source, example out there for the last decade. Yeah. I would say that nearly all. And then same thing on the mining firmware side with CG miner. Yeah. Yeah. Like, everything's built on that. Absolutely everything.
[00:36:26] Unknown:
So we riff we'll probably riff for another five minutes or so and then, hit the bar or something. But, and also Scott can get some sleep.
[00:36:35] Unknown:
But I I I can't I can't sleep. How am I how am I supposed to sleep? This is too tight. I know.
[00:36:40] Unknown:
It's kinda nuts. Like, let's talk more about the history. Like, how we're here. So, well, we did talk about a little bit about the history about and I think tomorrow night, we'll talk about what's to come based on some of these announcements. But I will say this, whether you're a larger company, like a proto and a block, or you're just a single dude that was, like, you know what, I wanna see this manifest in the world, and someone like you that's just been putting it together, and like someone like you that's, like, I think I can create and I when I said a billion dollar category, I think you can create a billion dollar business in a trillion dollar category. Like, this category is insane.
[00:37:18] Unknown:
I see. But, yeah. It is. Everyone's gonna mine Bitcoin whether they like it or not.
[00:37:23] Unknown:
Exactly. I actually agree with that because, you know, I I do think Bitcoin is truly opt in, obviously. Like, you would you like to participate in this open monetary network or not? Great. But when it comes to, like, heat reuse and Bitcoin mine I mean, the incentives are gonna be so hit you in the face that it's, like, I hate Bitcoin, but I love this machine that just, like, you know I
[00:37:44] Unknown:
I have to say something that's just on my mind because I finally, like, put it together in my head this week. What is the difference between, like, Bitcoin mining, heat reuse, like the Finland marathon project with 11,000 homes, and Hash Rate Heating, what we were talking about with an HVAC company? Bitcoin's the first time you can break up the data center, and it still works. And you get your portion of the rewards for your energy consumption. You can't break up OpenAI into a thousand water heaters. So sorry. What's a Finland project? Explain that. So Marathon has a a mining operation, full uptime, normal mining operation, but they also sell the heat. They have district heating. Kind of like, in The US, you think of that like a college campus or Disney World where the whole campus has a centralized heat source and they send it to all the buildings. Their whole town does that. And they're, you know, they'll scream from the rooftops, like, heat reuse, heat reuse, heat reuse. And I'm like, that's just a normal industrial Bitcoin mining operation where you send all the heat down a pipe and it gets split up. I'm talking about hash rate heaters in everybody's home.
And and you this is the first time you can break up the data center model Right. Because of Bitcoin's protocol and its properties, where you couldn't do that. I mean, you could heat a town off of NVIDIA GPUs,
[00:38:52] Unknown:
but you can't with Bitcoin. Yeah. But then if Put no house. If the if that central database goes down, the town is screwed. Correct. Whereas if there's one in every home, and then only one house is effective if if one goes down. Sorry. I get so excited over this. No. I wanna because
[00:39:09] Unknown:
the incentives align that you, like, actually help your neighbor. Meaning, like Right. I know how to fix this. I'm gonna go help it because I can get SatsFlow or just be a good neighbor and I just wanna help out. And it's it's
[00:39:21] Unknown:
amazing because it's a network. Right? It's a completely interconnected network. But unlike nearly other any other network, it's totally permissionless. Yep. If you wanna join, you just do it. And you, you know, what you contribute is going to be worthwhile for the Bitcoin network by the fact that all the nodes are are validating essentially. It's just such an amazing way to be decentralized to have this permissionless network.
[00:39:47] Unknown:
Totally. So, Tyler, will you join us tomorrow night too? Hell, yeah. Okay. Cool. Iko, cut Final thoughts? Yeah. Final thoughts, Scott?
[00:39:56] Unknown:
So, you know, I think some what brought us here was centralization in, hardware manufacturing, centralization in the closed firmware that ran on that hardware, centralization in where the mining how, like, 40% of the mining rewards are going to Kobo, centralization in the mining pools where we have, like, six mining pools controlling 95% of the global hash rate. You know? And we just thought there was a better way to do it, and that open source was the answer to that. And that's what made the two fifty six Foundation an actual thing. And, so I'm excited about where we're going, and I think, possibly, what we see tomorrow is going to really, accelerate the excitement and the development in breaking up all of this centralization that, the Bitcoin mining system has coalesced around over the last ten years.
[00:41:02] Unknown:
Well said. The openness of Proto to collaborate with this industry and the people focused on what you just outlined, Iko, is exactly what we need.
[00:41:11] Unknown:
Scott.
[00:41:12] Unknown:
Yeah. The the the willingness of Proto to collaborate, I'm I'm absolutely, honored and and stoked to be included in this. Right? Like, we just kinda started up from from nothing and to be, you know, included in this major event is absolutely fantastic. I think this is the way and, pretty excited about tomorrow. Yeah. I get Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. Speaking of major events, is there anything you wanna shill that's coming up next month?
[00:41:37] Unknown:
Me? Yeah. Oh, no. No. We'll talk about that later. This is their event. Come on. Stay tuned. Thank you, though. I appreciate it. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Time and time. Yeah. Exactly. But I appreciate that. The, I will say this. Proto took me and you on a absolute flyer. Like straight up. They're like, hey, we we wanna support you guys. What do you guys wanna produce? We're like, maybe a monthly email newsletter. They're like, done. We'll support it. And they like gave us free creative control. You know, we may have gone together a little bit outside, but it was good. And it's been great. And you just released the latest, newsletter. So if you go to 256foundation.org and, subscribe to the newsletter, it is awesome. I know Eco puts in a lot of work to make that to make that shine. I can't thank you guys enough for what you guys are doing. Straight up, Tyler, keep pushing it forward.
Scott, did I say this already? You're the freaking man. Keep keep crushing it, man. I know you're all over the place. My pleasure. My pleasure. You're building across the board. I wouldn't wanna be doing anything else. Heck yeah, man. Alright. Cheers. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Thanks.
