You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
We talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Gentlemen, here we are.
Good morning.
Dylan, welcome to the show.
This is your first time on Tyler.
This is your second.
Yeah, this is a long time first time.
So this is really exciting for me.
Well, it's exciting for me too, because we've been doing some work together behind the scenes,
putting together a playbook for mining at home.
And I think just jumping right into it, this is like an educational series that we're trying to do here at TFTC, just to set the tone and set expectations and get people excited to stick around.
What are people going to learn if they listen to this whole episode?
That mining at home, mining in your business is useful and can add value to your business.
yeah i think uh a lot of people are wondering what's going to happen with all these miners
shifting to ai and this playbook really outlines the case for building integrated mining and how it
can be useful like heating systems solar systems battery systems thinking about mining as a tool
in the toolkit of like energy infrastructure not just data center operations yeah and i mean tyler
you've been on the show before, but many people are listening now may have missed it because our
audience is growing exponentially since you were last on over a year ago. So there's a bunch of
new freaks here. But just to set the tone on authority, what gives you guys the authority to
write this particular playbook? So Dylan and I have been steadfast focused on the home mining
and really hash rate heating space for two years now is coming up on. So I authored the book,
Bitcoin mining heat reuse just out of curiosity, kind of fell into that rabbit hole. We talked
about that on the first pod. Thanks for the mention there, Marty. Really focused on how we
can integrate Bitcoin miners into heating systems, electric heat that pays. People have seen the
retrofitted space heaters, the hacked together products and gadgets, all the way to the heat
bits. And Dylan and I came in and said, well, how does this really scale into the actual energy
infrastructure of a building, your furnace, your boiler, not just a gadget you plug into the wall,
but part of the building, you call a technician, you get it integrated fully, part of your solar
system, et cetera. And that really led to the Heat Punk Summit, which we've talked on before,
where we bring together mining developers and people from the building and energy space,
electricians, plumbers, home insurers, ASHRAE certifiers, all this stuff. We kind of back
solve this problem. It's long winded, but to say, you know, we believe wholeheartedly that there's
this new use case for Bitcoin miners, this new home for them, like distributing into all these
different pockets of stranded energy to heating systems to solar systems. And we're really focused
on building integrated miners and we're trying to solve that problem. So this playbook is really an
outline of how we do it right now today. And then a little bit of discussion of where we think it's
going to go once the technology and educational people challenges get solved as well.
yeah i just want to add that at exergy we've been implementing miners in various systems
and testing them seeing what works what doesn't we've come to a solid conclusion that
control and software for these miners just sucks because they're designed for industrial use cases
not necessarily for homes and you know smaller buildings and so we've spent the better part of
the last year, running numbers, making sure that the calculations check out for running
these in your home and not necessarily being profitable, but being cost effective relative
to your utilization case, whether that's solar monetization or heating your home or building.
And so we spent the better part of the last year developing control systems to force these
industrial boxes to operate the way we want to.
And so we're able to touch on at the end of this about what the future of home mining might look like as open source development takes off.
Awesome. And so, I mean, just jumping right into it, I mean, the first section of the playbook is laying out the case that you have an advantage and you have to use it.
And so diving into what that advantage is compared to maybe industrial miners.
Yeah, if you think of a mining operation, the first thing that comes to mind is, okay, I need to exceed my operating costs in Bitcoin mining revenue, in Bitcoin profit, right? That's kind of the goal. And that's very hard if you have on-grid electrical rates, even for some commercial rates, and extremely hard for residential customers that have higher expensive electricity rates, time of use, space, pricing, all these things.
in addition to like the noise and the all the challenges there do i have the right power outlet
our argument for you have an advantage use it is buildings have sunk costs almost all buildings on
earth are heated and the simple framework that like all the electricity you put into a bitcoin
miner gets turned into heat that really is the undertone of of how we set the stage for why we
think home miners building integrated miners have an advantage you don't have to run a profitable
operation. You just need to be useful and you can be useful by, you know, counting the Bitcoin
earnings as a rebate against your electric heating costs that may come in cheaper than
your alternative heating fuel. Right. Or you just need to count the Bitcoin earnings if you're
running that miner instead of sending excess power back to the grid for a large solar system.
Is that more valuable than what the grid credits would give you? Right. Or maybe hash price rips.
Right. And you don't have a miner at the time. But if that building did have a miner, it could take advantage, seize that moment and opportunistically join into that profitable mining scenario.
So that's where like the useful miner framework is saying these things are tools. They can heat buildings. They can monetize solar and they can also run profitably sometimes.
And you want that tool in your energy system at your building so that you can use it when it seems fit. Got any other comments?
No, that's OK.
so i mean i think this is why we put the playbook together there's a ton of people
myself included and been like i would love to do this like just because not only being a bitcoiner
it's very cypherpunk and the the whole idea that you can subsidize part of your heating costs with
bitcoin miners while stacking sats in a non-kyc fashion um is always appealing but it's like all
How do I actually do this? And trying to discern whether or not your industrial building or your residential home is actually a fit for this model.
It really comes down to being able to calculate the real cost of your current energy stack and then weighing it against switching it out with a Bitcoin mining heating system.
So what what calculus goes into that?
You want to talk to him on the different heating fuels, because that's like the number one go no go gauge, really?
Yeah.
So we all like to be comfortable when it's cold.
You want to be comfortable and heated.
And so most people don't really know or care what their fuel source is.
And that's probably the first step in figuring out if this is useful for you.
Because in the United States and I guess worldwide, we have natural gas heating, propane heaters, heat pumps, electrical heaters, wood.
We're the guy playing mountain man.
And all of those are just different fuels to get BTUs into your home, whether that's through a boiler or through a furnace, what have you.
It's just an energy unit.
All of these fuels can they run at different efficiencies and deliver different BTUs per unit volume.
um and so what we do is we can convert a btu into made it straight into a kilowatt
right because it's well let's let's back up for for any of the ignorant a btu is a british thermal
unit right yeah so that's like the um the the the common term in the heating industry right because
we're trying to translate here from the mining industry to the heating industry people talk btu
when they're buying heat. Miners talk kilowatts, kilowatt hours. And so what Dylan's talking about
here is like we convert the BTUs to an equivalent kilowatt hour price. We bring it to the mining
language. And then from there, we say, okay, of all these different heating fuels,
who's like the most poised to benefit, right? To be useful, to offset that heating cost. How can we
get that equivalent dollar per kilowatt hour? What a miner would be looking at? If you're talking to
a heating guy, it's like a dollar per BTU. We're just talking about two different languages here.
This is all to say like some fuels are better suited than others, right? Yeah.
Sorry, I got confused because thermal units are dumb in how they convert.
So anyways, any building owner worth their salt is aware of their utility bills and what they pay.
And so you can take the exact, you can, you're metered, you know how much fuel you've used,
or you know how frequently you need to top up your propane tank.
You know how much that fuel costs, how frequently you're getting it,
how often it's being delivered.
So you know all your usage.
You can get back out your duty cycle of how much heat, not duty cycle,
how much heat you're building needs.
You can convert that to an equivalent electrical electricity volume
and directly compare that with miners.
And so because all miners are generally sold in.
Three thousand, if you're an industrial miner, three thousand watt chunks.
And so you can back that out and you can determine your duty cycle, which is I need this many kilowatt hours.
This miner runs at this rate, this wattage.
That's my duty cycle. That's the amount of time in a month that I need this miner to run, produce the same heat as what we're already getting.
Can I have a comment here? Yeah. So you got to figure out, OK, is my fuel that I'm comparing to expensive? Right. And and if it is, can a miner running out of electricity with Bitcoin rebate, can that be competitive?
So that's like an energy arbitrage. Right. Is one cheaper than the other if I count in the Bitcoin?
But what Dylan's talking about now is very important is the duty cycle, because we're talking about how do you know if you're a good candidate?
Miners call this uptime, right?
They say, I want 99% uptime.
The hosting companies are talking about it.
It means your machine's online more.
It's really just how, what percentage of the day is it running, right?
That same thing applies to the heating industry.
It's called a duty cycle.
Is your furnace on 10 minutes out of the hour, three hours out of the day, 45 minutes out of the day to duty cycle?
You actually want a longer duty cycle.
What that means is a longer heating season.
means it's colder, not just cold one day of the year,
but like cold for months
because that means the miner is going to run more
and it pays you back more
and it warrants its upfront costs.
So long-winded from both of us here,
but like the two main things are like,
is your energy arbitrage pricing good?
And then are you going to use enough of it
that it's going to be worth your while?
Yeah.
This is just for the heating use case.
We've got others to discuss.
Yeah, well, I mean, sticking on,
the heating use case and just the different sort of fuel sources or energy power sources for lack
of a better term uh that is a better term uh so like bring solar into this and we talk about like
the third league profitable mining under your utility rate like so bringing in like the
opportunity cost or weighing the opportunity cost of mining versus these different fuel sources i
I mean, you just described a big chunk of it, but going a little deeper.
Yeah.
So we live in the United States.
We have, relative to the rest of the world, very abundant energy.
We are fortunate enough to have natural gas piped throughout all of our cities which is a problem for comparing directly to hash rate heat because we have cheap and abundant natural gas to heat our homes and not necessarily having comparative electrical rates I think electoral rates are just going up So that not great as just comparing one fuel to the other
But if you were able to generate at home your own electricity with solar panels,
that really adjusts the comparison because now you have the surplus power
that you're generating on the spot that you don't have to buy from the grid,
which then offsets the cost to run your miner,
which makes it much more competitive against natural gas.
Now, propane is generally expensive.
It also has very variable rates across the year,
depending on when you're topping up your tank.
And so if you factor all that in, propane lands relatively very expensive relative to electrical rates.
And on the expansion for how solar is a useful minor principle when you're not heating is
typically for people that have solar arrays here, they're connected to the grid. There are some
off-grid solar arrays, you know, if you've got a cabin up in the mountains, but most people are
connected to the grid. And so what happens is if you oftentimes, like you'll be generating more
than your buildings using, and that excess energy goes back to the grid, you're selling it to the
grid in reverse, instead of buying it, you're selling it. They give you like pennies on the
dollar, or they'll give you credits into your utility account. And if you don't use them for
the next month, they get washed out at the end of the year. It's not really advantageous to the
customer, right? Think of it like airline miles instead of cashback on a credit card. So what
we're arguing here with solar is instead of sending that excess solar to the grid,
blow that excess energy through a Bitcoin miner. Maybe you don't need the heat. You just dump the
heat outside in this scenario. It's still the same tool for the building. It's a hash rate
machine. It's a Bitcoin miner in the building. It can heat the building. It can also just flow
excess power from a solar array or local generation. I met people last we talked,
Marty, we were talking about my Alaska trip where I saw people with like micro hydro in their
backyard, which is crazy. Anyways, excess energy, you flow it through that and it puts money
directly into your pocket. And then the last one is that profitable mining scenario. There are
moments, all this is saying we have this tool in the building. We have this black box that makes
heat and money and it can connect to your solar array it can connect it knows the bitcoin hash
price it knows the the bitcoin price the difficulty it knows when you're calling for heat this is all
intelligent system like building energy systems all this is to say it's the same tool but it can
do three things it can heat the building when it makes sense it can dump the heat outside and just
monetize the excess energy when it makes sense but also it might just straight up be cheap enough at
night with cheap power or if bitcoin's price rips to just mine full-time during that moment
for profitability and so this is kind of the putting a bow on the useful miner principle which
is like there are there are these three scenarios where you might want to mine and you better damn
well wish you had a miner in the building to do it during those times because it's gonna we've
proven seen through our data that um it turns out to be pretty worthwhile should we jump into the
data or should we dive deeper into the industrial use case like um yes you were doing the analysis of
the the energy sources and the three different leaks and then the sort of three scenarios you
want to set yourself up for where it's actually cheaper heat with mining uh yeah you have excess
solar um so it's profitable to instead of sell that back to the grid sell that to the bitcoin
network or holy grail um the the price of bitcoin's ripping difficulty is relatively low in
at any kilowatt per hour price
or what many would deem to be historically
a high kilowatt per hour price to mine Bitcoin.
Maybe it's profitable at some point
because the price is just ripping so much.
And so you want to create that optionality
to do each different thing.
You want to heat,
sell to the Bitcoin network instead of the grid
and just mine Bitcoin because it's profitable.
What does that look like in an industrial use case?
How should these individuals who own an industrial facility and operate one think about actually setting this up?
What do they need to replace?
What does it look like there?
Well, first and foremost, for the commercial industrial scale, I think they're poised to benefit well.
A little bit of that is economies of scale.
Also, they might use heat in a larger duty cycle or what the miners would call an uptime, right?
They just need more of it, maybe more of it for longer.
They also have these intelligent building management systems, right?
You know, these are large commercial spaces where the utilities are a substantial bill each month, and they're trying to minimize that or reduce it.
They also benefit from commercial electric rates, right?
So it's not residential.
So like all these things point to commercial being really well poised to benefit.
In terms of the actual integration, I'll tee this up here, and I want to hear Dylan's thoughts too.
is like we've seen this on the residential side and we're working on our first commercial install
right now with the mechanical electrical plumbing team out of Boulder County, Colorado. That
building is still being built. But the same principle seems to apply, which is you don't
want to design the miner to be the main heat source, meaning it's not designed to heat the
whole commercial space, the whole home on that coldest day. The reason is miners are expensive
for every additional bit of heat, every additional kilowatt or BTU we were talking about.
Because you need those fancy ASIC chips that are expensive. Whereas like a gas furnace,
if you need more heat, like you just burn more gas, right? You put a bigger valve in it,
you just more fuel bleeds through. It's marginally more expensive to get a bigger furnace.
So in this sense, you really want to size the system to be optimized for the average heat load
so that that duty cycle, that mining machine's uptime is optimized. It's high. Now, that sizing
optimization could be like, what is the best size do I need if I'm targeting heat? We also talk about
in the report, what is the best size if I'm trying to monetize solar as my primary use case, right?
It's not going to be size it for July 1 on a sunny day with no clouds. It's going to be sized for
your average solar production throughout the summer every day. That way you avoid kind of
this larger upfront cost. Just tangent on that, the commercial guys do get to benefit from
writing things off as business expenses, obviously, the hardware, the CapEx there.
But yeah, back to the sizing comment quick. The way I frame it in my mind,
we actually at Exergy, we don't recommend, if anyone's listening to this thinking like,
Do I rip out my furnace?
Do I rip out my boiler?
Do I put in a miner?
No, we add the miner to the furnace.
We add it to the boiler.
Think of it like a hybrid car.
A hybrid car doesn't have a 300 horsepower engine
and a 300 horsepower electric motor and a giant battery.
It's kind of fine-tuned and optimized.
You know, your little RAV4 has got a tiny little electric battery
with a tiny little electric motor that can go 20 miles.
But the way it transitions between gas and electric,
it's like this fine dance, the car is controlling it intelligently, you get way better fuel economy,
right? And so that's what we're introducing into the building, this smart building where you have
gas for that coldest day. You have the miner for the majority of your heating needs. You have the
miner that can dump heat outside for the majority of your excess solar generation. You didn't
overspend. And then in those instances where it is profitable, you've already got the infrastructure
integrated to just kick those suckers on. And this is really this intelligent combined system.
So that's how we think about it for residential. I think that same logic applies to commercial. You got any other thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, one other note is we've developed a system such that the building itself can determine which fuel source is most profitable at that time you are calling for heat and dynamically switch back and forth.
And so it doesn't have to be all or nothing, which is really where this buddy system kind of shines.
like I mentioned earlier you don't care where the heat comes from you just want to go to your
thermostat and hit 72 when you're cold and then the building will just say I'll figure out the
most economical way and that can pull in the solar that can pull in hash price and whatever
your gas rate is and really get that integrated so it's just effectively set and forget and you
just know your building is running as efficiently as possible using all the inputs and so I think
industrial guys have or larger scale buildings have an advantage in that it's very easy to add
solar panels to your building and you don't need the latest and greatest most efficient you can
just throw a power generation source in your building and really change the dynamics of how
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it's verifiable on chain go to ligos.finance tell them that tftc sent you and i think one of the um
needles we need to thread our ties we need to knot here is and we were talking about this like
you can do the combined cycle of your furnace and the Bitcoin mining,
like the building will figure it out.
But I think just really driving home,
like the economics of the mining specifically,
and like how you establish a new baseline cost and how you fit in the mining
revenue into that as a rebate or a subsidy,
or if you want to hold the Bitcoin and yes,
your power bill may go up,
but you've got this Bitcoin on the side and like,
what's that look like?
Yeah,
there's a lot of different units we talked about.
not very eloquently at the beginning here, like fuels and propane and gas and electric and all
this stuff. At the end of the day, it's all just like dollars per unit of energy, dollars per
kilowatt hour. Heat is energy. Electricity is energy, right? Your miner runs off of it. Your
heating fuel runs off of it. All these different things. The baseline is there's some cost to run
your miner. Maybe it costs you 10 cents a kilowatt hour, right? Maybe your propane heat,
this is how we think, we will convert that dollar per gallon to an equivalent dollar per kilowatt
hour. So then maybe your propane comes out to 9 cents a kilowatt hour. Okay, so your propane's
just cheaper than your electric heat Bitcoin miner, because the Bitcoin miner is 10 cents
a kilowatt hour, the propane's nine. But then the Bitcoin miner gets three, four, five cents per
kilowatt hour back equivalent in sats, right? And you could obviously hold those sats for the long
term and let those appreciate. But even if you just treat it as the raw hash value, the dollar
nominated value in that moment in time, you kind of have this 40, 50% reduction in cost, net cost
compared to the propane. That's obviously dynamically switching as the Bitcoin price
changes every second. But that's why it's really important to bake this stuff into the building
brain itself. It's not just like a one-time napkin math you run, right? But I think what you're
pointing to, to tie the knot on it, Marty, is very interesting is there's going to be moments in time
where the Bitcoin heater is 50% cheaper than propane. There's going to be moments in time
where it's only 15% cheaper than propane. It's going to be changing week to week, depending on
the Bitcoin price, maybe not too much over the long aggregate on average.
Maybe you just want to stack sats.
Could you believe, you know, that's the other thing.
All this napkin math like kind of becomes a wash if you just wait full cycle.
Right.
And let the stats appreciate.
So another operating mode I have it up in front of Dylan and I here is like one of our customers he didn want the logic to say the building chooses the cheapest heat in real time
He wanted the logic to say the building prioritizes sat stacking heat over gas always.
So even in the moments when the gas heat is cheaper, because the building knows this, the building brain knows this, it will still choose to heat with the miner first because he wants those sat.
Yeah. And so last week there was a 10% downward difficulty adjustment, which like hash price didn't change that much, but hash value was awesome. So like my home brain started screaming at me, crank all the miners, like open the windows, turn on the fans, push all the heat outside because I have solar at home.
and it's like there's this opportunity difficulty dropped you can stack 10 more in hash value
okay that's um and you don't need the heat but it's like i want the sats and i have the energy
let's go for it yeah because the input well not only that you have the miners the infrastructure
in place to take advantage of it well it's kind of like the opposite of these utilities sending
people letters saying like do not consume too much energy peasant like turn down your ac and
we're the opposite we tell our customers to crank those motherfuckers get the bitcoin well that i
mean and this gets to an important piece i mean you guys have been alluding to it and talking about
but like the building brain i love this concept how does the building brain work i mean conceptually
I think you've described it well. It runs the calculus of what makes the most sense to do at any particular point in time based off of the cost and profitability, the cost of the inputs, whether it's the fuel source or the electricity and the profitability of the mining at any given point in time.
How does that home brain or that building brain work?
I'll give some analogies to set the stage high level and then Dylan will talk about it because
he built the dang thing. Back to that hybrid car analogy, like the car has to have a brain to decide
when do I pull battery power? When do I use the gas power? When do I charge the battery? When do
I put this much power through the motor? When we introduce this second device to a home that can
provide heat and it can also provide Bitcoin, you need to connect it to all the other devices in the
home, all the energy infrastructure so that it knows what the heck is going on and it can make
those intelligent decisions. So that's the home brain. I think it makes sense for this machine to
live locally, right? Just to comment quick on like local software, self-hosted. You'd think like
smart home appliances, people think like your Google Nest or whatever, your ring, it goes to a
subscription, you get the gadget, but the brain's not in the home. The brain is, you know, rings
cloud server. And that introduces, you know, there's some sovereignty and privacy concerns
there, but there's also just like complexity with sending that data out for all these things.
Your hybrid car doesn't have the engine control unit at General Motors factory. It's in the car,
right? So we think the brain should be in the home and that way it can actually physically
wire to things, right? So now the brain will connect your fuels, your fuels. So the brain
knows the cost of your natural gas. It knows the cost of your electric rate and maybe the time of
use when that electric rate might change. It knows the Bitcoin price, the mining network difficulty,
or just straight up hash price. You could kind of, those terms can equate to, can calculate hash
price. It then also connects physically like wires to the thermostats. That's a good reason why the
brain has to be there. You could do it digitally, but there's benefits in just having a straight up
analog connection. So now it knows when you're calling for heat. And then it can also connect
to the solar inverter. So it knows when you're generating energy, when you're calling for energy,
heat, when you're generating energy, solar, it knows the Bitcoin price when it's profitable.
It can combine all this data to say, well, I know the cost of the fuel to heat. I know the Bitcoin
price. I know the electric rate and I know how much electricity we're generating. So all of that
goes into one equation to say, here's the current effective cost of heat. Maybe that's cheaper than
gas. Maybe it's not. All this to say is like we would connect all of these energy, heat, money,
and information sources. That's how I would frame it. Those four things into one. It's really just
like you could run it on a Raspberry Pi. It's open source software. It's not too complicated.
And then you set the automations and the logic to determine in real time, depending on what you're doing.
And you can go stir crazy wild west.
Dylan offers Home Assistant.
That's the software we use that we build our software in.
He offers office hours every week.
So bear with me because this is my favorite topic beyond Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining.
I'm a huge champion.
Home Assistant is open source software, huge community that runs on Raspberry Pi.
It's essentially like a basic, an input aggregator and automation server.
And when I say input aggregator, it's everything.
Like phone locations, energy inputs, IoT devices, whatever you can think of, you can import into Home Assistant.
Like temperature sensors throughout your house, whatever, minor control, your solar production, all of that.
And I mean, it's so easy now because you can just hook up a clanker to it and say, hey, I want this automation.
I have these inputs.
What can we build?
But it enables you to have a home brain that can react to anything.
So when I first started getting into Bitcoin mining at home and home mining, I had a fleet of S9s throughout my house.
And whenever my wife left, my brain would say, she's gone.
Can I crank it?
And it would just crank it because, I mean, it would just drive her insane to hear the S9s just whirring away.
And so we have taken over the past year, we've kind of.
I started at that framing of you can just have miners react to whatever.
And so over the past year, we have worked to get the miners tied into thermostats because.
It's intimidating for a lot of people to take a miner and duct it into their HVAC system.
so maybe you just start with like an avalon mini 3 or a stealth miner or a slim 19 one of the
850 watt max space heaters and like you like you know you want to do this cool so you just plug that
in at home you grab a either hasminer or one of the extra g integrations for home assistant that
lets you pair home assistant with the miner now you have full control and you can add like a
a digital thermostat you can control on your phone.
Now you have full control at home,
minor reacts to the temperature sensors and the thermostat.
And depending how loud it is and whether your wife is home or not.
And so using all that logic,
you have all these different inputs and that is what enables the dynamic
switching of fuel sources. The, I have excess solar. Let me, can I go?
difficulty just adjusted. You can make all this happen dynamically. You can add your input. So it
asks you, Hey, should I do this? And then you have input and say, and what your building is doing,
or it's really, the limit is your imagination. Cause it's just, I see the world in just
inputs and outputs. You have all these inputs, let it rock. Yeah. Just a last comment here is like
the building brain is
where we arrived after we started thinking about
miners as IoT devices, not as servers that are
on constantly. And if you think about them through their API connection
and you connect them with software to a tool like Home Assistant,
then, as Dylan said, you can go wild west
because now you can control them as intelligently
or as unintelligently as you want. You're muted.
I'm sorry.
My neighbors have the landscapers here, so I've been muting so we don't get background noise.
But Dylan, you touched on it. I think the best place to go from here is to really dig into hardware selection.
What's the right miner for particular jobs?
There's so many variables and inputs to making these decisions.
And obviously, the hardware selection is one of the biggest ones, considering the upfront costs.
How do you guys think about that?
Yeah, the most important question is like, what's your goal?
Are you doing space heaters?
Are you integrating to a furnace?
Are you integrating to a boiler?
Are you just trying to mine excess solar?
Can you have loud machines screaming in your garage?
So depending on your goal, that determines,
that's kind of like step one in determining which machine you need to integrate.
For a lot of people, like I mentioned, it's scary to start or hire electricians or start ducting into your infrastructure, your house.
So start with a space heater.
That's easy.
Very modular control.
And so you can start with small rooms or stack a couple, whatever.
And then I'd say the next requirement is knowing, do you have power available to run this thing?
What's what infrastructure changes do you need to do to get this minor where you want it at whatever power level?
Because if you know your duty cycle, your demand, all that factors in.
So as Tyler mentioned earlier, there's kind of two sizing methods for HVAC.
We call it baseload and peak.
Baseload is designing for your average cool.
so i think denver on average is like mid-20s 30 in wintertime and at my house a couple mini threes
solve that for me they don't keep up when it's single digits outside and so that's when i have
my furnace step in and so depending on what you want to spend to make up that delta you can plan
for just the 30 degree days and that's this system or if you want to plan for colder days
you need to stack additional miners, but then you run into this OPEC or this CapEx problem
where you're buying machines that don't turn on all the time. And so it's like, why would you spend
the extra money when you already have the existing infrastructure? And so part of what we do is use
your utilities or you can use the calculator on our website to help determine sizing and what you
need to do to meet your demand. Yeah, I think we gave an example in the playbook. If you take a
look at it and give it a read, you'll see, you know, your sizing for baseload might say you need
5,000 watts. And so you could buy one 5,000 watt miner that's new, and maybe it's three grand,
or maybe you could buy two 3,000 watt miners. S19s are like 50 bucks right now, right? And then
that's 6,000 watts. So that's the kind of thing that comes into mind when you're selecting the
right hardware for the job. Your goal, your heating application, are you heating water or air,
right that's a big one um we should also say control right control absolutely not all of the
miners um and i'm sure we'll get to this like they're designed for data centers and they
most of the manufacturers all the manufacturers basically aside from proto are our chinese
manufacturers with closed source firmware so some of them um have aftermarket options some don't
some play nicer to talk to you know home control software like home assistance some of them don't
So the control is a big one.
What firmware options are available?
What kind of heat it delivers?
What kind of power requirements it has?
Could you even have that at your house?
And the sizing.
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important thing to to recognize if you're thinking about making this decision that you guys have built
the tools to really i think the sizing is most important just you're just running the calculus
in my head like how do i implement this in a way where i can stack more bitcoin or lower my
my electricity bill yeah we're working on some some more tools to put on our website right now
we have like a simple calculator that helps you do the energy arbitrage so we mentioned that earlier
in the episode um just like what does propane heat cost compared to a bitcoin heat right and
it does all these unit conversions that we got bogged down over it does that for you so this is
like napkin math that's what's on our website now we we don't have a public calculator yet for the
sizing. That's a little harder because it depends on how much heat you use. Most people don't have
their bills on hand, but we do want to get towards that. So definitely stay tuned there for that.
And I pulled this up. I feel like this is pertinent to what we're discussing now,
daily minor on hours versus gas on hours. And basically highlighting the different costs
across different timescales. Yes. Yeah. Dylan, you want to talk about that?
Yeah, this was kind of our first install.
This customer has an M64 and how it works is it has a heat core enclosure, which is just it provides a pump, a dry cooler and a heat exchanger.
And what we did was we added a radiator to that loop without a fan that just slotted into his ductwork.
And his circulator fan pulls the heat off of that, distributes it around the house.
If there's any excess before going back to the miner, it gets pushed out with the dry cooler.
But what was interesting is that since we installed that, that was his primary heat source.
We kind of expected the furnace to turn on a bit more.
But as you can see in this graph, there's like just a couple of blips over this time period.
And I'm very confident that was user error and the customer changing the band of the set temperature.
And so how his system works is that.
The miner is plumbed, is wired as stage one heating, and so that will operate as long as the current temperature is not greater than four degrees off of the set point temperature.
if it is greater than four degrees his furnace kicks on and just tops it up once it gets back
into that dead band minor it's minor only and so we had no complaints he was comfortable uh i mean
it's awesome it's one thing to do it on paper but it's another thing to see it in the wild
actually working as expected and so this customer loved it he has a minor just cranking away whenever
he needs heat. It's also an example of like that miner is technically like 10 times smaller than
his furnace in terms of total possible energy output, that one miner. But this is a testament
to how we size, where we say it's not worth getting that. Like, imagine if we bought him 10
miners, that would have cost him a fortune, right? And I don't even think we could get enough power
in there for that. We got one miner and it solved 99% of his heating demand over those months.
And the gas never had to kick on. So that's just a testament. Like most heating systems are
oversized for that worst case condition. So that proves that well. The sizing though,
and I mentioned this before we switched to that chart is like, we're going to have some tools
coming out on this. It's a little bit harder because you can't just really call your standard
HVAC guy and ask about like, Hey, what size Bitcoin miner do I need? You know, we've found
that most of the heating industry is sized based on your peak load. Same with solar, actually.
Right. And so this notion of not sizing for peak load, like this buddy system, this hybrid car
approach, hybrid building, there aren't that many people that size that way. So it's just,
it's been a little bit of an uphill battle to kind of communicate that to the trades.
Yeah. Well, I want to bring this up to just like really drive this point home. You guys shared this
data too. And I think this really does a good job of really driving home the comparison rates
for the effective heat costs. Yeah, that's an output from our calculator at calc.xgheat.com.
And it pulls in, you set your location and it pulls in the average costs for your state,
or you can overwrite it with your actual costs. And you say, oh, I have a S19, I have an M64,
or whichever model you can put in a custom,
if you have like a mixed system,
and you can get a direct comparison
as to what is your fuel cost,
what's your subsidy,
what's your breakeven rate,
all these different values to show
how the hash rate heating system
can compare to your existing system.
Yeah, and so with this,
it's a 45% savings under a heating bill.
Yeah, and so this customer in this snapshot,
he already had electric heat.
and so it was a no-brainer for him he's just switching from one electric heat source to
another electric heat source and if your cost is the same and now you're getting a subsidy via
bitcoin mining rewards it's a crazy savings it's the easiest to switch if you have electrical heat
it is the easiest to switch to bitcoin mining yeah and how many we're just using one
one miner here it looks like right this one is two s19s two s19s yeah and you can buy them
what are they going for these days take 50 bucks and get i mean it's like 50 to 100 bucks to get
vanilla s19 yeah which is silly it is silly i mean that gets into we'll get to that later like
the dynamics of the current mining environment considering all the mega miners getting kicked
off-grid by all the hyperscalers.
But before we get to that, I think what I really wanted to drill into
is something that you brought up, Tyler, which is the HVAC companies.
They don't understand this concept of the hybrid smart home yet.
And I think that's one of the big looming questions
that you guys are obviously trying to solve,
but making this a popular setup for most people.
I think the value of this playbook is going to be for that niche audience
who's into Bitcoin and like, yeah, we're willing to put in the work and the time and the capital
to do this because not only do we think it's cool, like we're thoroughly convinced we've
seen the numbers, we've run the numbers and it does make economic sense.
But then what do you think is like the critical tipping point to go from that niche heat punk
audience that we have here at TFTC and that you guys have at pod 256 to the broader public?
you know i think it's been hard to convey this sizing technology approach to a tradesman just
to set the background here like when you need a heating system or you want to upgrade most people
don't do it themselves they don't install themselves they call a guy right they call
professional a tradesman he's certified and so that's who we have to teach really right you know
that's the B2B path one, but also it's just your distribution channel. I mean, you could find like
the people that are directly buying furnaces and water heaters and wrenching on themselves.
I would categorize those as like the Bitcoin audience that's listening and loving the show.
Shout out. I think for the other distribution path, what did we think was an interesting path
feeling that we want to check out. It's like the whole home humidifier.
These add-on kits. So this notion of strapping a black box and saying it offers X, Y, and Z benefits
is not a foreign concept. It is new with Bitcoin, but people get whole home humidifiers. This is an
auxiliary system. It has some control. Most of them are cloud. And then they marry to the thermostat.
That's not so different from what we're doing. It's like a strap-on kit, a backpack that straps
to your furnace, a small thing that sits next to your boiler, right? Something that plumbs into
your water heater. And then there's some control setup to marry it into the rest. So I think if we
can frame it that way, then we'll find the success to say, I think we have to solve the sizing part.
That's actually what one of my main takeaways you'll see at the conclusion of the playbook is
like in each of our four case studies, we were very proud with how our sizing technique played
out. You know, no one's, no one's like, this is totally the wrong size. The miner only runs
and it can't keep up and the gas is always on. So we're happy with the sizing. What I think is
going to happen is we're going to start to see with more installs and more data collection,
we're going to, we're going to get our rule of thumb, our finger in the wind estimate. So that's
how most of the heating system industry works. It's like, how many square feet is your house?
Oh, you need a furnace this big, right? I think we at Exergy in the hatchery heating industry are
going to come to, oh, how big is your house? You need a miner this big, right? And so when we get
to that rule of thumb, that's where I think we can kind of bake those into these buddy system
kits, like the whole home humidifiers, where it's just like straight on the label, the distribution's
easy the hvac tech reads it it goes oh this mining system smart home building control unit is good
for homes 3 000 to 4 000 square feet done and like you don't have to make it any more complex than
that does that make sense it makes total sense uh yeah i mean like the map is the terror we're like
figuring out what the map looks like right now in this whole budding industry and i think you guys
are doing very important work as well i was happy to partner with you guys on this playbook
and help you guys get it out there because this is, I mean, we've talked about this, Tyler and Dylan,
when we were in Vegas, like it is time for this stuff to happen. And I think the timing is perfect
considering what's happening for the industrial scale miners. Like, I feel like there's gonna be
a flood of basics out of the hands of individuals and smaller operators. But Dylan, it looks like
you wanted to say something before we get into that yeah and so i think pushing the needle on
hvec guys wanting to install this is definitely the right path to take i'd want to like call out
i do envision a world in which a solar salesman knocks on your door and they're also pairing this
instead of upselling you for a battery they're upselling you for a minor kit that just consumes
your excess because I grew up in California.
They sold a crazy solar deal of like,
you're gonna make a bunch of money you're gonna offset everything it's gonna be amazing utopia
um and now they're just rugging everybody who had solar panels in california their their buyback
rates are pennies on the dollar and it's like cool now everyone's mad about the solar system
it doesn't detract from its utility but it's like i'm not getting paid back from the grid but you
sold me i was going to so let me find this other monetization route and so it'll be interesting to
as these develop, not only as hash rate heating systems, but solar auxiliaries and pairing in that
way. That gave me one last thought here too, which is, I'm glad you brought that up, Dylan. Solar as
well, combined energy systems, smart energy, redundancy, all these things, right? Fancy,
smart control, brains. This to me says like Tesla Powerwall, Tesla solar product ecosystem. So after
Bitcoin or that's who I view the next target market is. It's these people that are already
spending money and want the cool tech, right? Maybe they're not as Bitcoin maxis, but they
want the tech and they understand the technological importance and the value add. I think they will
be the next target before we scale into like mass consumerism, offsetting everyone's costs,
you know, cheap machines, cheap products to target the masses.
I think that's the last one to solve.
Yeah. I mean, the data is here at 3.3 X multiplier on
the solar is pretty insane.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, if you compare it at the unit level,
it's like one cent versus 3.3 cents, but still that is that multiple exists
and it's there. And so that would occur regardless the size of your system.
and it's working it's working well for this customer uh i know we're developing still on
getting it's kind of like a pid control so you have dynamic step down of the minor power limit
and so the wattage kind of traces your surplus going back to the grid and so with home assist
you can have all these inputs you know what you're generating what you're sending to the grid what
you're consuming from the grid and my goal is to get the net export of any solar system
as close to zero without going over as possible which is hard because minor firmware lags you can
say cool go 3 000 watts and say all right give me half an hour to get tuned up and get actually to
that wattage level um and then shoot there's one other thing uh and then having the system also
react to, oh, you turned on the air conditioning. Oh, you turn on this, your washing machine's
going and having the miner react to just the whole home system's power generation and just
kind of be that last fire of energy before going back to the grid. I want to add a comment here
though, which is so cool. Shout out to the clankers. Home Assistant, the open source,
smart home building brain software we use, we think of it like an aggregator. You can connect
Ring, Google Nest, whatever. We just built the add-ons to add miners with all your other IoT
devices, blinds, lights, etc. There's an MCP connection. I was on Claude. I gave it a draft
of this playbook. And I had the home assistant set up at my house. And there's these different
examples we give of what you might want to control for, solar monetization, offsetting, heating,
right? I was like, read this playbook, look at all the sensors at my house, find the Bitcoin miner,
build all these automations. I want to do case three. I want to do maximize
sats. I want to do cheapest BTU. We labeled these
nice and clear in the report.
With AI tools, the barrier to entry is as low as ever.
I don't think we can
overstate that point right there. Again, going back to the opportunity.
BitQuinter has been talking about this opportunity forever, but with
the AI tools and IoT open source projects
like the ones you guys
are building on. Once you get the hardware
and you get everything rigged up, actually running it is going to be
less intellectually and it's going to take
less intellectual capital than people perceive, especially if you have the clanker set up.
I mean, that does preclude sort of dual adoption
of clankers and this infrastructure at the same time.
I think we can all agree that
adoption curve is going to be up and to the right for the foreseeable future.
I think what you guys are doing, doing the hard work to set up all this infrastructure
and figuring out the sizing is doing it
now and getting in on the ground floors. We're seeing this adoption
wave of AI and as this mega-minor
apocalypse is happening, the timing can be more perfect to begin implementing this across the
country. Yeah, it's doable. It's doable. It's challenging, mostly because the miners don't like
behaving like IoT devices. But I agree with you. I think it's worth figuring out these barriers
right now. Why wait? And we know there's lots of open source mining developments to kind of solve
those technical problems. And then in the same vein to sizing, it's like, these are what are,
this is what I would categorize as not technical problems. These are like people problems and
education problems. Right. Um, so there's these two veins. Yeah. So, I mean, let's get into like
the mega minor apocalypse. What do you, what do you, how do you see, foresee this playing out?
Like, it seems pretty clear to me that just on grid hyperscale monetization of electricity
in the world of compute,
AI compute is going to be Bitcoin mining on grid
10 times out of 10.
Yeah, what did Brad Cuddy say at Thames?
They're like 60x.
Yeah.
Dollars per megawatt hour.
It's wild.
Bitcoin mining, people always talk about
how it's the apex predator.
It's ruthlessly competitive.
It always is going to find this lower energy state.
That's my engineer brain thinking.
Meaning it's always going to settle to the cheapest power
the cheapest operation, right? I'll say that. I won't say cheapest power. I'll say cheapest
operation. The reason I make that distinction is like, what's the best mining operation? Well,
the best mining operation is one that's not seeking profitability, right? That's the bid
hex on your desk. Okay. And so if there's a mining operation that's not seeking profitability,
that could be subsidizing your heat load, right? Or that could just be running off the excess solar
or turning on when it is profitable in those brief moments.
So the building integrated mining, I think,
is a future case for a lot of hash rate
that will survive for the long run
because it's a sunk cost mentality.
I'm going to do it anyways.
I'm not going to shut off the heat load.
I want to be warm, right?
I'm not going to stop the sun from shining
if there's excess power, right?
And I'm not in control of hash price.
So if it rips, maybe my system at my house
is going to be profitable.
And this is just something that the large on-grid miners
they don't have that luxury because they're not connected to this combined energy system.
They're seeking this one path, right? Which is, I have to run my operation, my electric
costs my operating costs have to be cheaper than the Bitcoin profit that this operation produces And that kind of as we seen becoming more challenging The machines are getting more efficient There are
large megaminers like Electron Energy, right, that are long megamining on grid. So I want to
make sure to shout them out. But at the same time, the AI space race is happening and they're just
paying way more. And so for these large publicly traded companies, it's their fiduciary responsibility
to just pivot to that.
I mean, we're constrained for compute.
I'll wrap and hand it to Dylan by saying,
like, I'm bullish on this for home mining.
I think mining has this interesting character arc story
where it started on the nodes in the laptops
and to the desktops and GPUs,
and then it got more industrialized
through network effects, economies of scale.
And then now it's kind of at this choke point
where it's going to come back home
and settle back down to these low energy states.
But the challenge I see is if the large miners aren't buying the 10,000 machines from Bitmain that are designed for data centers, then they're going to have to start selling systems that are better for these energy infrastructure applications, right?
So solar, heating, profitability, controllability with smart home brains, all these things.
It's a totally different class of product.
And so what I'm wondering is going to play out is like, if no one's buying the slop from the mega mining manufacturers, they're going to come to the smaller guys.
And then the smaller guys like us are going to say, your shit sucks.
I don't want it.
And so that's something I'm looking out for right now.
Kind of a different take.
The mega miner apocalypse is music to my ears.
like whenever there's an announcement of over pivoting the ai it's like awesome hash value is
going to go up for me network sure network hash rates going down difficulty goes down but that's
awesome for me a home miner um i do think the future will be interesting as there's not billions
of dollars in asic sales of these industrial miners as tyler was mentioning but for now in
the interim, you can run S21s, 19s, et cetera, at home. It's when you get into these three-phase
systems that you can't use that at home. Yeah. The retrofitting won't last forever.
This S19 for 50 bucks, we're at the point now where Bitmain isn't even releasing the S23.
They're only releasing three-phase hydro miners pretty much, right? And no residential home in
North America has three phase power. So yeah.
But for the weirdos that want to retrofit now and strap them on,
it's like the best time. You're like, Oh,
I've been waiting to buy this minor. It's been expensive.
Oh crap. Prices came way down on the minor Bitcoin too.
But now I have this affordable entry point. So like right now,
probably, I mean,
prices will probably go down as more mega miners turn off,
but pricing looks great and approachable right now for a lot of people who want
to get started on this.
But I do think the future will be interesting as the MegaMiner slop is not usable.
And either they have to pivot and provide better firmware and better hardware,
or open source initiatives take off and enable people to build whatever form factor
and whatever control they want on these systems to better integrate into your home
or to your use case or whatever.
if you had to wave the magic wand and produce a a sort of supply chain for
asics in the future what does it look like
i mean yeah uh instead of having desolder chips off existing hashboards to build system it's like
here's the real here's how you control it have a great time playing with your bitcoins
I think we need chips and we need an open source firmware that works on all of them akin to Linux.
Right. So this is this is Intel and AMD. That's what's minor in micro BT.
They both sell chips. Linux runs on both chips. You don't have to.
There are proprietary OSs like Mac OS and Windows.
There can be proprietary firmwares with dev fees that offer fancy features or better tuning.
But the bare bones minimum that we really need is to make the Bitcoin mining industry reflect the rest of the electronics industry, which is someone sells chips a la carte.
And there is an open source, editable, inspectable, documented firmware to talk to those chips.
Are we getting closer?
Somebody working on that?
Yes.
Yeah.
Shout out to Ryan, one of our engineers at the 256 Foundation.
He is the lead architect of Mojina, which is an open source firmware.
Another shout out to AI.
It turns out when you have an open source firmware and you can SSH into miners that are hacked together at best, I'd say, like there's really no such thing as closed source software nowadays.
It's basically intercepting the mining operations on aftermarket firmwares, closed source firmwares, and literally sideloading an open source firmware in real time.
These are just a couple of AI prompts.
I mean, obviously, he is architecting it as an embedded systems full stack Linux engineer.
But with the AI tools, it's just become so much easier.
We've got Mugina running on S19s, a couple of different versions and images coming soon.
So a file you can download. It runs on BitAxes. It runs on some open source hardware, the 256 Foundation's working on. But long story short is, yes, we're building towards that platform, Regina. Dylan's actually pretty involved in the API architecture, right? I mean, it's cool. It's very early stages, but it's an opportunistic time to come in. There's dev calls for that as well.
to get to voice your interest.
Hey, I'm trying to do this solar thing.
Hey, I'm trying to do this heating thing.
Like I need the firmware to do X, Y, and Z.
And the beauty of it is
these can be built in a matter of minutes.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of wild to think that
Libreboard that 256 is putting out can run Mugina.
You can connect hashboards to it via USB-C.
You can mix and match hashboards.
So maybe you have a dying S21 and a dying S19.
You can plug any combination of those boards into Libra board.
And then Mugina is being designed to be able to programmatically dictate where the power is going through those boards.
Does it prioritize efficiency? Does it prioritize equalizing it across all the boards?
Let me turn two off and turn two on, etc.
So being able to get in right now to voice how you think minor firmware control should be handled is super valuable.
And you can help steer the conversation as like, hey, I like this on this firmware.
I like this in this firmware. I hate this, hate this.
So let's add these and disregard this and find a different system, which is the beauty of open source.
You can just contribute it and have a discussion around it and go back and forth on it.
Yeah, it's funny.
like when you connect all this stuff to Home Assistant
and do what we're trying to do,
and if you're reading this playbook or listening
to this episode, you might be interested in doing this too.
The thermostats behave like thermostats.
The solar inverter behaves like a solar inverter.
The furnace behaves like a furnace.
The battery behaves like a battery, right?
The miners don behave well like heaters That like and they don behave well like solar dispatch loads That like the missing piece And it just the pain point of where we at in the industry It a bullish sign in the sense that we early and we get to be alive for this But there a lot of
technical work to be done on the firmware to Dylan's technical points there. How do you architect
that? If you request half power, how does it do that? Does it shut off one of the two boards or
does it just throttle them back? Which one gets you the most saps? Which one gets you the highest
temperature. It depends on what you're trying to do, right? And then also the hardware itself.
That's something I just want to mention, which is like eating appliances, solar infrastructure,
this stuff's supposed to last 30 years, right? Like, I don't want the hash board to change shape.
You know, I want it to be a standard like hot swappable, upgradable heating element that I know
when I upgrade in eight years, it's going to be the same shape and I don't have to overhaul the
whole system. We don't have that luxury because the miners kind of do change shape and it's
whatever the manufacturer's will is,
they don't sell the chips, right?
So there's no company that said,
I'm gonna keep them this shape.
So all this is to say is like,
this is kind of the open source stack
that we're watching closely and helping
and advocates of with our time and energy
to support the 256 Foundation.
But my last comment here will be,
it's not just a benefit to the people
trying to do these energy-based,
building integrated home mining,
building mining, business mining systems. An open source stack is also beneficial when you're
a publicly traded miner and you don't want a dev fee on your firmware, or you want to, you know,
investigate and audit share accounting, right? Or you just want to make sure there's no backdoor
from Antbleed, right? That can remotely shut off your machine. So all this is to say is like the
Linux, back to that first point, the Linux firmware of the mining industry called Mojina,
and then chip accessibility and some reference designs just so we can get consistent form
factors and some standards.
That's all really needed to help the whole industry.
Completely agree.
And it's crazy.
We're 17 years in.
And to your point earlier, Tyler, about mining going through this phase of CPU, GPU, FPGA,
ASIC, industrial scale, and now coming back.
I think it's hard to predict exactly what the
end form factor looks like, but I have a feeling that the end form
factor is going to be in something that is conducive for
at-home mining. And yes, there may still be industrial scale to produce
the ability to participate in demand response, and there's going to be
parts of the world where they don't build out AI data centers because they decide the US
and China won the arms race for AI,
so we're going to use our excess power to buy Bitcoin.
I still think they will have a place.
I think overall the arc of Bitcoin mining history
will be more distributed,
a variety of form factors,
and hopefully, but I'm pretty confident
using mining as a way to be a sort of collaborative
part of a home brain to help with heating and taking advantage of periods where we're mining
bitcoin with your your electricity is profitable yeah i would just echo that by saying like what's
the end form factor of a computer processor or a gpu there's laptop cpus and gpus there's desktop
cpus and gpus there's data center cpus and gpus right and so i think that whole stack will exist
at scale in Bitcoin mining. We're not here saying building integrated mining is the only answer.
I still am a firm believer in monetizing stranded energy, right? Off-grid mining. There's going to
be the on-grid mining that's cheap enough or subsidized by the state or whatever. There's
going to be the gridless computes of the world, right? That are finding stranded energy, literally,
and offering electricity to their community from the application of Bitcoin mining into those
micro grids. But I think that what's very undervalued right now, and at the same time,
people want to participate is this building integrated mining, you know, and it's kind of
felt out of reach for a while because the machines are so industrial and you don't, you don't really
see one as a newcomer to Bitcoin. So we're working to change that. Yeah. And so people listen to this,
they download the playbook, they're reading it. What do they do next? What do they do next?
Uh, well, they can get started on our support page.
We've documented everything as much as we can.
So you can totally do this yourself.
Calculators are available and the equations are available.
You can take a stab at this and do it yourself.
Also, you can contact us.
We provide this as a service.
We were happy to work with people because it's important for us to get this into
as many homes and businesses as possible.
You have an advantage, use it.
Like at the top of the report here.
It's important for us to not only
get people exposed to Bitcoin mining,
but it also is this Trojan horse
to decentralizing and hardening the network even further.
Because it's way better, in my opinion,
to have every home on this block mining Bitcoin,
especially if they're either lottery mining themselves
or building their own block templates,
doing pool mining, whichever.
to not only decentralize it physically, but also on the pool scale.
And so we're excited about other open source pools coming out.
But back to how you get started.
Contact us.
Yeah, you get started with your utility bills.
Have your goal in mind of am I doing this for heating?
Am I doing this for solar?
Is sovereignty important to me or some combination thereof?
And figure out what your current sunk cost is for your building.
and whether you're losing value on the solar you're selling back to the grid.
And from there, you make the decision on how integrated do I want this to be?
Do I want to tiptoe in with space heaters?
Totally fine.
Or do I go fully integrated?
And do I have this tied into my plumbing system from my boiler,
ducted into my furnace?
Do I have a dry cooler so I can dump the heat outside during the summertime?
It really all goes back to what is your goal?
The good news, if anyone's listening, yeah, echo everything Dylan said. If they already have a
miner, maybe it's got an aftermarket firmware like Brains or LuxOS or some of the Canaan miners.
Chances are we've been building out more of these. Shout out to Brett Rowan at Upstream Data,
by the way. He is the tech wizard behind getting Bitcoin miners to respond to API calls in a
cohesive, aggregated way to help us in Home Assistant. But a lot of this stuff is on Home
assistant already, meaning a miner you already have might be able to be controlled like a smart
home device. And so to echo Dylan's point about tiptoeing, like get a $50 raspberry pie or buy one
or install home assistant on start 9040, right? Because now it's packaged for that or on your
umbrella. And then download the integration. These are like, that's like the app store of
home assistant. Download the one that lets you connect to Bitcoin miner. Home assistant is pretty
smart, it might automatically find your home thermostat or a smart switch or something.
Watch a couple of YouTube videos, come to our office hours, read some of our documentation.
Then you can start to toy around with controlling a minor like a smart building device with your building brain You can connect your Claude or OpenAI account to Home Assistant with their MCP connector And then you can start just
asking your AI to build the smart control. And that's where you really get more confident to say,
okay, maybe I do need to chat with these guys or help figure out the sizing myself for how many I
really need to optimize this. And then, you know, I'm going to cut it into the duct and I'm going to
install a damper or a valve or a pump that can control things and all that connects to home
assistant you tell your ai it then starts to build out the automation flow from there so that's kind
of how we grew into this over time that was our natural path and um i know it can be a little
intimidating but all the tools are available to do it today yeah and the uh the one thing we forgot
to cover but i think we can cover real quickly is like there's a bunch of people like all right
Like, how do I actually get the Bitcoin?
Like, what happens when you put the miner in?
You point it in a pool.
We're producing this Bitcoin and the miner's running.
I could see it.
But how do I get the Bitcoin?
We hosted an event here at the space and someone asked,
okay, so how do I get the Bitcoin out of the miner?
And it just has stuck in my head forever.
You're like, no, it's stuck in the hot tub forever.
The files are in the computer.
And so I think maybe we mentioned this, maybe we didn't.
A lot of this report is based on pooled mining.
And so I don't advocate for this.
You can do pooled mining, the FPPS.
You shouldn't do that, in my opinion.
But that's another conversation of another day.
I'm a big advocate of Ocean.
I like being able to build my own block template.
I accept the fact that they are the coordinator of the payouts.
I'm fine with that tradeoff.
um so on ocean you can put in your own bitcoin address and you will get paid out there
intermittently if you don't have a lot of hash rates it's going to take a long time to do it on
chain i think the minimum is like a million sats uh or you can if you have a core lightning node or
um coinos they offer the ability to hook up your lightning address
with a Bolt 12 offer to your Ocean account
and you'll get lightning payouts.
And then sats are in your pocket
wherever you access that lightning account
and you can spend it immediately
or you can send it to cold storage.
Totally up to you.
This is the best part.
My favorite part about home mining is that
it beats the hell out of credit card rewards
or airline miles or what have you
because your subsidy that you get back
for running infrastructure in your home
is immediately spendable.
once it's in your pocket.
And so whichever route that takes,
or you send it straight to cold storage
and don't worry about it ever again.
Very trivial to set up.
I wanna give a shout out to,
as I've learned more recently about Peterpool V2,
more protocol, this is a little nerdy,
but this notion of, you know,
we're like one of the biggest advocates
of physical decentralization of hash rate, right?
It's like, we're putting them in buildings.
Everybody's got building, a lot of people have buildings.
But on the digital decentralization, you know, it kind of was a trope for me before because I didn't fully understand it.
But, you know, it doesn't really do anything if you just point to an FPPS pool.
And so how do you solve for that?
There are different pools like Ocean, which have let you construct your own block templates or strategy, too.
But then there's also pretty cool protocol proposals for a decentralized pool altogether, meaning a company, an entity doesn't control it.
It is the pool is a protocol with a share chain.
And so that's a really hard technical problem that I was talking to Matt Carlow about and
Jungli, who's one of our engineers at the 256 Foundation that we're working on as well.
But I'm really excited about stuff like that to come in the future as well, because I do view
like my long term bullish view on Bitcoin mining is you're going to plug in a gadget into your house.
You don't even have to know how it works. It's going to pay you money. It's going to monetize
your solar. It's going to offset your heating costs. And it's going to just do this programmatically
at a protocol layer, and it's going to fully decentralize physically and digitally
the Bitcoin network. And we have this massive interconnected web across the globe
of these little machines that are building infrastructure that are
final settlement for the base layer of the monetary system. It's crazy to think about.
Yeah, they're enabling peer-to-peer digital cash at a time when it's desperately
needed. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure
working with you. I mean, you guys have missed the work, but it's been
it's been fun. It has.
For the last three weeks.
Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm really excited to see what the audience thinks of it. I know that
people are pretty hungry for home mining. There's always a lot of chatter online when they see a new
gadget come out. And I think it'll be cool to really get the playbook out there to say,
this is kind of our way of thinking about how much home mining can you
get away with to your benefit. You want the most bang for your buck,
this is how to do it. So thank you, Marty.
Yeah, thank you, Marty. This is great.
Word of warning to the listeners, the viewers,
stacking hash rate is more addictive than stacking sets.
Yeah, I can
co-sign that if somebody has been stacking hash rate for almost a decade now.
It is addicting. It is masochistic, but it's addicting. And I think your application makes it
less masochistic. But this is not the end
of this for us. You got the playbook. You've listened to this episode.
If you're at the TFTC roundtable, we are going to have
a one-off call
July 14th that night. Hope you guys are available
because that's what we've said it internally. I just told you that live on air. Business on air.
We have the TFTC roundtable now. If you like this, if you want to learn more,
Dylan, Tyler, and myself will be meeting in a closed
Zoom group where we can expand on this conversation.
You guys can ask questions when we go a little deeper.
So sign up for the TFTC Roundtable if you want to join that.
And gentlemen, I think this is great.
I hope if you're listening, you learn more, you become more confident.
And if so, reach out to Tyler and Dylan.
Certainly try to do it by yourself.
But I'm a big don't reinvent the wheel guy.
speed up the learning curve by talking to these two.
Thank you, sir. We'll see you July 14th.
Peace and love, folks.
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