And so with hydro, it's really interesting. Like you have, it's basically direct to chip cooling.
And this has been, you know, this is something that's existed in just data centers forever.
But with, with, with mining, we're seeing like with this direct to chip cooling, specifically
in a like liquid form, you kind of have like a mix of water and like a glycol mix. It's basically
like shooting, you know, cold water basically on these chips and cycling them in real time.
So you're getting like very precise cooling at the chip level.
And so like that's really important because the quality of the chip basically degrades
exponential with the temperature.
HashrateUp.
Hardware sales, advisory, hosting, and site brokerage.
Find new and use basic deals through the website and the Telegram channel below.
Make smarter decisions with HashrateUp.
Welcome back everybody to HashrateUp.
It's a very, very interesting time.
very very interesting time sorry it's late for me there's gonna be a lot of these um in bitcoin
mining right now and i have my good friend and supporter of the show and overall partner tom
with me hi tom how are you hey jesse i'm good how are you uh yeah i'm doing okay i'm still smiling
um we just sat here for quite a bit talking about the market and stuff and just decided to
to riff it basically, which is often no pressure.
Some of the best shows just end up coming from a point like that.
For the first time ever, I believe, hash price sits below $30.
So we are now well, well, well, well, well into the pain zone.
Bitcoin price, let's just give a brief overview.
I don't feel it anymore.
um bitcoin price is at 64 000 hash price sits at 29 hash rates at 900 we're still looking at our
difficulty adjustment of minus 13 which will bump that back up again but i'm sure as bitcoin is
falling we're going to see even lower hash price in the meantime we're at 11 minutes and 30 seconds
average block time let's quickly look at the time chain calendar at block height 935163 is
when we were recording this and if my eyes don't see look at hash rate hashrate 20900 exahash
yeah and then we are also 266 blocks too slow um we're in the middle of and i said this in the
in a video before um a focus episode that i did where i just you know covered the hash price and
the difficulty development right now i think we're looking at very um unprecedented times we've had
um crazy times like this when the china mining ban happened and when bitcoin dropped from 32
the enormous heights of 32 all the way down to two i believe um and i think we're doing we're
We're seeing something like that.
We're on our way.
You know, when this 13% hits, I think we will be at around 25% overall over the last 12 weeks.
And a lot of people are hurting right now, Tom.
What are your thoughts at the moment looking at this?
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts.
So, like, one is obviously the steepness of the Bitcoin price kind of drop.
Like, we've been through things like this in the past.
And I think a lot of there were a lot of discussions and like people thinking kind of previously like, oh, the four year cycle theory is dead.
We have, you know, we're in this super cycle and the ups won't be as high, but the lows won't, you know, the drops won't be as high.
I think we're like learning in real time that like, hey, this is still, you know, at least the price of Bitcoin is still a very volatile, a volatile thing.
But I don't think the thesis, at least from my perspective, has really changed.
right? Like, I nothing has changed in like the the code of this thing. Nothing has changed in like
how the economics of mining work. Like it's the same thing. We're just seeing, you know, volatility
in the price. And there's probably a lot of reasons as to like, why that is, but that's kind of like
my first take. The other thing is like, yeah, like people are feeling a lot of pain right now. I think
I think if you are in a position going into this, where maybe you had higher expectations,
and maybe you were making decisions around like, you know, leverage and different things,
it can be a bit of a scary time.
I think for us, we live in the world of mining and hash price
and how these systems work.
And so I think it still is true that as long as you're not overpaying
for the ASICs and your initial deployment,
as long as you have good operating partners
and you're on the right side of the efficiency curve,
we could say, leaning towards higher efficiency machines
relative to the average on the network.
It's really just a game about staying online, right?
We kind of see as hash price corrects
when difficulty goes up,
we'll see hash price correcting
until machines don't turn off anymore, basically.
And we don't know when that will be,
but that's just how the economics kind of play out here.
And so I think it's interesting
to be talking about this right now
because obviously there's a lot of people worry,
there's a lot of things going on,
There's also a lot of things going on just like in the world in general.
Like we were talking about how gold as an asset class like is completely ripping, how
the price of the dollar relative to, you know, other currencies is trading.
So for us, like there's a lot of noise.
We kind of just focus on the bare bones of mining economics.
And I think like if you have high efficiency machines that you paid a good price for and
you're running in good conditions, like you'll be able to withstand a lot of this.
And then over time, like you're just stacking more Bitcoin if the price, you know, relatively drops, right? You're going to be stacking more in terms of like staying online.
Yeah, it's a time where, and I just want to pull this up, you know, I've shown this before, like the way the Bitcoin hash price increases in Bitcoin terms as the difficulty keeps decreasing.
I think it's what you said is very right.
Like everybody just kind of has to decide what do they want.
And it's a very weird thing to think about.
What do you want your economic basis to be?
you know it's a very fundamental question because i was telling you um that the the south african
rand just increased in value versus the dollar and you were saying oh you know that's what we
want as americans um my rent just went from like went up by 250 bucks you know which is roughly
i want to say five percent seven and a half percent over the last six weeks just because of
dollar and rand exchange rate.
And at the same time, Bitcoin drops.
Is your rank denominated into US dollars then?
Is that what you're saying?
No, no.
But I converted because that's often what I earn.
I see.
I earn from overseas.
So, yeah, it's just a very weird time where there is no clear anchor, you know?
And you feel this like on a global stage, but then also, you know, starting to affect
our personal lives, especially as we are.
so exposed to to bitcoin volatility itself um but that's kind of where where this whole
whole bitcoin thing helps me right because i that's essentially my long-term vision is
you know i've i've made the choice long ago to to um value everything in sets right and we were
talking about customers of yours that are now you know maybe slightly uh uh miffed or have negative
sentiment because they bought machines maybe four weeks ago five weeks ago and now the machines are
literally half the price or you know somewhere in between um and i i was just saying look if you
price the machines in bitcoin terms they're still the same price they haven't changed in price right
because the machine i think that's that's that's important right like to to understand that the way
basic pricing works and the way a lot of these economics it's a lot of it is denominated in
bitcoin so if you kind of look at you know the relative bitcoin that you spent versus now and
the value of the machines yes in dollars it may be different but the value of bitcoin in dollars
is different as well so if you're denominating in bitcoin you're actually like you know your
your assets in those machines is actually like pretty much still the same exactly yeah and it's
it's a it's because everything everything that i do you know when you when you make a large
investment when you buy a car you know um i bought a car at this price range um i think over a year
ago and afterwards the price just jumped up to the 100 or whatever and i was like damn what a bad
decision right now i'm like hey the car is the same price again you know so it's like um it's
just a matter of perspective and yes sure like we can buy less um for for the money that we have
and what i feel for most is those people who um who get told hey save your money in sats save your
money in sats um especially those and this is a bit off topic but here in south africa you know
when we when we talk about using bitcoin and we just finished the adopting bitcoin conference
last weekend and a lot of newcomers you know um that are there that for them maybe 500 is a lot
of money right and they if they have it all in sets their halvings just got halved as well and
they might not be able to afford that and that's often you know the volatility is what keeps Bitcoin
from being this um great asset that we that we um think it will be at some point um yeah but then
again, you find volatility everywhere, right? Gold market is what, 30, 34 trillion. And it just
dropped by 20% in over the course of two weeks. Like it's nuts. It dropped more than the market
cap of Bitcoin. And I think like when we think about mining, like we talk about this all the
time, it's like the game is how do I stay online and keep my machines making, you know, generating
Bitcoin in an economically viable way for as long as possible. So I'm able to get the most out of
those machines. And I think like having options to be able to continue running the machines in,
you know, different economic times with deals like profit share deals and, you know, redeploying
machines instead of just sitting on them and scrapping them. Like, I think those options are
emerging as the like reality of the economics kind of play out. And I think there's a world
where like, if you have a machine, you can actually keep the machine running as long as
it's useful life and still be benefiting from that. I think it's going to take a while to get
there. But like, those are the types of things that like we always talk about and we're always
working on is like, okay, given an efficiency of a machine, does this contract structure even make
sense at what point do we need to consider you know turning this into a profit share structure
or re redeploying it somewhere else um because you know customers still want to you know hold
the exposure to the to the productive uh compute asset that is the asic um that that a really interesting thing and i think a lot of people just need to understand and have the right expectations when kind of engaging with the mining market Like
what we're seeing is not anything new. It's just, you know, maybe it's new to some people.
This episode is sponsored by Hashbranch, the easiest way to mine Bitcoin in the US.
Sourcing hardware and rackspace usually is a mess. Bad deal structures, misaligned incentives,
and no visibility after deployment.
I have placed tens of thousands of ASICs
in partnership with Hashbranch.
What I like most is that they cut through the noise.
Fair pricing, aligned terms,
and access to hosting that actually works.
Use code hashredup100.
Visit hashbranch.com today
to get $100 off of each miner that you order.
Yeah, no, again, what you say is right.
The two of us, we always look for opportunities
to make people money while being incentivized,
obviously, to have successful customers, right?
I think it's very important.
We don't charge 30%, 40% margins on these machines.
We don't charge, overcharge on the hosting rate, I think.
And so, you know, I just did a focus episode
that will be released when we release this interview
or this chat, I should say,
where you do hydro hosting for two reasons.
Maybe just to recap that quickly, right?
This is what I'm very, very bullish on
is we do hydro hosting for two reasons,
a long financial lifespan that we have access to
and then a long physical lifespan, right?
There's no moving parts.
The machine doesn't really get in touch
with the environment as much.
There's no air moving through it.
You just have water cooling the machines.
They run at 30, 40 degrees Celsius
years instead of 60 70 80 depending on on ambient temperature and then you know if we sort of solve
for the physical lifespan uh the way we we handle the financial lifespan for situations like this
are profit splits you know where um we just make a portion of the hosting rate variable
um which means that you break even now when hash price is at 30 dollars and you're mining at six
cents, right? But if hash price is at $100, you're mining at 14 cents, right? Sure, that's giving up a
lot of upside, right? But the downside protection, once the machine is near or at ROI, the downside
protection is invaluable because this market is so volatile still, right? And so then the modeling
is less relevant. If you can guarantee that the machine stays online longer, the modeling and the
scenarios become have less of a weight right because the problem comes when you have no other
option than to turn off not to lose money to not lose money right and at that point you're stuck
and you're sitting on less bitcoin that you mined than you could have bought two and a half years
ago but there's a question here tom also right just to critically um uh critique our thinking
as well right if i was devil's advocate now i would say okay what guarantees that the the hosting
provider that actually manages the machines and owns the power contracts and stuff how do we make
sure that they that we select hosts that don't turn around and want to do ai once the contract
period is finished because then the machine is out of there yeah no that's a great question and i
And I think there's like, there's a lot of thoughts there because we have like, on one
hand, we have this like massive explosion in just AI as a, as a technology, right.
Mainly through like generative AI.
And then we're seeing like agents and all these things spin up.
So like, there's a massive kind of exponential growth in that as like a technology.
And then from that is kind of as an asset class in general.
Like I think, you know, the way we look at mining is like one type of compute.
It just happens to be like the most, you know, liquid form of compute that you can basically sell perpetually on the market because the buyer of that compute is the Bitcoin mining network.
Right. So with mining, it's like, hey, the economics might be different, but at least you don't have to solve for who's going to buy my compute.
But at the same time, we have these massive tailwinds that are saying the investment, the global spend in CapEx for AI infrastructure, including the GPUs, the power infrastructure, everything it takes to run AI compute, specifically large training loads, inference, and other things, is in the trillions.
That's what people are publicly saying.
We're talking like $5 to $10 trillion by the next, at the end of the decade, that's what people are putting.
So when you see like this massive market, there are like, you know, there are you think about it, you're like, hey, you know, if I'm building a data center or I'm, you know, if I have access to a lot of power, should I look into AI compute? And I think the answer is like, yeah, you should look into it. There are like a lot of times where the economics make a lot of sense.
it's not easy though like it's not as simple as like you know I get some GPUs and then there's a
there's a Bitcoin equivalent that can just monetize them perfectly the problem that's
still unsolved at least to my knowledge is like clear liquidity for your compute that you're
generating on the AI side so like even the even the groups that are considering this sort of like
transition which I think we'll see a lot of don't get me wrong that it's a very difficult problem so
So I think for that reason, it's going to take a long time to solve.
Maybe people will probably solve it in different ways, but I think that is something we need
to have a conversation around, which is like, hey, if a current host has a bunch of infrastructure
and they decide to transition everything to AI and compute, that is something that could
happen.
For our customers specifically, on one hand, we have very strong relationships and contracts
with our operators. So like, even if that were to occur, it would occur like after our, you know,
client contracts are over and we'd have a redeployment and a relocation kind of strategy
already built in. We're, we're constantly forward planning, but I think realistically, like it's not
going to happen in like a overnight, all capacity is now AI. It's probably a transition. And most
likely I think the best solution is to have a mix of, of compute resources, you know, at any one
location because like right you know for example like right now like if if if you converted everything
to ai it might be hyper profitable today it could also be not super profitable in six to 12 months
depending on how the economics play out so like you kind of want to hedge your revenue streams and
i think that's going to play out at the operator level as well yeah so i think you know you bring
actually a lot of value to operators because now you know besides just being able to self mine
and being exposed to Bitcoin volatility
or doing the AI
where you have to look for your customer
and all of that,
all of the things that you just said,
you also have an aggregator like yourselves
and you just make a margin on the power.
And then also I was thinking
while you were speaking,
how does uptime play into this?
And does Bitcoin mining
maybe move to those points in the grid
where uptime is 85%, 80%?
No, for sure.
I wouldn't mind,
And I wouldn't mind my miner being online 85% of the year if the power price reflected that opportunity.
Exactly.
So like with mining, because you kind of control for like who is the customer, right?
You can always mine Bitcoin.
You just need internet and power and a compute resource and ASIC.
Because of that, the only trade-offs you really can make are uptime and base, call it power or hosting costs.
Those are really the two variables you have.
but the reality is that like when you you know most new machines we talked about this on the
last podcast like we think of like the brand new machines generally speaking you want to start them
at a high uptime environment because you want to you know monetize those as long as possible
but the reality is like economically it might make sense to actually run efficient units at a lower
uptime because your base costs can be lower so really what you're trying to optimize for is like
the time online that is profitable. And like that can be, you know, maybe you're only running 83%
of the time, but your base is much lower. So you're actually able to stay online. And so those
are the things that happen with AI and kind of the whole, you know, the compute markets around,
call it like GPU compute, we kind of coined this term industrial compute, like mining is one
type, but you have kind of this, this other type that that's emerging with GPUs.
Like uptime is like very interesting because in order to even be able to monetize them,
well, you have to hit a strict requirement for like even selling that compute.
Meaning like you need to basically be a tier three data center.
A tier three data center is like, you know, I don't know all the technical kind of specifications,
but it's like very high uptime, very high redundancy.
We're talking like 99.999% uptime.
A lot of times you need, I think on some of the compute marketplaces, you literally need access to two separate grid-tied substations for redundancy.
And you need, I think, fiber as well as another backup.
So there's a lot of infrastructure that's even required.
And so, yes, I think mining, but there's energy everywhere.
So I think with, you know, mining will basically be able to be spun up and economical in places that don't yet have that infrastructure.
Over time, it will make sense to maybe bring that infrastructure in and then start to diversify revenue streams.
But like this stuff moves at the speed of the physical world, which means like to build a data center and actually do this, we're talking, you know, months, if not years.
Like a lot of the capacity and a lot of the big infrastructure that's getting, that's coming online this year was all contracted like three years ago.
So that's what we're talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, look, I just also before we started recording,
we read the news courtesy of the friends at the MinerMag
that there were 250 gigawatts of power requests
in the ERCOT queue being reshuffled.
So it's just such an interesting time in energy and AI
and Bitcoin mining.
and I just have a feeling that getting a machine today
which costs the same amount of Bitcoin as it did four weeks ago
might just be a really, really good decision in five years from now
especially if it's still running then and you can guarantee that
and you have access because the hostess that we deal with
they don't qualify for AI if their uptime is 90%
95%. They don't have that option, right? They have all that capital investment. And if the grid
operator only offers them 90% uptime, which they have control over, the contracts that they sign,
then AI isn't an option. Right, at least not today. And not with a massive, you know, retrofit
and and capex spend and even like just the yeah it it is a it something that can happen and probably will in in in some places i don think it going to happen across the board Like everywhere that was mining is now AI
I think that's what people kind of say.
And that's the like simple answer.
But I think it's going to be more complicated than that.
The other thing I'll throw out there, and this is like just kind of a maybe an AI black swan or like something to kind of like just get thinking is we just like recently saw, I don't know if you saw the news, but like there's SpaceX is basically going to be merging with XA.
AI, so like kind of the Elon's like AI company and like SpaceX, which basically owns like
80% of the market of, you know, sending payload to orbit and they have, you know, Starlink
and whatnot.
And you can read like how they're talking about this.
They think that a lot of compute is going to move to space.
Now, whether that happens or not, and that completely changes the economics.
So like, there's a lot of things that could happen.
like the build out for ai to you know we'll say on the on the ground in you know those economics
could completely change if it's actually possible to do this at scale for you know cheap yeah outside
of like i guess the planet which is a weird thing to say so so i don't know what are we going to see
mining in space yeah yeah exactly solar mining you're far enough out i had a i had the guy on um
the earth is for mining space is for ai yeah yeah well you know you you get exactly you have solar
uptime 100 i had this guy on talking about mining in space no um no for sure but it's it's definitely
yeah very interesting time right now i would like to um ask you tom how do you or just explain to
people briefly you know let's say they have a fleet of machines um with other holsters somewhere
and they're not not profitable be it k pros i don't know whatever it is how do people do this
like what is their first move after they contact you what do you do with these machines and maybe
briefly explain how the profit split mechanism works yeah for sure so like a a big part of our
business like from the get-go was all around this idea of redeployment and it's basically like hey
i have this hardware already um i bought it you know whatever price here's the efficiency of the
hardware it's now out of contract at another facility or it is sitting on a pallet somewhere
It's not being well monetized. What can you do? Right. And so we like we've been working on this problem for years now.
And basically, like the way it works for us is like a customer will come to us and say, hey, like I have X amount of units of this making, you know, makeup and efficiency.
We basically intake all of their hardware in terms of like, OK, how many units you have? What types of units? What are the efficiencies? Where are they?
and what's the situation?
When do you think you can actually move them?
Once we have all that, we basically say,
okay, what's the quality of the machines?
Because a lot of people don't know this,
but a lot of machines, when you originally bought them,
they've been running somewhere.
You don't know how well they've been taken care of.
They might've been running,
but maybe the filtration wasn't great
and you have debris everywhere.
So we try to get an understanding for the quality.
This comes ideally through hash reports.
So what's the operating status of the machines
at least as close as you can give us.
So like if they're running right now, great.
If they were running, do you have any data on that?
The second piece is like, okay, what's the quality of the machine?
So this is kind of subjective, but basically like, are they dusty?
Are they, you know, have they have corrosion?
Like what does that look like?
Once we have all that data, like it's pretty straightforward.
On the back end, what we've done is we've contracted out
and we have rack space that like basically matches the profile of these units.
And so what happens is like we kind of talked about this earlier, you might have contracts that have low base rate, low uptime.
You wouldn't put a new unit there, but you might put a K pro or an XP.
That's like the first piece. So we have contracts in place that allow us to kind of redeploy older units.
The second piece is the profit share component. So in these contracts, you kind of have the ability to, hey, I just want a low rate, low uptime.
I'm cool with that. Or I actually want an even lower rate and then have a split of the kind of
of the of the rewards less the costs with the operating party. That's like easy to describe.
It's actually hard to pull off because there's a lot of like mechanisms around billing and how are
you calculating this and how are you settling and all that stuff. Our software really orchestrates
that. And then we have the contracts on the back end that basically is the rack space that can take
your machine. So once we've kind of like, okay, we've, we know what types of machines there are,
we get another understanding. Um, we have the rack space ready. Um, the next step is like,
if the units are not in good quality and I'll say like, as an example, Hey, they've been sitting on
pallets. I don't even have pictures. You know, some of them are broken. We don't know. We generally
have a checkpoint, uh, before the redeployment. Um, sometimes this is at the site. So like sometimes
a site is capable of doing the checkpoint sometimes we have to send them to a repair stopover to like
get checked basically what that means is like they will take it in diagnose them be like okay
you know x amount of machines are actually good to go the others need maybe a new power supply
new hash board whatever and they do it like a cleaning basically to get them ready for the
redeployment because a lot of operators that we work with like the last thing they want is units
to show up that just don't work or junk because they they want to monetize at this time yeah
yeah it's also an objective checkpoint right these repair centers they're being paid exactly
the machines and they're an objective neutral party so there's also no no discourse after the
fact where hash branch says no the units are shite basically and the customer says no they were all
working when I sent them off what happened right so no you have somebody in the middle that says
hey you know pay me I don't know 20 a machine and I will give you a report on it and give you a
sheet that tells you exactly what the state of these machines is at the moment.
BitX, solomining.de, got it.
Premium, made in Germany.
You want to go fancy?
Go for NerdX or NerdQX++ for a lot of power.
Worldwide shipping, check out solomining.de today.
Exactly.
And like ideally you get that before they leave the original facility.
You kind of, they've taken good care of it.
They have the data.
It's pretty, it's pretty simple.
but we have a lot of cases where like I said units are just in storage containers we don't even know
how they've been treated so that checkpoint is really important to like one just like give you
a reality check because like even if you get these units plugged in without a checkpoint if only
you know 70% of them even hash you have no idea what's going on so that's like an important step
and yeah like it's a you know it's it's it's a verified like repair center or someone that we've
worked with who's like done this with us. They don't really have skin in the game to like, you
know, on either side, they're just like, Hey, like, this is the reality. You know, we get diagnostic
reports and photos and all that stuff, really trying to just like streamline the process. So
once you've kind of given us the intake data, we've kind of made a decision, like, should it get
checked at an at a third party? Or does the site have a process? Then we go through the redeployment.
And like, even that is kind of complex because the way, you know, these are physical servers moving.
So like, as an example, I always talk about each one of the, um, each one of these ASICs is about 35 pounds, like a standard, um, uh, standard like air cool unit called like an S19 K pro or XP.
It's like 35 pounds.
Right.
And you can only fit maybe, you know, 20 to 30 of them on a pallet.
Um, and so we're talking about like, that's, you know, right there, we're talking about, you know, thousands of pounds, you know, maybe like.
a thousand to fifteen hundred pounds of servers depending a lot of these deployments like it might
be five to ten pallets and so we're talking like on the order of you know tens of thousands of
pounds of servers that need to like go through this process and they need to physically move
across you know we only operate in the U.S. so they're moving across um across the country
sometimes just takes time so like this the logistics of getting the deployment going
ideally you can just snap your fingers and they're online in another spot but the reality is like
they're going to come in batches those batches are going to have serial numbers associated the
site needs to understand you know what's going on with those it takes time to ramp those up
um but yeah once they're going and you're kind of in this better structure then like we've seen
like machines just stay online longer because the economics make sense yeah no exactly perfect
thank you so much yeah it's a cool problem before we yeah it's absolutely um and there's
it seems endless demand for it i've seen somebody today advertise uh m30 units stacked 80 on a
pallet i'm like no thank you yeah that's gonna that's gonna tip over in transit and then people
are gonna be pointing at each other and that bottom row is probably feeling a lot of pain
yeah um yeah no last time we talked a bunch about type one and type two facilities also
and going back to um the the hydro idea and again please if you haven't look at my little uh
focus episode on on the hydro hosting um where i go into a lot more detail on this right right the
the idea is to have a machine deployed and then be able without touching it and without moving it
to just change the business model to keep it more profitable um and change it to a type two facility
without having to physically move the machine um what else tom do we have anything else or do we do
let me let me talk let me talk a little bit about hydro um because i think it's really really
interesting like yeah at the end of the day as the the asics themselves so everyone talks about um
an asic i'm you know i bought an asic all this stuff what you're buying is or like what you have
is like an ASIC server really. And like, it's basically just a chassis with a bunch of, um,
hash boards and each hash board has, you know, uh, dozens of these individual ASIC chips.
And so like the reality is like with these chips, as the efficiency increases over time,
and we have OEMs releasing new variants, like at some point you're starting to hit like physical
reality in terms of like how you can actually dissipate the heat that comes off of these chips.
And so with hydro, it's really interesting. Like you have, it's basically direct to chip cooling.
And this has been, you know, this is something that's existed in just data centers forever.
But with, with, with mining, we're seeing like with this direct to chip cooling, specifically
in a like liquid form, you kind of have like a mix of water and like a glycol mix. It's basically
like shooting, you know, cold water basically on these chips and cycling them in real time.
And so you're getting like very precise cooling at the chip level.
And so like that's really important because the quality of the chip basically degrades
exponential with the temperature.
So what that means is like if the temperature is stable in a good, you know, cool threshold,
the chip is stable for its life.
Like, you know, that's how it works.
As you kind of ratchet up temperature, the failure rates go exponential, meaning like
you're going to fail more and more often just because there's more heat.
And so with hydro, because it's such a more efficient cooling mechanism,
one, you get more stable chipsets for longer, which means that you can run these things for longer over time.
You have the ability to overclock them without losing efficiency which is important because if you can control the temperature you don lose as much efficiency as if you were overclocking an air unit And the last thing is they way more power dense because you can control heat better So that means you get a lot more in a smaller volume of space
And so you can be pulling a lot more power, and it just is a much more efficient layout.
So we love hydro, and we see a lot of OEMs shifting and exploring more hydro-cooled options.
But yeah, I think it's really interesting. This is something that's existed forever, but we're seeing it start to be really kind of the standard. I think air-cooled will always exist because you can't set up high. If you're just going to send the unit somewhere and run it in a chicken coop or something, it probably won't spin up hydro.
But I think like a majority of my, my, my bet would be a majority of mining is going to be hydro, maybe not immediately, but like the production, like there's going to be more hydro.
But that takes time to build out capacity.
So it's kind of a, yeah.
So gun to your head, how long does, do these hydro machines last and what temperatures are you seeing?
Yeah.
So I'll answer both questions.
So on the temperature side, what we've been doing for the last probably like four months or so is we've actually been trying to benchmark.
And I'll have more data that I can share.
I mean, we can do another episode.
We've been kind of trying to benchmark all OEM hydro setups.
And so we currently have every, and OEM is like the manufacturer.
So we currently have just about every one of the latest hydro-cooled variants all running at, you know, the same kind of, we'll say the same geography, kind of trying to control for as much as possible.
And we're just, one thing is we're just seeing stable temps across the board.
I'll give you more detail kind of as the data comes out, like which chips are performing better or whatever.
But like, it's really interesting to see.
So we'll have some benchmarks around the manufacturers there.
And then the other question was like, gun to my head, you know, how long would these things last? I would say, given the data we're seeing in terms of just stability of temperature, the physical life of these machines is going to be like, six plus years in terms of like, they can actually run for that long, probably longer, but the economic life is totally dependent on, you know, the contract that you that you have in place.
um so that's a different thing but i think like my you know gun to my head and like you know
don't hold me to it i think it's the wear and tear and the quality is basically like there's
no wear and tear basically um assuming you're you're controlling for things like uh you know
the pressure and all these things in the fluid but i think these things will last a long time
uh you just have to find you know have the right place to put them and run them for the long term
so what is the highest um probability of failure what do you think has the highest probability
which part of failing in those six years or after those six years on what do you do if that happens
yeah it's a great question i think i think it comes down to like basically the so when you're
moving this liquid through through a loop continuously you need to like make sure that
the flow rate is sufficient to basically pull the heat out and do it well so like if you have
anything that happens with the the pumping mechanism where you're not the flow rate drops
like you're not moving the hot liquid out fast enough um you can see like chip level failures
right because the heat will pick up so i think like controlling the pumping mechanisms and making
sure the flow rate is is is good is like that's kind of an operator thing but like that's one
way that these could fail um i think the other way is like it's it's it's somewhat similar and
kind of just affects the flow rate but like each of these machines has a specific mix of it's super
interesting there's a specific mix of glycol to water ratio that you need in the in the fluid that
goes through and it's slightly different per manufacturer they might recommend a percentage
of glycol to water that's different than another manufacturer now the other thing you have to
control for is like the ambient temperature because if you have more water to glycol ratio
and at lower temperature, you might be more susceptible to like that stuff freezing or not
flowing as well as quickly. So there's all these like, uh, almost like fluid mechanics and stuff to
get, to get, to get right. But, um, I guess like maybe your question was like, what fails most
likely? It's probably like something like that, like messing up the flow rate or the glycol mix.
Um, obviously power surges can always happen. Um, yeah. What about the PSU?
yeah yeah the psu um probably like i would say like of the thing that may fail quicker is probably
the power supply that those things are easily swapped out um really what you want to make sure
is that your chips are good if your chips are good like you're good yeah and that the operator
is is good right because now you just said all of these machines have different kind of cooling
requirements so now when all of these machines are in one container chained up in a loop right
You need to have a partner that really knows what they're doing.
And it sounds like you found exactly that, which is obviously very good news.
Yeah, exactly.
The other thing that's interesting is the form factor of these.
Like we're seeing a trend to going towards a traditional like cabinet, like a U style form factor for these hydro cooled machines.
So you'd like single U, two U, three U.
They're all the same form factor horizontally and you can stack them on top of each other.
But some infrastructure is not designed to take those yet because a lot of the earliest hydro machines that came onto the market were like, we call them shoebox form factors.
They're like way different. So like we find a lot of interesting times where people will, oh, you have hydro capacity.
Yeah, you have hydro capacity. Great. I bought a bunch of these. Can I send them?
And like no one's thinking, will it actually fit? Because that's a whole different thing.
And with air, it's kind of like, do we have enough CFM running through?
Do the PDUs work and the cables work?
And as long as we're clearing enough air, you're good.
With hydro, it's just a little more complex.
But the trade-off is they're going to last longer.
Tom, let's do a round of rapid fire for the shorts.
Cool.
You ready?
Let's go.
Cool.
Short and sweet.
One thing hydro hosting does better than any other cooling method.
kind of already answered it but yeah go uh dissipate heat stable temps and just high uptime
why not immersion okay immersion is interesting because from like a physics perspective actually
immersion has a better like theoretical uh kind of it can cool better theoretically because you
just have more surface area to to pull heat from um in reality it's a lot more i think it's a more
complicated system because you have massive amounts of fluid that needs to be kind of changed
out. You also have this idea of like, oh, I can take an air-cooled machine, strip the fans off,
strip the grates off and dunk it in fluid. That doesn't always work because an air-cooled machine
is designed for airflow, not liquid flow. So we've seen a lot of failures there. I think there are
immersion-specific types of machines that can go in immersion-specific containers, and that does
great but i do think in our experience like it just actually costs more to get right um so like
you know theoretically it's there and practically it's yeah practically it's not there i i just let
me add something there because um and now we're wearing off the rapid fire but it's fine we'll
get back there um my editor can do his magic um the you run the risk of the oil becoming conductive
that cannot happen with hydro right um so if you don't if you have an operator that doesn't really
know what they're doing they're not keeping the air clean and the basins are open or whatever and
oil um gets sort of fed with particles then that oil becomes conductive at some point anyway let's
check on it's a lot cleaner you need a lot cleaner to set up whereas like with hydro it's a
a closed loop direct to chip so you're only controlling your control you have to control
less volume basically.
Yeah.
All right.
Fixed price contracts or flexible pricing?
Which works better long term?
So let me rephrase this.
If you had to choose today
between fixed pricing
or a profit split from the get-go,
what would you choose?
In this market today,
I think it depends on the efficiency
of the hardware.
But I would say like a profit split
is a great option right now
because you're hedging your downside
and we're in a market where things are dropping.
I think both are great.
I'd say right now, probably profit split,
but realistically, depending on the type of machine,
it might still make sense to do fixed rate,
albeit maybe at a lower uptime or something like that.
Worst contract close you've ever seen
in a hosting contract?
Oh my gosh, that's a good one.
um i think gpt wrote that one yeah that's a really really good one i think um
worst contract clause i've ever seen i'll have to think about that one i think one is like basically
the unlimited ability for the operator to just like own the machines with very you know like
low barrier to that kicking on so like as an example hey if we if we if you don't pay something
in seven days like we own your we own your machines now like there's there's very nuanced
things where like you have risk of like you know someone else taking title to your machine with
you know unreasonable things so i think that's like that's one um yeah there's probably a lot
though so that's probably the worst if you had to choose extend life via a profit split or sell
the machine and you're not allowed to say depends on the market
for me probably extend life through a profit split because i'm just i can mine for longer
and then i have the option to sell when the market is is better for selling so that's probably
what i would say all right but it depends on the market screw you
yeah that's it we're done thank you tom this was a pleasure once again um i'm glad we did this and
I didn't go to bed.
Guys, you already know where to find Tom.
I did a previous episode with him
not too long ago. Please feel free
to check him out in the subscription
and the subscription in the description.
Leave a sub, though. Leave a comment
and a like and all of that good stuff
so that sponsors like Tom
can see that people value this content.
It's very important for them so that they can
show them good data.
Guys, thank you so much.
Stay strong in this tough
hash price environment.
let me just check where are we at the end of this recording we are at 28 now we used to be at 29 44
remember those good times and yeah difficulty adjustment downwards is coming guys stay online
if you're interested in getting your feet wet and getting into hosting now i still think is a good
time and yeah if you have any questions let me know tom anything else quick uh no thanks for the
time cool see you next time cheers bye