157 – Where the Wild Sats Live with Kent Halliburton

Episode 157 opens with Avi’s sermon “The Forgotten Forge,” a meditation on what happens when a civilization outsources the making of the things that keep it alive. The frame is applied directly to Bitcoin: early on, acquiring BTC and producing it were effectively the same act, but convenience split buyers from builders, and the network has been living with that fracture ever since.

Kent Halliburton, CEO of Saz Mining, joins to argue that this split is one of Bitcoin’s under-discussed fault lines. He traces his own path from a decade in the solar industry, through burnout and a Portugal walkabout, into Bitcoin and eventually mining, where he came to see mining as the “hashpunk” counterpart to the ledger’s cypherpunk side. His core mission with Saz Mining is to make sat-based acquisition through mining accessible to normal people rather than leaving production to specialists and institutions.

A big chunk of the episode is devoted to Kent’s “hidden history” thesis: the 2013 combination of ASIC specialization and Coinbase convenience created a fork in how people acquire Bitcoin. One path led to buyers, the other to producers, and over time those became culturally separate worlds. Kent argues that Bitcoiners failed to think through the downstream consequences of surrendering majority hashrate, while the mining industry failed to earn the trust of Bitcoin-native users with products that felt sovereign, legible, and easy to use.

From there the conversation gets practical: Saz’s hosted-ownership model, mining pool payout tradeoffs, the meaning of “wild sats” mined straight from the network, and the dangers of pool concentration, especially with Foundry and Antpool commanding an outsized share of global hashpower. Kent’s answer is simple but demanding: more proof of work from actual Bitcoiners, and less passive dependence on fiat-native public mining companies.

There is also a rich side-thread through the geopolitics of energy and place: solar incentives and greenwashing, hydro-powered mining in Paraguay, Norway, and Ethiopia, plus reflections on Portugal, Peru, and the cultural textures of life on a Bitcoin standard outside the U.S. orbit.

Executive Producer: Richard Greaser

Links

• Sazming
• Kent on Nostr
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)