TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #199: Edward Evenson

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Edward Evenson, Head of Business Development at Slush Pool / Braiins Systems, to discuss: - Mining pools - The race to zero profitability for pools - Value add services pools provide - The future of mining pools - Firmware products - PPS v. FPPS v. PPLNS - Cheese - Wine - much more Follow Edward on Twitter Check out Braiins Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. With the immense pleasure of sitting down with Edward Evanson from Slushpool slash Brains to talk about mining pools, their profit strategies, how they're creating value-added services for miners, what the future of mining pools may look like, a little bit of wine, a little bit of cheese. Great time, great conversation, great follow-up to the conversation I had with Leo Zhang. so if you just listened to that podcast uh this is a great follow-up to that to to add to that conversation this conversation was brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking cash cash up cash up they're helping you stack sats and sets sell sats receive sats and sell sats

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When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt.

It's Marty Ben here. Looking forward to another deep dive into mining. I'm very excited for this particular conversation because I think it is actually going to be a great extension to the conversation I had with Leo Zhang, which you freaks should be able to listen to by this point in time. We're recording before that drop, but by the time this drops, that will have dropped as well. I'm sitting across from Edward Evanson from Slush Pool and Brains. Edward, how are you doing?

Doing great. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I've been a listener for a while, and it's good to finally get on here. Well, you're putting me to shame with the studio you're sitting in right now. I'm looking through Zoom from a back deck. I've got construction to my left, so the mic's definitely picking that up to some extent. It's very cold out, and you are in a soundproof, warm studio, and you have the best audio quality of any guest I've ever had on Zoom, so I'm very jealous. It's actually one of the first times we've used it.

So we kind of put the sound padding and everything in the room, and then our logo up and purple lighting and all that, and then we promptly just stuck a bunch of minors in here, and so we can barely use it because there's already four to five miners constantly humming in here for testing some of our stuff so I'm glad we get to finally bust it out. Testing in the podcast

studio. You know you gotta make sure each room has multi-purpose to get as much bang for your buck in terms of rent so Well it's the only soundproof room in the whole office so people tend to put it in here otherwise they get really annoyed if it's in one of the other rooms. Yeah I can imagine

it gets annoying that it's screaming The cybernetic hornet noise is a very loud and annoying one if you're subjected to it for too long. Yeah, we've got a lot to talk about today. We'll get to mining pools and firmware and stuff like that eventually. I just want to learn more about you, how you came. You've had a very interesting career up to this point. You have traveled the world, it seems, from California, have lived in China.

Where are your roots now? You're in the Czech Republic. Yeah, I'm based in Prague. yeah yeah um so how did you number one find bitcoin number two specifically hone in on on mining and and working with slush and brains um so i guess i'll tackle the bitcoin thing first i first encountered bitcoin uh just very casually and superficially it was in i think like 2012 or something like that i just overheard one of my friends speaking about it at university and I didn't look into it and I didn't know anything more about it besides the brief five

minute conversation we had on it and then some years later right before I went to China I was in a grad program studying economics and history and I was particularly interested in the formation of early financial institutions and early political economies and how they evolved into what we have today. And I was studying the first illegal mint outside of England and the British Empire and what is now New England, like Boston area. And I thought it was really fascinating that this tiny colony started minting its own silver coins called pine tree shillings and the resulting catastrophe that followed when the crown in England found out about it. And it started sparking these debates over whether or not they had the right to make their own or

mint their own coins or not and whether the the crown should have a monopoly when it wasn't extending any help or providing any liquidity or like money supply to the colonies at the time and so i just started getting really interested in topics like that and can we dive into that topic a little bit yeah of course it's yeah infinitely fascinating so what what happened they had the new england colony was minting silver coins so they had a private banking system essentially yeah so when uh the specifically massachusetts right like what is now new england was basically uh in all but name the colony of massachusetts they were the most powerful they had the most leverage everything that is now maine was massachusetts as well they were

the most developed um and when they first got there they didn't have really any actual specie what it was called like gold or silver coins and so they had to do things like employ uh natives to trade wampum these shells that were often harvested off the coast of long island sound but when the dutch and english started doing that they started sort of making like a factory business out of it and so those inflated away almost instantly because the natives realized that the colonists really wanted this and can get stuff like copper and iron if they did trade with them. And so within a matter of a couple of decades, Wampum had inflated to basically being worthless. And then so they needed to find other solutions and it was just really difficult

facilitating any trade, paying debts, things like that. So eventually they employed a very prominent man from Boston by the name of John Hull. And he was a silver worker, silversmith. And they enlisted him the town council to basically set up the first uh massachusetts mint and this is really significant considering that at the time this is like well into england's rise as the most powerful like superpower in the world at the time they hadn't reached their peak yet but still extremely you know not to be messed with and this was the only and first instance of a entity owned by the British Empire that started making its own money. And of course, you can imagine the consequences for doing so were automatically like the top tier, the worst

things you could possibly get. It was considered treasonous. You'd be put to death. You'd be made an example of. So it was pretty risky undertaking this venture. And basically what happened is when it came to light in the late 1660s through 80s, a couple of people that were responsible for it were sort of dragged before the crown in Whitehall in England, and they were basically told to explain themselves. And they very cleverly put a pine tree on the back and said that it was actually the tree that housed Charles I when he was hiding during the English Civil War. And it just so happened that I think James II, who was one of his grandsons, was in power at the time, and they said it was an homage to the king and through its symbolism they paid homage to him and

they uh fairly like sent the king his his tax because you're supposed to give like a fifth of the species to the crown and they sent it to him in the form of timber for masts which were only available in like the large trees that were found in north america at the time because england was largely deforested by them um codfish which is still prominent today in western europe i mean you can't find codfish in the waters around here, but it's still like a national dish in Portugal and Spain. Yeah, and eventually somehow, I don't know how, they wiggled their way out of death sentences and public executions. They had to shut down the mint eventually, but it was a really interesting sort of contest and experiment and battle between the colonies

and the crown and whether or not the colonies were going to have control over their own money or not yeah it's a tale as old as time the struggle for uh sovereign monies that's a fascinating story and the way to wiggle out with the pine tree on the back and a 20 tariff to the to the crown yeah so because it was so risky back then right you had to like set up ships it took months to get across the atlantic you needed to finance it somewhat yourself you know etc like exposure to disease you name it really risky venture and people saw all the silver and gold that the Spaniards were getting out of the New World, particularly out of Potosi,

this mountain that basically had a massive silver mine underneath it. And the other European powers wanted that for themselves. So they said, hey, if you go out and explore this New World, which is extremely risky and at your own peril, you get to keep four-fifths of whatever you find in terms of minerals and ore, but you have to give basically the king his cut. I can't remember the exact term they called it now.

it's been years but basically uh 20 of anything you found belonged to the crown it's crazy it's crazy how like colonization exploration led to these insane uh deals between colonists and the crown and so the crown would finance the mainly finance mostly finance excuse me the the travel across no it was actually uh the colonies were originally set up as joint venture companies so um when you see the earliest references of like virginia and massachusetts it wasn't as a colony or a state or a government but as a company um and basically a bunch of middle class to somewhat wealthy men at that time would pull together funds to support the setup of these colonies in the hopes that the natural resources that they would gain from the setting

up of these companies at the time would pay back you know 100 volt it's fascinating and here we are i'm in new jersey in a plastic house so you're studying this stuff and this naturally just pique your interest about bitcoin the fact that it is a a political way to create a money that is separate from any state yeah i mean immediately because I'd been studying stuff like I just described for years at the point I actually dove into Bitcoin and it was just automatically fascinating to me and its potential to sort of just completely make all these contests throughout time irrelevant surrounding money and I just in that regard in a historical context I immediately recognized the potential once I

actually understood it once I got beyond that you know five minute superficial conversation I had had years before and that's what really kind of made me dive down the rabbit hole and then I got to Shanghai China started going to like local meetups you know we just meet up bars or parks a bunch of people that are local whether they be Chinese or another expat get together and talk about what they were doing whether it be bitcoin or crypto like blockchain in general ether projects mining at a bunch of different people there and then this eventually led to getting into mining in a professional capacity was easily the most interesting part of the whole ecosystem to me and then i moved to beijing start working in it with f2 pool and now i'm here at brains

and slush pool in prague three years later four years later almost so what is uh what's your experience with the pool life been this is a an area it's funny it's mining i would say until maybe more recently is not not getting the love that i think it deserves particularly when it comes to pools it's probably one of the most important it's obviously one of the most important parts of the network it's it's one of the major stakeholders and the thing that makes it go around and uh there's been a lot of debates in the past of uh the distribution of of hash power particularly in pools is centralized but before we get to that discussion like what what's it like working at a pool what what if your um what if like what's your what's your job

been at at these pools up to this point yeah so i've been mostly on the uh the business development and marketing like growth side um and i can tell you i guess my overall experience is the market changes extremely quickly um you always got to pay attention because the markets are 24 7 something new is always happening and it's fiercely competitive um really fast paced really fun um and yeah i guess that's kind of like the the short and dirty of it but uh in terms of mining pools in general um i think we're well into this shift but my long-term outlook on them is that they'll cease to exist as we've traditionally known them um i'm saying this for a while now and it's it's clearly happening in many cases so whereas before you'd have

entities that would just solely be a mining pool you can't really do that anymore like the raise to the bottom and fees doesn't support that type of business model there have been multiple mining pool companies that have publicly stated that they don't intend to turn a profit off their pool and they're using it to leverage some other services they have like looking at who will be or binance the exchanges, trying to push off exchange services onto them, some derivatives, some loans, things like that. Or you have others offering financial services in tandem with the pool, and then you have us that offers firmware, soon management systems, the pool, another fun project that will be

coming out 2021 that i can't really speak about and yeah so everyone's trying to expand vertically aggressively and as larger entities like dcg and potentially legacy institutions get deeper into it maybe like fidelity or some other investment funds the pools will change even further because they'll have to be completely auditable compliant and then there may even be a need for something like kyc aml in them i hate that i hate the thought of that the corporatization of pools does that so let's dive into the dynamics of why the inherent nature of pools is changing you alluded to it the fact that profitability is being driven towards zero uh but what is what is driving that specifically and then uh like how let's get into a discussion of whether kyc am

aml compliance forced on pools uh sort of denigrates the uh the sort of essential properties of bitcoin from a permissionless standpoint yeah definitely um so the first point i guess would be that some of these larger companies with huge reserves of bitcoin have you know driven prices into the ground because like i said before they're not interested in really turning a profit on the pool but just want to push some of their other products they can make money on or um somewhat maybe like like i said before loans or structured derivatives or exchange services financial services um and so that's been a huge part of it uh the fact that you know most pools are pretty similar so really the only thing they can offer as an advantage over

the others purely on the pool side would be a reduction in fees um and yeah so basically what this means is because pools in a large sense are kind of like providing insurance to the miners right you get a reduction of variance in exchange for a fee however traditionally within insurance companies stemming all the way back to the 16th century um in exchange for the insurance company taking on the risk you pay an insurance premium but because of the context and scenario i've just described uh miners are getting quite comfortable not having to pay that premium so it's not really a profitable business in and of itself anymore and it's kind of turned into a loss leading you know uh project that in an attempt to accumulate as much hash rate and as many miners in your

network as possible so you can leverage them and their hash rates for other things in the future yeah try to create moats of users that will then use more of your products and yeah it's interesting it's it's crazy how how quickly it's all evolving too um and i think obviously slush is the oldest pool been around for a while it is it has uh it has survived the test of time and you guys have innovated on this it seems like um obviously that we had jan and uh pavel on the podcast what feels like almost two years ago now at this point uh we're talking about stratum v2 but um the the firmware that you guys offer your customers uh has been on the market for a while it's something that

It seems like Slush and Brains really honed in on pretty early, and it is a great product that miners love. And so I guess we could jump into the firmware conversation. How do you guys view offering that service particularly, and what benefit does it bring your customers? Yeah, so the project started several years ago in reaction to some things we showed Bitmain was doing. I guess to put it simply.

And those two things primarily be Antbleed and CovertASICBoost. And just for a quick 20-second thing for those that don't know what those two things are, Antbleed was basically a backdoor which would allow Bitmain to essentially shut off people's machines or have the ability to. and uh covert asic boost was bitmain running uh asic boost covertly on its machines and its own facilities without disclosing it sort of publicly or allowing their other customers to run it on their machines so we were the first to offer overt asic boost through our open source brains os allowing people to get another like 13 efficiency out of mining and then a bunch of people of course since we open sourced it piled on board and uh it's pretty much universal now there's still

some people that don't use asic boost but i think it's only really nice hash that does that and it's because it's for a shaw 256 pool that mines all sorts of different coins not just bitcoin um but it's standard now uh for the most part and um then we started developing that primarily for s9s because that was by far the most used machine on the market at the time. And then eventually, we added our own proprietary tuning algorithms to it, which essentially allows you to squeeze some more profitability out of your machines through overclocking or underclocking and having a tuner in there, which basically adjusts frequency and voltage to optimal settings given power consumption setting.

so you know anywhere from 15 to 25 percent depending on the power consumption and machine you're running it on we've since expanded to the s17 s17 pro s17 plus coming out in a couple weeks as well as the t17 models after that and we already have people working full-time on what's miner as well so we're looking to expand the service uh throughout all ant miner and what's minor models and allow people to run their machines maybe a couple more years as people have been able to do with the s9s with tuning firmware as well as you know increase the break-even price and give miners the ability to squeeze as much profitability out of their machines as possible because the manufacturers do not allow you to do that with the stock

firmware they give we know that well when what's minor that's uh it's our question at great american mining uh but before we get into more details with the firmware so do you do you guys just split some of the the increased revenue from those performance tunes is that how you yeah so out of that that's what really funds um helps fund anyways some of the open source projects we do like the open source versions of the firmware as well as stratum v2 and basically what happens is we take a dev fee it's different size depending on the generation of machines for the older machines it's a smaller dev fee about two percent and for the newer gen we'll be charging 2.5 percent of the hash rate but this is you know well under the profit uplift that the

miner's experience so they're generally much more happy to pay the dev fee than they are a mining pool fee because they just see the mining pool fee as a cost they have to to take on of running their operations whereas the dev fee they get some sort of efficiency boost or profit uplift that well exceeds the actual dev fee they have to pay so they see it as a win yeah now the firmware has always fascinated me like why wouldn't the producer the manufacturer just allow users to mess with because you basically have to jailbreak these machines correct and yeah and then and tweak uh tweak with the firmware like why would manufacturers just deliver the best possible firmware or deliver it uh so that users could tweak with it without

having to jailbreak it it's always been a question i mean i think i know the answer but i like to hear it's kind of bizarre right because you purchase the machine these very expensive machines by the way and you're supposed to own them at that point but for some odd reason the manufacturer will do its best to lock you out of the machine that you own and when you you know unless you're a massive miner because they will unlock it if you're a huge customer in some cases but if you aren't then you're kind of screwed because they won't let you into the machine even though you own it. And if they see that you've been sort of trying to get into it or installing some other firmware onto it that you want, it completely voids the warranty, which is completely fine if

they want to void the warranty for that. But what I don't understand is why they don't do something like open sourcing their firmware. Because a lot of the reasons when they were asked and when I personally asked them at conferences or just via email or something, it's that, you know, we want to protect our clients and we don't want them to be exposed to viruses and things like that. But it seems sort of counterintuitive because if something is open source you'd be able to see exactly what's running on your

machine and you wouldn't have to worry about things like viruses or security breaches. Or AMP lead. Yeah, or stuff like Bitmain putting basically kill switches into their product or making it easy to see if they are running something that allows them to mine more efficiently against

their own and compete with their own client base. But yeah, I mean, but of course, I see some reasons. There are some reasons why you wouldn't, I guess, just offer tuning or certain features into your firmware as a manufacturer, like standardization is really important. It's really important to be able to say, hey, this is the specs of the hardware we're selling you. This is what you can like the minimum of what you can expect, plus or minus, you know, two to 5%. And it's, it's really important, especially when you're structuring multimillion dollar deals that people know what it is they're getting. And there isn't just a huge variance. Because when you do start doing stuff like under overclocking or tuning, the performance of that is highly dependent on the quality of the chips inside the machines, often referred to as like the silicon lottery. It's always interesting, a little frustrating when miners keep wanting to know, like, what's the best power setting with your firmware or what's the exact efficiency I can get out of the machine? It's like, well, it's completely dependent on the quality of the machine, how long it's been running, the environment it runs in. Is it immersion cooled? is it air cooled is one are one of the hash boards dead um you know there's just so many

variables that come into play that the best thing really is to just test it and see what each machine gets for you but in the end it's you know 9.9 times out of 10 it's definitely worth doing yeah yeah and imagine the manufacturer probably especially for smaller miners just wants to lock them into a purchasing cycle where if you're able to extend the lifetime of the individual machines, you're just buying miners less often. Think of the iPhone batteries

and how shitty they've gotten over the last year. It's just, oh, wow, my iPhone batteries only last like a year now. Right when the next model comes out, that's interesting. Planned obsolescence. We're trying to get away from it, okay? All of you miner manufacturers out there. but it is fascinating and it adds to the i guess excitement of this industry is having to jailbreak

these machines and tweak them and uh geek out as much efficiency as you can eek out excuse me not geek out but you can geek out over it as well uh and uh so like how how much of your business is driven by working on this firmware specifically and obviously stratum v2 has been a topic of conversation something you guys have been working on as well i'd like to get an update on that and um potentially uh ways in which you guys are going to expand your product offering i know you hinted at something 2021 we probably can't talk about but other things outside of the firmware to help your profitability at brains and slush yeah definitely so on the first question um uh there's been a huge push by me to shift as much of the revenue over to the firmware because

one it's more sticky um as i said before miners are much more happy to pay it because of the profit uplift they experience from it and also the previous um things i had to say about mining pools and where i see them headed um and it's been going really well so far uh for the first you know six or seven months of its existence it was only s9s but that took off really well partly because of the incentives we offered on the pool if you used it in conjunction with slush pool. And then more recently, in the last month, we started releasing some of the S17 models as like a beta version, and the full release is coming out very soon. And that's showing some good progress so far. And we even kind of upped the ante on the deal where if you do use Brains

OS Plus on your machines, you have 0% pool fees, just to add some nice little juicy incentives for people interested um and yeah so it's driving more and more of our revenue actually as each month goes by which was the goal so i'm very happy about that um and then for your second topic of v2 v2 is actually supported now and it's uh also supported through brains os if you run it on your machines um on the open source version and the plus version especially on the open source version you get some pretty insane like data load transfer reductions like two to three times smaller um it has a lot of the security features of preventing middleman attacks and people from potentially stealing your hash rate um and then we actually have a grant through square crypto

Jack Dorsey's company that allows people to work on v2 if they're interested all they need to do is go over to Square Crypto's grant page and put together a proposal and if it's approved by the Square Crypto team then they get a bunch of money to work on v2 and help

develop it with us so I guess the kind of overall update on v2 is that most of the features and security efficiency are implemented and running now in some form. And then the decentralized aspect of job negotiation, which is probably the feature that is the most talked about and quote unquote most controversial for some reason.

That is what's going to be primarily developed through our own efforts, which is currently underway and with the help of the grants. That's an open source project for anyone interested or wanting to implement it in their system or pool um and then what was your last question you had that was it i think that i think that was stratum v2 update but to dive deeper to what you just said like yeah let's go over the controversy of some people in jan and pavel and i talked about this the first time they're on but the the when they were still thinking of strategy too we were talking about it in the context of better hash and this is when they presented that like hey we're actually working on something else that we think is better because uh better hash has a flaw or perceived

flaw that individual miners constructing the block within the pool will not uh will not fine-tune for the highest amount of potential fees that could be accumulated in a block and that is uh people are still even knocking stratum v2 for that as well like how can you uh guarantee that that happens and the other miners contributing to this Strata v2 pool will be making less profit than they potentially could, especially as it pertains to getting the most fees per block. Yeah. So you're asking specifically about the block templates and basically...

Yes. Okay. So I understand some people's concern about maybe, oh, it's not going to be the absolute most profitable block if the most profitable transactions aren't included in the block. I don't see this being a real issue, though, and in part. One, when you consider the reward spread out across all the miners on a pool, if something were to be a couple bips or even 1% to 2% less profitable

from the block as a whole, after that spread out to all the miners on that specific block, it would take a long, long time to start noticing any drop in revenue as a result of that. Also, for the most part, because miners are still incentivized to do so, they will pick the transactions and fine-tune the block templates to choose the transactions that would show them or give them the most rewards. And then thirdly, I think people are unfortunately underestimating the future of mining in places like North America and Europe and their incentive and legal obligation to exclude certain transactions, whether they come from North Korea, Iran,

something like that. Whether or not that's actually possible and sustainable in the long term is another question. And people may be incentivized to include the most profitable block templates anyways, just because they would be at a disadvantage to the people that did choose to do so versus if they chose not to over a longer period of time. It's hard to see, to your previous point that you've brought up about like a KYC AML pool, it's hard to see a pool like that really seem attractive and competitive to anyone besides very specific institutions that would be hyper concerned over things like that like where they're how they're pulling their hash rate with other people

um but that's not even necessarily a huge issue i think because especially on pps models and uh you the the pool in effect is a buyer of the hash rate and so they buy hash rate from a bunch of people and mine the blocks um they collect right uh basically a hundred percent of the reward but then redistribute it to the people they're buying it off of minus whatever fee they're charging them um and then the pplns and scoring model the hash rate and work is pooled together completely anonymously and there's no way really to trace where the origin of it is from and it's not really the miner interacting, say, with a miner in North Korea,

but rather once the work's mixed up on the servers, it's not really like you're doing business with an entity like that or facilitating any transaction for them. So it's not really clear how it's going to play out, but I can see just mounting concerns over regulators and how they're going to interact with it. But in terms of V2, what you originally asked me about,

i don't really see any huge valid criticisms out there besides the fact that you know maybe someone would choose a block template that wasn't as profitable if they mined the block um i don't see that as a huge concern or a big downside moving forward interesting yeah the whole because right the that slick slic or whatever oh god that weak attempt to uh try to force a coalition of miners to to force kyc aml on their uh customers even though it was a weak attempt it did sort of illuminate some of the potential vectors that these types will attempt to to attack and like so they would depend on a centralized entity and slush kyc all uh of the miners within their pool but that's if they're constructing the template themselves

they're actually adding the block and then distributing the rule the reward centrally most importantly, the distribution of the award. You could reward, you could argue that's money transmission service or whatever they call it. I don't even fucking know. But Jeremy

Rubin presented an interesting idea that would need OpCheckTemplateVerify to be enabled to make it happen, the idea of a decentralized mining pool where you have a bunch of individual miners pointing hash rate this decentralized pool each is constructing

the block template the one that mines the block uh then distributes it to the other miners in that decentralized pool but each miner in that pool could mine a block and then they each have to distribute it individually to the other miners in the decentralized pool and that a situation situation like that makes kyc aml almost too burdensome like we have each individual having to kyc each other individual in a decentralized pool it just seems logistically impossible so getting to that point seems like something that should be a goal for for mining pools or just miners in general i haven't heard too much about that and i honestly i just i don't know much about that specific project you mentioned at all but a couple things jump to my mind um one every time

someone tries to attempt a pool that say is decentralized or maybe the pool never for even a second acts as a custodian it just it just goes straight from the coinbase into the miner's wallet you immediately run into scalability issues um it's not really easy to facilitate this when you're talking about any serious volume of hash rate i think you know if you're just talking about a couple hundred petahash it could be fine but as you scale up into the exahash territory it's not feasible from based on my conversations with uh some of the people at slush pool and then also um as you know mining stick gets more and more consolidated into these larger entities after each having it would seem easier at that point if a pool like you just described popped up

for the regulators in each country to go to the people they know who are mining and double checking where they're sending their hash rate um uh so i'm not sure like it seems valid for a world where retail is still very prominent in mining and they'd be able to take advantage of that smaller operations but uh the further and further the network ages the more and more economies of scale are rewarded in mining so it may be much easier in the future to sort of um monitor where it's going yeah yeah i just dumped that link from jeremy in your telegram chat i'd be interested to see lovely your thoughts on that after that but um you mentioned uh pps too it's actually a subject i want to touch on paper share

or if somebody might mention complaining about pay per share like if you are directing hash at slush for X amount of time and then your miners go down

for some reason and then slush mines a block while your miners are down you may not, you probably miss out on that part of the reward but you guys are taking on risk as well so I think explaining PPS, how it works, why you guys decided to do the payouts in that fashion

would be educational for the freaks out there. Yeah. So we actually don't do PPS. We do our own scoring mechanism. PPS is paid per share, but what you described is a possibility in our system, but it's very one-sided perspective of looking at it because the opposite could just as well has happened where you only turn on your miners for 20 to 30 minutes and then we mine a block which is equally likely to happen um and if your scoring hash rate is been turned on or rather scaling up for 30 minutes after your real hash rate is flipped on then you're already pretty much at the average max scoring hash rate you're going to get and you're going to receive a much more you're going to receive a much larger portion of the block um than you maybe should

because you've only been contributing work to the pool for 20 to 30 minutes before the block was found, whereas maybe someone with less hash rate or maybe almost the same amount of hash rate has been doing it and still gets a similar reward to you. So I think it's kind of naturally people, especially miners, want to take the perspective that they see as them potentially losing money,

but it could be equally beneficial to them in the opposite direction, which is never really addressed. right like everyone's really quiet and super happy when we're running at like 120 percent luck but uh you know what we never hear any complaints about that um but the moment we dip under 100 it's like oh you know what's happening um so you know when you when you look at it on a longer time frame there's no issue the payouts are still the same as a pps pool um if it's just a matter question of whether you're willing to take on short-term variance for lower fees. And

there's also the fact now that if you use our firmware in conjunction with it, the infrastructure is literally provided to you at zero cost to you. So it's basically a question of how much short-term variance you're willing to take on and how important that is to your operations. Like some people may need extremely stable cash flow on the short term for various reasons, whether it be reporting to a specific board that wants to see that or to maybe cloud mine, right? Because if you buy like a month contract, it could affect the results at the end of the month. It could be affected really well because you've bought a contract for a month and we get, you know, 110% luck that month and you get way more than you expected, but it could equally

go the other way down to like 95 percent and then you get five percent less than you're expected um but yeah i mean that's like all the formulas how it's paid out how it's you know measured and processed it's all on our website it's all public information we publish the hash rate proofs as well so you don't have to trust us but can verify yourself that you're getting the rewards you're supposed to be getting um it's just really a matter of preference do you want to pay less and take on some short-term variance, or do you want to pay more and not experience that variance but receive lower income in the long term?

Yeah, and I confused the feedback there. He was comparing slush to a PPS pool. But yeah, thank you for that explanation. I guess that leads me to another question. I got my slush dashboard up right now looking at the uh uh the amount of scoring hash rate the pool has like is there a minimum threshold that you guys look for um you try to like hold the line at to make sure that you're you're mining enough enough blocks to keep your customers happy um just as much as possible really

um there's there's no real line that like a hard line that we discussed that we can't drop below but it's always just pretty much get as much hash rate as possible thus the miner experiences less variance and our revenue increases from the pool and that's something that's basically always happening in the background so

and do you have do you have things like nice hash that do profit switching and you see them adding a bunch of hash rate and falling off we do not do profit switching no I know you don't do it

but like other things like nice hash that do it may decide to mine bitcoin and point their hash at slush oh okay so you mean like other people using coin switchers and BTC they point it at slush yeah I mean

there are some cases that happen I know before having there was sometimes our for like a couple months our hash rate would fluctuate up and down on a regular basis like five to six hundred petahash because there was a miner doing just that they were like purchasing five to six hundred petahash on nice hash and then trying to devise some formula to game the luck on the pool in an attempt to only mine as we had a more like increased chance of finding a block and then

not mine with us as we um as they thought there are chances of finding a block decrease that i mean it was interesting good for them for for trying i'm not sure how well it worked out for them um but yeah that was definitely interesting i remember reaching out to them going like hey we noticed some really like strange activity from your account is there anything we can help you with or any support we can provide and they very happily just explained what they were doing and what they were trying to achieve um and yeah i guess that's the the main example that sticks out in my mind, but there are people that do it on a smaller scale as well.

That would be interesting. Do you think that's a why strategy at the end of the day, at scale, trying to time? Especially with that much hash rate. It seems pretty intense to be doing it with like 500 to 600 petahash, but it may be a fun experiment

or just like a game to play if you want to throw 500 terahash at it or something and you have a much larger operation and you're just doing it as a hobby um but i don't recommend people do that at all it's especially with some of the products that are available on the market now it seems much better just to mine bitcoin know within a small range what you expect to get paid out on it and um i mean personally you have to look at the asset as well right like when i look at bitcoin that would be the only thing i'd want to mine. I know there's profit switching algorithms out there that allow you to get more

Bitcoin, but then it comes from an exchange. It doesn't come from the Coinbase, which has some implications as well. And if you're talking about longing Bitcoin, which is kind of what miners do naturally, I wouldn't really want to long another asset, especially when you have to put in many cases, just millions and millions and millions of dollars into these operations. I would not feel comfortable you know naturally longing any asset besides bitcoin and and mechanically like what's the process of moving that hasher like how much time does it take and uh like is it like a burdensome process um from what i understand no especially with v2 zero time back-end switching um it lets you install failover pools in case the pool you're

connected to server goes down it automatically just switches to the backup pool but um it doesn't seem like it's that arduous or burdensome for people to do it maybe if an individual miner were to try and develop an algorithm like that for themselves to use but if you go to one of the many services out there that have profit switchers whether it be a pool whether it be purely a profit switching service or any other person that's developed it um it's pretty hands-off from the miners perspective yeah that makes a lot of sense the tough part is uh timing the cells right because you're switching between generally btc bch and bsv which is only one component the other component is after you've mined each of the specific asset is uh quickly selling it on the exchange to convert

it to btc which makes it a bit more complicated when you start thinking about liquidity and which exchange you use and how quickly you can sell it things like that slippage comes into play i would imagine it's yeah it seems like a headache another question i have is some of you guys mine a block distribute to the the award award reward um you're not getting an award you're getting a reward uh how do you guys take into consideration the the current congestion on chain distributing actual rewards to individual miners like taking the fee market into

consideration Can you repeat the question? So when you mine a block, when a miner within Slushpool gets a block, you get to distribute that reward, is it automatically is that coinbase automatically set up

or do you have an additional batch transaction that sends reward out to the individuals within the pool okay so you're asking if if it ever gets into like a slush pool wallet before it goes to the miners yes yeah um yes it does as i mentioned before it's almost impossible to operate a pool at any real scale uh currently anyways and distribute it directly from the coinbase into the miners wallet but depending on what you're reading what circle you're in there's right like quote unquote virgin coins which are a lot of challenges to just philosophically because then you're challenging like the fungibility of bitcoin but um and then

there's what people call clean coins or you can equate the two which is there's only one hop from the coinbase or rather two hops i should say from the coinbase to the pool provider provider to the miner itself and generally the coins that go from the coinbase to the pool provider directly to the miner are seen as quote-unquote like the the freshly minted or or clean coins whether you subscribe to that or not is another question but um people that are concerned with regulation and compliance definitely subscribe to it um and then especially when you know the pool's wallet you can easily demonstrate that it just went from coinbase to wallet to yours and so there's no risk of uh having it mixed in a batch or maybe the coins coming from north korea or something like

that as i said before yeah yeah the uh quote unquote virgin coins are sharia compliant aren't they isn't that uh yeah i remember when i first read that uh some years ago when i was working in beijing and uh not not sharia but halal uh well uh when they're not haram declared that bitcoin was halal and so that's uh it could be safely used by islamic institutions i just thought that was so fascinating that here we have um this brand new digital currency or digital gold however you want to look at it that's sort of uh growing pretty quickly especially the mining sector and then you have this you know almost 2 000 year old institution or 1500 year old institution declaring it halal under like religious scripture and saying it's a like god

sanctions its use and things like that it's just so interesting the crazy world we live in right right do you subscribe i don't subscribe to the virgin coins they're all tainted with fees right um i i don't really subscribe to it personally i only subscribe to it insofar as uh the people willing to pay a premium for them you know if it's real to them uh that's good for me but personally i don't subscribe to uh you know the whole virgin versus non-virgin coin thing yeah all bitcoins should be fungible yeah how big is that premium are people willing those people willing to pay uh it completely depends um we always get requests on like a i mean most of them just go completely ignored because they just seem so shady like the other day

i was getting an email it's like hey we're these these investors are looking to buy some coins from miners they want 5000 btc over the course of two weeks i'm like okay yeah because someone that's looking to purchase 5,000 BTC over the course of two weeks directly from miners anonymously, they're probably real good people to do business with and put ourselves at risk like that. So most of it just goes ignored and I roll my eyes. But when you look at some of the more serious people, they're like, hey, we're this trading firm out of Lucerne, Switzerland or something. And they identify themselves and all that. The premiums are generally like a couple percent it's nothing insane right a lot of people that don't know too much about it or don't have

too much experience are like oh you can get eight percent premiums on on version coins which is just not the case at all um if you can get any premium at all it's probably closer to like one to three percent three percent right probably getting a better premium trading p2p otc like behind the scenes yeah it's fascinating stuff there's so many fascinating topics you can discuss in bitcoin like we're only talking about mining pools right now like what else outside of your your job and what you do excites you about bitcoin well just one last thing on the the version coin thing like we see more and more hash rate instruments coming out and when you can just buy physically delivered hash rate it kind of makes purchasing a virgin coin seem irrelevant to me because if you can

just get the hash rate physically delivered, you get those coins anyways. Especially when you can buy them oftentimes at a discount to the BTC spot price. So why would you pay a premium for a virgin coin? So I don't see them being even like a real concept that people pursue in the future. I see it as it will just be people pursuing

hash rate instead of these so-called clean coins. But outside of mining or inside mining? well you just brought up an interesting topic of hash rate futures forwards contracts now i want to dive into like that is like a like buying future hash but engaging in a contract with a miner so that they deliver hashes that will be solved in the future um and the the bitcoin

rewards that uh come with that hash uh to be delivered in the future it's pretty revolutionary for the mining industry, correct? Yeah. Evolutionary. And I think Leo Zhang is, shout out to Leo, your alchemy of hash power stuff is always super interesting to read.

He did a really good job at describing what you could potentially see in the future with some investors or even just data centers themselves and how they would structure like a hash rate portfolio and how they would hedge

some of their operational risk of uh you know running a bitcoin mine and how they can kind of offload some of that operational risk into financial risk for people taking on and bearing some of it uh which is really interesting and one of the ways they can sort of hedge right is to sign some contract in a forwards market with another individual that is interested in purchasing the hash rate and this could be at a discount of some sort i know that it's still very like early excuse me and rudimentary today and that some of the discounts that buyers are asking for for some of these products are just absolutely ridiculous like personally as a power miner i would never enter into any such contract

because you know some people are asking well below 90 of btc spot price for some of these forwards contracts um and it'll take uh much more developed and liquid marketplaces before we start seeing a forwards contract uh startup you know approaching much closer to the spot price of btc it's the noon bell here uh let the city know it's noon thank you thank you city council for letting me know what time it just it's so funny it's like uh it's like a new world cathedral bell right so i'm over here in europe the bell's ringing every hour everywhere and over in jersey it's they're they're uh they're fainter but there are church bells in the background going off right now

it's reminding me of like oh shit i gotta get back to class in second grade when you hear that right that's uh for for my niece and nephew they know it as the lunch bill once that goes off it's time for lunch um but yeah so like i just see uh markets developing around hash rate and providing better hedges for miners because i mean when you look at some of uh the larger miners or public companies that enter into some of these hedging instruments they're kind of in a bind in many cases so if they take on uh loans for equipment financing or something like that then they're kind of restricted by these really aggressive interest rates on the loans. And then if they want to sell more shares, say, as a public company,

they then have to dilute the shares of their company, which isn't good either. And so with the development of something like I just described, you could really free yourself of some of those burdens and just enter into a trade with a party interested in buying the hash rate without exposing yourself to some loan that charges you 15% interest or... 18, 18 in some instances. Yeah, exactly.

Or, yeah, I know what you're talking about. And, or, you know, diluting the shares of your company, which is pretty destructive too. So there's every incentive in the world for miners to participate in something like that, especially some of these new hedging instruments as they become more liquid and more sophisticated what i'm more interested in is the buy side it seems that the market for the buy side is still pretty underdeveloped and i don't have any doubts

that it exists and will continue to grow but i'm really interested to see you know who these buyers turn out to be the biggest ones you know are they going to be there's a bunch of noise around paul tutor jones buying bitcoin some months ago are we going to see people like him enter into hash rate contracts and get hash rate instead of bitcoin as well is it going to be mainly restricted to miners and uh institutional investors that currently invest in mining already or are we going to see you know people like fidelity or um these more legacy institutions start participating in mining by never actually purchasing a machine to begin with but just starts purchasing hash rate as a part of their portfolio i know fidelity is mining currently but

there are plenty of uh you know maybe something like micro strategy instead of just buying it on the spot market you can buy some hash rate contracts um and you know stack up part of your reserve as a company in btc over the course of a year through some hash rate you've purchased yeah now leo and i were actually talking about that the slippage that came on micro strategies buying strategy uh could have been alleviated with a something like a hash rates forward or futures contract and it's so fascinating how these contracts will work to the mechanics of because it's just so much smoother than what you experience in the traditional financial system so like as like say you as a miner i engage in a forward contract with a family office they give

a bunch of cache up front so that we can build out our operations and plug the machines in, deliver the hash, you could easily set it up with Slushpool and say, hey, we're going to need a subpool that directs the rewards towards these addresses that are owned by the family office

that bought our hash months ago. It just seems like a very seamless process. That's a good point. Of course, there are risks to that, too. If you buy all the BTC, OTC, as MicroStrategy did, you may be exposed to some slippage in some cases, or some of it is bought on exchanges. But then if there's any short-term price appreciation, you get to enjoy the benefits of that.

Whereas if you enter into a 365-day contract for hash rate, and there's massive hash rate amounts coming online and difficulties shooting up, and there's also price appreciation you could have potentially lost out but another way to look at it is just you know a really solid dca over a long period of time yeah no that's i mean and that's another big question that needs to be figured out these contracts like what is the necessarily both parties have to meet at the table and decide it how much discount the miner is willing to to sell that hash at and the family office on the other end has to weigh the risk of more hash rate joining the network throughout the duration of the

contract they've engaged in. I'm excited to see it develop though because I think it'll make cloud mining largely irrelevant and people can just engage in the exchange of hash rate without having to worry about some of these opaque deals and getting screwed over and often...

Controversial topic, cloud mining. Some people think it's coming back with a vengeance. Others think it's still scammy. are you are you in the latter camp i mean it's not a i don't i don't think it's a scam i just think it's uh um i think the purchaser of a cloud mining contract almost never comes out ahead so not a scam but maybe something that uh businesses willingly offer knowing that their client will probably never receive as much benefit as just buying btc which you could question

of course right like they're not doing anything illegal or something like that in that case right if they're just operating a cloud mining platform legitimately but i think that cloud mining only really gets going in pretty significant bull markets so i think that'll be the case until uh kind of the things we talked about just now become a bit more developed and widespread and then the benefits of doing you know participating in that will become extremely clear very quickly to people that have traditionally bought cloud mining, especially when you see the profitability

at the end of, say, like a month contract in comparison to one another. And that will force cloud mining contracts to sort of lower its pricing and thus margins to the point. And they may survive for a little bit after that. But I think eventually, many of the people offering cloud mining

or many of the miners that have large data centers that offer cloud mining or hashrate contracts will just eventually opt in to something like a marketplace. Yeah. Seems like a very annoying business to build, too. A lot of moving parts. The cloud mining? Yeah.

I don't know. We've never done any cloud mining operations, so I wouldn't know. But I imagine it's pretty crazy because it's mostly retail that's interested in it, right? It's not... Yeah, exactly. So you've got a customer service headache that seems like a task I would not want to take on personally.

People find my email and Telegram all the time. People with maybe one or two S9s. And they're like, hey, how can I partner with you? Or how can I get discounts on my 45 terahash? i can't even i can't even imagine that happening at a you know massive scale right exactly yeah i'm gonna need you to 1000x your operation and we can talk well it's just right like you know bless them for uh for doing their part but i think so many people are just don't realize what mining has sort of become at this point and the scale it operates on and you know people are

ordering two months worth of the manufacturer's supply now right the you look at the horizon kinetics core deal and they bought almost 18 000 s19s um you know which i think is like 1.42 exahash uh all at once which is something that you know just didn't happen before um that's like it's like a little less than a third of slush bowl right now yeah it's pretty insane yeah but we'll get them don't worry well yeah i guess so slush is a again been a stalwart in the mining industry first pool still around the pool industry has a lot of churn how do you guys position yourselves to to sort of stay away from that churn and stay keep the lights on we've already talked about the different um

different revenue streams you're creating but just in terms of like the ruthless nature of the mining pool industry specifically um i think and i think slush actually at least me personally i love slush because first pool it's always been altruist i don't want to say altruistic but true to bitcoin's ethos and i think you guys get i don't want to say goodwill but people want to point their hash at slush because of the history of the stewardship that you guys have uh showed to the network so the question is like moving forward like do you see you guys uh the percentage of overall hash rate rising uh because a combination of people liking slush because of the stewardship plus the the benefits of the product suite that you offer um i see it primarily

developing through like the vertically integrated product suite that we offer um while there are some hardcore smaller miners that only mine with slush pool because it's the only western pool because we're the only ones that are transparent about everything like publishing the hash rate proofs um you know keeping true to bitcoin is the only sha256 coin we mine um from being the first pool from uh you know voicing some of our founders voicing their opinions and like you know the block size wars back in 2016 2017 and um offering open source projects and the amp lead and covert asic boost thing i mentioned before so that does bear some goodwill um as anyone would expect it to but uh you know it's interesting it's kind of a meme as well when you look at some of

the larger miners, especially when you look at some of the narratives coming out of places like North America, where they say, oh, we want to bring X percentage of the global network hash rate over to North America, which is a pretty lofty goal in many cases, especially when the figures are above 10% of the global network hash rate in a single facility. But then they direct that hash rate to a pool that isn't in north america which means the terminus point for the hash rate actually isn't north america regardless of the machines being there um and right it's a nice it's a nice story to tell investors and to shape your marketing narrative online but in the end you know as you said it's a cutthroat business and they're only going to go to the areas that offer the lowest

fees um like i i know for a fact that every single large miner in north america that's that has a press release about this strong you know north america vision um directs you know a sizable portion if not all of their hash rate to pools in china so i don't i don't take it too seriously yeah i'm trying to think if i could disclose i think i don't think anybody okay i mean we point Uh, yeah, I'm not going to disclose it, but it is, uh, well, and so like, do you think there will be competitive pools? Um, no, we use slush. I think we've said it publicly before.

I'm thinking in my mind, uh, but, uh, now we do that because it's the best option at the point. Like there is no North American pool that's as profitable. You see that developing. would you guys ever like to another pool outside of czech republic or i mean we've yeah we've definitely thought about that um uh generally it's not a problem for our north american miners especially some of the ones that are say publicly traded because of our transparency you know auditors from pwc from ey they actually all generally recommend that these companies use us

because of our willingness to, you know, open up and participate in something like a full audit. And this is very, very helpful for people whose companies are traded on a stock exchange. So that's something that we always have in our corner. So in that respect, we wouldn't necessarily see a need to open up something in North America, especially if we're already providing all the necessary information that we can to make it these mine these uh companies you know comfortably and securely keep mining with us and you know none of none of this ever is disclosing private information of of other miners most of which we don't even have right because you can sign up anonymously to the pool and start using it um it's only really for vip clients that we speak

to on a regular basis that we have any sort of information on um which is necessary right if they want special terms or conditions or if they contact us looking to help them out in an audit they're undergoing right so there needs to be some exchange of information or communication on that front when it comes to that but so i guess there's no real barrier for us to protect our users privacy while allowing some of these companies with more restrictions to operate on us so we can do that from europe fairly easily and you know eu restrictions and compliance is no joke either so we have our our fair share of fun dealing with that um but i i think the only way opening up a sort of another pool or like a proxy pool or an agent pool as it's often called in another area

would be to take advantage of some local legislation or some tight-knit community that generally uh does something like you know national within its borders i know there's some countries where the government have legalized mining and they're offering tax incentives for people that use services or companies within their own borders of upwards of 15%. So that creates some incentives. But then you have to evaluate,

well, if we do set this up locally and have this team locally represent us, naturally we would have to give them a part of the proceeds and would it even be worth the time and resources put into it? And at that point, it's still just using Slush Bowl because we'd be signing the blocks and the whole backend infrastructure would be us anyways. So why not just have a rep or two in that locale

to push for use of Slush Pool? And especially with stuff like V2 and job negotiation, if that catches on, the need for a pool, like a ton of pools spread out across the world is diminished significantly. Yeah, that would be a great place to get to. That's what I talked about with Ethan Barrow when he was on the podcast,

the fact like you alluded to like people like oh we're gonna distribute hash but a lot of the big pools most of the hash rate as dictated by pools is still in china oh yeah i mean good luck with that right like uh when i always think it's kind of funny it's kind of cute when these guys are like we're trying to start a new pool and we want to we want you to help us do it because we have you know 50 peta hash and we're going to take the market by storm in north america because of all our connection it's like this is not going to be lucrative for you guys right like the the the fee structures and the business is so competitive at this point that i really it just demonstrates that you don't really know what you're getting into if you're making statements like that

yeah and that brings us back to the point made earlier is like will a north american mining pool be brought to fruition via a miner or something like an exchange like coinbase i hate to say it but they're probably more incentivized to do something like that than kind of worrying considering the uh their recent cozying up to regulatory bodies and the irs and you know it's can use can use a better example like river.com river financial or something like that um well i mean there's an there's an opportunity i think like we discussed before that some people that get into mining are going to be required or demand of themselves to enter into some sort of kyc aml pool i don't know how much that demand is currently and i think if

those pools do show up soon that they won't take off or gain any traction for quite some time and the only way i see it making sense or being a viable move is if you have an extensive network of miners already and a massive amount of hash rate yourself and you're not intending for the pool to be any real source of like you know revenue stream or main line of profit for your business um and you're just solely setting it up to leverage other services or products that you want to offer the miners um because in the end you know all the newest pools set up are pps pools which require a large reserve to start up right generally you don't want to do anything less than 1000 BTC in reserve. And there's a fairly large percentage chance that that it could

be depleted if you don't have the best luck within like a 365 day period, not talking about even operational costs at all. And then on top of that, you're entering into a market that as we said, has already well, well into its race to the bottom and fees. So it's not like you're going to be able to convince some large miners to come on and pay a premium for the reduction in variance to them, but in fact that you're going to be stuck paying them what they

can get on the market, which is extremely low right now. So, your margins are going to be razor thin to begin with, and as soon as anyone sniffs out that you're doing this, they're going to be seeking out your customers. Yeah.

It's ruthless. Ruthless capitalism. yeah bitcoin is bringing it to the world good stuff it's beautiful it's fun never a boring day never never a boring day so now we can finally get to outside of mining like what is exciting you obviously we we talked about bitmex before we hit record let's pour some out for bitmex still reeling that's uh uh are the regulators trying to clamp down will bitcoin survive into the future kind of get over the hurdles put forth i've never been concerned over bitcoin survivability i'm super bullish long term on it but uh i mean kind of like what i mentioned before

uh the podcast started i don't think anyone is shocked that something like this happened i think it was just a matter of when and which exchange and i think it'll probably happen to more um but outside of mining god outside of mining i like history that's fun um as you probably could tell from the random 17th century spiel about a mint being developed in new england um uh outside of mining yeah just reading relaxing as much as possible which isn't going so well i to just get back from portugal that was fun but right now i gotta be honest my my life is pretty consumed with bitcoin and all things mining it really kind of drags you into it in many respects but um yeah i mean the beer's good in prague i had my fair share of that yeah i was meaning like

outside i wasn't even meaning outside of bitcoin outside of mining like within bitcoin you're excited about like anything going on a lightning uh dlcs how sad is that you're like what do you what do you like outside of bitcoin i'm like uh cheese free freaks god no all right it's a huge cheese enthusiast all you freaks out there as marty calls you cheese is the devil's food and it should never be consumed it's the most disgusting thing on the face of the planet and it's probably the thing i miss most about living in china is never having to say please no cheese on that i i vehemently disagree jesus a gift from god get a gift from the bacterial gods awful for you tastes like garbage you know do i need to go on

it's stinky most of the time terrible i love that i mean how could you travel try like spain portugal and not get get some get some cheese with your jamon like just sipping seems like blasphemy seafood man it's the way to go some mussels some lamb chops oh actually i had paella for dinner last night lobster clam shrimp delicious did you have any paella when you were in uh portugal it's some crackling skin like suckling pork oh really nice with like some sweet potato puree and and uh i've never drank so much wine in my life just because the beer is so garbage over there i do not like it finishes like rubbing alcohol do not recommend super buck or portuguese beer and in fact the portuguese do not recommend

their own beer so just try to uh stay away from it if you can do they not serve imperial there either uh no i just saw super buck everywhere i know they have two different they only really have two brands in portugal but i just saw super bach pretty much everywhere i went and coming from the czech republic the beer mecca of the world it was a real disturbing change of pace yeah yeah it's pretty sipping on riojas or mainly green wine uh so actually the farm i grew up on in in california is half of it got turned into a vineyard when i was about like eight or 10 years old and uh so i've been probably dipping into that juice a little bit earlier than i should have uh growing up and it's uh the reds are always by far my favorite like the really strong

pinots or zinfandels cabernet is always really good but a lot of fun memories from a kid stomping on the grapes and doing the little parties like that yeah the uh the wife and i were thinking about a trip to sonoma in january we're a big fan of wine country california wine country specifically you should check out san luis obispo it's uh there's a ton of wine grapes there that have been planted in the last 10 to 15 years because of extra demand and um generally what they do is they start making their all their own wine now but before when there have been dry seasons or droughts in napa there's still a ton of demand for their wine so what they'll do is they'll go search throughout California's central coast

to purchase the grapes. And then, of course, that drives up the grapes massively. You can charge like two to three times the price you normally would. So there's not a whole lot of central coast wines during those times. But in fact, the wines in Sonoma and Napa for like a good five-year period were all coming from different parts of California because of some drought. Interesting. I wonder if the fires this year will be affecting that market as well.

Oh, undoubtedly. It's been absolutely horrible. I've been monitoring that a little bit from across the pond and it really kind of bummed me out when I saw that it was hitting some of the national parks because I just remembered, you know, those were pretty much vacations exclusively growing up was going to camp in Sequoia National Park or Gurley Creek or any of the other various, you know, Big Sur, the beautiful redwoods of California and the Pacific Northwest. it's a it's a shame that a lot of it burnt down but the good news right the silver lining is that the largest of the sequoia trees are generally fire resistant and a lot of them survived so there still remain a lot of the five to eight yeah five to eight thousand year old trees that's crazy what's your solution for the forest fires everybody's throwing their head in

the ring is it uh is it land management is it controlled burns well I mean controlled burns are always important I mean Native Americans were doing controlled burns for you know thousands of years in north america uh to great effect so i'd say controlled burns should always be present and um i mean just being extra cautious and taking extra steps as a forest service as individual citizens as cities to um just be hyper aware during dry seasons and droughts has been the case recently because you know no matter

how much forage management and controlled burns you do when you've had a dry couple years the smallest thing can make it go up like a you know tinderbox the gender reveal party yeah that's right that caused one of the big fires that's absolutely insane

right stop it with the gender reveal parties nobody gives a fuck please as somebody who's had as somebody who's had a child and did not know the gender until my son entered this world

I highly recommend it it's the best surprise you'll ever get the gender reveal parties are worth it seems like I'll make a party out of anything if you can commercialize it and make some money off of it why not

it's disgusting disgusting fiat culture like whoring out your kids before they even enter the world you get a bunch of free stuff right strollers and there's up the baby showers i'm not sure yeah the baby i don't have a kid so not too familiar with the baby accessory uh market is the industry it's not a market set it's a whole full-blown industry people are making out like goddamn bandits it's ridiculous i always hear people complaining about diaper prices are those insane as i hear i i believe so my wife handles all that um i i just check it on amazon every once in a while

and uh yeah it's a first world privilege right there i don't even know um the the uh we have i guess uh there's an actress i'm trying to think she's in saving sarah marshall um forgetting sarah marshall forgetting sarah marshall yes saving private ryan and the uh the collab you weren't expecting sarah marshall goes to war but the actress i forget her name she has like a diaper company and they're like the cheapest on the market and they're they're cool she's apparently uh on a vendetta against huggies to bring down the diaper empire. Jeez, what an empire to take down.

Yeah. Huggies. Not for long. Not for much longer. Do you guys have like a bell that goes off every time you mind a block in your office? That's a great idea, though, now that you've mentioned it.

No, we don't. I'm sure a couple of the other offices in the building would get annoyed if we did. but yeah that's a good idea um yeah oh god some music starts playing we all have to get up and dance like the people at the ice cream shops yes turning slush bowl into a stone cold uh ice cream place whatever their stone cold parlor what about you what's going on with gam i'm just trying to lock up gas deals oh yeah plug in as much machines as possible as many

machines as possible uh now we're perfecting our container design we just built um we just finished a couple containers this week and um they're the best we've built to date and we're also working on some immersion when we get into west texas to do that cool you need you need successful immersion system so we're designing that out um and it's that again yeah it's fun And I'm the idiot of the company who is just forward-facing. And the ability to interact with our engineers is, I feel, incredibly fortunate. The stuff that they're working on feels very cutting-edge. And they're some of the smartest people I've worked with ever in my life.

And so just being able to learn from them. You have a chemical and mechanical engineer on staff. to just get into these deep conversations about physics and chemical engineering. It's like, well, because with what we're doing in the oil fields, we're dumping these containers off in very harsh environments. So you don't want to take into consideration

the factors outside of the container that affect the inside of it, which is airflow and wind, dust particle and stuff like that. We can totally sympathize with that, being some of the forward-facing guys and hearing some of the devs and engineers speaking at the company. It's just completely over my head half the time.

What the hell is going on? Some of the really nuanced, deep parts of the tech still just completely escape me. Some parts of the firmware or some hardware plays we're doing or some parts of V2, but it's just a constant learning process as you go along. No, it is, and I feel extremely fortunate to be a part of this journey with Great American Mining specifically.

Yeah, so we've been doing a weekly webinar catered towards oil and gas industry folks who want to learn more about Bitcoin and mining specifically, and that's just been a fun experience seeing how people in the energy sector view Bitcoin and are beginning to become more curious about it. and it feels like synapses are beginning to fire in the oil and gas industry in regards to Bitcoin mining.

So it's just exciting to see people having aha moments and being like, oh my God, this could be huge for us. It's actually, it's been fun. Personally, I think it's the most interesting part of Bitcoin mining, the whole oil and gas sector. It's just like the benefits of it, how untapped it is, the just the awesomeness of something like oil and gas meeting up with bitcoin um you know it's

it's remote uh some people having to get on like lte sim networks uh satellite internet and how how much some of their operations need to be customized as a result of their environment they mine in it's really interesting yeah yeah we're we're paying attention to starlink um interested to see if elon could deliver on that uh that's satellite internet because honestly if it does work the way they think it may be able to it would definitely help us out in the middle of north dakota these far off places that are are near cities with better internet connections what are you using for your internet currently we have satellites satellite internet um but uh something like startling successful would make it much much better

bandwidth gotta get bus on your machines with a proxy reduce your data consumption like 40 what are you doing marty well edward that's why we're having a call next week um yeah when when what's minor we're gonna keep bothering you with that yeah it's uh We've had it exploited for a while, meaning we're inside the machine. It's unlocked. We have root access. And it's pretty much mostly reverse engineered at this point. The last remaining task, which honestly, when we're not super close to the date it's released, I don't even ask the devs for a deadline anymore because it's so impossible to get an accurate estimate.

um but the last thing we're working on now is uh basically porting over boss miner support into the what's minor and it's a lot smoother and quicker now with the ant miners because once you do one everything becomes much easier on the other models after that there's a lot of similarities in some of the architecture but with um a completely new line of machines it takes a little extra time but um i'm pretty sure it should be 2020 or potentially the beginning of 2021 when we start pumping out the uh m20s and m30s firmware um i'm gonna hold you to that yeah i mean that that's the best estimate i've heard which means you know who knows anything could happen maybe it's a little sooner maybe it's a little later than that but uh don't don't include that part on the podcast i

want to be held accountable well edward if you listen to this podcast you know i don't edit i actually have to remind myself uh i have to edit out a pee break in a in a podcast i can't forget that it'll just be two minutes of dead air this is my editorial process right now i was just reminding myself on the go and so i'm definitely going to forget that you you don't want that included in the episode so tough luck uh um yeah man it's been fun yeah thanks for having me on it's been uh a fun conversation i felt like i rambled a little bit there but i had a good time this podcast is just one large ramble so

pop in between four more pools v2 cheese cheese 17th century new england and a brain gets a little scrambled. Probably mess something up in there. I mess stuff up all the time, so I'm not going to hold it against you. Beautiful. Maybe your boss as well. Is there anything, any parting notes,

any final thoughts you want to get out there before we wrap up here? Let's see here. I guess just come check us out and what we're doing. Brains, we got a mining pool called Slush Pool, as most of you probably know. We have pretty sweet firmware called Brains OS Plus

that makes your machines more profitable and also gives you zero pool fees if you use it in conjunction with us. We have some actually other exciting projects coming out in the near future that you should keep an eye on. And yeah, just interact with us whenever you see fit. If you have any questions, reach out. available in the twitter sphere and all that but um just to end thanks again marty and it was a

real pleasure having the conversation with you the pleasure was all mine edward and i really love your twitter handle you can follow edward on twitter at will hash number four coins will hash four coins the number four um very very uh very fitting considering your line of work yeah it didn't take long for me to think of that one i was like i know what i'm gonna do i didn't really use twitter before i got into uh to mining it's a new thing to me um but it's a dirty place it's a dirty place it is a really dirty place isn't it you're you're clean pretty face should stay away from this whole environment it's uh i i get angry at myself for getting too drawn into twitter everyone's screaming at each other and memeing each other and shitting on each other very few seems that very few people

are happy on twitter oh no no i doubt many are um all right i'm gonna go get angry on twitter go to the bathroom i've been drinking tea during this whole interview and i haven't peed so i'm about to burst well well enjoy that relief i will thank you for coming on and uh yeah keep crushing it man i'll uh i'll definitely see you in the mining channels that we that we bump into each hell yeah all right and so we got peace and love freaks