109. Hashrate Heat, Home Sovereignty, and the Open-Source Mining Stack

0:00I think we're live. Yeah, I think, yeah, we're up. We're live odd to 56109 coming at you live. Thank you, Dee. Thanks, Dee. All right, thanks. All right, so March 25th, UTC 1700, we got Tyler and Eco holding the fork down. Start is MIA today. Just kidding, he's not missing. We know where he's at, but it's an undisclosed location. How's it going? It's going good. How are you doing? Well, doing well. Lots of hacking around, building stuff. Don't need heat anymore. It's getting warm out. It's a bummer. What are you guys doing with all the heat from your miners? Sweating. Yeah, great. But we'll have to turn them off. I hear myself. Sorry, that's me just making sure the broadcast is working on Twitter. Yeah. So now we got this cool dashboard built right at the end of the heating season, which I'm a little bummed about for a customer, but it's measuring how much of his heat in his house is delivered by the miner versus the gas.

1:00And it does all this cool reporting, like, the temperature when the miner kicks in, the temperature when the gas has to come into assist. What percent of the heat delivered like BTUs are miner versus gas, SATs? It's a bunch of cool stuff to build out charts and dashboards for. Are you doing that with home assistant? Or how are you managing all this? Yeah, home assistant. And this really cool thermostat that Dylan and I found called a Venstar, which is one of the only home thermostats we found where you can just straight up turn off like the smart cloud service. It's out of the box. Like it's sovereign focus, like you install it. And it says, do you want to enable cloud control? No. Do you want to enable local API control? Yes. And then you connect that to a home assistant. And then it's all contained there, which is cool. It has everything from stage one being fired, stage two. What zones are open in your set points? It's got all these entities. It's really cool. Awesome. Yeah. Is it just me or do I hear us in the background? I hear us in the background too. Where is that coming from?

2:01OK, I think I figured it out. We're good. I don't know. Maybe it was by Twitter page open? No, I got. I figured it out. Sorry. That was just a little distracting. But back to setup. I'll see if I can pull it up without doxing information. OK. You're going to do screen share. I can. It's a little overwhelming, but it's frickin' cool. I'll share. Let's see. Yeah. Can you see this? Yeah. This is so cool. This, the blue here, is the hours per day that the miner is heating the house. And the yellow is when the gas turns on, which is not. And that's great. And then you can see the sets earning two. The total miner heat time, like 36 hours and 12 minutes of miner heat, only 10 minutes of gas. How far off we are from what he's asking his house to be outdoor temp when it last turned the miner on at 60, 54, the previous night. And then with electric rates and the BTU sizing,

3:02that's where we can get into fun economic stuff. This is great. It's coming together well. So you've got that site. Was that the dashboard for your customer? The guy you set this up for at his house? Or was that for the space where you're at now? Yeah. So it's an alpha customer, a good friend of ours, who has opted in to allow us to use some remote monitoring where we actually have a tunnel into his home assistant because home assistant is self-hosted. But it's local access only. You can pay easily in their application like $6 a month and they'll expose it for you, just with their hosting service. But we're just doing a tunnel directly. So it's just us and him that have access to it. Yeah. And then is he keeping all the sats? Is he doing this because he wants sats? Or are you guys like taking some of the sats? How do you make your money? Playing around with some things. I mean, I don't know if we have the full like hash rate split dialed in yet. So we have it split right now with a datum gateway

4:02for 5% to XRG, 95% to him. He bought the hardware up front. I know some guys are doing some like our buddy Softworm and Idaho, we've mentioned this before. He does like 80, 20 and flips it. So he'll front the hardware. He gets 80% of the sats until it's paid off and then they get 80%, which is pretty cool. But that works in a small town where he's the installer, the salesman and the callback guy, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, do small town business models are one thing and they're something completely different when you go to a more developed metropolitan area. Yeah, I've figured that out the hard way. Yeah, part of me wants to set up shop in a small town in like Wyoming or Idaho and just conquer it with the Bitcoin miners. I mean, this is like kind of true in metropolis settings, but like definitely in small towns, like you find your niche and then word gets around

5:02and word travels very fast in small towns. And like suddenly you just become like that guy. That is like good at that thing. Like maybe you're good at like fixing old cars and like word gets around and everyone's like, yeah, you've got, you know, a car that doesn't have OBD2 on board diagnostics like bring it to this guy. He's good with that stuff. And like word just gets around and like, you know, before you know it, you're able to sustain yourself and feed your family. You know, you kind of cut and paste that into larger city. And I don't know what it is, but it just in my experience, it doesn't work. Like your entire business model has to change as you move into a larger town. Yeah, it's been interesting to try and offer things like remote monitoring and still be navigating it too from the technical layer to where it's like, well, we're trying to sell these things as, you know, sovereign devices you can control your own at home. But then you also want to be able to peer into it or at least get push data when there's an issue

6:04so we can come and fix it. Just doing it right has been a learning experience all in its own too. So what miners does he have? Are you using any of this stuff from 256 yet? We should be. So he's got a What's Miner M64, which is the only single phase hydro. And we talked about that last week with Scott where, you know, he's going to want to upgrade. He's already set up with the infrastructure for an M74 and we're paying What's Miner and they're so elusive about what it actually is. And when I told them I want to be able to control the wattage for heat output, they were like, it should be steady. You don't need to do that. And I'm like, okay, it's frustrating, dude, like, but an eventual 256 platform built from the ground up water-cooled miner would be perfect for that kind of application, right? It's something cool that's been verified for us. It's like, people don't realize this. His natural gas furnace is like 50,000, no, 100,000 plus BTUs. So it's big, it's a big home, 3,000 plus square feet.

7:06The miner's only like 17,000 BTU, 5,000 watts. So it's like a 10th, maybe an 8th the size. But from that thing I just showed you, it's delivered 100% of his heat. Obviously the blunt of the winders over, but it's cool to see that like one miner can heat a hole 3,000 square foot house. Right. And I guess like people just need to understand and correct me if I'm wrong here, but the idea is that the furnace is so oversized so that it can perform adequately under the absolute worst conditions, whereas you're in practice, you're only gonna experience those absolute worst conditions a very small percentage of the time. Exactly. Therefore, the vast majority of the time, you've got this ridiculously outsized heat source in your home, your furnace, and it's like you're not using anywhere near its actual output capacity for the vast majority of its life. And exactly right. And that's what's been probably one of the harder things to communicate in the heat punk ecosystem

8:08with our community, because when you're talking to the HVAC and the plumbing industry, you know, it's trivial to just put a bigger valve and burn more gas. Like it doesn't cost much more the sheet metal box that makes up a furnace, right? If it's a 100,000 BTU or 200,000 BTU, it doesn't really matter. When you want 5,000 lots of miners versus 10,000 lots of miners, it's a lot more expensive. And so we're much more sensitive to not over-sizing it. Like an upfront capital. Yeah. Expenses, you mean, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And not just that is like if you oversize it too, you don't wanna buy five miners that only run on that one cold day. Right. You'd rather have one miner and the gas helps out on that one cold day. Right. And that's like a foreign concept in the heating industry to have these little buddy systems. Uncharted territory, man. Yeah. Yeah, it's been fun. That's how you know you're on the right track. I think so. Thanks so. We'll just have to see if we can get Colorado bought in because it's a electric heat, right? Right. Yeah.

9:11Sorry. Go ahead. Isn't Colorado doing something like banning? Is banning the right term banning natural gas, heating sources like natural gas furnaces in new construction? Denver County is. Denver County is for new builds. Yeah. Even to like, you know, for electric cooktops and everything like that, really leaning towards heat pumps. But then I remember Rob posting about this a couple months ago because I don't understand, you know, it's like the utility in the state, they're pretty much one in the same. They pressured Excel, which is our largest utility here in Colorado. Excel energy to like wind down natural. This is what I don't fully understand. Like how can you convince a company that effectively has a monopoly that already spent billions building the infrastructure that pipelines already laid to say, yeah, you can't do that anymore. It's just preposterous to me or you can't use what's already there. What is it wild? What is Denver want people to use for heating then if not natural gas? Heat pumps are electric.

10:13Either electric, but the electricity drives a pump. That's why it's called a heat pump kind of. It's like an air conditioner that runs in reverse. So it actually brings heat in from outside. Even when it's cold out, there's like energy in the air. So they're really efficient. Like you spend one watt of electricity and you can get three watts of heat because you're not actually making the heat, you're moving it from outside. But they're slaves to how much energy's in the air outside, meaning if it's super cold, they often have these electric resistive backups in them. Yeah. And they're expensive because they're more complicated. They have refrigerants, they have pumps, it's a thermodynamics cycle. I thought like the laws, okay, we're getting out into the weeds here. Yeah, let's do it. I thought like the laws of thermodynamics dictated that like the most efficient you could get is like one to one. Like how is it getting one watt in and putting three watts out? That just sounds like a perpetual motion machine. Yeah, it does. It's because you're not making the heat. So that is that law of first law thermodynamics can't create or destroy energy.

11:14It's true when you're converting things, like you're converting a hydrocarbon fuel, stored chemical energy into heat energy by combustion. That's what natural gases are propane. A heat pump, you are just powering a pump that's moving a liquid or refrigerant that goes through a compression and expansion cycle. And so it's actually like the boiling point and the like the boiling point and the condensing point of that liquid is designed well where it can actually suck heat out of the air outside in this big condenser fan coil unit. And then it comes inside the liquid and then it condenses and it drops that heat. So it absorbs the energy and evaporates outside. It's like a gas, the refrigerant comes inside condenses that energy that heat is released into the home. And so you're not spending one watt to get three watts of heat. You're spending one watt to move a pump around and it's pulling three watts of heat from outside in. Interesting. Yeah.

12:14Okay. I mean, it's very cool. It's an awesome breakthrough. So someone in Denver County politics, Denver County government has a relative who owns a heat pump company. And they were like, hey, it would really help line my pockets if you could make it a law to ban our biggest competitor, which is natural gas furnaces. That way everyone in Denver County has to use my heat pump. It wouldn't surprise me. I mean, what kind of funny business is going on because he's also have $10,000 plus tax credits for heat pumps. When you file your taxes, there's a question on there and it's like, did you get a heat pump installed this year? Just like electric cars. You know, it's one of those things where I don't think necessarily, because they are more expensive. As we just described, it's like a pretty complex system. It's the same with electric cars. Like the free market, I don't think would be deciding on heat pumps all the time. Dude, yeah, no way. Maybe you're off-grid solar guy with electricity and a pretty good climate for it

13:14would self-select one, right? Because he wants free heat. I get a little worried about him because we said they don't work when it's really cold outside. So it doesn't really work well when there's not a lot of energy in the air. So it's cold or thin, right? So high altitude. Yeah. And then I don't like the idea of my house not being able to make heat. Because remember, we just talked about how they move heat. That's what heat pumps do. Right. I would prefer from like a sovereign robust resiliency perspective to also have a way to make it myself from fuel. Yeah. Be that wood or whatever. Well, it's absurd that the government is stepping in to tell people how they can and can't heat their own houses. Yeah. Completely absurd. Yeah, the utilities are totally captured. And it's something that, you know, I don't think people will feel the pain until it doesn't work. Or yeah, you kind of just, it's the boiling frog theory. Just like a Germany, you know, they had the,

14:15they had several nuclear power plants. And they just, I think they've already shut down their last one or maybe they have like one left standing. Yeah. And then the gas pipeline got exploded. Right. Yeah, I mean, and you meet folks up in the mountains. I love talking to these guys. There was a guy at the heat punk summit named Mark, who is, we were just talking about small town, small business businesses and being known as the guy. He's like the guy in Bunevista that does wood fired boilers. Yeah. So not a wood stove in a cabin that you'd see. But it's an outdoor unit sits outside the home. You put wood from your forest on your land, chop it up, throw it inside, makes hot water. And it's just connected with a heat exchanger to your radiators, your heated floor, whatever, that might be running off of natural gas. If you have the infrastructure, a lot of these folks up in the mountains are on propane. So, you know, what happens if the propane company doesn't have any propane? Right. Or when propane gets really expensive, because fuel prices are going up, right?

15:16Right. Whatever's going on in the world, geopolitics. So like, this is cool because you just have this extra backup system where you go get some firewood, throw it inside a box outside, and it supplements. It's funny, it's like the same type of buddy system. I just described it with hash rate. That's what he thought was so interesting about the heat punk summit, because we're effectively trying to do the same thing where you strap a little buddy system to your boiler. But it's the opposite end of this spectrum. Like the wood fired ones are very primitive and hash rate heating is the most technical complex version of that. Do you think the wood fired boiler is more efficient at heating a space than just like throwing the wood in a fireplace or wood burning stove inside the space? Hydronic heating. Welcome to the pod Heat 2.6 today. Hydronic heating is more efficient. Heating when you have radiators or you've heated floors because you're not heating a big volume of air that then seeps out through cracks and door crevices and around window sills. And so you have all this like thermal mask

16:18because you're heating a big heavy slab of material. And then you're not spending that energy to heat the air that leaks. You're like just heating the surfaces. And it's more akin to like that heat bit canvas that was at the space that you saw at the heat punk summit. It feels warm when you're next to it. You're not like warmed by the air. It's like sitting next to a warm window. And so it's more efficient in that sense because the house kind of just stays at this constant temp because the actual material of the house is hot, not the air in the house, if that makes sense. No, it makes sense. All right. Well, we should probably talk about some mining stuff. Yeah, what's been going on, I saw some messages you were chatting with our developers, our project engineers. It's probably good to walk through each of those. We've got, well, we're trying to do a couple things. So on, we're trying to renew the grants for each project internally in the 256 foundations. So let me just back up one step. So every year, we hold our fundraiser, the telehash.

17:19We did that in January, the day before NEMS at Bitcoin Park in Nashville. We mined exactly zero blocks. Got some donations though. Couple of phones. Yeah, we did get some donations. I wasn't for lack of effort. We had a lot of people pointing hash rate to us. So thank you, everyone, who supported us. But at the end of the day, we did not raise any Bitcoin for the developers. So the last couple of months, we've been trying to think of ways that we can keep the developers moving forward using the resources we do still have. So I think we've finally settled on some good compromises where the foundation is not going to be overpromising and under-delivering, which is my biggest concern. I just any time where making promises to our developers, I just want to make sure everybody's on the same page and knows what to expect. So I think we figured out what that looks like. For the near term future, that all being said, we've got some plans to have to get,

18:21sorry, I'm being distracted because my dog is barking. I don't know if you can hear him in the background. So we've got some plans for more supporters and we're in talks with some people. I don't want to name any names, but we might have a couple big announcements coming up soon, which would be exciting for the open source Bitcoin mining movement in general, the 256 foundation and our developers in particular. So I am looking forward to that. So more to come on that. But in addition to that, we're circling back with our past supporters and talking with them about continuing support in the 2026, 2027 cycle. So yeah, we're just trying to get the funding to keep the developers we have focused on what they're doing. Our project funding, the 256 foundation hasn't cut any checks since December of 2025. So even though it's been going on three full months now,

19:23the developers have still been making contributions and pushing the projects forward, engaging with the community, reviewing pull requests and maintaining their projects. But that can be expected. That can only last so long when people have bills to pay and families to take care of. So we just want to make sure we can get the funding we need to keep them focused on these projects, because we really believe that they're going to have big impacts on the space. So the hashboards, and so what are those four projects? They're the Ember one hashboard, the Libre board, control board, the Regina firmware, and the hydropool mining pool. So with Ember one this year, we want to see a version release that has the Intel BZM2 ASIC chips on it. So we want to get that design released. And just like the design that we have out in the open now, this one would also be an open source license.

20:24Anyone could grab that and start manufacturing it. Yeah, the BZM2 ASICs are not the latest and greatest, they're not the most efficient. But they are brand new, and they wouldn't require any unsoddering of old hardware in order to make these new designs. So that's good. And I really see this just as an incremental step on the path of eventually releasing designs, working with ASIC manufacturers who are not antagonistic to the consumer and are supportive of open source and providing documentation and helping those who want to create ASIC designs and release them open source. So I do see that day coming soon. And I think when that happens, we're going to have open source Bitcoin mining hardware that can compete with the latest and greatest closed source Bitcoin mining hardware, both in terms of hash rate and efficiency. So yeah, we definitely want to keep that going. But it's just one step in a multi-step plan.

21:27And then there's Libraboard. So we showcase the first version of Libraboard during the telehash in January this year. And anyone who was listening to the podcast around that time, we were working on it late into the night before the event. But we finally did get it working. And we learned a couple of things about it and identified some issues that need to be corrected in the design. So in the months ahead, we're going to be correcting those designs. We're going to have already on our second version. So we're going to have version three out later this year. And then people are going to be able to use that to connect to a number of Ember1 hashboards. They're going to be able to connect to relays and switches and sensors to integrate their miners into other systems, like home heating systems, office heating systems, solar systems, not solar systems in the galaxy, but solar panel systems. Yeah, so we definitely want to keep that moving forward. We ran the whole telehash on Hydropool.

22:29So we definitely want to keep that going. That's the one click deployable Bitcoin mining pool that anybody can spin up on either consumer grade hardware or you could host it on an elaborate AWS system if you want. We want to do Ansible packages so that it actually is just like a one click deploy on an EPS. It has two payout methods in it. You can run solo mode or you could do PPLNS where it pays out from the Coinbase reward. So and it's configurable. We bring the configuration options forward in a config file for the user. And so the way we set it up when we were doing the telehash was that users would point their hash rate to our instance of Hydropool, but in the event of a block fine, it would pay out 100% to the 256 foundation. That's the name of the game with our fundraiser. But you can go to dash.256f.org

23:30and you can see this dashboard that D++ contributed to the 256 foundation. And what's cool about that is, you know, she's implemented some neat gamification in there. So we can see like little badges show up for like the top three difficulties whoever has submitted the highest share, whoever has the most hash rate gets ordered toward the top of the list. And you can also put your endpub in there as your worker name, as your user name. And then you can append that with a worker name with like dot worker name or whatever you want. And it pulls in like your profile picture and information about your Noster profile. You can even put in like a website. Like if you have a website you want to shill, you can put that in there by using dashes instead of docs. And yeah, it's just, it's a really great dashboard that makes it engaging and user friendly. And it gamifies, you know, a few different aspects of it.

24:31So yeah, we definitely want to keep Hydropool going. We want to do like a plugin system. We want to see Hydropool available on start nine and umbral. We want to see people trying out different payout methods, lightning payouts, e-cash payouts. So we've got some big plans for Hydropool as well. I'm not saying that we're like going to do all that like in the next three months or anything, but you know, that's our long term vision. And then with Magina, you know, where our long term outcomes for Magina are that we would like to eventually see like flagship manufacturers shipping their hardware with Magina open source firmware or like their fork of Magina, you know, like Magina is like the mining firmware that we want to see that offers like great support out of the box that anyone can build on top of. So whether that's like, you know, me trying to mine at home or like a large hardware manufacturer

25:35shipping products globally. Think of it like like Linux has great support and it just works out of the box and people build all kinds of cool servers on top. So we're kind of thinking of Magina in the same way where it just becomes like the de facto standard. And since it's open source, you can take that and put your own special sauce on it and like sell that and build a business off of it, however you want. I just had an interesting thought about that. So you're right in the data center style side of the aisle for computing, it's all Linux. That's the bread and butter, right? You can buy a super expensive server, racks of them and they'll run Linux like think AWS. But in the consumer home computing space, that's where you have your closed source windows and Mac OS. Bitcoin mining right now is the inverse of this. You have the closed source, yeah, firmwares at the industrial data center side of the aisle.

26:36And it's the home miners that are demanding the open source, which is so funny to think about. I didn't realize that until you said it, but yeah, it's interesting to point that out. Yeah, but you want to see that. I'd like to see like, you know, BitMain has 80 to 90% of the market share right now. I think Scott has a slide in one of the presentations that he gives that says like 99.9% of all Bitcoin blocks have been mined with closed and proprietary mining hardware. But, you know, in the next five years, I want to see that flipped. I want to see like 80 to 90% of the hash rate running on open source Bitcoin mining firmware and hardware solutions. And, you know, given how quickly the lifecycle of this hardware turns over to like, I think it's possible. Especially if we get Regina to where it can be flashed onto existing legacy hardware.

27:38You know, we're already working on the S19 being able to flash Regina directly onto an S19 like a stock control board, like everything being able to take control of it and run Regina on it. So yeah, you know, imagine a scenario where manufacturers start turning to Regina for their like, go to firmware solution. And in addition to that, Regina is there to, it's available to be flashed onto any legacy hardware. What's mine or antmine or can and you name it. I think we could get to that like 80% of the hash rate mark in five years. Call me ambitious, but I think it's possible. I think so too. I think once the large manufacturers and the large mining operators realize the benefits they'll all adopt it on the, how could you settle for anything less? Like first and foremost, like there's no dev fee. All right, so granted like stock firmwares

28:39don't charge a dev fee, but you have like zero insight, zero control. You have to trust that they're not taking a dev fee. Yeah, we don't know. The aftermarket firmwares, again, their closed source, you get a little bit more flexibility, but you don't really know how they're working under the hood. There is still trust involved. And you know, they're upfront about the dev fee that they're collecting. So you're paying a dev fee for these added features that you're getting above and beyond the stock firmware. But then imagine like a fully open source firmware that's completely configurable. It works right out of the box if you wanted to or it and it's fully extensible. If you want to put your own special features into it and you can see how it works. And there's no dev fee. Why do you think the aftermarket jailbreak firmware manufacturers, there's a big list of them now, have not, none of them decided to open source their firmware. Just because they have the moat and they want to keep that monetization.

29:40No, I think they all have their own reasons. You know, I think some of them probably just haven't even thought about it. Some of them may not even understand what open source is and don't understand how that can be a viable, how a viable business model can be built on top of open source. Some of them actually did try open source like brains, OS at one point was open source. And I think if I recall correctly, there was this sentiment from brains that people were taking from the project without contributing back. And somehow that was putting them at a disadvantage or they just didn't want to continue with that model and they ended up closed sourcing their firmware. I think they might have a version that's still open source, but I think like the version that you pay for is closed source. I don't know, I can't remember. I don't, my history with slush pool and going to brains and every all the things that have transpired

30:44over the last few years is getting foggy, but. I mean, it's certainly helpful. That's where being a nonprofit organization, which is mandated to not make profit can come in and say, we don't have to worry about all these other challenges like appeasing shareholders or investors or whatever it may be to try and make money. Our sole focus is to open source the mining ecosystem. Right, yep. So yeah, I mean, you know, I think the guys that are offering the aftermarket firmware solutions, they've found an interesting niche in that they recognize the limits of the manufacturers firmware and they see that as a problem for the customers who want a little bit more flexibility, you know, so the ability, for example, to like overclock or tune your miner. And so they offer a solution that does that. And, you know, there's a non-zero cost associated with all the development and marketing and research

31:44that, you know, goes into that. So that's what the dev fee is there to cover. So like it totally makes sense, like I get it, but I just, I think there's, you know, that worked for a very short period of time. And I don't think it's gonna work for very much longer, especially when a very comprehensive, competitive, extensible, easy to build on, easy to read, and available firmware comes along, that's open source. Yeah, I mean, it works until the open free alternative is competitive or exists. Yeah, and that doesn't exist yet in the Bitcoin mining status quo, but it does in broader computing. And so no business would go and try to like make a closed source alternative for data center computing on instead of Linux right now. Right. Yeah. Yeah, you're not gonna reinvent the wheel when there's like all these open source tools that are there and they work out of the box. And you can, that does the majority of the lift for you.

32:47And then you just gotta come in and put your, you know, your unique spin on it that makes your product attractive. Yeah, and I was chatting with my buddy about this the other day, like I think we're gonna see a lot of stuff shift towards open source just because as we've mentioned before, like AI is making software effectively free. It can do so much, build so much. And so there's been commentary that like the software as a service model, which is effectively what a dev fee is. Yeah. Business model won't be around forever. I mean, I think it can in the sense that, I think software as a service, which is to service as a service, SaaS as a service, where it's like you have to, the code is not the product. Like I could go one shot it, right? Maybe you have just better support, you know? Like you have some service I want. It's not gonna be about the actual source code anymore, I think. On the hardware, Libra and Control Board. So there's some new revisions in work. Well, those newest revisions is that the plan

33:47for the ones that will eventually be built on pick and place machines, and folks will be able to get them in their hands and start hacking around these next versions. Yeah, I mean, the current versions are online now. Yeah, you could go make them. Yeah, I mean, even if you wanted to beat me to the punch, you could go on GitHub right now to github.com slash 256 foundation. And you can go into the Ember 1, I think it's Ember 1-00-PCB repository. You could go in there and you can go to the version six branch and you can download all the manufacturing files. And then you can order the PCBs based on that and get those delivered. You can export your bill of materials and order all the components from whatever supplyhouse you want. And you can get to work and assemble these hashboards. You can, you'd have to buy the ASIC chips too. So the Ember 1-00 uses the Bitmain 1362 AC ASIC chip.

34:52So yeah, you could go get a bunch of those and start assembling version six. And then if you were a very cool person, then you would give some feedback in the repo and let us know any bugs that you find. So tweak the design. But yeah, I mean, it's there. You could do the same thing with Libreboard. We don't have version three released yet, but we're going to be working on that over the next few months. We should have that out in the next three months. So by this summer, there will be a version three available. And then same thing, it's there to go and take. Have you heard of any of the folks from the rest of the open source mining community, OSMU or the cool manufacturers out there that are selling BitAxes or even manufacturing their own tinkering with these projects yet at a hardware level? OK, so a couple of things. One, no, I haven't really heard, but two, I haven't really had my ear to the ground, so to speak. As soon as Discord, like so gleefully jumped

35:55into the age verification thing, I deleted Discord from my desktop and my phone. So I haven't been on the OSMU Discord for, I don't know, I'd say like a couple of months now. We'll have to ask God. Yeah, so yeah, I just, I haven't really had my finger on the pulse there, so to speak. But I think the other thing is that the guys that have been manufacturing BitAxes and the distributors who have been selling BitAxes, there's so much demand for BitAxes that I think they haven't really started trying out any of the other hardware, like the stuff that we're working on with the 256 Foundation. I think the demand is there, but someone's got to be the, someone's got to take on that non-zero cost of getting the pick and place machine, putting in the time to learn how to use it, buying the PCBs, buying the materials, putting it all together, failing,

36:57learning from your mistakes, reordering everything, doing it again, and then having like a finished product that they can put in the hands of people who are interested in this like very novel technology. And then once that happens, then you start like getting some feedback about the project and you start getting some more interest in it. So that whole process of like taking on the risk and that non-zero cost, like that's a role that I've taken on with the pick and place machine that I have. And so I'm in, I'm going to be doing the Ember 1 version six shortly. I've just got like a laundry list of things that I'm trying to get done before I have the mental bandwidth and time to focus on it. But that day is coming soon. And it's one of those things, too, where the Bidaxx has become, you know, this whole movement of like a desktop toy, solo lottery ticket product. Even though it, you know, the intention, obviously from the beginning,

37:57it's a great learning tool. It's an open source Bitcoin miner. It's unique. It's got ESP32 on it's got a Wi-Fi. Whereas Ember 1 Libre board, I mean, you can obviously make a little desktop miner product from this little higher power, 100 watts per hash board. But, you know, with a full-fledged, full-size form factor, control board, things like this, like it is more of a reference design, like a dev, it's a development kit, really. For Bitcoin mining. So I'm curious to see if you, some of these suppliers and Bitcoin mining stores will eventually have, you know, fun, cool products with a wide range of different numbers of Ember 1 hash boards and different ASIC models and whatnot, different cases, different cooling methods. But I don't think they necessarily like see that yet, but you're right, it's also like, you gotta go spend the time and money to design that, too. It's gonna need a case, it's gonna need cooling, it's gonna need a whole list of stuff. I think the lowest-hanging fruit is a simple design that a manufacturer can copy and put into their production flow

39:00without having to really modify anything. And the bidax is a great candidate for that because of what you said, it doesn't have an external control board. The control board is the ESP32, the hash board itself. Exactly. You know, everything, it's a self-contained unit. So that, you know, that, you can just grab those files, put it into your production flow. You know, you've got an open source free design going in. You've got your production flow in the middle and then the output is this finished product that can be boxed up and shipped. And then it's a complete finished product because the end user can receive that box, open it, plug it in and start hashing right away. And so like, where we're at with like the Ember 1, it's like, you know, there's multiple different components of it. So there's the, there's the hash board itself, but you have to have a control board to talk to it. And then you have to have a way to cool it. So you need to either put like a heat sink on it

40:01and put it and then put a fan on it or you need to get like a custom water block built like Ryan did for the demonstration at the tele hash. And then you need to get like a little reservoir and a pump and a little radiator. So yeah, it's just a lot more involved. I'd like to get it to the point where, you know, and I've got plans to like make like these 3D printed enclosures or maybe even metal enclosures where the, you know, you can slot four hash boards in there and your control board. And it's got the fans, it's got the power supply, it's got the heat sinks, it's got everything packaged up. And then it's like a complete unit that can get sold as a product. So, you know, I've got plans to make that happen. The other thing that's working against us is that the chips that are on it, like I mentioned, the BM 1362 ACs,

41:01they're not the greatest efficiency. You know, they're like three or four generations behind the cutting edge ACs. It's the J-Pro chips, right? Yeah. Yeah, they are the J-Pro chips. Sorry, the S19J-Pro chips. So that's just, you know, so even if I like created this box that's got the chips in it, it's like, okay, great. It can do three, six, you know, okay, so it can do 12 terrahash, but the efficiency is the same as the S19J-Pro, so it's not that great of efficiency. It's just kind of, it's not really a big deal. You know, that's not like in terms of like... You think the Bidax buyers are looking for those kind of stats? Well, they can get like, what is the Gamma Turbo do? They can get a Gamma Turbo that can do what like six terrahash? Yeah, I've got the, I've got the Bidax touch on my desk, which is a GT and it's that two and a half terrahash right now

42:04in like low power mode. Yeah, so there you go. So say like in normal power mode, maybe you're doing three or four terrahash, but... I'm at 20 joules per terrahash right now, 19 with my Bidax on my desk. Yeah, see, and I think the S19 are what, like, 30, 35 joules per terrahash? Yeah, 30 and change, yeah. So it's like, it's like necessary to do this because the long-term goal is to have like these bigger boards with many more chips on them that can actually compete with the boards that Bidmain is creating. But you can't just go from zero to competing with Bidmain. Like, it's an incremental process. And like every chip you add in the chain adds this complexity to the design that needs to be figured out. So it's just, you know, that we had the Bidax that was like a single chip design. That was the big unlock. The next step was stepping it up, you know,

43:0610X in wattage consumption. So like a hundred watt board and we've got 12 ASIC chips on it. And, you know, we're still trying to fine tune that and create it, but it's like the latest and greatest ASIC efficiency is kind of dwarfed. What we're still trying to do with this design. So when this comes out, it's kind of like a flop from like a marketing perspective because the efficiency isn't quite there. It's going to be more expensive because it's got all these extra components. So it's just not that attractive from like a general consumer market, right? Yeah, and I mean, the larger desktop miners already exist too, like the NerdX Q++, right? You've got to sweet one of those. But when you mention marketing, like the story we need to tell and really the purpose of this platform is a reference design building block. You buy this not because you care about the power output or the heat output or the efficiency of the chip. But it's like, okay, sweet. Now I can start hacking on this and understand it better

44:09where if I want to triple the wattage or quadruple the size of the hash board or do 10 more hash boards, like what changes need to be made? How do I understand how to communicate with this thing? If I want to support the next version of chips, there'll be a new version of Ember One that shows how to communicate with those chips, right? That's the story we're telling. Right, yeah. Yep, it's just, it's an iterative process that is going to take a few generations before we get to where I think it can be. Yeah, because when the Bidaxx came out, like it didn't matter what the efficiency was or the chip was, because the breakthrough was that it exists. Right, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it's tough too. I mean, because the average person that owns a Bidaxx, I think, doesn't even realize, hey, this is a colossal step forward towards open-source mining. It's not just like a lottery ticket on your desk. It's also marketing lingoed and productized, which is great. It sells more units. It gets more solo miners out there at Decentralize's the network. We're trying to keep that momentum going

45:10with hardware and software. Yeah, we'll get there. Totally. I'll buy them. Good. Yeah. You want to look at dash 256f.org? Yeah, let's do it. Just a quick reminder, though, I at least forget. How many hashboards will LibraBoards support? Four. Four. Cool. Well, it has four, sorry. It has four USB-C ports on it. So I think you could plug in a USB hub to one of those and expand that capacity. Yeah. But I think there's a limit. And I'm not sure what that limit is. Schnitzel would know. Yeah, it's like a bandwidth limit. I think so. On 256f foundation, hash dash, which is dash.256f.org, courtesy, awesome dashboard built by D, courtesy of her. We have 75 Terahash. Nice. 20 active users, 45 active workers. Shout out to THAC777, longtime supporter. He's got like every bidax on Earth. 13 Terahash of bidaxes. That's awesome. Nerdax Hydra, that's cool. XG's got a couple systems online.

46:11Canadian hash and coin. Camira Chimney, I wonder what that is, 11 Terahash. Scott 9000's got a couple bidaxes. Hardestblocks.org linked to his website. That's so cool. Zarka, econo-alchemist, serving Bitcoin, D++, Schnitzel, hash rate heatpunks, Satoki, Montani, IX Tech, Pizandi, backwater mining collective, western mass Bitcoin meetup, wood miner, and two and in Bitcoin addresses. Thank you so much for supporting hash rate. Ego, this hash tub still has the highest difficulty, 103 billion. I think I've seen this difficulty get reset a couple times, and I'm sure when, if there's a window, and it only tracks two weeks worth of difficulties, and then it resets, or what? Or when we were just doing some maintenance on the server, I think. Was that it? Didn't Hydra Pool get moved from where it was hosted for the actual Terahash once or twice? Yeah, but since then, I was on the leaderboard, and I think I had like 30 billion.

47:13Yeah, I do remember that. And now I'm not collusion. Now I'm all the way down in seventh place, like a loser. Yeah, what is the network difficulty right now? It's going down 133 trillion, 968 to hash a second, on the one week moving average. Hash price in the dumps, home miners unfazed. Yep. Yeah, this one year, hash price, chart is hilarious. A year ago, we were at 50. Did it face down to the basement? Yeah, yeah. A year ago today, we were at 50 dollars per petahash, which is useless for home miners. So, sat's per terahash. We were at five cents, and now we're at three. Yeah, dude, it's wild. Hang in there, guys. You'll be all right. Yeah. You'll be good. If you're a pubco, I don't know, maybe you're playing around with AI. Yeah, if you're a pubco, just stop mining. Let us inherit the world, and you just focus on AI stuff. You think if more pubco switch to AI HPC,

48:13the manufacturers, the Bitmain, it's of the world, we'll start to pay more attention to the requests of the small guys. No, I don't think they give a fuck. They'll just wait to see whatever's popular and do that. I don't know. I think they're just not even that. I think they're just going to keep doing what they want to do. You don't think Bitmain will ever come out with a home miner. No, I, didn't they try that before? Yeah, I heard a rumor that they were looking into the feasibility of producing a home miner, like targeting home miners with a product. I have no idea what that product was, or any specs on it, or if that's even true, this is the 256 rumor mill. Love it. Yeah, I mean, leave it to a company like Bitmain to have the audacity and the tone deafness to want to produce a product targeted at home miners and not take any input whatsoever from the home miners who are actually doing it day and day out. Totally. I was just looking at Best Buy's website

49:14because I heard that Cainin was selling theirs there now. I mean, talk about distribution channels. That's awesome to see. Yeah, well, we'll build it. They won't. Yeah, if you build it, they will come. That's right. Anything else you want to hit on this week? Something like that. We had a great time last week at the space. Lauren Rodriguez was in town speaking on behalf of her husband, who was the lead, or one of the two lead developers for Samurai Wallet. So, Keon Rodriguez and Bill Hill, if you're not familiar with the Samurai Wallet case, you should be go to billandkeonie.org to learn more, but it was great to see Lauren in person again. We had her make an appearance on Pod 256. She recorded a podcast with Danny Nulls of what Bitcoin did. So, yeah, I hope the word keeps getting out there and that Samurai Wallet gets the pardon that we've been fighting for and that they deserve. Other than that, I think that's all I had to say. Yeah, it was a great episode with Lauren last week

50:16and she really explained it on Danny. So, maybe you caught that and then there's a recording from the livestream of the event from last week as well on the Spaces Twitter. Other than that, we're working on some updates to really try and bring the community together. Now that we've got all these different projects in work and the Telegram group is growing right now. So, I finally got under the hood in the forum today. I'm testing out a forum for the 256 Foundation. So, there might be some announcements there soon, but we'll see how we like it. Because as we've said before, we really want to start to catalog and build a snowball effect where we're building on top of one another from GitHub PRs to questions and frequently asked questions and answers and pointing to resources and references. Just having a one-stop shop I think will be very helpful. Yeah, and having all that stuff web searchable. Yes, so stay tuned for that. And then, oh, I got an email this week that they announced the schedule for

51:19when the 256 Foundation team, the project developers will be talking in Las Vegas. So, if you're going to Bitcoin Las Vegas, on Monday, April 27th, at 12.30 pm Pacific time, we are going to have a panel about open sourcing the Bitcoin mining ecosystem. I'll moderate that and we'll have Schnitzel, Ryan, and Scott on stage there. Awesome. Yeah, that'll be fun. Can't wait, great. Well, let's call that a show for this week then. All right, until next week, thank you everyone. Adios, amigos.