0:08

How do you like the new light? Dude,

0:12

when I walked in here and I realized there's a

0:16

big ass light hanging from the ceiling,

0:21

I was like, alright. There's only 4 people that I can drill holes in this building.

0:27

Luckily, 2 of the 4 were part of the party that drilled a hole. I actually like it. It's not bad. And if you guys like it, it kind of removes all the extra stuff. So we're gonna remove all that stuff over here? Probably. Yeah. Okay. And, yeah, it it's gonna be good. Okay. Yeah. No. I like it. What do you you like it? I like it. Yeah. It's bet I like having the floor space open. Yeah. Because, dude, it's a lot because we can have guests like Rob join us. Now we've got our first guest. It's just a lot of

0:54

these things take up a lot of floor space. And for anyone who's who can't see what I'm pointing to off camera, there's, like, these, like, large tripod stands for all the studio lights,

1:04

and they just they take up a lot of space in a small room. Mhmm. And we've already got, like, so much light with just this one

1:11

for this room. I think Totally. I think this is a better setup.

1:15

Yeah. I agree. It's about iterations. It is. And we're getting better and we're gonna,

1:21

and I'm we're so excited to have Rob join us. Rob,

1:24

my friend, how are you doing first of all? I'm feeling great, guys. It's good to be back. I feel like I'm there with you in Nashville.

1:31

Good. You know, he was part of the pod 256 crew Yep. And then he kind of, like, left us. And then I was talking to There was a there was a power struggle.

1:41

Yeah. Then I departed.

1:44

Yeah. Yep. So so you feel like you lost the power struggle. Is that what you're saying? Clearly.

1:51

Well, we miss you, and we're glad to have you back.

1:55

Well, he's been busy since he's been gone. Yeah. Published a book,

2:01

signing autographs at the Bitcoin conference.

2:04

What is it called? Kissing baby

2:07

or shaking, babies kissing hands? Something like that. That. Yeah. Or it's my dyslexia. As long as the babies get shaken, you're winning. Yeah. As long as the babies are getting shaken, you're winning.

2:17

But, dude, massive congrats on the book launch. Paul Thank you, guys. Overlay the applause on that one. It

2:25

it is, by the way, we we we've not taken it up a notch. You know, we're actually gonna put the book right here. I don't know. You probably saw, like, the 3,000,000 plus or 2 to 3,000,000 plus people last week saw That's right.

2:38

You know, how we were showcasing your book.

2:41

You know, how by the way, you're well over a couple million books sold now?

2:47

It's between 5 to 7,000,000 books have been sold at this point. Okay. Rock and roll. Perfect. Yeah. So very pleased with the numbers. I think a lot of that launch pad started with pod 256 as far as,

2:59

as far as the marketing inspiration. Right? Nice. Clearly.

3:02

Nice. We definitely have our act together. So we're in inspiration.

3:06

Yeah. So how about this? Let's do for this week's pod, we wanna go and discuss the journey of creating this book. I want I want there's a million questions I got for you, buddy.

3:18

Beef by the way, I got I should've charged this. I got only, like, 10 or 11% left. And actually, I think it does hold pretty good battery. But, I wanna get through the state of the network first. Yeah. Definitely. Because your computer that, I guess, mines Bitcoin, we don't wanna have it too close to my ears because they're sensitive. I don't want anyone's ears bleeding when they leave the studio, so we're just gonna leave my computer over there for now.

3:43

Yeah. Totally. And we'll go through the state of the network. You as you know, Rob, you can chime in with any feedback,

3:51

comments, or concerns and,

3:54

and then we'll get into it. Then we'll get into it. How about this? You can move this thing up like that and so on Oh, good. For your eyes. Alright. Yeah. I need I need the text as large as possible.

4:04

So today is September 4, 2024.

4:08

Crazy. We're at block height 859-869.

4:13

And according to our friends at new hedge dot I o, Bitcoin difficulty is 89.4

4:19

trillion as of August 28th, and looking like it'll increase another

4:24

roughly 2% at the conclusion of epoch 426,

4:28

which should be on September 11th. Mhmm. Rob, who's plugging in minors in this in the with in this environment? Who's plugging in minors?

4:37

I want names. People who it's the minis or the megas, dude. I mean, everybody in the middle is suffering.

4:44

Big dudes on their infrastructure, playing a lot of hedging games, playing the financial services games.

4:49

And then little dudes, all the bit ax boys have been going absolutely bonkers, and they're plugging in like mad. I'm not totally sold on the,

4:59

the pitch to get multiple x a hash of BitXes. Why? I think there's a strong

5:04

is you know, there's just a really and I love these guys. There's absolutely no shade to these guys. But But the the language very quickly becomes one of these things of, like, first off, the product is beautiful, and second off, it's simple.

5:16

And third off, it's pure ideological mining. So you plug it in. It rips. You learn about mining. You get it set up. It produces, you know, 111.5,

5:25

you know, nominal terra hash, which is beautiful.

5:29

But the second you start selling that as

5:32

if we only sold a million of these,

5:35

then you're starting to get into trouble. Because it this idea that it's gonna be competitive with, you know, a mega miner, I think is a little bit silly at least at this point in the network,

5:45

just on sheer scale. Right? You know, you've got new version, immersion cooled Watts Miners that are ripping, you know, near 300 terahash per unit, and you have people's installing 100 megawatt buildings of those. So it's

5:57

when you think about the actual scale of that,

6:00

the math does the math as they say. Right? So I am very pro BitX, super pro BitX.

6:07

And I think that they're just getting started in terms of the cool stuff they're gonna start

6:11

presenting to the community. And and, you know, at the end of the day, it'd be cool to see these guys lay the foundation for people building full scale open sourced very, very efficient miners, which I'm sure is coming.

6:22

Just don't pretend like a BitX is gonna compete with, with an s 21

6:27

or an m 60 s. It's, I think the the term

6:31

compete like, I think, really, the paradigm with the bid acts is more about, like,

6:36

with, centralization around, like, block templates that we've seen

6:40

and the potential risk for censorship to become, like, a very

6:47

formidable reality on the Bitcoin blockchain.

6:51

If if there were a 1000000 bid access out there,

6:55

then you've got that amount of hash rate in that amount of individual's hands

7:02

that can go anywhere, do anything against any of these other miners that are perhaps colluding or working

7:15

to to to promote censorship on chain. Right?

7:19

And so even though, like,

7:22

comparatively, it would be a small amount, even if it was an exahash,

7:29

then, you know, whatever transactions are trying to get censored, if the BitAxers

7:34

don't do the censorship, then, you know, those transactions

7:38

get through just that much slower. Yep. Well, is there, an ideological division in the BitX community? Is there a pro censorship arm of the BitX community?

7:49

I I'm sure there is. Just like every I'm sure there's internal strife as well.

7:54

Well Like all communities. Right? I mean, even I mean, just between, like, even Scott and I, like, we we view,

8:00

ocean and ordinals. We have, you know, we have 2 different views on that. So,

8:05

I mean Totally.

8:07

I think I think every Which is good. Right? You know, this is mining is like the purest free to choose because the reality of people using the Bitcoin network is that most folks that will use it aren't gonna run a node. Like, if you're self custoding, predominantly people are going through their 3rd party,

8:22

3rd party server to go access, you know, whatever their wallet,

8:26

wallet back end is. So that's a problem.

8:29

But then on the mining side, it's kinda like the confluence of all of these free to choose problems. And

8:35

arguably, we have the greatest incentive as miners to actually

8:39

behave with a low time preference. You know, a lot of folks are gonna be buying a big stack of Bitcoin and calling themselves low time preference,

8:46

but they're gonna be using, using services that might not necessarily

8:50

align, with the best interest of the the the long terms of the Bitcoin community.

8:56

But the monetary incentive is the fun fundamental driver. Right? And

9:01

exactly what the guys at Ocean are getting into, which I absolutely love,

9:05

at some point in time, it's gonna become a business risk to mine through a centralized

9:10

template provider or to be a hasher, as mechanic would say,

9:14

to hash to a centralized template provider. And what Ocean is doing is so important because it's essentially proving the point through their product that

9:21

you can essentially you can take back what it means to be a white paper miner. Because when you read the white paper, you know, Satoshi wasn't creating a distinction between,

9:30

between miners and nodes. That came later with the advent of mining through GPUs and then mining through FPGAs and then mining through ASICs, where you started to, like, disembody

9:39

what was happening just running software on your computer, you know, 1 CPU, 1 vote.

9:44

That then transitioned into this whole other thing, which was

9:47

one farm pointed to foundry and one farm pointed to brains.

9:51

And, that's a very different that's a very different calculus. Right? And

9:56

while it may be convenient, there's huge business risks, but their business risk that because we haven't seen them yet,

10:02

maybe we've gotten a little bit lazy on the large scale mining side of things or even the home home mining side of things where it's like

10:08

it's better to have a product like Ocean that can give you a solution to a problem that you may not necessarily have yet in terms of, like, the real world or somebody going to Foundry and and,

10:19

forcing them to do, you know, OSHA compliant or green compliant or whatever compliant blocks,

10:25

it's better to have the resources and not have to use it and be able to participate in a in a pure ideological way than it is to

10:32

wind up in a situation where somebody knocks on the doors of all these mega miners one day and says to them, hey. We need you to,

10:40

look at this list of addresses and make sure that you don't mind any templates that include any of these addresses included in it.

10:47

So from a pure risk hedging strategy, it's it's it's perfect. It's ideal, and it's it's wonderful that we actually have a product.

10:54

Not a 100% there yet, and they're very open about that. You know, it it starts to break the link of a miner being a pure hasher, but the the inevitable kind of game that we're trying to get to is something that I think,

11:05

you know, is a full rollout of Stratum v 2, is a full rollout of,

11:09

local template building that you can validate through any any variety of, like, technical mechanisms.

11:16

It's good to have those resources, and

11:19

it takes it takes the gigabrain autists

11:21

to kinda see around the corner and start building for those products before you actually need them.

11:26

Yeah. Yeah. I like that you brought it back to that line, 1 CPU, 1 vote. Mhmm. Because I think getting back there would be would be huge. And I think there's a lot of different people throughout the ecosystem, ourselves included, that are trying to bring it back to that. Right? A 100%.

11:42

And we may not all agree and that that's a good thing.

11:48

Yeah. We're not Yeah. We're not supposed to. Right? Exactly.

11:51

Yeah. That's why we need Rob more, on the show more often.

11:56

It brings it back to reality. Alright. What's our next step?

12:00

Yeah. Before this thing runs out of battery, over at KaboomRacks,

12:04

Bitmain ampminer s 21 pro

12:07

234 Terahash, 15 jewels per Terahash,

12:11

for sale, brand new in the box, under Bitmain warranty,

12:15

49.79 each. What do we price it at?

12:19

2127 at Terahash. 20 okay. 2127 at Terahash. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Which is which is crazy when you think about a couple of years ago. Dude. Right?

12:27

Yeah. Yeah. Like, a $100 to Terahash?

12:31

$100 a Terahash? Dudes that are sitting on $14,000

12:34

s nineteens. Yeah. For real.

12:37

Yeah. RIP.

12:44

Dude. Dude. Yeah. These knuckleheads are set up for oh, wait.

12:49

Yeah. Morons. I didn't mean to hurt you. Yeah.

12:52

I I feel attacked. Moving over to mempool.space.

12:57

We'll just keep rolling along here. Hash rate is back up to

13:01

648 x a hash on the 14 day moving average.

13:06

And taking a look at insights.brains.com. Real quick. One question for Rob.

13:11

One one Zeta Hash, Rob. Oh, yeah. Oh my goodness. I was just thinking about that Sam Wilder's report from River

13:18

where he wrote about the Zedahash. And when I when I looked through it the first time, I thought to myself,

13:24

I don't know. Are we getting ahead of ourselves? And I am shocked at how quickly

13:29

stuff is coming up. I don't know, man. It's How old was that report?

13:35

Maybe a year, year and a half. It's not super old. It's crazy how fast life comes at you, isn't it?

13:41

Life comes at you fast. So what do you think? If you don't stop to look around, you might miss something, guys. I I'm still betting November 5th. Yeah. I got Iko Prior to the end of the year. He's got November 5, 2024.

13:56

Like, I I think it's at, like, 7 o'clock or 8 o'clock EST

14:00

is when he you got it? Yep. Yep. Yeah. We'll go with that.

14:05

I could see it rocking along, like,

14:07

6 to 8 months from now. Wow. Wow.

14:13

Bearish? I don't know. I think I think it's, like, coincident with a lot of, you know, if we get a proper bull run and we get the kind of brain brain melting, face melting, parabolic advance that we had in 2017 or something like it,

14:30

because the 20 early 20 twenties were were very disappointing for folks who were, in Bitcoin before that. And I think a lot of folks

14:38

you know, the the vast majority of people in Bitcoin have never seen, like, a 2017

14:42

ripping face melting holy smokes bull run.

14:45

If we could get one of those, which I'm not convinced that we won't, because in in my mind, it just seems like the degeneracy

14:52

has more money. You know, 2017 was like the CryptoKitties

14:56

and the Leverage Longs and the BitMex rec tracker and all that fun stuff. And I kinda feel like that's gonna happen, but it will be,

15:04

it'll be dudes with dudes with banking degrees that are now having to freak out about, you know, 20,000,

15:11

dollar moves a day in Bitcoin.

15:15

So if we get that, I think if we get that, everyone and their brother is gonna be plugging in ASICs, and we'll again have, like, a supply shortage. And then we'll then have a an infrastructure shortage, but it won't matter because you'll be mining on your s 19 in Hawaii on, you know, 50¢ a kilowatt hour.

15:31

And then everybody will get wrecked. But I could see us having some, like, crazy rip where

15:37

assuming there's some supply there and I don't know. There's a lot of secondary supply. There's finally, like, some resources in the repair sectors where people are actually able to, like, set up proper repair shops and do proper volume and and work with manufacturers to maintain warranty.

15:52

If there's enough supply or, like, latent supply or, like, these m thirties or these these early model s nineteens that are kinda sitting in warehouses, people are waiting to figure out what to do with them, or they're just using them as, like, you know, dead stock that you can swap parts for.

16:06

I don't know, man. If if an s 19 becomes worth, you know, 3 grand, 4 grand, 5 grand again, these dudes are gonna be, like, drop shipping these things from eBay,

16:15

and sending them to everybody and their brother to go mine in their basement. So that could accelerate the the Zeta Hash in my mind.

16:23

But I'm so I'm so terrible at

16:26

any sort of, like, macro prediction anything.

16:30

It is so far outside of my wheelhouse that I'm much more content to just, like, sit down and grind on some day to day stuff and figure out today's problem.

16:39

Word. What do you when do you think are gonna have a set of hash?

16:44

Greater than 8 months. Yes. Greater than 8 months? Yeah. Why?

16:49

I think it's gonna be a very slow and steady growth. I I don't or or slower and steadier growth. I don't think there's enough power. There's a lot a lot of competition from the AI HPC,

17:01

if I got the acronyms right, world that they are going to be gobbling up,

17:07

power purchase agreements. And when they can't,

17:10

I have a very I have a belief

17:14

that they will acquire Bitcoin mining companies

17:17

and say, okay. We have a boatload of cash. We have to get this power.

17:21

There's a perceived finite supply of power right now in the market right now to plug in. We're just gonna go buy x y z company. Great. You guys have

17:31

x amount of power or y amount of power. Okay. Cool. Take those freaking machines out. Let's

17:38

refurbish everything around here and we're gonna plug in our, AI machines.

17:43

I think that could happen. And then so the plus minus ratio around something like that happening

17:49

while the plebs continue to mine, while

17:53

other maybe nation states get into mining, other folks, it'll be still

17:58

up, but it won't be as crazy.

18:01

If the AI world was not involved, then, yeah, I mean, 1 Zeta Hash by, like, you know, 6, 8 months is definitely in the cards. Wow.

18:12

I we all heard Trump at the conference.

18:14

We're gonna be begging him no more energy, please, sir. That's what he said.

18:18

He said 1 Zeta Hash by November.

18:21

Please please, president. No more energy. We have too much.

18:27

It's so crazy.

18:29

What was the last step? The thing died but,

18:33

the, hash No. It didn't.

18:36

You little monkey. Good job.

18:39

Sorry. I thought it died. I'm just retarded.

18:43

So the, let's see. According

18:47

to insight stop brains.com, hash value is currently 70,000

18:51

sats per petahash per day. Hash price is $42

18:55

per petahash per day. And the halving is due in 1,315

19:01

days according to coin wars.com.

19:04

And what about the telehash? The telehash

19:07

Rob, you come to the telehash? I can't wait for it. Let's go. 146

19:12

days. So mark your calendars for January 29th. January 29th.

19:17

Dude. Hey. It's right after my birthday. Oh, nice. Birthday.

19:21

You know, like, now Future future birthday.

19:24

Future birthday. Yeah. Happy birthday in advance. You know? Yeah. Love it.

19:29

The last week or we've announced this for a while now, but our first mining Monday is in less than 2 weeks. And I think we already got, like, 30 or so RSVPs

19:40

Mhmm. Which is awesome. Scott's gonna be flying in Yeah. And coming in for that one. Cool. And I think there's gonna be a number of other folks. People have been hitting us up, like, they're excited for it. So I think there's gonna be some a good turnout. I think so too. We'll see what happens.

19:56

I'm excited to see it because if there's if there's somebody who I know can take

20:02

a vision and turn it into something particularly awesome,

20:07

Rod, you are the dude to do it. I remember

20:09

when you were just starting to tease the idea of

20:13

what happens if, if the Bitcoin conference comes to Nashville and you were starting to, like, put the chess pieces in place.

20:22

And then to get to show up to the park

20:26

and see just the heavy hitters

20:29

that you were able to, beyond everything,

20:34

build relationships with, which is the thing that, like, people don't understand. They think like, oh, you have an event and then people sign up for the event and they come. Like, no. If you're gonna get a governor, a sitting governor,

20:44

and a bunch of senate people and billionaires

20:48

and some of the biggest builders in the space to put their butt in your chair, and you're only gonna have you're gonna have a stage that has less than 200 people,

20:56

which I don't know how many people we packed into that main room, but it was it was probably around 200 or way beyond,

21:02

potentially, way beyond fire code. I won't get you guys in trouble.

21:07

You have to have unbelievable relationship skills to be able to do that. So huge props to you guys. I

21:15

was at the conference right after Sailor got off the main stage, and it was the afternoon, and I didn't really know what to do with myself for the rest of the day.

21:24

And he comes shuffling through, and, of course, he's got his, like, 7 he's like a quarterback moving through the pocket. He's got, like, 7 bodyguards around him. And the room, like, gets quiet and everybody's staring at the dude. And he rushes off to a car. And I forget who I was talking to and they're like, oh, yeah. He's gonna go over to the park right now and, and go give a talk. And I was like, oh, shit. I should go to the park right now and go see what, see what afternoon's gonna be like. Go catch up with the with everybody there. And so I hopped on a lime scooter,

21:52

and I it wasn't one that had the nice little cell phone holder thing because with one hand and it was raining. It was drizzling very slightly. It was a beautiful afternoon.

22:02

So there's me ripping through the streets of Nashville

22:05

on a lime scooter holding up the the Google Maps on my phone to see where the hell I'm going because there are these weird little turns you have to do to get through before you come down,

22:14

you come down 21st to get to you guys. I look over to my left, and Charlie Spears is there,

22:21

in a car. So we're saying high five at a stoplight.

22:24

It was a scene out of a movie, and I pull up and I open the door, and you were still doing doing the political talk. Everybody stares at me because the stage is oriented in a strange way. I immediately become very insecure. I sit down on the floor, and the security dude, who I only know is the security dude because everybody else is facing the stage,

22:42

has determined that I'm not a threat, because I'm a sweaty rain covered man who has just dropped in to this talk. But the heavy hitters, the presence in that room,

22:52

was unbelievable was unbelievable. I'm sitting there and I'm watching this. I'm like, this is unfricking believable. Like, Rod took a vision,

22:58

nurtured these relationships with these people, and gave them something of value such that he was able to turn it around and say, hey. Do you wanna come talk to my friends? And it was it was brilliant.

23:08

And the only thing that makes it better was that I look over to my right because there's a dude that I was very much encroaching on who was sitting on a chair.

23:16

And I noticed he has some tattoos on his hand. I was like,

23:19

I think I've seen those tattoos before.

23:22

And I saw some art. I don't know if you could see it, but I have my I have my little Maddox art right there that came with my start 9.

23:32

And so I'm, like, butting up, leaning against Maddox watching this thing, I go, oh, I haven't met you before, dude.

23:38

I look up and there he is, you know, a tat full full arm of tattoos, full body of tattoos.

23:42

He was clothed this time. Not like the photo. But

23:48

it was a beautiful moment, and I don't think people appreciate fully just, like, how hard it is to put something like that together and just how high signal it was.

23:58

Well, rock and roll. And thanks for joining us, man. It literally means the world when, like, friends like you guys just continue to just show up. Like, whenever I you know, I'm, like, half joking, half serious, like, see you at the telehash? And you're, like, auto response is, like, yes. When is it? It's like, oh, yeah. January 20th. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right after my birthday.

24:15

Awesome. I'm there. But, yeah, the Mining Monday, I think, is gonna be, if we can pull it off the way I think we can, which I believe we can, is gonna be something that's special. I I think they do something similar in Houston

24:29

where they have a mining focused meetup.

24:32

But this one being a little bit more of like a bit devs meets Cool. Pleb focused,

24:39

do it yourself home mining, bent. And we'll record a pod 256 maybe at the beginning of the,

24:46

meet up. And it'll be cool because I think we'll do 4 or 5 of these mining Mondays,

24:53

leading up to the telehash. Mhmm. Bring your best tuxedo, Rob. It's gonna be a big it's gonna be a big deal

25:00

and, yeah. We'll make it happen. Can't wait. Yeah. It's gonna be fun. Cannot wait. By the way, tangent,

25:06

you're gonna come to the Africa Bitcoin conference?

25:08

For the what? We're going to Africa, me and Iko and Scott. Oh, we're going to Paul too.

25:15

December 3rd. Kenya. Kenya. Nairobi, Kenya.

25:20

Actually, I think there may be a direct flight from Denver. So you're gonna go see Eric Hirstman. He's putting on something with gamma?

25:26

Yes. Amazing. Yes. Yeah. I would love to get out there. I've only been to West Africa. I haven't,

25:32

and, of course, Eric is just an incredible guy.

25:35

He's the absolute stunner of the store. The best.

25:38

Stoner. Stoner. I I want I joked with Iko. I'm, like, I I half of me just won't wanna go spend time with Eric. So I'm gonna go get on a 20 hour flight just to spend some time with it. Do you have a weird urge to ever just give a dude a hug?

25:52

Well, he's a big dude, but yes. Obviously, I get that with you guys. One of those. Eric Eric is one where the vibe it's it's a vibe thing. It's purely a vibe thing.

26:01

Yes. 100%. Alright. We'll we'll send you our flight path and, our flight plan plan. Dude, Cano is never gonna send anybody his flight path.

26:11

I don't even click on calendar. OPSEC.

26:16

We cannot deny this man who's Absecc. You guys have no idea how, like, the beta of my existence is, like, coordinated calendars with a few of my friends. This maybe this guy included. But,

26:28

you know We'll take things one step at a time. Hey, buddy. I don't wanna rush into this relationship and hit the accept button I love it. On a calendar invite. I don't know who's getting it or where it's going.

26:38

You know? Yeah. Let's just keep it very formal. Yeah. Let's keep it very formal. You know? If you could just, you know, hand me a card Mhmm. With a few proposed date and times, I can write back to you. I can hand the card back to you, and That's right. We can go from there.

26:53

But, it we'd love to have you involved in the telehash, buddy. That'd be a blast.

27:00

We have any more stats on that bad boy? That was it for stats. We got some special thanks.

27:05

Nice. And then some hashers that have been pointing us hash rate. Let's do it. Alright. So special thanks to Foundry USA for their generous support of the 256

27:16

Foundation's mission to make Bitcoin mining free and open. Dude, do we know if there has anyone pointed us any,

27:23

through the donate? It I don't think I've checked since last week. But,

27:29

because that's one area. Again, shout out to Foundry, not to cut you off, massive. They kinda got the ball rolling on the 256 side. By the way, I think 2 weeks Turkish,

27:40

we may have an announcement. Yes. 2 weeks? Yeah.

27:44

Less than that. Less than that. Actually, at Mining Monday,

27:48

we're gonna make the announcement. Yep. And then on the Tuesday It'll hit your socials. It'll it'll hit your socials. Yeah. It's gonna be cool. Yeah.

27:56

Stoked on that. That's dude. Yeah.

28:01

That's a good one. But, anyways, Foundry got the ball rolling. Massive shout out to them. Yep. I do wanna figure out on this donate side. Look, it's nearing the end. You wanna pay the tax, man. You may love, you know, whichever politician you wanna love paying taxes. God bless you. More power to you. For those folks that wanna maybe minimize their tax bill, and then

28:22

empower themselves to utilize those dollars and appropriate them and things that they care about,

28:27

you have a unique opportunity now. That's right. And you can, like, donate to Open Sats. You can donate to Brink. You can donate to a number of, Bitcoin Focus. The p2p Rights Foundation. The p2p Rights Foundation. Totally.

28:41

And you can also But you should donate to pod 256.

28:45

Oh, oh, sorry. What was that, Rob? You should donate? You you should donate Okay. To pod 256. Yeah. Could could we talk about the controversy?

28:53

Oh, what's the controversy? What's the controversy? The foundry controversy. There was there was raging chat. Oh, Rob, you had me laughing out loud

29:03

when you told the guy in our group chat, hey, man. This is not an airport. You don't have to announce your departure.

29:11

I was dying. But here, I get it. And, actually, we still need to connect with John Stephanopoulos. We've been, mixing up. He I think he's away and so our calendars.

29:23

I'll take the other side. I'll take the other guy's side that was, like, a little bit, perturbed by,

29:28

us taking Give give us some context, though. Like, paint paint the scene for the viewer. So I think look. We we start this,

29:35

our mission at the 256 Foundation Yep. Is to make Bitcoin mining open and as open and free as possible.

29:43

And, a lot of folks think

29:46

it's they may think it's a lot easier to be done,

29:50

and it should just be done through

29:52

individual grassroots, donations

29:56

and, involvement, if you will. And say, let's shun out this area here because they're mega corporations or or they don't have the best interest of Bitcoin.

30:07

Iko and I actually had this, like Iko and I do, we

30:12

not we don't spar. We just throw out a hypothetical,

30:15

and then we discuss the hypothetical. It's like, well, what if this happens? We have dialogues. We have dialogues. Right. And then we'll we'll talk through a dialogue of something.

30:23

And then one of which was I think I said this to Iko. I was like, well, what if, you know, Coinbase wants to,

30:29

you know, donate money or or somebody else that I It was Ocean. It was Ocean. Yeah. It was like This is, like, back

30:35

at, like, the very beginning of the year when we're just starting the foundation or trying to figure out

30:41

what the vision is, what it's gonna be like. And

30:44

we're like, well, if we're doing this, where's the money coming from? And you throw out, like, well, what if what if Ocean wants to donate money? Because I had been very vocal about my opposition to the way Ocean was operating.

30:55

And then I'll and then we came to the conclusion, which I I'm now passionate and I believe this is the right conclusion, which is we will take,

31:03

money from all, influence from none. Right. And I think it's such a simple

31:08

focused mantra where there's a number of things, by the way, Rob, and anyone else, whether you like what we're doing or not like what we're doing. It's pretty

31:17

easy just to either talk shit, which is fine,

31:20

ignore or participate. Or

31:23

if you're, like, so, you know, wound up, which that would be actually a compliment, to be honest with you, that you start your own initiative,

31:31

more kudos. Like, rock and roll. I think it's kinda it's in an odd way. I I think we need more content. We need more podcasts. We need more newsletters. We need more foundations. We need more developers. We need more, more, more, more across the board.

31:45

So, be about it rather than, you know,

31:50

talk about it, I guess. LARP about it. LARP and and so that guy, I think, was, like, very,

31:56

excited for what we were doing. And honestly, in a weird way, like, the first big donation coming from Foundry may have from the optics perspective, but I don't think people know, like, the the especially the folks we we're working with, how high quality, how,

32:12

high integrity that those folks are,

32:16

that it gets kinda lost in translation when they see, woah. These guys have so much of the hash rate,

32:22

and yada yada, in that regard. So

32:26

There there is something that I think, like, has happened as we've been putting on our big boy pants as an industry over the last couple of years.

32:33

We're, like, you know, 3 3, 4 years ago and pardon me if you hear the trash truck coming by because it is coming by.

32:39

You know, 3, 4 years ago, there was this whole thing of, like,

32:42

the the the not a true Bitcoiner. Right? That kinda took the stage. I could it's like the no true Irishman

32:48

fallacy. Like, who's a real Bitcoiner? Who does it in this kind of way? Which is always kinda silly to me because it it

32:55

it's actually in contradiction to the whole permissionlessness

32:59

nature of the protocol. Like, just because you were in a small group of people who had a lot of the same viewpoints, and a lot of us did coming from these these, like, mid teen or late teens class,

33:10

just because you're in that same group of people, if you wanna hold the belief to be true that this thing will continue to grow and will become something global and will become something meaningful,

33:19

then you can't also hold the opinion that it's only for people like you.

33:23

And you have to you have to realize that, yeah, we're we're rooting for hyperbitcoinization,

33:28

but this thing is probably gonna happen, you know, short of an asteroid.

33:32

It's gonna be incremental, and every inch of that incrementalism you're gonna have to fight for. And so the important thing is that you have institutions

33:38

like yourselves with the with the the the the the the foundation that you've set up.

33:44

The important thing is that you have people in the driver's seat who are making those decisions because

33:49

the levers of power haven't gone anywhere yet. We have not hyper Bitcoin eyes like like Steve who bought, you know, 10,000 Bitcoin in 2012

33:58

and is now sitting on a beach in Maui, that is not the dude that is going to be pushing forward initiatives that allow for the other 50, 60, 70% of the world to start to get access to the the service and the network that is Bitcoin.

34:13

It's all this incrementalism that we're in now. And what it demands on you is that it demands that you actually hold to some values which you've established,

34:21

but it does pose a risk of some kind of capture. And I think that you have to just accept it for what it is. Like, this is the nature of wanting to participate in a permissionless protocol that is becoming a global monetary system and is becoming a very well respected

34:35

asset across across world markets. You don't get that without some dudes

34:41

in really nice ties trying to figure out ways to make things go their way. But what you want on the other side of the aisle are people who are ideologically secure, people who are gonna be able to, you know, give voice to the things that you care about.

34:54

So So I was I yeah. I had a reaction to that,

34:57

immediately shitting on your guys' good announcement. And it's totally fine because the core people and and, again, he I don't think we know the guy really that well at all, or I don't know him. And, like, you know us, and we you know kind of some of the behind the scenes stuff that we're doing,

35:13

and you know our integrity, you know our focus, and what we're potentially capable of.

35:18

So, that kind of stuff doesn't,

35:21

faze me. Yeah. I love that guy too. He he is brilliant. Some of the stuff that I've seen him do analyses on for, like, particularly immersion mining is, like, unbelievably good stuff. When he's doing all the But, yes, I I did do a little trolling. The bid acts with the solar panel stuff and, you know, I think he he does some great things. But

35:41

for whatever reason, he was triggered by the announcement of our support from Foundry and he got emotional and and, like, started

35:50

But that's another cool thing because honestly, like, in a year from now actually, I have a note to follow-up with him a year from now. It's like, hey. Here's what we've done. And by the way, one quick thing to go back on

36:02

is so I think, like, studying some foundations and in general, like, how they get money and so on.

36:09

Whenever you're beholden to, like, one large donor,

36:13

oftentimes that foundation will go towards the direction of that one large donor and so on in the traditional,

36:20

nonprofit world. Where I think we're gonna do something similar to, like, how Bitcoin Park

36:26

has evolved is get a lot of the plugs that are pointing us hash, streaming us stats, you know, giving us individual donations. I think getting that group of folks

36:36

consistently coming in is massive such that, you know, Foundry is not guaranteed every single year.

36:42

Our next 2 that we announce are not guaranteed every single year. But it's having a number

36:47

of those folks such that when one of them,

36:50

undoubtedly, over time, either,

36:53

you know, doesn't support us anymore, you know, the foundation continues to go.

36:58

And the second thing is different than a lot of the other folks that may have so many grants and so many projects, I think us focusing on a handful of projects that are pretty mission critical,

37:10

that we think are mission critical and we want to put some time against and and dollars,

37:15

and having focus there that individuals as well as businesses can kinda latch onto and say, oh, yeah. I definitely wanna support that project. So I wanna support the 256 Foundation because that's such a huge project and we need teams of people Mhmm. Working on that, not just an individual,

37:33

if you will. Right. And so, hopefully, there's, like, recurring annual grants that are just supporting that. And then, you know, eco leading the charge, building out content,

37:43

how to like, there's a number of things that we have planned Yeah. From there. And, you know, at the end of the day, if we had restricted this down to just taking money

37:51

from people who have the same views as me or the same views as Rod We'd have. We would have gotten 10,000 stats. Yeah. We would have gotten all of, like,

38:01

3 to 5 people to donate money to the foundation and,

38:04

you know, it it would have all been for naught. So

38:08

Don't worry. When, Eco's rocking his,

38:11

Chainalysis shirt, you know, then he's like, hey, guys.

38:15

Pod duty 6 is brought to you by.

38:19

Do do not put that in. This is, Paul. This is like a real American revolution moment, though. Right? No. No. Like, this is this is what people should really like about Bitcoin is that everyone complains about the infighting,

38:31

but it it's like a real American revolution moment. Like, when you look at the 13 colonies and making the decision to go and say, like, f you to the British,

38:40

these dudes did not get along with each other. Like, they were very, very different from from the perspective of, like, cultural background and where they come from and religion and things that they cared about. And, historically, we talk about, you know, founding fathers and and the American Revolution as if it was just this monolith

38:55

not realizing that it it it was a problem so big

38:59

that it forced people who were in radical opposition to each other in other times

39:04

to actually agree on something. And that's actually the cool thing about Bitcoin is, like, you know, as soon as it it was a couple years ago when all the Bitcoin progressives started,

39:13

started sticking their heads up and being super pro Bitcoin for, you know, climate reasons and,

39:18

kind of saving the world, saving the whale reasons, and they they wanted to, you know, bank the unbanked,

39:23

But a lot of the the main kind of dominant language in Bitcoin, people were just like, what the hell are you guys doing in here? Which is a total wrong attitude. It's like, if if you're having an American Revolution moment, you need everybody on your team. And it's especially important that you get and look what the product of it is is that we have these we we have this huge outgrowth of, like, educators,

39:44

you know, college professors like the Troy Crosses and the Margo Pays and and the Andrew Baileys and the Bradley Rettlers.

39:51

And what happens? 3 years later, the the University of Wyoming is standing up an institute for Bitcoin.

39:58

Like, that that's the only way that you get that stuff is is when you have people that may disagree in other conditions

40:04

that because they're so compelled by this, like, dominant reason, you know, the rise on the the the raise on debt of of Bitcoin, which is freedom money,

40:11

and hard money, that they actually kind of sit down and go, well, I could put up with these guys.

40:17

And that that, I think, is something that I think we should be more cognizant of. It's like, anytime you see a new kind of class or group or type of person get involved in Bitcoin,

40:25

that's cool. And even even if you disagree with them radically and, like, many of whom,

40:30

I do personally, and and you should disagree,

40:32

as a Bitcoiner, but you shouldn't forget what the underlying theme is. Totally. Alright.

40:40

You wanna call out some of the so Yeah. What did, this This is how it works. The battery died. No. It didn't die. You hit the top button,

40:48

and then you have a little passcode, which I'm not gonna show you.

40:52

You know? So I know you got an Apple product. This is not this is not an Apple product. This is a beautiful product that you can actually hit a button, turn it on, save your eyes. No. I use I use real products that are made from Android.

41:05

This is not an Android product. I deGoogle them. Oh, you deGoogle them? Okay. Not Apple.

41:11

Anyways, like, I'd like to do this one. Well, a special thanks to our friend, Rob Warren,

41:17

Bikes and Bitcoin on Twitter, author

41:20

of the Bitcoin Miners' Almanac, available

41:23

today and tomorrow

41:26

and the next day in the foreseeable future. Correct?

41:29

Yeah. In print, anywhere that you find things in print,

41:33

except for in person, not not in libraries.

41:35

Well, maybe maybe send sends,

41:38

get the magazine guys to send us give us some copies and we'll sell them here for you. I also I did just find out that the book is gonna be used in the economics department in Ole Miss.

41:47

Joshua Hendrickson, let's go. Shout out. Yeah. Super, super cool. Professor,

41:52

rebel econprof, I think, is his handle. He is a great follow, by the way. Great memes, great content. That guy,

42:01

good good follow. Yeah, man. And you've been very kind. 10%.

42:07

Hey. Did did you send him the the the stats, by the way? Yeah. Or did he We got them. Okay. No. That's that's gonna come in a couple. I just haven't gotten the check yet. You gotta have to

42:16

The check's in the mail, Rod. Calm down. Yeah. First thing away, man. I was excited to send it. 10% of, all the all the royalty profits is going straight to the pod 256 foundation in perpetuity.

42:28

Dude, that is unbelievable, man. Thank you. Thank you so much. Amazing.

42:32

Yes. And so if you haven't bought a copy yet, buy a copy.

42:37

Coffee table book, bedside, bedside book, flip through it. Great conversation starter. Great first date. If you wanna bring it on a first date, open that goddamn way up. Late. It's a great thing to bring with you on a first date. You know, I don't know if I recommend that on the first date if you wanna build a relationship, but, you know

42:54

maybe maybe then save the book for, you know, date 10 or date 20. Because if if that's what Rob's,

43:00

going for with the book, then you may wanna hold off. But, seriously,

43:05

massive I I well, I'm gonna come back to this because I wanna ask you a few questions before we wrap around the book.

43:12

Like, how the heck you decided. Of all the things that you're working on, you're a great father. You're doing that you had the energy and the foresight to just write this book, but we're gonna get to that.

43:24

I'm passing it. Okay. So these are

43:26

Eco's Secret oh, wait. These are good. These are good.

43:30

Oh, you want me to read them? Alright. So for the people that have been pointing us hash over the last week, we've got a shout out for.

43:39

Tried and true. Bikes in Bitcoin. Let's go. Bit axe wanna be just an s 17 pro. That's a

43:46

And then true. We've got 2 new Hashers

43:50

on the public pool. Boris, as always, thank you.

43:55

And then we've got the schnitzel axe. Oh, schnitzel coming in. And my personal favorite from this week, Eco's secret diary.

44:06

You know he's got a secret diary. You gotta check the opera turns on that one.

44:10

Dear diary. Well, again, thank you so much to the Hashtag.

44:17

Honestly, I think it's one of the coolest things, like, looking at this list, looking at the tried and true folks and then the new folks, and then figuring out all these,

44:26

like I think in the future, donate or or nonprofits in general of, like, collection are gonna just be different. Yes. There should be events and there should be all these different things, but there's so many cool avenues

44:37

to collect money. Like, I don't think we've gotten our act together yet on, Nostra yet to accept Zaps on our pod 2 56.

44:45

Well, I it's got a a lightning address in there now. Let's go. So yeah.

44:50

It does? Yeah. Let's go. It's,

44:53

pod 256 at minibits.cash.

44:59

Is that your own wallet? It's

45:02

well, I mean, technically

45:06

yeah. But?

45:09

Like, everything with

45:12

the 256 foundation and on 256

45:15

goes into our wallet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It all goes into the same place. Good. Good. Good. Good.

45:20

I mean, it's just you know, with the lightning address, you

45:25

you're it's it's kind of a roundabout way of getting there. So there's there's the mint. And this is a total tangent, so I'll try to keep it short. But there's, like, the eCash

45:34

mint that you're you have connected

45:37

to Noster, and you're, like, zapping from that wallet.

45:41

So when you it it displays your balance as SATs, but what you actually have are those little Ecash tokens Mhmm. Mhmm. On your phone. And so when you wanna, like, zap somebody,

45:54

the the Mini Bits application and their Lightning node

45:58

has the channel liquidity, and they're actually

46:02

managing that, the SATs moving back and forth. You're just sending the little eCash tokens from your phone back to Mini Bits and back and forth, and it's being displayed as SATs. Got it. But they're doing the Lightning,

46:15

transaction. And then when you

46:18

have when when you send that to your Lightning Wallet where you have the inbound and outbound liquidity

46:24

connected to your on chain wallet, then you that's where you get them off

46:28

and out of Lightning and into the same place all of the sats are going for the foundation.

46:35

Paul, we're gonna insert that meme. You know, this is the left side of the bell curve. And then, you know,

46:41

then the right side of the bell curve, you know, like the Jedi and then, like, dumbass.

46:46

So, he just did the Jedi, explanation. I just say, we got sats. Yeah. Yeah. Good.

46:53

There's a caveat there, but yeah.

46:55

There's a caveat? Yeah. What's the caveat? Well, mini bits,

47:01

it's custodial. Yeah. Yeah. No. I know. Yeah. Let's

47:04

go on. So, like, you're getting the display you're seeing in your wallet is a little deceiving that it's, like, displayed as sats. You don't actually have sats. You do have a bearer token, a little e cash token. Yeah. But you can only redeem those

47:19

with the mint that issued them Yeah. Which is MiniBits.

47:23

And, like, if we both had, an account with the MiniBits mint Mhmm. We could send eCash tokens to ourselves,

47:32

and the mint wouldn't necessarily have to know anything about that. Mhmm. But the only place those can get cashed out is with is through that mint. Yeah. And then when they cash them out, they're sending the lightning transaction.

47:44

Yep. Yep. Yep. So, I mean, that's the caveat is that it's custodial.

47:48

Now, when I first signed up for I thought that was a red line for you. Well, it was. And that's that's what I was just gonna say. And

47:54

when I first signed up for it, what I had read online was that

47:59

when you use the eCash

48:02

with MiniBits, you have a bearer token that only exists on your phone. Mhmm. And I was like, okay. So it's it's

48:10

non custodial because I'm in possession

48:13

of that token. Yeah. But what I didn't realize

48:17

until after the fact was that,

48:20

what's being displayed in my wallet isn't it's being displayed as sats, but it's not actually sats. It's a one to 1

48:28

e cash token. So I have this token, but it's not really worth anything to anyone except for the mint. Mhmm. And I have to give it to the mint, and then the mint has to do the lightning invoice.

48:40

So I don't have the ability to take what's displayed in my wallet

48:45

and send it as Lightning to anyone Yep. Without

48:48

going through that MIT. So there's

48:51

there's the risk of permission and

48:55

and a custodian. Now the custodian

48:59

who's running the MIT, they can't rug an individual, but they could rug

49:04

all of the people who are using the MIT. Yep. If, like, somebody came in and told them they had to shut their service down. Yep. Then I would just be left holding these Worthless. E toke eCash tokens

49:16

and can't redeem anywhere. That I can't redeem anywhere except for the mint that just got shut down,

49:21

and they had the channel to get my sats back into my own Lightning Wallet where I have the outbound liquidity.

49:28

So or the inbound liquidity to get it into that wallet, and then I could cash it out. So, yeah, I mean, there's some caveat there.

49:37

All that is to say, Zeus

49:39

is working on a Lightning address that is non custodial.

49:44

And so I'm just using mini bits in the meantime until that's good to go because I really

49:49

don't wanna go back to running all the Lightning infrastructure it takes to do a non custodial

49:56

Lightning transaction. Why I love Iko.

49:59

He's like Tangent. Yeah. Tangent. Endangent.

50:03

I just that's why I love you. But you'll get the full breakdown. Dude,

50:06

Rob, why are you crazy and why did you write this book?

50:12

Yes. Yes.

50:14

You crazy? Yeah.

50:17

Because yeah. You guys know how it is. When when you get into a hype cycle

50:23

and everyone is saying crazy stuff and none of it makes any sense

50:30

And, like, one second, homeminers are gonna save the world, and then the next second, we're gonna

50:37

we're gonna save all of the egrets

50:39

by using flared gas, and that's gonna save the world.

50:43

And the mega miners are gonna save the world and save the grids. It all just kinda sounded like discombobulated

50:48

bullshit to me. And I was so over this, like, perpetual mining hype cycle

50:54

where everyone was saying different versions of something, but there was no kind of coherence. There was nothing holding it together.

51:02

And in isolation in isolation, the arguments make sense. Right? Like, in isolation, it makes sense that ideological mining,

51:10

price insensitive mining, utility mining for heat in my house

51:14

is a decent way to mine. Like, that's a that's a a totally legitimate way to mine, and, like, you could build a model around that if you wanted to use the heat or you wanted to take some some solar off of your roof or something. Okay. That's one thing. And then if you look at the oil and gas world,

51:29

yeah. Okay. Vent and flare gas, there's, like, an issue environmentally.

51:33

There's excess gas. The price of gas changes. So the the producers of the gas won't have access to various markets. They're stranded from a pipeline.

51:42

Somebody who owns a bunch of wells is gonna orphan them because they can't monetize the gas because the cost of getting the gas out is too expensive and the price of gas is low, so it's not worth it. Alright. Well, that kinda makes sense.

51:54

And then mega mining. Okay. I'm gonna go set up in in Texas, and I'm gonna build, you know, a gigawatt size site.

52:00

And I'm gonna go basically become now a financial operator

52:05

on, ERCOT's open grid.

52:08

That makes sense to me. Like, okay. You're like you're you're

52:11

you're an options trader that can actually take delivery of the underlying if your trade goes against you. That's pretty cool.

52:18

There's nobody else in the market that could sign a contract and say, I'll take 50 megawatts of electricity

52:24

at 6 PM on a random Tuesday

52:27

and actually receive delivery of that 50 megawatts.

52:30

That's a really cool business model. And there just wasn't coherence. And I was so frustrated that everyone is, like, so hyped up, like, kinda huffing their own farts about the same stuff.

52:40

But from the outside consumer's perspective,

52:43

nobody knows what the hell you're talking about. Like and everybody immediately wants to jump into, like, oh, I got the the 26.2

52:50

joules per tera hash, and we're gonna use the immersion cooling, and then we're gonna do like, dude, if you wanna turn off 99% of people that are gonna be interested in your space, the way to do it is to immediately jump into the technicals, to immediately jump into the hardware, to immediately jump into, like, networking and electricity and things like

53:09

that. And that's really interesting stuff. Like, it's all really interesting, but unless you introduce it to people in a way where they can have some some central nuclear nucleus of coherence,

53:19

it's all fluff. And the people who we're having to explain ourselves to

53:23

are politicians who are gonna wanna make policy around this stuff one day. It's the big four accounting firms that are going to wind up doing all of the audits for these large companies.

53:35

It's all of the mid and small scale investors that wanna understand the market and get into it and wanna hedge their risk, so they wanna develop some kind of understanding about it. You know, it's it's people who are coming from atypical backgrounds as many of us are and wanting to just learn about this space before we dip our toe in it. And if you immediately go to the technical or you immediately go to some, like, very

53:55

very apparently esoteric niche use case,

53:58

you have the risk of of getting so lost in in the trees. People never see the forest, And they never understand the principles of it. So

54:06

that that was kind of my nights and weekends project that started,

54:10

a year and a half, almost years ago at this point,

54:13

where I thought, like, what's a what's a way that you can make all this stuff coherent? Because at the time, I had been writing,

54:19

a bunch for Bitcoin Magazine and I was playing around doing my own thing and we started to mine up in Wyoming.

54:26

And I was like, okay. Well, there has to be there has to be a better way. Like, there has to be a way to actually distill this to its,

54:32

its core principles. And it kinda felt to me like

54:36

if you ever read, like, the early days of dudes that were doing,

54:41

like, oil and gas exploration or you read, like, the early days of guys that were, like, doing science experiments in electricity or something like this. Right? Like, you're Nikola Tesla.

54:51

Not to say I'm Nikola Tesla ing anything,

54:54

but there there was this, like, first principles approach towards understanding

54:58

what the hell is going on. And

55:01

it occurred to me. I was like, well, nobody I was looking for resources and, like, nobody had really put together anything that was just a first principles approach of mining.

55:10

And when I started to look at it, I thought, well, what is the thing that you start with then? Because I had written an article for bit, Bitcoin Magazine that was, like, 3 it's called 3 Easy Pieces. It was how to teach Bitcoin to your grandmother,

55:23

and it actually got syndicated on 0Hedge. It was super cool. It got a lot of publication,

55:27

a lot of distribution. And it basically breaks the network down into,

55:31

there's 3 things that you need to be concerned with. You need to be concerned with signing devices or wallets as we call them. You need to be concerned with nodes, and you need to be concerned with miners. And I kinda broke it down because Bitcoin is hard to learn.

55:44

The signing devices, here's what they do. Here's who they participate. Here's who they talk to. The nodes, here's what they do. Here's what they're running. Here's how they interact with the network. Here's how they generate consensus with each other. The miners, these kind of alien landscape people over here, here's what they're doing. Here's how they're keeping kind of the the the machinery of the network greased and how they're issuing,

56:04

they're issuing this currency. They're selling transactions.

56:08

It was kind of an extension of that piece

56:11

where it was just focused on mining. And the thing that made the most sense to me was you start with the Bitcoin mining machine.

56:17

And the Bitcoin mining machine okay. Well,

56:20

why start with the machine? Well, we we've kinda and I only realized this after I finished the book.

56:26

We've kinda hit a point in Bitcoin mining where

56:29

in the same way that you had, like, a lot of different types of cameras in the early days of the camera, right, where you were, like, you were doing, like, colloidal wet plate or you're doing, like, tin types or daguerreotypes

56:40

or or you were coming out with 35 millimeter film and you were playing with these different kinds of lenses and these different kinds of bellows.

56:47

As as the evolution of the the the film camera developed into something that we would all recognize today,

56:53

it took the form of something that all had the same kind of constituent

56:57

conceptual parts. Right? So a camera has to have a lens.

57:01

It has to have, a light type box. It has to have a medium that's able to,

57:07

to record the image. It has to have a shutter. So, you know, something to to let the light in, to stop the light.

57:12

And it seemed to me that, okay, well, we're actually at a point in Bitcoin mining

57:16

where the mining machine itself is now

57:19

it now exists in a kind of format

57:23

where it has the same kinds of constituent parts

57:27

regardless of if you have an air cooled machine or an immersion cooled machine

57:32

or, or some kind of hydro machine. You know, it's always gonna have some mechanism of cooling. It's gonna be in a case. It's gonna have some kind of control board. It's gonna have some kind of ASICs. It's gonna have some kind of power supply unit.

57:44

And that's kind of the basis. Like, that's the thing.

57:47

And once you construct that thing, you can construct it in a 1000000 different ways. And there's all kinds of ways that you can, you know,

57:54

move elements of the the control board onto the chip, move parts from,

57:59

from the PDU to other places that you can start to change the format of the cooling mechanism.

58:03

Well, once you think about it in terms of, like, this principles based approach, which is what are the constituent parts of the machine,

58:10

now you can do something cool, which is say,

58:12

how do I run it? Okay. I need 3 things to run a Bitcoin miner. I need a source of electricity.

58:19

I need an Internet connection, and I need a a a mechanism for cooling because it's gonna get hot. All the all that energy has to go somewhere.

58:28

And that's the nucleus. The nucleus is start with the machine,

58:32

break it down into the 3 things that you need to run a machine,

58:35

and then move out from the machine and explain what's happening at the Internet connection.

58:41

What the fuck is hashing? Stop saying we're solving, you know, complex math problems. It's not. It's so much more interesting than that. It's so much more interesting than that.

58:50

But you have to break down something more on the network side. You have to break down the SHOT 256 algorithm. You have to break down why that's important. You have to break down hashing. You have to break down what a template is, and that's where you kind of touch the network.

59:04

Okay. Well, the electrical plug.

59:07

What about that? Okay. That's a cool one.

59:10

Well, your machine has to be plugged into something. Well, it's got to be plugged into something that generates electricity. You can't plug it into a fireplace.

59:16

You can't plug it into a gas stove. Now, all of a sudden, it's like, okay. Well, where do I get, electricity from?

59:24

I might get it from the grid. Alright. Well, what the hell is a grid?

59:28

Well, it's this, one of the most complex human run machines in the face of the earth, where it has to maintain consistent voltage voltage at all points in time, while the people who are using it are coming on and off freely over the course of the day.

59:42

So how do we participate in that? Like, where does an asymmetry come up? Like, where do I wanna go run my machine? Do I wanna go sit on a substation? Like, do I wanna go run next to a wind farm?

59:52

They have a lot of electricity there. Now you start to talk about the the energy systems. You know, I I focus on the US because we're US based and that's where a lot of the mining went to.

1:00:01

But that that power cable takes you in the entire direction of, well, off grid,

1:00:06

off grid gas mining. Well, they have electricity. Well, yeah, they use gensets.

1:00:11

So, like, throw a small block Chevy V 8 in the middle of a field in North Dakota,

1:00:16

attach it to a generator, now you have a genset.

1:00:20

Now you can take a stranded, mineral or or or waste product or something that you would have otherwise been venting,

1:00:27

or you could throw it into a turbine, and now you can all of a sudden convert it into something. You're feeding one of those ports because you're solving for 3 problems. You know, your your, your Internet connection,

1:00:37

your electrical connection, and your cooling. And the cooling is the last piece. Right? And the cooling is actually,

1:00:43

one part that I'm really, really interested I I I've already told the publisher, like, listen, guys. Like, I'm I'm trying to write this in a way that you don't have to do a,

1:00:51

a v 2 20 seconds after it's published. Like, write it in the most, like, high level principles oriented, kind of open as possible, and don't kinda tie

1:00:56

yourself oriented, kind of open as possible, and don't kinda tie yourself into,

1:01:02

something that will be obsolete, which is why it's not written like a manual,

1:01:06

because everyone is writing the manuals now with their business models.

1:01:09

The cooling side is super fascinating. And then you have to get into,

1:01:14

the various ways that we cool machines. And so now we're talking about, thermodynamics.

1:01:19

We're talking about, the heat transfer coefficient of various mediums that have to keep this chip cool.

1:01:25

And why would I do air cooling in one system or I would do immersion cooling in another system? And then what are the implications that I have as far as setting up another box around my smaller box, my Bitcoin miner,

1:01:37

to try to run this thing in in every kind of, far stretch of the world. Right? You know, the the problem becomes really interesting when you start to realize that it's,

1:01:45

it's this huge unsolved thermal problem.

1:01:49

So that's the that's the the impetus of the book. That's what we explore is just how do you start from this this tiny nucleus of what's the footprint of the machine,

1:01:58

how the hell do I run it, what are these three pieces that I need

1:02:04

to use? What do they do? What are the what are the general principles that sit behind them?

1:02:09

And then in the second half of the book, we apply them, and we say, okay. Let's talk to the operators. Let's talk to the people that are actually doing this,

1:02:16

And there will be they will be some of the most different people that you have ever met in your entire life, econoalchemist

1:02:21

himself included. You you, you have a wonderful chapter

1:02:25

talking about privacy and ideological mining.

1:02:30

You start to realize, like, oh, these people are all solving for the same core problems,

1:02:36

but they're doing it with very different business thesis. Or in some case, in the case of ideological mining, it's not a business thesis at all. You know, it's an ideological reason.

1:02:45

And once you can kinda start to segment and and get a sense of, you know, get get 10,000 feet over the terrain and start to look down and kinda see the shapes of the hills and the mountains,

1:02:55

then you can start to share that with people, and they can start to assess the world around them and actually understand what the hell is going on.

1:03:02

So that that was the impetus, was just kinda my own personal frustration with, you know, this stuff,

1:03:07

I can smell something, doesn't smell right in the way that people are talking about a lot of this stuff.

1:03:13

But I hadn't actually put in the work to say, what's a more sensible way to express this to people? You know, what's the most coherent way that you can say, I could hand this to my wife and she can read it and she can go, you know what? Like, 90% of that was totally

1:03:28

totally understood it. Like, one one you know, as technical as the book gets is probably when we're going into, like, hashing and the difficulty adjustment and,

1:03:37

what proof of work actually means,

1:03:40

which you could write a whole book on. And there's there's really at least, you know, my my personal,

1:03:46

having had to write this section a few times,

1:03:50

there's no way to make it simpler. Like, there really is not a way to make,

1:03:55

proof of work and as it relates to,

1:03:58

the shot 256 algorithm, via the difficulty adjustment.

1:04:03

There's there's no way to really explain that in kind of a simple, it's a metaphor of this. You really just have to kinda eat the elephant. Right? You have to look at the machine and see it run and put the pieces together in the most coherent way possible. And if you can kinda build that correctly, you can get it. That's as technical as the book gets.

1:04:20

But I wanted something accessible. And, you know, so far, that's that's a lot of what the response has been, which I've loved. I've loved that,

1:04:28

I've loved that the book's been getting picked up by educators

1:04:31

who are trying to teach folks more broadly about Bitcoin.

1:04:35

And when they get to mining, there's kind of this black hole. You know, they're what am I gonna do? I'm gonna read a Wiki? Like, I'm gonna

1:04:41

what am I gonna do in a Wiki? Like, you're gonna you're gonna talk to me about the history of pool? Like, there was no central resource for these kinds of things.

1:04:49

It's cool to see I I spoke with

1:04:53

a big consultancy a couple of weeks ago,

1:04:56

and they were in the process of,

1:05:00

working with a large Bitcoin mine and got to chatting with them when and the book comes up and they go, oh, we should probably get that.

1:05:07

Yeah. Like, your auditors should probably know what they're looking at,

1:05:11

if you wanna be a if you wanna be a public company, if you wanna be audited, you know,

1:05:16

and you don't want the IRS, you know, poking in every which way. You want things done properly.

1:05:21

The legal field as well. A bunch of attorneys have gotten these books because they wanna understand what what are the shape of these business models.

1:05:30

You know, what are they getting into? Like, how does this look like from a from a contracting perspective, from

1:05:36

I'm writing a I'm writing a PPA. How do I protect my customer who's a Bitcoin miner, but I don't know anything about that?

1:05:42

Or I have to figure out what the heavy assets are of a Bitcoin mine. How do I understand this thing coherently?

1:05:48

If I can look at their setup and kind of understand,

1:05:50

you know, are they mining in huts? Are they in large buildings? Like,

1:05:55

what does it look like? What does the business look like from a legal perspective? So all these ancillary,

1:06:00

ancillary purchasers, right, these smart folks who just wanna know what the space looks like. That's really who it's who it's for.

1:06:09

And, of course, Bitcoiners because as kind of rabid learners as as the vast majority of us are,

1:06:15

it's worthwhile to to be able to

1:06:19

see how you understand these things and how they hang together. And if you're working on the programming side, you're not necessarily

1:06:25

spending a lot of time looking at the the emerging Bitcoin industry, the Bitcoin mining industry.

1:06:30

So it's a good refresher for anybody in that sense. But that was the core nucleus. You know, distill it, make it simple, make it principled, and then build out to the world from there.

1:06:38

I love it. How much is the book?

1:06:41

It is 29.99 on Amazon. It's also being sold on,

1:06:47

Bitcoin Magazine Publishing on their website. And you can now also get a Kindle version, which they've put up. And I think we gotta do we gotta do an audiobook. I'd love to see an audiobook. You got that was what I was gonna get to. Are

1:06:58

are you gonna you gotta narrate the audio.

1:07:01

I would do that. Well, I've got I've got the nice mic, so I might go ahead and,

1:07:05

and see if I can put something together for No. You gotta get Morgan Freeman. No. No. The reason why I actually so what I do now,

1:07:13

this is big tangent, but a new habit I've been developing is I I always want to read, but I'm just

1:07:21

I never have the time, quote unquote time to read. Anyways, I create a new system in my morning routine that I dedicate some time to read because I put the freaking iPad on my kitchen table

1:07:32

and it's set to like open and then I just read my goal is just to read one paragraph. And then now I like that I read like multiple pages and essentially chapters and it's part of my routine.

1:07:43

But I'm so dumb. Again, I'm on the left side of the bell curve.

1:07:46

I actually have all these old devices like my Daylight, which is actually, I you asked me if I recommend this. I highly recommend this for reading like a re it's a it's a souped up Kindle

1:07:56

that you can use as your daily driver if you get to that point. I'm not there yet on as my daily driver, but as my go to reader,

1:08:04

absolutely. Like, I'm actually even nervous because it sits by my bed. And I got I'm reading, Stephen King on writing right now.

1:08:11

His, like, philosophy on how he's written all these books and his writing techniques and so on. It's actually really good. Some of his books just get banned in Florida or something.

1:08:19

In Florida? Why? I I don't know for, like I think they got banned from schools for, like, sexually explicit content. Oh, I hope not. Okay. Well so, well, supposedly, this on writing book is good. I don't know about that.

1:08:33

I hope not. Hey, Rodney. Were you supporting a guy that's,

1:08:37

hey, man. I'm just reading the book. I I just since you brought his name up, I just thought I'd ask. I don't know the whole story.

1:08:47

I didn't mean to derail you. Sorry, dude.

1:08:52

Well, anyways, I have these books. So I have all these old devices. Like I have a old, like, you know, bigger Android phone here or Android tablet and like an old Kindle device.

1:09:02

I actually put a different, Kindle book on each of those things. So when I wanna grab it, I just grab that other book and I'm like, oh, I'm reading, like, I have this new book I wanna read called The Art of Learning. Somebody like, a person I really respect,

1:09:15

recommended it to me. So I, like, moved it up my priority list. But instead of, like, toggling, like and, of course, I could easily go search in my Kindle and just look around. But when I open this up, it's on my page, and I'm immediately into the to the book.

1:09:29

Anyhoo, the audio version, I also buy when I buy the Kindle, I also buy the audio version because I like hitting the button at the bottom to have to download the audiobook, which I I guess I didn't have, already on this one.

1:09:44

And I like to hear the voice. But when it's like a normal person's like, a a a stock,

1:09:50

narrator, I'm not as engaged. But when it's the author,

1:09:54

super engaging, like, straight up. How do you know how do you know the difference? Because the you can tell because a, the voice is a bit different. Like, you the narrator voice is like,

1:10:04

nah, nah. It's like a stock. It's like a stock perfect voice on the audio.

1:10:10

When it's the author's voice, it's like, hey. Thank you so much for, like, listening to this book. Oh, they let you know they're the audio. Kinda do. Or maybe they don't even do it, but, like, you just the tone is different. The the pitch is different.

1:10:21

And then I'd, like, Google or Google it or whatever, and I'm like, oh, cool. This is the author that's doing this.

1:10:26

And pro tip, you can actually go and be like, hey. Let me stop here. Let me tell you a little extra about this section or this paragraph

1:10:34

and some inspiration. By the way, funny story. I was in a coffee shop,

1:10:39

and I'm while I was typing this paragraph, my wife told me we were, having quintuplets.

1:10:45

You know? I love it when that happens. And a loved one happens. It happened to me 3 times, by the way.

1:10:52

You know, you you've you have the physical version of leaving multiple tabs open.

1:10:59

You have the physical version of leaving what what do you mean?

1:11:02

You have 3 devices with 3 different pieces of text on it?

1:11:06

I have, I have my iPad.

1:11:09

I have my phone. I have my daylight computer, this device. I have a Kindle.

1:11:15

And then I think I have one more device. So, I have 5 different books that I'm Five tabs open at all time. Mhmm.

1:11:23

I have 5 books that I'm reading. I don't look at my, like, tabs. But, like, here, I just I literally on my main page, I just have my Kindle reader basically.

1:11:32

And I just open it up and I go into my book so. Are they all different books though? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no sorry they're all different books exactly.

1:11:39

So like the iPad is like this business book that I'm reading this one's like more

1:11:43

like a skill and a habit that I'm trying to develop the other one's like

1:11:48

just there's one that's, I don't know, I don't know what the article. I haven't read it yet, but the article I think is like Can we talk about your skill maxing, Rod?

1:11:57

Dude, I'm no. Because that's gonna we're gonna tangent off to another whole thing. I'm gonna talk about your routine.

1:12:03

What's skill maxing? What what lit the fire? Like,

1:12:08

what what did it for you? Because now you're you're in it. Like, you're happy, you're 10, you're jacked,

1:12:13

your push ups are recorded. Like, what what set the fire off? So,

1:12:20

I believe, I I am

1:12:23

I want to live to a 160 years old.

1:12:26

Wow. And,

1:12:30

but tomorrow, I could die. And it's not like one of these things where I'm like, you know, I fear death. I mean, knock on wood, my day comes tomorrow, it'd suck because I wanna see my kids

1:12:39

and see them grow up and everything. But I wanna do put myself in the best position to, you know, live a long and healthy life. Not like a I kinda wanna get to 160 and just fall off a cliff, by the way. I don't I don't You don't wanna get to, like I don't wanna get to, like, 80 and then gradually the next 80 years And then have, like, 30 people, like, dragging

1:13:00

me, you know, around. So I was like, alright. What are like, to your first principles aspect, I'm like, okay. Cool. If, you know, you have this low time preference because I got the you know, knock on wood out of the sats to protect my future purchasing power,

1:13:15

you know, for the things that I want to, invest my,

1:13:19

invest in. I have this beautiful family. I have awesome kids. I have an awesome wife. Okay. Let's go. And then I've always, like I mean, Iko and I jam on this all the time.

1:13:29

There's so many opportunities right now just to be an entrepreneur,

1:13:33

and it's, like, right in front of my face. And it's so much

1:13:37

that I'm, like, alright, rather than trying to take everything in and being spread so thin,

1:13:41

it's, like how do I compartmentalize and then build the necessary habits and skills such that I can, you know, take,

1:13:49

take, these opportunities. And honestly, one of the things, Rob, it's just reframing so many things

1:13:56

around one question. Does this give me energy? Yes or no?

1:14:00

And if it does, then I do it. If it does not,

1:14:05

then I figure out, okay, how do I delete the task or delete the activity?

1:14:09

How do I, delegate this to somebody that would give them energy or purpose or intention

1:14:15

such that because we need to get it done. Or how do if it's only me that needs to get this done, how do I just muster up the energy just to get this freaking thing done and off my plate? So instead of, like, organizing all of those, like, you know,

1:14:30

insufferable tasks and prioritizing those because I just needed to do, quote, unquote, the work, I've honestly, like, delegated the majority of, like, the stuff that gives

1:14:39

me low energy to people, like, gives them high energy and higher purpose.

1:14:44

And now I get to do, like, fun tests to myself.

1:14:48

Like, can I wake up at 425 every single morning? Yeah, I can. Like, it's been like 200, 300 days. Can I just quit drinking? Because if I quit drinking, it gives me more energy, believe it or not. I'm already a high energy person.

1:15:01

So today's like 252 days in a row not drinking any alcohol.

1:15:05

And, alright. Cool. This 100 push ups challenge. I'm, like, I've always wanted to do a 100 push ups, and, honestly, I gotta give a shout out to Peter McCormack. He, like I mean, he didn't continue doing this because he didn't do it, but he just wrote in his little Apple notes thing. Alright. 100 notes. I was, like, dude,

1:15:22

Peter's definitely on the left side of the bell curve. I'm squarely on the left side of the bell curve. I was like, Luddite like me? I can do that. So that's what I would just do. I'll be like, look, 20 push ups, 20 push ups, 20 foot I did my 100. Alright. It's beginning 25. Now it becomes 34, 33, 33.

1:15:37

And then all of a sudden, I'm like, wait a minute. What are other things that I can do with more of my time that I have that'll help me when I'm in my 160

1:15:47

range? By the way, do you wanna know how I got to 160? Yeah. It's, interesting age to want to live to. So, again, left side of the bell curve. I thought about, life in 4 quarters because I'm over 40 years old. I was like, alright. My first quarter's over. I'm in squarely in quarter 2, so 40 to 80. We're gonna me and you, especially, we're gonna dominate this quarter. Killing it.

1:16:09

And then at 80 to 120, maybe some of my businesses have done well, maybe they haven't, but, like, you know, I'm not I'm not as crazy active in the businesses. Maybe hopefully, I'm like a a very, active grandfather or maybe great grandfather at that time.

1:16:24

And then, you know, doing other, because when you study, like, old people and how they're,

1:16:31

super fit and super healthy, it's, community. They have activities that they're doing amongst their they have routine. They're like, yo. I I wake up at this time. I eat I eat my yogurt. I drink my tea, and then I go play mah jean with my friends. Don't don't interrupt it. You know? And they have their routine that keeps them, you know, actively

1:16:51

in their mind. So, like, there'll be something along those lines. And hopefully, I'm still working and doing businesses and so on. And then 120 to 160 is like a crapshoot. It's like, alright. All bets are off. How do you figure out the first 40 years was 1 quarter?

1:17:05

1, 40 divided by 160 is 1 fourth. Well, yeah. But, I mean, you could have ease just as easily said the first 40 was like 1 third.

1:17:14

No. Because I'm gonna live till 1 60. But how'd you get to 1 60?

1:17:18

40 because I was done. Yeah. Multiply by 4 is 144. But you just arbitrarily decided that was the 1 quarter? You just decided that was the quarter.

1:17:27

Yes. I arbitrarily decided that. Why so bearish? I could have been 1 eighth. It could have been. But yeah. It's like that movie,

1:17:34

oh my god. Was it not Along Came Polly? It was,

1:17:38

Brett Favre was in it with Cameron Diaz.

1:17:42

Oh my god. Man, I'm so bad with movies.

1:17:46

Oh my god. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Boyfriend, Brett Fox. Yeah. Yeah. What what and then they're in the car with the sociopath, and the guy's like, oh, Something about Mary. There's something about Mary. And he's in the car with the sociopath, and the guy's like, the sociopath is telling him about the, his business idea. It's like 7

1:18:05

it's it's, 7 minute abs, man. You just gotta do it in 7 minutes. Well, what if somebody came with 6 minute abs? Oh, yeah. No. No. No. 7 is the number.

1:18:14

It's like, no, man. 160 is the number, man. Well, why not 200?

1:18:19

Well, you're still in quarter 1, Rod. You're not why so far?

1:18:23

Well, you never know. But, but, dude, dude, like, you guys are fathers as well. Like, is how do you extend

1:18:31

the quality of time together?

1:18:33

And then the other crazy thing is, why I'm kinda got urgency now

1:18:38

is, dude, no matter what, we have a short window

1:18:42

most likely with our kids until they go off and leave if they go to college or leave for a job or leave to go do whatever.

1:18:50

They're just not gonna be under your by 18.

1:18:53

Yeah. What's that? 90% of the time the stat I've heard, 90% of time you're gonna spend with your kid will be 0 to 18. Yeah. So that's a Tim Urban,

1:19:04

stat line. So by the age Is that right? It is correct. Yeah. So by the age of 12, 75% of the time you've gonna have on this light on this earth with your children is over by the time they turn 12.

1:19:15

90% is over by the time they turn 18.

1:19:18

So I was like, alright. Well, how do I extend that time? Well, if I live longer, you know, then I'll have more time with them.

1:19:25

And, also, if I build businesses such that they wanna be involved in the businesses, that would be kinda cool too. Yeah. I don't know how much I want them actually in the business, you know, working with me. I want them to kinda experience it on their own. But,

1:19:37

anyway so, like, now I'm doing all these different challenges, and one of them is, like, reading,

1:19:42

because it helps me even think about more opportunities, whether it's expanding our businesses

1:19:48

or, setting up new, things. And then for another time, delegation is the superpower. All these successful people, Richard Branson,

1:19:55

all these big time executives, the governor, like, all these guys know just how to route and delegate

1:20:03

specific things and then hold the vision accountable.

1:20:08

That's it. It's funny that people don't do that. You know, like, in a in a business, it's, like, second nature that you

1:20:16

wouldn't do your accounting or bookkeeping if you're the CEO. Like, you would find somebody to do operations.

1:20:22

And it's, like, a hard skill for people to learn, but then you think about it in life and nobody ever thinks that they should actually apply that same mindset,

1:20:29

would you a 100 like, that's the reason you would hire a maid to clean your house, like, because I'm delegating something that I don't like to do. But people don't seem like I don't know. There's a lot of hesitation to not extend it in the same way that people do with businesses, which is very curious to me. And they will, I think, over time because they're gonna hit, like, a a a ceiling,

1:20:48

and they're gonna say, how do I get more leverage on my time? And unfortunately,

1:20:53

I think there's been, this,

1:20:57

perception that, whatever breadwinner or whatever entrepreneur has to

1:21:03

not, be present as a family and sacrifice the family side or other things in their life to be a great entrepreneur. And that is unequivocally false. Like, you can literally have it all. You're just not, like, good enough about time prioritization,

1:21:20

and you're just not prioritizing the things that really matter for you. And so, like, with that stat, I'm like, shit, man. That scares that stat scares the heck out of me. So how do I make,

1:21:31

you know, the the a nonnegotiable for me is not to is I take my kids to school every day. Okay.

1:21:38

So for me, I had to wake up so much earlier because I needed to get my day

1:21:43

pretty much done and rocking

1:21:46

such that I could be present with them, making them breakfast, making their lunches, getting them dressed together, and doing all the things in the morning that I love to do now. And then it's like, alright. Cool. This is nonnegotiable. I love doing this, so I'm gonna do this. Okay. Cool. Oh, those mornings are so much better when I'm not, like, even a couple beers, you know, like, a little bit hazy. It's so much better when I don't have that. Rock and roll. I'm gonna just gonna try it. And, you know, it's a lot easier said than done. Don't get me wrong, but it's kinda cool now, like, 200 some days later to say, you know, I've did done all this. But, anyways, I don't really wanna talk about this. I wanna talk about you, buddy. 40 more years. To 40 more years. To 1 more quarter, buddy. 2nd Yeah. The 2nd quarter. To the 2nd quarter. For sure, man.

1:22:28

Well, dude, how about this? For the telehash,

1:22:31

why don't you we'll we'll do a section just on the almanac Yeah. And, we'll make it a fun, thing. We'll because the telehash is gonna be, like, 15,

1:22:42

24 hours long. Love it.

1:22:45

Right now, you go and I are negotiating how long this is gonna be.

1:22:49

I'm get I you know, I'll I'll train for it. We'll we'll get the coal if we could get the coal plunge over here honestly, Paul just dropped out of the room for a hot second, but, we get the red light, the infrared lights here. Yep. Then we build, like, a, a rental sauna as well. Yep. And,

1:23:08

we just need to get all of the PEDs that are,

1:23:11

that we need here. Yeah. We just can't be expected to, like, sit in these chairs for 24 hours because Exactly. Yeah.

1:23:19

That would be bad news for us. Back surgery afterwards.

1:23:22

Speaking of which, my, you reminded me, I actually owe 33 more push ups. Today was a off day because I typically get my push ups done all before my second wakes up, but all of them woke up super early.

1:23:35

So, thank you for that. You know, my kids got up super early this morning too. And what did you do? Well, I didn't do anything. But it's because

1:23:46

they I just laid in bed and just continued to pretend like I was asleep.

1:23:51

But they they, learned how to bike without their training wheels yesterday. Oh, sick. Like, full send, both of them. Both of them? Okay. Cool. So, like, as soon as, like, first light came up this morning, they were both out the door on their bikes, like,

1:24:05

crushed it. Yeah. You see, you know what's,

1:24:09

that that's awesome. So one of the, like, the most mad like, some of my friends that have older kids,

1:24:14

they say one of the most magical moments is when you're in bed

1:24:18

and you kinda wake up and you hear what's happening, like, out in the kitchen area or whatever. Yeah. And you're like, wait. Are kids just, like, making themselves breakfast? Yeah. Did they just, like, self sufficiently go outside and ride their bike Yeah. Totally. Without us? Because it was like you high five in bed. Totally. And they're like, we're making it. We're making it. Yeah. Yeah.

1:24:38

Yeah. I love it. Rob, what else do you wanna leave with the last few minutes, buddy? But, like, for the telehash, I have an idea. I'll I'll just right off this cuff, we do the almanac quiz, you know, for all the people in the audience. We give them out sats. Oh, that'd be cool. Yeah. Pull, like, snippets from the book, and then people will, like, earn sats or something.

1:24:59

Although it's a fundraiser for the 256 Foundation. Maybe maybe anything you earn goes back to the 256 Foundation or something. But but we'll make it super fun,

1:25:08

and I think we'll have a a really good turnout,

1:25:11

for that, which will be awesome. But, Rob, anything else?

1:25:15

It's hard to follow that with final thoughts, man.

1:25:19

I think the most important thing for us is just to keep trucking. Like,

1:25:24

this is this is a big to kinda continue on that theme that I was talking about with,

1:25:30

like, taking ideas and turning them into reality, like, you know, what you did with

1:25:35

everything happening at the park, what you did with everything happening with the podcast, with the book.

1:25:40

You know, we're still in that moment. I I I feel like we're in we're in this kind of, like,

1:25:47

seemingly endless summer moment where all the people that you're bumping into now I mean, I thought it in 2017, but I feel it even more now, and I know it's gonna go away.

1:25:58

I know it's gonna go away. As soon as we become, you know, mainstream

1:26:02

in a real mainstream kind of way as far as,

1:26:07

you know, Bitcoin is more than just a name, but things something that people really grok and participate in and mining even bigger than it is now, much, much, much bigger.

1:26:16

We're in this, like, it's like this high school senior year. And I keep trying to remind myself that, like,

1:26:23

now is the time that you have to, like, make your moves and really push and put the effort in and do stuff because you have so few chances over the course of your life, really,

1:26:34

that you get to participate in something

1:26:37

and be the right person in the right place at the right time

1:26:41

that you can there's something tangible about it. Like like, it I was I was putting the baby down, and I would then go off and, like,

1:26:49

sit at my island and write for 3, 4 hours and get, like, a paragraph out after having to, like, research old Bitcoin talk forums to find the the original posting of Merrick launching Slush Pool.

1:27:03

I kept having to remind myself, like, okay. You found a way to get this thing done, but, like, this is now is the time. Right now is the time. And I try to treat every day like that because we are we are in this kind of, like, eternal maybe endless summer is the wrong metaphor, but, like, the the high school senior year where it's like it's the culmination where if you're here and you have the skills and you can build the things, like, now is the time to build the thing.

1:27:25

And the reason you feel intimidated is because you look out and you go like, oh, well, there's a lot of smart people here. Like, maybe I'm not the right person to do it. If it does not exist, you are the right person to do it.

1:27:35

And I've been saying this for ages, but I feel it even more now because as you look around as you look around the room at these conferences and you, you know,

1:27:43

Econo, you've experienced this. Raj, you've experienced this. As you go and you start to contribute to the space and people start to invite you to things and all of a sudden you're chatting at conferences,

1:27:51

and all of a sudden you're talking to people who

1:27:54

were were 4 years ahead of you or 6 years ahead of you,

1:27:58

and they actually you're having, like, a real conversation with these people, you know, the cypherpunks, the OGs, the people who,

1:28:05

who are really just the gigabrains of the space, and you all of a sudden realize like, oh, shit. I'm doing it too.

1:28:10

It's it's like you're the baby bird. Right? Like, you think everybody else has already jumped out of the nest and is, like, flying around and you're like, well, I don't really know how to do that. Maybe I won't contribute.

1:28:20

And then you kind of start doing and you're like, oh, shit. I'm doing it. And you're looking around. I'll get I'll I'll finish you finish with a funny story that,

1:28:27

so Peter Todd, the programmer, he

1:28:31

I'd never met him in person. I'm standing in Mara. They brought their 2 phase,

1:28:37

their 2 phase, mining, mining for heat solution, basically. Really cool solution.

1:28:42

It uses an existing technology, something called a vapor degreaser that is used for, like, cleaning high geometry, typically machined parts,

1:28:50

And they reworked it so that you can put Bitcoin miners into it, and it uses a solvent that boils off from the Bitcoin miners, and it condenses on condensing coils, and it's all sealed, and you you suck out the heat. And it's it's fascinating. It's really a slick piece of technology.

1:29:05

And it's even cooler to me by the fact that they're using

1:29:08

a very well known piece of, like,

1:29:11

cleaning apparatus, this this vapor degreaser.

1:29:14

And I'm standing there in the booth, at the Mara booth,

1:29:18

not as an employee of Mara. I'm wearing, like, a riot shirt at the conference. Right? And I'm just, like, looking around, like, this is pretty cool. This is pretty slick. And I'm chatting with this guy next to me, and I'm like, oh, like, we're we're talking, we're looking at stuff. I'm like, oh, you do any mining? He's like, no. I don't really do much mining, but I like to keep up on it. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. And you guys know how it is when you're at conferences when you don't know people. And sometimes you talk to people and they just say the most ridiculous stuff and you're immediately like, dude, I don't know how you got in here. Like, I don't wanna see, like, your your falafel coin. Like, I don't think it's gonna be the future of Mediterranean food. Like, why are you what is happening?

1:29:53

But you can immediately tell us dude is very competent. And I'm like, oh, that's pretty interesting. He's like, yeah. Well, I've I've also been thinking a bit about, like, you know, direct consumption ASICs on solar panels.

1:30:03

And I was kinda thinking about it for a second. I was like, you know, it's actually

1:30:05

it's actually brilliant, because the solar panel is outputting DC and the chip is consuming DC

1:30:11

and if you can ventilate it. And so we're kinda riffing on that a little bit. And we're schmoozing, and the Mara rep comes up, and, you know, he's he's the product manager. And so he's schmoozing. He's showing us all the stuff. We're kinda shooting the shit, just having a nice time in their in their little 2 phase immersion thing. And I'm like, okay. Well, I gotta I gotta get cruising. I'm gonna go, like, get a coffee and keep cruising. Yeah. Nice to meet you, man. What's your name?

1:30:31

Peter. Who? Peter Todd. Like, oh, shit.

1:30:37

And you realize, like, oh, I just had, like, a 20 minute conversation with somebody who is so overqualified

1:30:43

for anything that's happening in this space, and we were just, like, chopping it up. Like, holy shit. Like, I'm flying. Like, I'm doing it. This is pretty cool.

1:30:51

I don't I wouldn't begrudge anybody the opportunity to, like, make their dent and contribute their thing. And I think the biggest thing is just to get out of your frigging head and and do the thing that feels right to you. And the tide is still rising. You know, we have we only have a sliver of time to be able to do this until Bitcoin is is is 20 years old. And once it's 20 years old, it's gonna be 30 years old, and then it's gonna be 50 years old. And there's only this tiny sliver that you get to find the thing and actually act on it, and so do it. Like, now is the sliver. And your competence will rock it up, and it's the biggest the biggest thing is that it's it's just a head fake. It's a head fake. And I hope that everybody finds themselves

1:31:28

one day standing in, Mara's 2 phase immersion setup, accidentally talking to Peter Todd,

1:31:34

because it's a good feeling to have. It's good to know that, like, you can actually start to learn. You can start to contribute and and continue to add value to people. So that's that's my my tangent, my final thought.

1:31:46

But I feel so glad to be schmoozing with you guys who

1:31:49

have been doing the exact same thing, have been grinding in the space and building the stuff and, like, seizing on your little sliver because you've you've felt the same thing that I've, I felt, I'm sure. 100%, man. Yeah. Very well said. There's no hidden secret

1:32:03

to getting out there and and making

1:32:06

your voice heard. You just you just be the change you wanna see in the world. That's right.

1:32:11

Rob, thank you so much, my man. You're the kind of alchemist.

1:32:14

You're the man. Yeah. Thank you. Gotta come back soon. You guys, Rob. See you, buddy.

1:32:19

Thank you so much.