TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #347: The next chapter of Slush Pool with Jan Čapek

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Jan Čapek, co-founder of Braiins, to discuss the transition away from Slush Pool and everything going on in the mining world. Follow Jan on Twitter Follow Braiins on Twitter Learn more about Braiins Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data CrowdHealth TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what is up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce rip 347 i sat down with this man right here yon capuch chapik chapik god damn it thank god he was here thank god he was here to uh correct me yon chapik very good co-founder of brains we talked a lot about a lot you think it's worth listening to i think so all right go listen to it freaks okay this was brought to you by our good friends at unchained capital right down the hall from me here in the austin bitcoin commons and the bitcoin austins and bitcoin austins bitcoin commons in austin texas it's early it's not early anymore it's like almost 11 here so i should be awake. Unchained Capital is awake. Awake and securing, helping you secure your Bitcoin by

helping you eliminate single points of failure. As we've seen over the last many months, there is certainly single points of failure risk out there, especially if you're giving your Bitcoin to centralized custodians who are then lending it out on the back end to people who are taking crazy risks that end up losing your Bitcoin. Unchained is here to help you mitigate that risk, to help you mitigate these central points of failure. They do this by leveraging Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties. Nothing exemplifies this more than their Volt product, which is a two or three multi-sig where you hold two keys, Unchained holds one. As long as you have your two keys, you're going to be able to move your Bitcoin as you see fit. If you're ever in a pinch,

Unchained is there to be the second in the two or three multi-sig. If you're high net worth individual if you're a business if you're a humble sat stacker with a considerable stack i would consider highly consider engaging with unchained capital you have single points of failure at the centralized custodian level and then also if you're just holding your bitcoin on a single sig wallet that's a single point of failure as well if you lose that wallet and the backup your sol the two or three multi-sig vaulted on chain offers helps you mitigate that single point of failure you distribute that risk out if you want to figure out how to get onboarded onto the unchained vault they have a very high class white glove service where they'll take you

from zero to understanding multi-sig to understanding the vault to interacting with the vault and putting sats in it eventually go to www.unchained.com slash concierge to connect with their concierge team to get on board and onto a vault. Tell them the TFTC sent you. This rip was also brought to you by our good friends at Brains. Breaking news. Not breaking anymore. It happened

yesterday, but Brains is a team behind Slush Pool, which is the oldest mining pool in Bitcoin's history. They're rebranding Slush Pool from Slush Pool to Brains Pool. They're bringing the whole Brains brand and all their products under

the brain's name they have what will soon to be brains pool which is a mining pool for your hashing and you're looking for a a pool that has exemplary service exemplary reputation consider pointing your hash at brains pool i'm like mentally beginning to remind myself not to say slushable it's going to be hey slut slush is an incredible brand it'll be remembered uh throughout the annals of Bitcoin history forever. Turning the page, new chapter, Brainspool. You also have BrainsOS Plus firmware. If you have an ASIC that is compatible

with BrainsOS Plus firmware and you're not using it, you are an idiot. You're leaving sats on the table. Only idiots leave sats on the table. Don't be an idiot. Idiot proof yourself. Download BrainsOS Plus firmware. Go to brains.com, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com.

Check out their BOS Plus page. Find out if your ASIC is compatible. And if it is, I highly recommend you download it. If you have BrainsOS Plus firmware and you point your hash at the Soon to Be Brains pool, you're going to get 0% pool fees. If you want to learn more about the benefits of that firmware, I recorded an episode with Edward Evenson a couple weeks ago in which he described it at length. I'm also going to be sitting down with the co-founder of Brains tonight, Jan Kapic.

And that episode will be out immediately after this one. So be on the lookout for that. Brains.com. B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com. this group is also brought to you by our good friends at HODL HODL HODL HODL is here to bring you a lending platform that leverages Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties as well

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They have a link to my episode with Andy Scroonover, the CEO of CrowdHealth that we recorded a few months ago. Highly recommend you check it out. I'm a CrowdHealth user. That's how I'm paying for health care for my family. It's important to mention if you use the code TFTC at checkout, the first thousand members of the Bitcoin community you're going to get $100 or excuse me, $99 a month for the first six months. That's a good discount. Go check it out and enjoy this rip. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If 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. Jan, it's been, gosh, it's been what, three years? I think three years. Since you and Pavel were in the studio in Brooklyn?

Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. I mean, I've seen you since then, but how have you been for the freaks out there? well it's been very intensive few years we did a lot of stuff on the rents os side i mean and it it feels like yesterday i mean this is not three years to me it's like a week a week of development is gone and we have a few more products we were uh yeah the three of us we

were talking about stratum b2 back then before it was even stratum b or no it was iterating on what Mac Rallo had before Stratum V2. That was the beginning of the discussion of the BetterHash versus Stratum V2. And then we actually invited Matt to help

us with certain aspects of the protocol. Yeah, so those were the times when we were like accepting the whole concept of the V2. Maybe that's a good place to start. I was gonna start with when, what's minor, but we'll get to that later what is the uh the status of surrounding b2 i mean you guys have it implemented in bos plus okay so we've been uh actively uh using it uh with with brain source plus so it's available

and we have the service endpoint running on our pool um what is good is that there is actually a group of independent developers sponsored by Spyler, I think. And they basically wanted to take over the open source initiative so that we have an independent implementation aside of the one that we have originally published, which I find

very positive because our original implementation was a proof of concept and considering the experience that we made with all the security aspects of the protocol that we have introduced not too many people know but we

have basically used noise protocol framework this is essentially what's behind the scenes when you use Signal or even WhatsApp so it's the modern way how you how you do crypto cryptography um yeah so i'm happy it's actually happening that we have more open source developers out there that are not associated directly just with us

and are willing to work on uh on the protocol uh they do have reference implementation now and now i think there's going to be a new website for stratum v2 started, we actually gave them the domain for that. So we'll see how they perceived all that stuff. That's big of you to just give away a domain like that.

Well, we keep the domain, but we will host the content. That's the plan. So stratumprotocol.org would contain the full open source initiative. So for any freaks who didn't listen to our first episode and are hearing

our conversation now three years later what are the benefits of stratum v2 as it's currently implemented implemented in uh brains os plus how's that how's it going okay so it's running over a secular layer so essentially all the all the communication is encrypted and the integrity of the communication is checked so if anybody intercepts the communication the protocol is essentially going to fall apart it's going to detect it then it has efficiency improvements In terms of we have switched the protocol from a textual, very verbose form that the original Stratum V1 was using. It was JSON format. So we switch it over to binary and the payloads are just the pure data, no verbose chitting of the protocol.

In terms of the efficiency, the protocol is ready also to improve the empty block issue, let's say, that some people like to talk about. um in a way that essentially uh the server is able to propose you uh like an alternative block candidate and you as a miner can actually start mining on this alternative candidate when a new block is found in the network as long as the pool essentially confirms it that this is the valid template that you can still use because um when a new block is found it takes seconds and seconds to generate a new template to collect a new set of transactions so essentially this could eliminate some of some of these uh aspects and let's say reduce the number of empty blocks but i don't i don't really think that the empty blocks are really really an issue but let's just uh uh try

to make things as efficient as possible. Last but not least, on the server side, the protocol is more favorable also towards the server load. So essentially you can either handle more connections or you can allow miners to submit their results more often.

So that means reduced variance in their rewards. That's pretty much it. Yeah. I mean... We can speak about transaction selection if you want. One of the concepts in the protocol is that we have proposed that miners can actually prepare their own block template. And if it's approved by the pool, they can actually mine on it in the meantime. time. So it's like a security feature where if we are facing some censorship problems,

like transaction censoring, miners could actually fight this problem by choosing their own transactions. However, it's important to say the B to this story, and that is if you potentially have a pool that would be doing transaction filtering and censorship uh chances are they such a pool will not be willing to participate in the transaction selection protocol on the minor side so they won't broadcast that block they they will not basically provide that as a service because it's like an alternative part of the of the mining service where you have an alternative channel where you negotiated okay i have generated this block template i'm already mining on it but please can you check that this this template is in line with what you think is the right template

because um you know the pool typically collects the reward from the from from each block that is mined and that means uh it at least has to verify that the block template that you propose is not mining into your own pocket but it's mining to to the to the pool wallet uh and And then the rewards are eventually evenly distributed among the miners, which is the purpose of the pool, to reduce the variance and have the rewards spread throughout the time evenly. Is that a relatively easy process? It's just a quick check to make sure that they're not sending...

It's like one of the checks. I mean, you could probably look for... I mean, technically, there could be other flaws in the block template that could make it invalid, right? What are some of those? What if you mess up the end time in the block template? So it's almost valid, but if you try to submit such block, if the end time is shifted by more than two hours,

it could be a bug and not an intentional. So then essentially such a miner is essentially doing block withholding, even though it's not intentional. So there's like more checks. So it has to be valid, not just in terms of not mining into your own pocket, but also other features. End time transactions have to be valid, obviously.

Right, right, everything. So it's not just that. When you think this gets... I mean, obviously you mentioned Spiral Team's got a bunch of open source developers. Does there still need to be that merge in the core? Correct. Correct. There is actually an aspect of the protocol that we need to have in the Bitcoin core. And that's related to the block template negotiation.

And that requires changes or extensions to the core. and as far as I know they do have a merge request or pull request ready for Bitcoin Core and the way they want to do it is they have they have written it in Rust and they want to link it together

with the C++ code base Rust is hot right now oh yeah it is why is everybody going to Rust I think we have come to a point where the former C programmers

are looking around for a language for their future projects and the C programmers were typically from the operating system environment or they have been hacking some embedded systems like low-level stuff

with all the problems that come with a language like C where you can make different null pointer problems, memory leaks and stuff like that. so it's generally not a memory safe language and Rust essentially

provides a memory safe environment where you can still have buggy programs that would be like leaking memory but the compiler takes care of a whole bunch of undefined behavior

issues that you could introduce in a C-based program but through Rust the compiler just takes care of it so essentially the outcome of the code is uh safer and typically works out of the box so to me or to us as the company rust is the language that we use for all our existing projects what's actually even neat about the language is that it goes from like low level embedded systems like the firmware on the miners and scales up to the servers and you can share the same code base. So for example

for BrainsOS the protocol implementation for Stratum V2, it exists only in one implementation and we use it on the server side as well as in the firmware. So the testability integration and everything is

much more simple. Significantly better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like seeing this transition towards Rust. We had the guys building Fetiment earlier today and they were describing they're building that project on Rust and saying it's just

much more modular and efficient and a powerful language. I would say the language itself is a very nice environment to work in, but what the Mozilla Foundation put into

this is a tremendous effort and experience of all the developers from the past ages. The typical problem of any C developer is the build system like you can write code but like when you find somebody else's code like how are you going to integrate it it's not

impossible it is easy but you have to have your own build system or you have to somehow be compatible with their build system it's just you know it's like the the variety of how people build C based

projects is so big that it just makes it a little bit more difficult to integrate third party code But with Rust, the language comes with a nice build system and a packaging system. So you can even run and have a program that is using two different versions of the same library. And it's perfectly doable. And it's like a huge ecosystem. So when you find somebody else's code that's published on Crate's I.O. and you like it, you just say, okay, I want to use it.

And it just comes in. And people who, for example, work with Java, they're used to this because they have these Maven build systems and all these kind of things. But in compiled languages like C or C++, this has no precedence. Even in C++, there is no single standard how you would build your applications and how you publish your library code that would be compatible with somebody else's. I mean, they always can take just the source code and use it, but that's very time-consuming, especially if the code base that you're trying to use from a third party is complex.

Then implementing your own way how you're going to build it is a waste of time. Because you have to go and build it. Right, right, right. And you have to write scripts and make or whatever build system you're going to use, but it's just not a unified environment. So you're going to waste time.

And when that third-party code updates, that means you still have to update the way you build the code. Yeah, it doesn't seem very efficient or scalable. And I mean, this all is sorted out with Rust. So that's another aspect for me personally as a developer that I find very attractive to use that language. Yeah, and there's people working on a core implementation of Rust too, right? Oh yeah, I mean, the Rust Bitcoin initiative is pretty big.

So essentially, if you wanted to, you can technically build a Bitcoin node just from Rust components. I'm sure they already exist. The problem is that, from what I heard, it's... And I haven't been following the development for probably like past two years, but it's not still recommended because the reference implementation is the C++ one. um so you may end up having what we call a bitcoin note but it may have certain behaviors that could be different from from the c++ implementation is there so is there a future in which the rust implementation becomes a reference implementation or uh i'm not sure

about this but we can have matt to explain this matt can you tell us matt please please if you're listening out there i know you're listening sir yeah but it's fascinating seeing all this development going on and since the last time we spoke i want to talk a lot about what you guys are building and brains is a holistic company um you you've got the firmware brains os plus firmware you've got uh which implemented strand v2 which we just talked about obviously you've got the pool which is being uh renamed to brains pool come september you can talk about that as well you've got the farm management system that you built uh for people running mining farms um you've got the the dashboard at insights.brains.com and disclaimer brains is a sponsor of the podcast

and uh uh you just came out with a beetle bone update for anybody running guest 19 it seems like You guys are very busy in many different parts of the mining arena. Well, probably like three years ago, we were thinking like what would be the overall concept of where we're headed with the company. We're thinking, okay, we're stuck with the pool, but we should think about the whole mining industry. Like what do they need?

And if you're able to come up with like a full software stack with like a full set of mining tools. and when you look at like what the existing mining firmware for example the machines provides it hasn't changed in the past i don't know five six years it's still the same it's it's a firmware with a cg miner with an api but how does it scale how can you think about your farm as a cluster of machines like what is the support and the stock firmware for for running these machines and like managing them monitoring them there's like nothing right most farms actually are forced to develop their own solutions and there are third-party solutions for management and

monitoring but it's still a little bit twisted because there's no direct support in the firmware so we decided okay let's let's change this in the firmware and we started adding like standard features in BrainsOS firmware so that when you take standard monitoring tools, you can actually get the metrics from the firmware running. So an outcome of it is, for example, the dashboard for the farm monitoring, which is an example use case where we show how it can look like, but the technology that's behind that can be customized by any mining farm that has smart developers or if sorry that sounds that doesn't sound correct that has people who can add beyond is an elitist i really meant that um if you want

to look for developers or devops engineers that know standard toolings it's much easier than if we look for generic people and tell them, oh, you have to now write some code to grab metrics from stock firmware that just doesn't do it in any standard way. So we try to go and show that there should be some kind of standardization, not like enforcing it, but showing that the product can actually have standard interfaces that everybody who is used to writing applications that are deployed in cloud, for example, these applications are monitored in a standard way.

Most of them have Prometheus endpoints to grab the metrics and all these kind of things. So we decided we want to go down this path. And how's the reception from your customers been with this? We just announced it. uh where was it uh on bitcoin 2022 and like the people were really interested and essentially i had a talk with a few customers and like you would feel the synergy like oh finally somebody is doing something in a standard way so that we can like approach the problem from from both ends like the

farm wants to do the monitoring but they don't want to develop everything they want to use standard tools and we want them to we want them to have a standard interface of the mining firmware and so that's what we are trying to do like we can provide even the tooling in the form of a dashboard but it's an example like what it can look like but you can have completely different dashboard if you don't like this one but you don't have to like develop it from scratch because you you have standard tools that you can build off yeah yeah yeah and you don't this doesn't only work with brains os plus compatible asics right you can use it for uh we actually uh now have a tool that would allow also the stock firmware to be included yes so that would be something we

would be showing in mining disrupt hell yeah which is this week yeah a little break here to ask how you're doing you traveled all across the world you're here in austin you're going to miami how you feeling uh right now a bit jet lagged because you got in here like 8 p.m last night or something i had a i had a very adventurous uh transfer at jfk i had like one hour to get through the immigration customs and get on another plane so when i got on the plane like the ladies were just giving me water and paper towels because I was sick. I felt like people, when they saw me,

like, oh, you've been running? I've been sweating for like an hour. JFK is one of the most treacherous airports in the world. But the ridiculous part was that once I got on the plane, the plane would be literally sitting at the airport for another hour and a half because they couldn't close the door.

They couldn't close the door? Yeah, so actually there was no rush. it's not very confidence inducing hey we're about to take off just give us a an hour and a half to close the door well they closed the door in like 20 minutes but then you know they lost the slot that where they could take off and it was like 20 airplanes before us so we lost like hour and a half and i think i had probably like extra hour because of this i would still be able to get on the plane maybe i don't know hey you got a workout in okay a traveling workout is hard to come by

so you gotta come in and then let's talk about slush pool and there's a lot of people who are a bit perturbed online saying why are you guys moving away from slush pool it's so historic, it's so iconic transition to brains pool

but this is a move that you guys sort of have to do, right? right, let's not call it a transition rebrand It's a combination of a few things. Basically, a few years ago when we bought the share and the last remaining share in the pool from Slush himself,

one of the conditions was that eventually after two years, we have to give back the Slush pool brand, not in terms of like it's going to be used somewhere else, but like we can't use it commercially. But at the same time, nobody is going to wipe out any history. So all the history of the pool is going to be present in our website. The original website is going to redirect to the new one. The mining URLs are going to stay the same.

We're going to add new URLs with the brains pool in the name. And we can use them indefinitely because we actually own the slash pool domain. So we're going to keep the domain. We're not allowed to use it for web presentation, essentially. But the whole story about the Slash Pool and the history, how we started developing the pool and so on, is still going to be there. So everybody can read up on that. So from user perspective, nothing really changes except for that title. So if you guys saw the animation, that's really what it is.

Christian's been pumping the animation. We're going to put it in the newsletter soon. yeah it's uh i mean yeah what do you have to say about like uh the it's a part of the history that's uh we're closing let's say a certain um a chapter chapter and starting a new one um i would say that christian he did a tremendous amount of work in building the brains brand and i think at this stage uh i'm confident that it's not going to cause any any significant harm or no it shouldn't be any any issue in general no i think brains is one of the iconic brands in the industry right now um blue chip if you will what do you what do you think of my ad reads where i

go brains is that it's i'm trying to get the stick in people's heads i think it's working Actually, any time I hear that, I remember when the first time I heard you saying this was in New York, in Brooklyn, in 2019. Trying to make it stick. People wake up and they just hear brains. They're like, all right, I got to go check my mining operation. And then you guys are coming out with a suite of books. I'm proud.

I'm honored. We have the first Bitcoin mining handbook here. I was asked to write the foreword and like you said you said thank you I'm going to return the thanks because I was extremely flattered and honored to write the foreword to this book so you guys are getting out there on the education side

this is only the first book you guys are writing we actually do have a whole marketing branch of the company called Brains Publishing and we do translations to the Czech language because there's not too many books being published in our native language so we want

you know, a little bit raise the awareness of Bitcoin and the whole problems in the financial world. We have translated Bitcoin Standard and other books. And I think this is the

this is actually the first English book that Dan and the company wrote. Yeah. And it's a good one. I mean. Yeah, I like it. I like it a lot. And thanks for forward yeah and thank you for asking me to write it i'm again i'm honored uh good memes in this book too you guys are looking for good mining memes they're they're in here uh you mentioned

raising awareness of bitcoin in uh czech republic what what is the bitcoin scene outside of brains like uh within within the country um overall i would say we're still facing this um like banking issues like generally like banks i don't know what the situation in the us is but banks in the czech republic are like super super paranoid about any transaction related to this uh and like there's no way you can like explain oh you have i have alleged business and like this is no money laundering or anything so they typically tend to close accounts to companies and individuals who are anyhow associated with bitcoin i specifically don't say crypto but they they label it as crypto like crypto is something that they don't want to understand or they maybe they're scared of

so this is a big issue and that's one of the reasons like why why we run the publishing because we want to explain that there is a space uh in the world for for for this whole movement and there's a good reason uh and that all the economic or economical changes that we're seeing inflation uh are not just a random thing they're a result of of uh what the central banks have been doing for the past couple years or tens of years and we want people to realize that something is not uh the way it should be uh but at the same time if if we kind of keep this narrative it doesn't improve our situation because then it could scare the banks as well yeah so but we will keep doing it but you'd think like the government of the czech republic you guys go

to them be like hey we're one of the the blue chip companies in the space in your country like come on we're not we're not quite there yet i would say all right yeah and you're a humble man you're there okay well i will work on that um i would say the attitude of the government towards bitcoin or generally uh is not negative so there is at least a situation back home is that i see a big contradiction between like government generally uh accepts um any business activities related to Bitcoin or general crypto, let's say.

But the biggest issue is still the banking. The banking, yeah. Which I find ridiculous. Is that EU-related or Czech-specific? I think these issues are generally all over Europe, but as long as

you have a legit business, you typically have no issue opening a bank account and using it for transecting with your exchange or whatever outside of the Czech Republic. But within the Czech Republic, it's getting harder

and harder and harder. Interesting. What's the situation here? Can I go to Wells Fargo and open an account? No, probably not. There's very few banks. We've got Silvergate and Signature. We were in Nashville last week for the

Nash Bitcoiners meetup and there's a private bank in Nashville that's beginning to open up accounts. For our mining business, we had to go to a community bank and they were cool with opening an account for us. But when it comes to the major banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, all of them, I still think they're shying away from it as well. Okay. And the official reasoning that they give? It's Bitcoin. We don't want to know anything about it. We're scared. Yeah.

Okay. We don't want to touch it. I mean, we had a Bank of America account for the media brand, but we weren't really dealing it with, we don't deal with Bitcoin transactions, like giving Bitcoin their life. They call it Bitcoin transaction, but the only thing that hits the bank is the cash, right? Yeah.

This is what I never understood. Like they would say, oh, this is a crypto transaction. I was like, where's the crypto transaction? You just received some paper money, your paper funny monopoly money. Where's the crypto? So it's, that was handled somewhere else. Okay.

It's, yeah. I mean, we live in a clown world, Jan. I know. Don't expect these people to. No, it's not rational at all, but I'm just, and the problem is like, you can't defend yourself at all because it's the compliance that makes the decision and they will not tell you who the compliance is. And if you, if you can talk to the compliance department and explain or like defend yourself,

say oh these are my invoices and this is the bitcoin that i received that's fine right yeah you can amend this you can look at the ledger no no no it's it's uh yeah it doesn't work well now we're getting into like the overarching theme of just overburden some regulations globally particularly in the eu and the us i mean that that administrative state that compliance layer of everything that people building businesses have to deal with is completely insane and it's just a lag on the on the economy overall yeah um and it's getting worse i mean i mean the level of bureaucracy is getting worse and worse and worse yeah um we're just going to meme them to death though we're just going to make fun of these people and get into a circular economy that's

interesting too like do you like does slush pool have any aspects of his business that are fully like bitcoin circular economy that help you um when these banks are shooing you away well what what i have seen so far and we actually do use it when we acquire like testing hardware we never pay it in cash we pay it in bitcoin all the time because i mean transferring usd to china is close to impossible and because we need the testing hardware for development um and the amounts would be quite significant at the time

we just had to resort to this so this is what I would consider the economy right yeah no totally again Bitcoin we bought we bought the machines for Bitcoin because we need we need the development

some people in our company are paid partially in BTC if they decide to so yeah yeah contributing to the circular economy thank you brains uh but we have to do it because otherwise um there's no way to eliminate the problematic components from the system everybody knows what the problematic components are um yeah i mean that's it i mean why do i have to have some other

party deciding if i can make a transaction or not you shouldn't we should live in a free world it's It's 2022, freaks. It's time to destroy the clown world and stoke the circular economy. Speaking of the economy, let's talk about mining economics right now. Obviously, we're in a bit of a bear market in terms of Bitcoin price, and there's a lot of chaos in the Bitcoin mining markets. You have a lot of publicly traded companies over here in the US, Canada, and in Europe as well that are having to dump a lot of Bitcoin and dump a lot of ASICs.

We've had hash price hit a multi-year low at $0.08 last week. It's hovering around $0.11, I believe, right now. We've had three consecutive downward difficulty adjustments. Four of the last five adjustments have been downward adjustments. Price per terahash for top-of-the-line machines is ranging between $25 and $35 a terahash. It's pretty chaotic right now. What's your view of the mining market specifically in this particular cycle? i would say it's it's again a proof that the incentives how they've been set up or outlined

in the white paper work so you're not worried about a mining death spiral i'm not i'm not worried really either my i mean you would have at some point i mean in the last cycle when when we hit the 3000 right 3000 usd for bitcoin that was the time when the miners started capitulating and we probably will have some miners capitulating even now but that still means other miners are going to get more Bitcoin that compensates

for the loss in the exchange rate so I mean I'm not worried about this no I mean every time you would say oh is it going to work this time as well but I mean if not it's better to know now than in

10 years it works yeah it works if it fails it should fail now right because i don't want to waste my next 10 years with this 10 years we need you for like at least 30 so so 30 but yeah so the sooner bitcoin fails the better because we can do something else but i i'm kind of in doubts that it would fail because it still didn't succeed in failing it died how many times uh hundreds of times yeah it's it's still and a death spider in a way but do you think there's any particular lessons we're learning within this bear market compared to cycles of years past i would say people are less greedy

so even though they're stacking btc they would do better financial planning to get ready for for the waves that's actually brings up a good point too like hash rate futures and hedging products for miners. What are you seeing there? I think this is an area that I would like to have Pavel here because he can talk about this for hours. I'm an expert in this area. I definitely think that something should come to the market

and something should be available. You guys announced something related to this. We actually have been talking about this. but it's not in any state of material yet. Yeah. I would say, yeah. What are your side thoughts on this? I know you mentioned...

One thought on this, though. What I think should... At least that's my vision. If this ever happens, that would be pretty cool. And that would be the futures for not the mining hardware, but for the chips. Why do you say that? Well, if you think about the chips...

Do they not already exist with futures orders? But with the full hardware. Okay. But I was thinking... Ah, at the chip level. Because if you're at the chip level, then you can have multiple vendors. Like now you can make a future,

but you still have the three companies or two companies that produce the hardware. But if we eventually get to the point where the chips themselves are commoditized, and I may be wrong, maybe this would never happen because there's a big incentive not to sell like raw chips because the edit value that the where you make the most money is the full device right the markup on that yes you can have like significantly better markup but let's imagine this happen uh it would be

pretty cool because the chips are very similar to how you grow crops right you just can't make a chip uh in one day it takes time it's growing the silicon is growing the different layers and you just can't speed it up the process yeah so it's very similar so you have an estimate where when the chip is going to be ready but if there is for example a seismic activity so like like a micro earthquakes in in asia where some of the foundries are this affects the process because we're at such small dimensions where we're like any seismic active is it in English for seismic?

Seismic, yeah. Seismic, yeah, sorry. So when the earth moves it influences the manufacturing process and sometimes it screws up the chip the wafers. Really? So they have to redo it.

Really? Or they have to stop the manufacturing. So it's sort of like weather that has impact on growing crops. Here it's not weather but like geological processes have effect on manufacturing sometimes. I didn't know that.

I don't say always, but that's what I heard. Like they have to account for this. That's insane. I didn't know that. And then they redo the layers and it's fine. That's why I guess like when a seismic earthquake happens, I guess they're laser etching this

and maybe like throws the laser off a little bit and fucks up the whole chip. The wafer, yeah. Yeah. Wow. earthquakes affecting wafer delivery. We have COVID.

You don't have people, you know, working. That's another aspect. So, yeah, futures in this area would be very interesting. It's the same thing.

We don't have futures for bread, right? We have futures for the crops. Yeah. For the wheat. Wow. But maybe I'm too visionary

or it's never going to happen. You've got my mind running right now. We've been thinking about this many years ago but it has never been materialized

well maybe the market needs to get to a more mature state which is another interesting route to go down like we have foundries being spun up here in the United States one in Arizona one here in Texas not too far from where we're sitting right now we just learned that micro BT is going to be working with

Samsung and their 3 nanometer chips it seems like that foundry market maybe get more robust in the next 5-10 years well definitely there is demand for any kind of silicon even outside of bitcoin mining so i'm sure there's a strong incentive for more foundries to be built yeah and like what is the process of a foundry being built i i want to really stress to the freaks listening to this how capital and energy and time intensive it is

i would even say if you if you even have just the capital you will not be able like let's say you have the capital to to build the foundry billions of dollars yes uh i don't think you would be able to build it because nobody would sell you the technology what oh let's dive into this why is that yeah i think this is this is one of the problems trade secrets too yeah too valuable so so i don't think we will have eventually that we would have like more companies owning the foundries it would just be the same companies so they would just scale up yeah because foundries are like very controlled environments

right like when you're building them you need like crazy like air control when people are working in the foundries they're wearing insane suits like they're very delicate processes they even measure the number of dust particles in the air number like

in this room like you have probably like millions right or even more they're speaking about like single particles because one single particle can mess up a wafer probably not yeah I think it

does not and so what's your view on the state of the competition between Bitmain, MicroBT Kanon, all these players in the market it seems like has the dust settled after the

Jihan, McCree breakup is microbt gaining any market share any uh any quality share well it looks like it's that microbt is rising slowly you think so but overall majority of the machines are still made by bitmain yeah what is definitely visible is that all the manufacturers are really out of components and the supply chain problems. So you would see it on Bitmain producing hardware with one type

of control boards and then another type of control boards. So basically they're taking anything of the shell that's available and just assembling onto the PCBs. Yeah, this is what we were talking about before we hit record with the BeagleBand. The BeagleBand support and WhenWhat'sMiner.

Alright, you're the one who brought it up. WhenWhat'sMiner, sir. what's going on there I mean I believe I talked to Ed and you guys are focused on the newer generation what's miners

is that correct yeah we have upgraded the task and now it's it should cover the new gen

together with the the original M20s yeah what's I know this is a tough subject I know it's a tough subject I want to say something

it's not it's not well known but the the what's minor image is actually available for uh for downloads uh for the m20s but the installation procedure is a mess that's that's the problem what what's uh what's a mess with it uh the problem is that you have to be at a certain version of the stock firmware and then you're able to to install it so somebody would have to download like yes they would have to downgrade it uh and if you have a bigger farm that means you're running with an sd card around

the machines it's just a logistical nightmare yeah it's a logistical nightmare yeah so we have to come up with some uh being smarter when are when are these guys just going to be like all right we think that you guys can create better firmware we're going to let you do it i mean what i would envision uh is that we should oh okay to answer the question i don't know let's try to push them somehow, I don't know how though if I was a manufacturer

the way I would do it is that I would sort of take the same approach did you ever jailbreak an Android phone? Yes I have actually okay, so the way it's done on some of the cell phones is that

it's actually locked and you can put an alternative firmware on it But if you decide to unlock it, you explicitly agree with the manufacturer that the warranty is void, and they let you do it, and then the bootloader on the cell phone accepts an alternative firmware. but now the manufacturer can tell okay this cell phone has been unlocked in order to run an alternative firmware so that means the warranty is now void which gives at least an alternative for the owner of the device to let's say when your warranty expires and i don't know what the warranty in the u.s is in in europe it's like two years typically i don't know if it's one year here whatever when it expires it doesn't matter right so you can do whatever you want and some people

want to even take the risk during the warranty period. Because they are confident that the device is in a good shape. So that's an approach that I think would be generally acceptable within the industry.

And I would take it as a good practice. And what are the ASIC warranties like right now? Three years? I think it's like two, three years. Yeah. I mean, I've only seen like one year. Yeah. I'm trying to think

the reasoning behind why they wouldn't do this is well the official reasoning is that they want to protect the customer so you're protected by this but I don't want to be protected I want to take the risk

that's true but the problem is that they don't listen to this request I understand it but no I'm trying I'm trying to champion for you

right now I mean it is the firmware that you guys produce is incredible again in terms of like the

efficiencies what it does for fan speed sound management like it's it makes our biggest

nightmare is really the installation so if there's anybody out there who can

change this policy it would be really cool anybody anybody from MicroBT or Bitmain if you're listening and you think

that could be a competitive edge for one of them too like the first one to allow this could potentially gain a bigger market share because people would

want that feature the problem is sure I mean that's what I was thinking as well but at the same time if you think about

maybe maybe now the bear market is a good is a good situation but A few months ago, the manufacturers don't have to compete with each other, right? Just basically anything that you manufacture is sold right away.

It's even pre-sold before it's manufactured. So why would you make your life more complicated? Like, why would you implement some features that will... Oh, Amber Alert. if anybody if anybody sees an 11 year old black female

she was last wearing glasses a black and gray shirt black striped red letters multicolored sweatpants and Crocs she was last seen in a newer model gray pickup truck please call 911 we get these I got one in the morning

you did? that scared me because I don't know what it was you get them as soon as you get here? yeah it was my cell phone going off as well oh that was yeah

so I got one in the morning Imani I hope you're okay that was a poor taste I'm sorry but

yeah back to the firmware yeah it would be incredible if they could so there's no

incentive for that no still now maybe in this situation when there is when the demand goes down

but I still doubt because I think people they learned from their previous cycle and there's going to be still groups of people who will try to stack hardware in this situation

for the TerraHash price that is very favorable right now. Yeah, do you think that's a viable strategy, like buying at $25 of TerraHash and not even plugging them in just waiting for them to go back up to $50? I mean, because it was crazy. It was only a year and a half ago when people were predicting like $200 TerraHash price.

And now it's like one-eighth. So I would not dare to make a judgment in this because I'm not an economist this is something that you would need to model right I hate models

because they never work they never work no models never work and this is specifically specific to the mining industry where you get like a bunch of spreadsheets of like oh here's the model of my mining operation here's all profits never turns out to be the case

but shouldn't be the case that you actually once you have the model and if you see it doesn't work you should adjust the model so that the next time it just doesn't work in a different way okay models throw the models out

you just have like very wide sort of parameters like this could happen this could happen the modeling the models the models it's always the models throw the models out freaks um so in that case um with every cycle uh you get to a point where basically anything that can mine

that you can plug in becomes profitable is it but you would see it with every cycle right even in the previous cycle that let's say maybe ended uh the s9s speaking of s9 2016 or 17 when they were released 16 yeah so six year old machine was still on the edge of profitability which is dramatic thanks to your firmware thanks for the firmware yeah the s9 firmware works really well but i would also say it's thanks to the hardware because the s9 was were an exceptional piece of hardware yeah people refer to them as the ak-47 of the mining world yeah that's so good i never heard it but that's that's a good you never heard that one no no no oh yeah i love i love saying that and that's what who designed the s9 the gentleman who's uh the founder of of micro bt

right that's correct that's why i love the watts miner machines they are extremely durable beast in the field um they're actually the only machines i've ever personally run because i just at great American mining. We were running M20s in the oil field, and they were just tanks. Okay, so we're going to try and make you happy. Jan, it's not me.

I mean, I would be happy. I'm sorry. People DM me when what's mine. I'm like, hey, it's coming. Patience freaks. It's a virtue. That's the there was a point I mean

who knows how accurate it was but there was some non-data analysis like around 60,000 when Bitcoin

was at 60,000 that was saying that like S7s were even running that's quite impressive but I can imagine that in certain

electrical conditions that's probably BS still doable yeah as long as the space for you is not more valuable

for running other machines. Other machines. Yeah, that's a... There's a very nuanced science to running a mining operation, right? Like, the decision-making of going, like,

do I run S9s? Do I run top-of-the-line hardware? There's a lot of factors that go into those decisions. Rack space, something you just mentioned. Electricity price, obviously. Whether or not you have

firmware available. There's a bunch of variables to take into consideration if you're out there. Correct. Yeah. And what was I just going to say? I was going to say something. Start with the S7s.

The S7s, Watts Miners, M20s. I don't know where I was going to go. I completely lost my train of thought. But going back to what you guys are building at Brains, what are you most excited for moving forward? I think to me

the biggest and most interesting era is automation and generally the farm support. When we move from a single machine firmware and we already we are almost there with the monitoring and everything but when we move

to a point where you think of the farm really as of a cluster and the firmware has like like first class support for something like this so including the configurations including monitoring and all that kind of stuff so that's what i'm personally most excited about yeah and you so essentially when you when you will build when you build a mining farm

you would call brains and brains would send you a brains box and the brains box would just take care of everything yeah and Edward was on a couple weeks ago and he was telling me you guys are getting really involved like actually like flying to operations and helping them plug everything in yeah we have something called

we call a white glove service Essentially, we fly over to customer sites that are above a certain size and just help them with the installation procedures and setups and everything. What are the most common questions and problems that these bigger farms have? Typically, when we're speaking about Texas in these hot days, it's the dynamic power scaling or performance scaling not all the users are

really aware of this feature so they were like oh so what do I do with the firmware when it overheats and it would like sit for a couple hours until the machine cools down and then it would start over again but if you actually have the DPS configured

it can like step down to a different performance profile the only drawback is that it is very convenient to already have all these performance profiles pre-tuned so that any step down doesn't mean like it would start the tuning cycle. Yeah, that's a big, interesting variable with the mining industry.

A big part of it migrating down here to Texas is the heat and how to do with that. I mean, you see. Yeah, so this is one of the things that we typically are asked about like what to do. And so we're actually working on like making users aware of this that this feature is really there for this specific case yeah underclock when it hits 105 degrees and just yeah make sure you don't burn out your chips and then you see it on the manufacturer

side too they get bitmain and micro bt coming out with these water-cooled units um i think they're trying to front run this big migration to these these hotter areas to make sure that they're not selling machines to customers that then get burned out right that's probably the only way yeah and And especially, the hydro is very interesting also for this era in terms of the dust, right? Why do you say that? Because when you have immersion, you're still fighting the dust problem, right? The dust is getting into the oil. When you have air, then the fans are not very happy with the dust going through that.

With water cooling, that's a slightly different situation. Mitigated. Yeah. in a way what are your thoughts on water cooling versus immersion um interesting question um like overall the the hydro or water setup seems uh quite attractive but one drawback that i would see is that uh you're really indirectly cooling just the chips but how about the pcb how about the PSU and so on so

it could have different lifetime characteristics interesting for the particular components right, especially like capacitors, capacitors are typically the components on

any electronic device, if it fails okay sometimes you have some semiconductors failing like transistors, but typically where you're experiencing the most severe aging are the capacitors. And if you do overclocking and the machine is not running in a very favorable temperature conditions, it's the capacitors that are wearing out, basically.

And when they fail, the whole device is gone. And you can't replace them. Well, you can, but I mean, it's costly, right? I mean, you can replace them, but... It takes time. it takes time uh downtime you know and all these kind of things so um when when you have the full hash board immersed in oil it the cooling has different properties because you're actively taking heat away from components that you normally don't don't cool and if you have air cooling you

still have air blowing over these components as well whereas with the hydro you're just taking the heat away from the chips that are attaching the heat sink that has the water loop in it. But the other passive components, like specifically the capacitors, are not getting any special

treatment. So the question is, what is going to be the lifetime of these machines? But again, what is very attractive on the Hydro at the same time is that the setup seems much cleaner. Much cleaner.

yeah yeah because with immersion too like you have to have these huge and cheaper let's say you don't have thousands of usd and you know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands sometimes especially if you like have like a an oversized like heats water like water cooler and heat sink yeah like and and then another interesting variable of like immersion too is like if you have to repair a machine you take it out it changes the level of the immersion uh of the liquid in the tank which has externalities in and of itself yeah you can unload half of the machines from our tank because then your level would be low for the remaining machines yeah you have to like take one out and put like a 30 pound brick or like could you put like a 30 pound brick

in there or yeah i mean it's just about the volume yeah volume so you could have like plugs basically Yeah. That's what fascinates me about the mining space because there's so many engineering problems from the firmware level in the digital world and then in the physical world with all the physics that goes into it. Yeah, the physics is very interesting. Right. And you guys are experimenting with this. So you mentioned that you're buying machines to experiment. we're yeah we're we're uh buying machines to experiment with them we built our own small immersion systems to tweak the firmware for those conditions um yeah yeah it is needed because otherwise without this you can't easily develop yeah and then with immersion particularly like as soon as you get to a certain scale things get wonky i think that's

yeah that then it becomes different sport in what way in your opinion well it's like when you're running a single air-cooled machine and when you're running 1,000 of these machines then you have a completely different type of problems right you have to play with the hot ale and a cold ale and all these kind of things with air cooling and when the with the with the immersion you have to deal with with the water with the heat exchangers where you take the heat out of the oil and just distribute it somewhere else so you you build a whole new infrastructure that you never had before in the farm so when you do it on small scale you can just have a small prototype yeah what are uh what are your thoughts on like machine efficiency these days we're hitting what's the lowest 29 28

25 isn't BitMay marketing like 21 and a half or we have ordered the XP machine but we still don't have it so I'm waiting wait ooh delays or

it's just not your time to get it delivered we're still waiting in the queue probably how efficient do you think this can get I mean especially as we move to like 3 nanometer are you excited about like the microBT deal with Samsung?

With 3. I mean, chances are we could hit below 20 at some point. Do you think a lot? But the problem is, again, considering the whole PCB design, you have also losses somewhere else except for the chips themselves. So you have some fixed component that,

let's say, all the hashboards are designed the same way, the optimal way you would still have some fixed component where you're losing some energy so when you look at the efficiency of an individual chip that's one number but the average efficiency

the average efficiency of a chip when it's actually populated on a PCB is slightly lower so the number is higher because you have losses all over the place not just on the chips other chips don't have really like a loss they're converting the computing power into heat yeah do you think we

ever reach like asic commodification well that's what we already mentioned i wish you want to get there i wish we we got there but who knows um make a bold statement are we going to get there yes okay i like that you know why uh it's getting like more and more expensive like if if you want run the project like building the chips and everything it's because we're not at 50 nanometers where people are talking about three yeah you can't go much lower than three right can you go below zero like black hole or something and then uh i mean we mentioned like this trend towards texas and a lot of the talk down here is big energy companies getting in and that's uh been a theme on this show in a while like historically up to this point mining industry has been

dominated by what many would deem as bitcoiners uh just believing in bitcoin and spinning up these large mining farms because they recognize the opportunity to profit from it and now we're reaching a point particularly here in the u.s and other parts of the world i believe oman partnered with crusoe uh here in the united states and they're going to be spinning up some mining operations uh on their energy assets it seems like the energy producers are getting into the game and uh i think there's just like a broad question out there like who becomes who or energy company is going to become the largest miners or the largest miners going to become energy companies and make sure both uh do you have any thoughts on that trend

um i'm seeing a very similar pattern also in europe like a lot of companies are interested in in the great programs and there is actually i didn't know until just a few months ago that Czech Republic didn't have a support market for electricity. What? Really. It's now off-rating, but it's just... What was it before? I don't know. It was run

through external trading outside of the country. I don't know. What is the Czech Republic's main energy sources? We have nuclear. We have some coal. A little bit

of wind, a little bit of solar, a little bit of hydro, but the majority are the first two. Nuclear and coal. Good. That's what you want. You guys have reliable baseload. Yeah. It's a problem here.

Oh, with the solar peaks? Yeah. I mean, here in Texas, they're building a shit ton of wind and solar, which is unreliable and we're having like grid problems here. Well, it's actually an opportunity, right? In a way for... for nuclear power plants to come in and say

hey just build nuclear power plants I meant it could be an opportunity for the miners to participate in the trading

yeah and it's happening but again you can build out all this wind and solar capacity but if the wind doesn't blow

and the sun doesn't shine like why would you want to be a miner using that as your energy source as a miner definitely not

yeah as a miner only under the condition that you're part of the whole infrastructure and the mix yeah yeah yeah of the mix yeah because um i'm assuming even here um the original uh way how to get rid of the electricity was just to burn it like just waste it yeah yeah just produce it and just not not not consume it at any end point so and the problem is that the economic economical equation when you think okay let's uh instead of burning the energy

i'm gonna build a device that consists of miners um if it was sitting just there um the reward for for doing that has to be higher than the uh you know capex yeah to put out so they probably buy like older gem machines throw them in there that's one way of doing it probably going to turn off that's another thing demand response is a big thing here like you're just mentioning

and Brains OS can help with that too right with the turn off and turn back on speeds

yeah we have we have the pulse resume feature so it can ramp down ramp up very quickly through an API so

yeah and especially even the old S9s were really good for like ramping up and down

the machine itself could even boot from cold state in a couple seconds. Like 11 seconds, if you plug in an S9, I think within like 11 seconds, the machine was running like full speed, which is not the case

with the latest generation for some physical reasons, but it was quite amazing to see that the machine was capable of doing that. Just using an API. Alright, go back on. 10 seconds, hashing, pointing.

adding to the mining pool uh why are they later gem machines how long are they taking um ramp up and ramp down uh when they're already mining that's you're still within that range like uh 10-15 seconds but what i was trying to explain was if you have a machine that's like completely turned off an s9 can boot up within 11 seconds and get to full power consumption within like 11 20 seconds uh whereas with the x19s it's not the case because the firmware has to wait for for the psu to stabilize and things like that so so when the machine is powered off like completely like power down uh that takes a long time to to bring up the machine is that like a material effect on a mining operation uh well for that for that use case that's why you should use the api

and just suspend the machine and resume its operation. And then that's a different story because the PSU is still active. It's not consuming the power, but you don't have to use the PSU. It's just waiting idle to be like, all right, turn the fans, turn the chips back on. God, it's so fascinating.

Do you ever feel like, damn, I'm working on the most cutting-edge shit in the world? Except for the space programs, yes. Yeah. that's for me I always said like as an IT guy

or as a developer I would either want to write firmware for rockets or for Bitcoin mining or work in Bitcoin like using the skills

I don't see any other area that I would feel like putting my potential or my productive years into yeah

it is cool seeing those SpaceX Falcon missiles like land back on the ground naturally got in the world. So that's amazing software engineering. Yeah, like how hard is it to make something like that happen?

It's probably much harder than the mining for a while. Well, for sure. But that just goes to the fact that the mining itself is a simple operation, right? It's like rolling a dice. Hashcash shot 256.

There's so many. And that's the beauty of the free market capitalism, the incentive system too it's like eking out all these efficiencies anywhere you can right and you can I think

when you look back at the white paper you would think like oh why did they I'm saying they but I mean Satoshi but generally like why why did they choose such a weird algorithm that is so

easily reproducible in an ASIC. But if you think about it, it's actually good. Because the ASIC itself, speaking of the chip, it's a very simple piece of hardware that

you can easily design. It's not so easy to manufacture a cutting-edge technology. But if you took any other more complex algorithm, then you would actually have less players in the game. Because you would

have skilled companies optimizing the thing right uh essentially if you say okay i want bitcoin to be using gpu mining algorithms or something that would be requiring a complex system as a gpu plus some graphics memory gigabytes of memories then you would start with a general purpose system where you take a gpu in a regular pc and so on but eventually you would have players that would be able to optimize this so they would have like hybrid gpus with a special dedicated embedded system that would be much more involved than a simple asic chip so how many players do you think you would have eventually like now nowadays i think it's more a matter of having the experience and having the capital of doing it and having the access to the foundries so having the foundries

available. But if the system was built on top of the GPU part, I think the situation would be much harder. Yeah. I mean, keep it simple stupid. The fact that these A6 and the HashCash H256 is

relatively dumb is a good thing for the market overall. I would say so. I think it reduces the risk of a single party basically taking over eventually. Well, speaking of that, brings up an interesting point like outside of micro bt and bitmain do you see any formal

competitors entering well we have seen an announcement from intel so i think that's that's a valid competitor have you gotten your hands on those yet no we did not yet uh but looking at the numbers if they are true then and i would assume they would not publish anything that doesn't compute it doesn't compete or that does not exist right um so looking at the numbers i think that's quite competitive so and that's a big player yeah and maybe in the bear market the incentive is a little uh lower but for the companies who do realize that we still all assume that this is another cycle it's actually convenient

to enter this adventure in the bear market. Why do you say that? Because you have the time to do a lot. To build out, yeah. Building happens in the bear markets, right? That's what we hear a lot. Well, because you can buy

cheap hardware, right? That's the other thing too, like supply chains just outside of Bitcoin specifically are very constrained globally. We'll see what happens. I think this is the most annoying part that, that I think this is, uh, uh, the factor that has changed from the previous cycle. So you cannot really, uh, assume that the new cycle is going to be exactly

the same, like the previous one, because before we were not speaking about supply chain issues. Well, the money was being printed at that time and quite good quantities. And this is the result. yeah or do you you don't agree no I completely agree

you can't you can't turn an economy off print a bunch of money and just flip a switch turn it back on expect everything to go back to normal

right the central cloud world the central planner is just messing up everything for the rest of us I agree yeah

they messed up I was actually wasn't going to be able to attend because of the birth of my second child but I was really looking forward

to the idea of thank you of the brains conference in Prague um the that was quite unfortunate but they basically changed the rules in the last minute and then they cheat them again anyway so we could have technically had yeah the the conference but then the unfortunate things in ukraine happened and we were getting feedback from a lot of people were like scared of coming over and the number was kind of like dwindling going up so

we were like okay maybe not we were going to be doing a live rabbit hole recap on a boat in prague at some point in the future that was the plan before uh before all this madness happened i'm looking forward to that i am as well i've never been to the czech republic oh you have to i hear you guys have good beer oh yeah we do good czech pilsner sounds i definitely recommend that yeah i mean the way ed talks about it he he's falling in love with frog yeah that's why he doesn't want to come over here that often can you uh we actually uh have something very important to talk about and it is the need for the brains team to stock the fridge solely with cheese why is that because ed hates cheese

i know i know i know but you need to sort of force him into a situation where he has to eat something he hates hmm okay we'll think about it hope he's not listening he better be listening so outside of mining and just Bitcoin more generally

is there anything that's exciting you in terms of Bitcoin adoption developments at the technical level wider awareness of Bitcoin the protocol uh i'm super excited about the next steps that are going to happen with stratum v2 i just want to see the critical mass of developers which is happening right now

um so what's going to happen with that i'm happy we can be sort of like outside just observing and helping but not like really actively pushing because I mean the protocol should be basically a consensus of multiple parties so that's one thing

I am excited about the three nanometers when they're happening with our ASICs also I want to see in five years or a few years maybe

what the market is going to look like in terms of which players are going to succeed in terms of manufacturing the hardware and if we're going to see any significant form factor changes like now we're seeing that uh the hydro pooling is showing up but is it the technology for the future i don't know maybe maybe you know we'll see uh so all my thoughts are really quite related to to the mining part that should be expected this is that was a trick question i was going to make sure that you pulled it back to my name because you better be focused on it okay yeah i am but i mean okay outside of mining uh well i think for me do you think you guys think about implementing it at the pool level or in anything that you guys did not at this stage but um i mean

i don't know what the situation here in the us is but i've been to a bitcoin pizza day in prague um they have adapted lightning and they made it very comfortable for the visitors of the pizza day so it was like a party basically all day some workshops and stuff they made it very comfortable photo visitors and everybody was participating in that yeah so so you would basically come to a bar and the bar would be written off your open channel that you opened when you deposited some the out paper funny money into cash machine yeah while you were entering the venue so the user experience as i would call it was like i like i you didn't you wouldn't even know that you're using lightning and that's that's where it should be like you wouldn't you shouldn't think

about it it should just work yeah and when we send this podcast out via our rss feed people are going to be streaming assets over lightning as they listen cool yeah it's happening it's already happening it's here we're on the cutting edge yeah so we just have to sort out a few banking issues and uh or actually just sort out the banks and yeah just just push the banks out of the way get the circular economy do you see any uh increased um excitement about bitcoin in europe among individuals um typically when the exchange rate goes up uh i'm getting phone calls from people that i didn't hear about for a couple years and it happens with every cycle uh when it goes down then i hear the phone calls like oh shall i sell now but i i have to say that uh it's getting

better so that means that the education level is is much better the previous cycle when it hit the 20k and then went eventually to 3k that was i think the worst cycle in terms of this like everybody wanted to buy at 20 and they pretty much all of them sold at three at three uh not at three at 10 or something like that um so with a loss um but with this cycle uh i can see that people do understand that the price movement can happen and they are aware of uh what they're doing with with the investment yeah so i am not getting that many phone calls like if they should sell i'm getting phone calls if they should buy actually okay on these levels or if it's going to go lower Which I don't have a good answer.

The yawn indicator is bullish right now, freaks. We've created many indicators this week. The yawn indicator is one of my favorite. Okay. You should tweet out when you're getting these texts, should I buy? Okay, I will. Well, it's always fascinating.

I'm very happy that we were able to sit back down and do this again. It's been too long since you've been on the podcast. It's always a pleasure speaking with you again. In person, doing remotely is not the same. No, it's not the same. We can't have these giggle fits with each other. So in three years time?

No, we're not going to take that long. Are you going to Riga? Most probably. I'm going to ask my wife. I got permission. So I'll see you there if you go, if you get permission. Okay. But we're going to go drink some beers in Austin, Texas.

Is there anything that you haven't said that you think the freaks should know about what you're working on? I guess we covered everything. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for doing what you do. Again, you're humble,

but you're on the cutting edge. A blue chip company in the space. You're helping spread Bitcoin, make mining operations more efficient and adding value to the space. So I want to thank you and your team for everything you do. And again, disclaimer,

response for the podcast for supporting us as well anytime and thank you for having me here yeah let's go have some fun oh let's have some beers peace and love freaks