TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #73: Jan Čapek + Pavel Moravec

Episode Date: May 21, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Jan Čapek and Pavel Moravec, Co-CEOs of Slush Pool & Braiins, to discuss their backgrounds, Slush Pool's history, what they're building with BraiinsOS, the nature of reorgs, BetterHash, the dream of a shared foundry, mining futures markets, and much more. Checkout Slush Pool: https://slushpool.com/ Checkout Braiins: https://braiins-os.org/ Follow Jan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/janbraiins Follow Pavel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mor_pav Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/martybent Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today.

What's up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce you to this episode's sponsor. You freaks already know all about them, the Cash App. It's been the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years, the first P2P payments app to allow you freaks to purchase Bitcoin. And they also have an incredible boost program. If you're not participating with your personalized boost card yet, what the hell are you waiting for? Go download the cash app now uh with the boost card you can go to uh merchants uh like chick-fil-a coffee shops whole foods panera taco bell the list goes on so many i can't even remember uh you use your boost card there and you get a little uh get a little discount because you're part of the boost program

it's like you're part of a special club just like you're part of the stacking sats club and when you're done stacking sats on the cash app you can uh you can take that bitcoin and send it to the personal wallet of your choice when you take custody into your own hands and you take control of your financial sovereignty. Easily scan a QR code or copy paste the address into the app and send it off to your ledger, your trezor, your electrum, your cold storage, whatever it may be. So go find the Cash App in the Google Play Store or the App Store today and start stacking sats now. Hope you guys enjoy this episode with Jan and Pavel from Slush Pool. Very rare, very rare appearance by these two uh was happy to have them on and think you freaks are gonna

love it just as much as i did enjoy what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt at your boy marty been here on a friday afternoon in relegation studio we haven't used yet this is the first time we're using this studio I'm very excited. It's a little rainy out. We've got a very fun conversation in front of us. Blockchain Week has officially started in my mind. We've got a couple of seasoned veterans in from the Czech Republic, a couple of members of the Slush Bowl team. I'd like to introduce you freaks to the co-CEOs Jan Čapek and Pavel Morovic. Did I get it right?

You did it right. Hi, how are you doing? Doing well, doing well. Thanks for coming by. How was your trip to America? Pretty good. It was sort of a pleasure coming. yeah um no i'm very excited for this conversation i was telling you earlier we've never had any mining pool operators on or anybody like big in the mining industry on this podcast so i'm very excited about this slush pool in particular has a seasoned history you guys are the oldest um bitcoin mining pool in existence slush mine slush pool mine its first block in november of

2010 when you guys were still bitcoin.cz mining uh when slush was around yeah that's true um well we got involved sometime in 2013 yeah before we get to that we have a little background history here so you guys so slush pool for you freaks that don't know uh out of all pools is it has mined the third most bitcoin of all time over a million at this point uh in my view you guys are an altruistic like very good actor in the space and uh a mining pool that has stood the test of time in an industry that is one of the most cutthroat uh industries in the world not only in bitcoin i would argue with bitcoin mining before we get into what you guys are doing at slush pool like you were mentioning on you guys came into 2013 what were you doing before 2013

how'd you get into bitcoin what drove you guys to bitcoin and then slush in particular well we sort of uh heard about bitcoin by that time around 2010 or 11 it was the first time but um we didn't thing it was like that serious so me and Pavel we had a company doing embedded software for embedded devices it was it's still called brains brain systems and that's the company behind the pool right now so we were doing programming for for industry players that do gen sets and stuff like that so we were like the firmware guys we know how to do embedded Linux and real-time stuff so So that's where we were making money on.

But then when we had the opportunity to enter the Bitcoin field, it was 2013, we thought we shouldn't miss it a second time. So we got involved. Maybe Pavel has some more input on this. I think you summarized it pretty early. Mining draw you guys in because of the hardware aspect, the firmware aspect? Not really. I think we realized the Bitcoin idea is great, which we didn't realize the first time.

And I was the best friend of Marek Slash in childhood, and he was really into Bitcoin and we talked more. So he was your Bitcoin friend that wore you down eventually? Yeah, you can tell that from him. He started the pool himself, single person. It was too much for him at that time and he wanted to focus on the work around Trezor, so he wanted to create a company in the long run. So he proposed us to join the pool or be part of the pool. So right now we, and it was 2013 and since then we are fully committed to Bitcoin. We don't do anything else. Yeah, no, I mean, that's evident.

You guys have stuck around throughout the years. I'm showing you this chart. We'll get to that eventually of pool distribution throughout time. You guys had a significant share in the beginning through like 2014, 2015. The share dropped a little bit. We were talking a little bit why before, and now it seems like you guys are making a resurgence. But before we jump into the dynamics of the mining pool industry in particular, let's talk about the software that creates these mining pools.

So you guys created Stratum in 2013, and that was an iteration or a replacement of GetWork, correct? It's not an iteration. It's a complete rewrite. The principle of the protocol is completely different. At the beginning, the original protocol was absolutely inefficient. And Sonatum was an idea how to make it much more better designed or much more efficient for miners. The more connections you do, you need to create the protocol for the specific task. So Mark at that time tried to solve that with Strato. And it's pretty old protocol. Today is obviously obsolete in a lot of sense.

You would design it differently if you had all the information you have today. But it's good enough for all the mining that is done through Sartum today. Let's talk about the dynamics of how this pool works. As a pool operator, what is your function and what are you facilitating for these individual miners that are sending a hashrate towards your pool? Well, our primary purpose is to aggregate the hashing power. so basically uh it it means that the miners if they were mining on their own their um participation in the total network hash rate is very insignificant but the um the minimum amount of bitcoin that you can mine is one block right um so this uh block finding process called mining

it's a statistical process that has some pass and distribution, that's how the blocks arrive. Basically any previous work has nothing to do with whatever you find in the future, so it's completely unrelated. It's like as if you were rolling a dice and thinking like what's the probability that I find a number smaller than three or whatever. So the point of the pool is to aggregate those people who are rolling the dice and making their variance smaller. So the probability is still the same, but their variance and the distribution of the reward is smaller, so that's the point of the pool. You get some rewards frequently, so you can

calculate some numbers. It's not a random thing. If you're a solo miner you can get one block roughly for example one once in a year which is disaster if you try to run it as a business but once you join a pool you can get your rewards every single day so this is the basic principle why people do that so how does a divvying up the rewards go on your end because that's actually something that came to the fore the conversation this week that I thought about in a while is the fact when you guys mine a block you don't have access to the block reward for 100 blocks because the coinbase transaction doesn't get released so

how are you guys sort of uh taking that into consideration and and giving it out based off yeah that's right uh we are basically calculating what what amount of bitcoins everybody deserves for the block and if we see that the mind block is deep enough in the blockchain we just uh add the the rewards to to the to the balance of the user what is deep enough 100 100 yeah 150 right now internally but we advertise 100 because it's the number used by blockchain itself but you always have the buffer so we theoretically we could pay the rewards earlier but there is still some some security number you want to keep because the reorgs are technically possible and we don't want to be like paying coins and then you are it would be a mess right the thing is i think the bitcoin

core even refuses to you cannot spend the block before it matures and the the constant the number of uh of the depth how deep in the blockchain the block is uh that's what's being checked by by by the bitcoin core and there's some software that you can tweak technically you basically can hack your source and make the bitcoin core um pay out the block earlier a little bit earlier but there are some constraints yeah but we never yeah exactly the coins yeah i mean it doesn't matter right which which coins you're technically paying out because you have some some stack from the previous blocks and so on and users have different thresholds for payouts so um yeah yeah it doesn't matter it doesn't have to be the most recent block in your mind you have

reserves yeah from other blocks uh what did you guys think about the whole uh cz coming out and saying that he thought about it more like this week it's uh the big story a big story I think Jimmy's song was right when we wrote, I think it was a Twitter post or something, that it's a pity that they didn't try. Because if they tried and failed, it would be so great. And everybody in the industry is 100% sure they would fail with a re-horror game. So it's missed opportunity. It's like with every other fork, you can fork Bitcoin anytime you want, but we already know

that it doesn't make Bitcoin less strong, it's even stronger. So it's a missed opportunity from my point of view. What did you think of the proposition by Jerry Rubin and a couple others to basically try to double spend Binance on access to those private keys? Obviously they did, and they tried to double spend that transaction with a fat fee, like a thousand bitcoin fee to the top 10 mining pools that helped in this process as a mining pool and you saw that would that entice you at all well right yeah but they didn't do it right so i mean this is like the last last resort that you could or you should do it's actually it actually makes

sense i mean if you if you know something like this happened and it happened in a big batch you can do it why not but the thing is they didn't do it right so from theoretical perspective if you have security measures and processes defined that you can do it as like the last resort or the yeah well how the security measures even work they would have to know that somebody stole their coins and then how would it work like alerting you guys hey we would like to rework this as quick as possible they would have to construct a transaction pretty quickly I don't think it's but you can detect that mempool contains the transaction and steals your money you

can detect it pretty easily if you monitor what's what's happening on the network and what you can do is to create your own transaction spending the same outputs and put there some crazy fee so that the miners would prefer your transaction before the other transaction I'm not sure about the technical details of it I'm pretty sure it's doable and we even did a note we are redesigning some money related clearing subsystem right now and we are probably doing this kind of research in this topic as well yeah it's a good idea well once you start yeah well this incident sort of high and this is we

talked about in our weekly show yesterday rabbit hole recap it sort of highlights the incompetence of some of the industry players like the fact that CZ sort of thought this was even probable especially six hours after the fact at least yeah but nobody can know the details about everything and I really appreciate the fact that they they were open about the thought process and and he came out and say okay it was a bad idea and I don't I know it now so it's it's perfectly fine to have this conversation so people can be brought to students will pay can understand more about how Bitcoin works so at the end I

think it's a good thing it's actually very educating it was a great and we learned a lot this week it was a great like relearning process it's pretty much overshadowed everything else nobody talks about the exchange rate but people talk about this reorg thing well well how crazy is it that we had tether Binance we get two weeks ago this last week and the price just blew through I think it's at like 6400 right now I don't have it up right now but I just read uh some update that there are some problems with withdrawals from betfinex as well wouldn't surprise me yeah wouldn't be surprised yeah so i think uh the exchange rate is like the form of

the honeybed which just doesn't matter that's a good thing like i like this dive into that why do you think it doesn't matter oh you mean the problems or the exchange rate why do you change well the reason why we're into Bitcoin is I think this is the future of the money and this is like the hard money that you have and we're really interested in the technical aspects and the exchange rate is a nice thing to have that creates the incentive to stay in the industry but it doesn't have to be like super crazy it's great for running a company you know but not necessarily the only thing we have some internal number which is we need to be

in north of the number and be fine with running the company and anything better is just a bonus is a are we allowed to talk about that specific number or we can say it relates to the size of the company so you can always change the slice of the company yeah hiring more people but yeah we are bound to the exchange rate obviously but yeah the price rising is I think always it's always exciting right oh yeah even in all this hoopla this week it's been fun I found myself up like watch the charts last night for the first time in a while was it was a purchase like 6200 i was like oh man but i personally i uninstalled all the widgets

showing me the price because it's destruction basically and we went through uh times when the price were was dropping and still you have to do your work so yeah well let's talk about that let's jump into the history of slash pool let's talk about this chart so you guys came out with It's a pretty hot start. Got a nice considerable chunk of the hash rate. Today you're sitting at about 4.7x hash. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is, what are we at? It's like 10% of the overall. What are we at, like 62% overall? Yeah, I didn't check lately. Yeah, we really didn't. We can use the calculations. It's the conflict of everyday stuff you do. And once in a while you can look at...

You can recheck. You're somewhere between 5% and 10% right now. Yeah. probably closer to 10 yeah roughly in these nice numbers and so like you were saying your bear markets happened before 2014 2015 probably being one and your your hash rate share diminished in that in that period what was going on back then it was uh i think it was a combination of a few factors uh the first one when we got into the industry there was um the pool itself was like prototype right and it was suffering from scaling issues and all these things

so we were like really building the infrastructure from one server to be like worldwide spread all over the world so paying for this technological debt took some time second factor 2013-14 was the time when ASICs were coming so all the GPU guys and the ones that you know the geeks who were mining in their you know dormitory rooms and wherever we're just going out of the game because their mining rigs were just obsolete so they went for altcoins whatever um so and this was like you say shit you can let loose here don't worry yeah yeah okay so so these guys were sort of like leaving us um and initially the ASICs were

pretty much in the hands of the manufacturers so and those had no incentive to connect to some you know pool which would not bring them anything if they can if they have enough hash rate so that they can run their own right mining operation about variance if they're at that yeah yeah so these I think these three factors and including the exchange rate sort of like going down that all turned into this trend of our market share going up to like three percent or something like that yeah it was like the critical boundary if the pool starts hitting like three person then the variants start stepping in

because then you're mining like you should be mining like three four blocks a day I think what is it 50th out of 144 yeah yeah let's say it's not somewhere between two and three two and three blocks and that means you can also mine zero and you have this psychological effect like statistically it works you would be mining these number of blocks and on average you would get to the number but when a miner sees that you mine zero blocks during 24 hours and because we as a humans are you know are like day oriented right we sleep we wake up we check status of certain things like how is my business doing how is my miners doing um they got you know excited sort of like if there's something wrong with the pool because if it's mining zero

blocks it means the lock is low or you could have some technical problem so it started this spiral of people you know disconnecting from the pool and making things even worse so we got through this you survived a mining spiral yeah yeah we really survived this and then things started changing with the exchange rate with the technological updates that we made in the pool and then it started rising and I think that was when when the hashrate started rising again it was at the time when when the big farms especially in the Western world because majority of our users are from the Western world like us and so on they needed some trusted entity that they could direct their hashrate to and they

apparently chose us for some reason so that's the time where our market share started like going up a little bit and being really stable i think another reason i think it's because you guys have been very good actors in the space for for a consistent amount of time and i think you guys have developed a brand at least in the first decade that that suits you well and again a cutthroat industry do you do you uh sympathize with that do you guys feel that way about yourselves that you're sort of good to the community communities good back to you But what we say, we try to be the good guys, don't do anything that's not morally sustainable or acceptable.

There are a lot of actors in the space behaving this way and it's an honor to be in this space and we think it's a great feeling to be part of the whole movement, let's say, and it would really short-sighted to like prioritize momentary monitor effect so yeah we feel pretty comfortable in this position and Mark started with this approach really really back in in the old days yeah it's a great thing yeah thank you for for holding strong and being so principled in a in an industry that has a lot of unprincipled people outside of Bitcoin I would say. It's easier than you think because you don't have to think about the shady space so it's pretty easy

you can focus on technology or your internal problems we had a lot of technical debt and we still have some so you can focus on the work and what's good for the customers and don't think about a lot of other stuff. I think being a bad actor is very exhausting, because you have to keep some integrity in what you're saying and doing, otherwise it's going to break down, and if you try to think always in the honest way, it's easier to stay consistent, because you can always check like, is this good? And yes, I'll do it.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this saying... It's like difficult to be lying, right? I'm not a good liar at all. Yeah, but he and me, we both have memory like hamster. So you need to keep your lie and repeat it in the future. And it's really difficult. And we can remember a lot of things.

So it's easier to tell the truth and just, yeah. I'm not trying to blow smoke up my own ass here, but I'm a bad liar too. I'm like, damn it, I just lied. Like, what the hell? I feel like I should tell my lie. But no, it's crazy. And, again, I think that is why people are drawn towards SlushPool

and you guys are between close to 10% of network hash rate right now. You're talking about focusing on technology. What have you guys been focusing on most recently? What's on the roadmap at SlushPool? Well, let's cover the BrainsOS, Adventure, and iSigBoost, maybe, a little bit. Yeah. Okay, so it all started a year ago when there were new miners from Innosilicon called U1s, or they were called Dragonmans, whatever, Dragonmans, and we were involved in testing

them and helping with a proposal for, actually we were the authors of the proposal to use some version bits and stratum extension that would allow using them or configuring them so that mining devices that support asic boost could operate could be used for mining and these devices i mean the recommends he wants they could not work without asic boost they had an optimization that just takes this functionality out of the chip so you really have to run it with AC goose otherwise you just are not efficient so we were involved with with this and at that time we were kind of thinking that there would be some business deal between us and you know silicon that would allow us to you know

also participate in firmware development but the deal never happened so we had like a bunch of work that we already did on mining firmware that we didn't know what we're going to do about and then we started thinking okay hold on so we have this thing we can we want to make it open source but what is the most popular miner in the market right now and that was the S9 and since we were into the ASIC boost adventure already you were like well people say that this device apparently supports ASIC boost but it doesn't work so we started researching this topic and it turned out that the devices really can

do ac boost so once once you turn it on you're saving right away 13 percent of energy but the problem was that the manufacturer somehow made the part of the miner um which is like a small firmware in the fpga um with a small bug and this bug means uh it was um yeah uh the bug in the firmware was that it was touching the wrong bits in the version field of the Bitcoin block header and these were like particularly wrong in a way that this was invalid work from the Bitcoin network perspective so any block that you would find would not be accepted because the version bits were like wrong so we were thinking okay let's fix it and it turned out that it's

not easy to fix it because this FPGA code is not like regular code for you know when you write your software and compile it and it's not worth reverse engineering because it's really difficult it's basically a code for describing hardware gates and and so on so we started on writing our own part but also at that time I think we published the story about our findings and saying basically we will continue on this initiative or we will make the manufacturer publish at least a fix to this. It took like a week or two and then they released the firmware that was supporting async-boost and it was

already at the time when we came up with the idea of the BrainCOS, it was I think the second release that already had this async-boost support with this FPGA code fixed from Bitmain but nevertheless we still think that this is not an open-source variant because there's some small part that's still coming for the manufacturers so we still keep on working on the open-source alternative that would be integrated into BrainsOS so this was like sort of like a hobby project but we still see it as an extension logical extension to what we have in the pool because we're providing the mining service and it's easier to

integrate with a farm that's running over firmware you know that we know works correctly with the stratum protocol because there were that was like the second motivation for the project that there were like historically many problems with the firmwares where they would be you would even see them today where somebody really sees new mining hardware it has problems like mining with certain pools because they have some bugs in the firmware so it's easier to take care of the whole software stack but at the same time keeping it open source so that people can audit it and can if they want they can build their own images

and make sure that they're really running um what they uh can trust now it's it's crazy how like the interaction between the firmware and the hardware can sort of affect your hash rate and the performance of your miner and so I guess let's, if you can explain like a couple of things at the firmware level that would affect a miner's performance and what you're looking at like you were just talking about the version bits, you

fixed that but what else, like fan cooling, stuff like that, tempering the fans and other sort of operations at the firmware level. Yeah, I don't think that there is a lot of space where you can do in a firmware for making

device more efficient. It's about tweaking the parameters for a particular environment like if you have a strong fans in your operation you don't have to run the fans on the miner as fast but these are small things. The firmware thing is more about like reliability to connect to every pool and managing the devices securely and knowing what you actually run on the devices because there are some I don't know problems potential problems with hijacking the firmware or the miners through some call home problems so it's more about security than efficiency and the basic boost is in my opinion something special in this sense yeah so that's a sick boost is a this is a

storied history in Bitcoin bitmain famously doing covert a sick boost where they were they were taking advantage of this before most people really know rumors they did it I don't think anybody can prove it easily and it doesn't it doesn't matter yeah because the over AC boost is more efficient so once it was the basic motivation for us to help this kind of AC boost to be used all over the world because it makes mining more efficient and it like disables the over async boost because it's less efficient so once he wants everybody can use the version rolling there is all the incentives are aligned there is no need

for overt async boost so miners don't bother with what's inside the code base there's incentives perking their heads in the system again yeah so the incentives drive everything in Bitcoin which is beautiful and the incentive to overtly use ASIC boost is there now but it was interesting that during that whole Ampli was a different thing that's what when they could remotely shut that was yeah it was the calling home thing did you did you got were you guys affected by that at all or not really I think we had a couple cases where somebody was reporting hijacking of the hash rate but it was the BGP

thing where you can really make the farm thinking it's connected to something to the to the poor is connected somewhere else even though the IP addresses are correct yeah but it's not really frequent it not where it's not very frequent all years but it's still but the new protocol should really take care of this but one thing that I still find very interesting about the AC boost is is that, specifically with the S9s, is that nobody ever, like, I mean, people were complaining, but this is not about complaining, this is more for a lawsuit, because it's like, if you buy some product, and I would just tell you that it just doesn't have this feature,

and it would have the feature hidden, and it would be the manufacturer who would decide for you that you cannot use it and it would affect directly your your cost of operation because it's not ac boost will not give you like it will not give you extra like hashing power but it causes that you save energy so you can cut your electricity cost by 13 percent if you use i would be technically if you use four mid states that's the setting for the hashing chips uh if If you do like only two misstates, which is like the first phase of the SHA function that's running in the chips, you do like 8% so you can say between 8% and 13% and you could have been using that feature since day one when the S9s came out.

So I'm really, I don't know, this is interesting for me. All right. Bitmain is a very interesting story. Oh yeah. I refer to them as the Icarus of the early Bitcoin days. Flew too close to the sun, thought they were too hot for their own shit, and they're falling to earth right now. Yeah, it's a good analogy, I think.

It surprises me so much. Why is this? They were in such a great position. They dominated the market. And if you fast forward two years, the scene is completely different than it used to be. so i i don't know it surprises me very much bitcoin network's a worthless if you uh try to try to uh wrong her she will smite you it's uh they learned uh they learned a hard lesson

right and so as a company that's entrenched in the mining industry what have you guys noticed any fallout from from bitmain's fall from grace any any particular companies stepping in where they're where they're sort of falling short um are you seeing the market sort of route around them Or do you think it just doesn't matter as we get closer to ASIC commodification? Yeah, that's a big topic. Yeah, it is. We would love to see as many manufacturers as possible. It would be great for the whole ecosystem. So in this sense, I'm pretty okay with what happened to Bitmain. Not necessarily because I would wish them anything bad, but it was too much, their dominance was too strong and it was felt in the community.

So this is changing in a good direction. um actually uh the latest actions from bitmain are also very interesting where like one day somebody on on our telegram chat or it was i also he i think he also even tweeted about it he said oh hey i just upgraded my my s9 and he was running the factory for where not brain service um with the march update whatever and then suddenly he couldn't log in through ssh to his miner anymore and the firmware image is now digitally signed so that means like until then you could technically feed the miner with any image that would be valid and the miner would just you know be dumb and he would just flash like anything that you give it if it was to brick it would

become brick but this was the standard mechanism that we were using to upgrade from the factory from our two brains os but now they added a feature that actually con checks um the the digital signature uh of the image that you're feeding it and obviously like we don't have their private keys right so um we cannot anymore uh take our brains os image feed it to to the s9 that has been upgraded is going to refuse it um which is a good thing in a way that your device should not accept like any firmware image it should check image check the signatures this is what we do with the brain so as well because if you do a great we check the signatures because the standard line distribution

like anything this is good thing but you as a user if you really want to you should have a way to do what you want that means like flashing it with anything that you like and I I don't understand the the incentive why they're doing it because it's really pissing off the users I mean it's like even your car manufacturer would just say you cannot drive anymore your car because you think you're not competent to do it yeah we'll have somebody else drive it for you do you think they're spinning up a pool their own well they already have they already have yeah yeah I don't know it's not about about pools we don't have any

any special position with Brent's OS in regards of the pool. There is no like mining at our pool where you plug in the device or start the firmware. You can obviously point it to our pool and it will work but you can use the device for mining at any pool you decide. So the whole firmware thing is not about the pool I think. I think no what is bitmain doing so Jihan's out his other co-founders out right there there there's somebody new in Marcon or something like that yeah we don't have any yeah we don't we don't have all the insights but to be honest until you guys are coming out good information and what they do at the

highest level it's difficult to get information and we we don't try to get any special we have met with some bitmap representatives in chile it was the lab at conf there's a conference in there and they were I was actually in a panel with them and they were very positive and they were saying oh we are going to be the good guys now and we're going to be open sourcing everything and very transparent and stuff like that and whoops they released ds15 uh and we keep asking them like when are you going to release the sources so that we can integrate it into into our uh firmware uh it never happened so i mean i really don't know well if recent history shows they're probably embarrassed by

the performance to release it because they've had bad wafer deliveries recently haven't they or bad wafer designs um yeah i think i think the the whole s the s15s were a big failure because they use the seven nanometer technology but it's like super expensive so i think they it's not profitable for for them to sell them yeah the problem was a bad yield so it's tough thing to create so so small chips yeah what uh so we mentioned uh asic commodification earlier yeah how uh how far along that path are we how close to like a pure commodified asic market are we um it's kind of a heated topic um why is this um like right now um the problem is that the manufacturers they don't have a good incentive and it's obvious they have no incentive to sell

the asic chips uh for talking about the foundries or um they definitely they they want to make profit and they can make profit in two ways if they're selling the chips then their margin has to be on the chips and it has to be pretty big or they can create an edit value and you know pack the chips in to mining devices where they can make additional margin so economically this makes sense but if you try to ask them can we have the chips yes you can have them but the problem is that you're taking the risk which could be absorbed by a futures market maybe you would be taking the risk of the chips not being performing well or not being on time available and so on this

can be overcome but the problem is the initial price that's already usually too high for anybody to actually make anything out of these chips like produce physical hardware because you would always be above the cost of the manufacturer so we had one day the idea of creating something called ASIC foundation that would be like a non-profit organization taking care of running these manufacturing batches of chips and basically on a long run forcing the other manufacturers also joining the foundation and selling the chips through the foundation it was meant as a non-profit organization who

would organize the my trading with the chips so that everybody can can buy it because the big thing is you have to rent the space on the foundry floors to the manufacturers you guys you guys would just rent out like a huge chunk yeah yeah the amount of manufacturers come in one at a time and yeah but then you can you can create some publicly known rules how you can participate in buying the chips there can be an open trade with the chips so if if anybody can create better miner you could buy or sell the chips the futures it was man as a futures market for the chips which are and in production being being delivered

in the future so useful yeah there is a lot of interesting things what you could do that but the biggest problem is you need to control somehow the manufacturing part of the chips and we almost did an agreement with some manufacturer and but then it collapsed because obviously it was at the time when yeah when the exchange rate went really crazy and this is this exactly demonstrated the case where even though we were sort of very close to the deal it was at the time I think six thousand was the exchange rate and that he was doing this and the manufacturers started withdrawing from all the deals because they saw they could make

much more money just by running their own business and selling the full product. So it was for us a proof that it is not possible to do any kind of activity like this with a commercial subject, with a commercial entity or business partner. has to be done by the foundation itself outsourcing the manufacturing process obviously to the foundries but it would be the entity taking care of this yeah how hard would it be to get a fifth foundry out there for big winners only well I think I think Adam back when they tweeted the exchange rate is not quite there yet but some I don't know it was TSMC or GlobalFoundries they were

selling some manufacturing plant so when the exchange rate is there it could be that the Bitcoin community could actually buy a plant like this maybe it's too naive. Maybe this would be a crowdsourcing project. Buying a foundry and running this. It would be awesome project. Alright Freaks you heard it here first on Tales from the Crypt we're starting the the crowdsourcing project for a foundry we're gonna make it happen we need to get the pineapple fund i think the pineapple fund will be able to cover this in a few years um so hey anybody riding the pineapple fund out there you ain't on just keep this in mind um it's uh so what else are you guys looking for i mean we've been talking about mining

specifically like you guys again like you think bitcoin is the future money of the world why is this what uh what in your life has led you to come to this conclusion um any personal experiences growing up any uh well for for me the most fascinating thing is that you finally have your money under your control which doesn't have happen with regular money anymore and you have something that's uh immutable right uh there's not too many things that are digital in our lives that are immutable this is written once and you cannot change it uh and these are like two fascinating technical things that both came together in the form of bitcoin um and i personally i myself don't i can't imagine as an it guy that i would be active in any other industry just

because of these two reasons yeah i mean you can write software for anything but but this is the era where yeah it's a great mixture of awesome technology and and the connection of freedom and personal responsibility at the same time i think bitcoin has can have uh like larger can make larger point in the sense that people should take their responsibility for their lives themselves and bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in a sense demand can yeah can give you the the uh the lesson because you need to secure your keys you need to start about things how and why you do what you do uh you can mess up you can lose some coins uh so it's it's a broader broader message bitcoin can bring you know it's been said on this podcast a lot bitcoin demands

extreme ownership and i mean we see like we were talking about finance earlier and these exchange hacks like that's i think a lot of i mean that's a cause for a lot of fun in the mainstream headlines people see these exchange hacks they extrapolate it to bitcoin say bitcoin's been hacked and it's like no this is a service yes related to it yeah and uh but a lot of people have like the preconceived notions of how they interact with the traditional banking system and financial system and they just assume oh this is the way bitcoin will work but it's like no this is again it's digital it's a bearer asset too so like you have to take it into your control and control your keys and where do you think we are uh in terms of sort of educating the masses about this process

this is definitely going to be a learning experience and uh that's something we talk about a lot here too like uh something that i'm worried about in the long run it's like apathy people not wanting to take this control do you think do you see a path through which people come around and your average joe starts taking control of his private keys Well, I think we still have the problem that the average Joe doesn't even know there are some private keys. So it's going to be a long process and I think it has to start in elementary school where people really have to start understanding cryptography.

Not on a mathematical level, but to understand that this is the tool that humanity is going to use and it's like a regular day thing. It's getting better. more people understand the principles the more people can get it from them it's a long process obviously and I don't think everybody must have their keys and all the coins controlling the coins in this sense but understanding the principles are our key and it it's spreading it's gonna take a lot of a lot of time obviously but I think there is a lot of my knowledgeable people already

and the more bitcoins and headlines and more people are describing all these principles the easier is to just get used to it and once you really face it yourself you already know that there are some principles behind it you can dig deeper ask people around so I'm pretty optimistic I don't have any my years when it's gonna be known by everybody but I'm pretty optimistic about going in a good good direction yeah it's like when the world first got industrial plumbing and everybody to learn how to wash their hands wipe their ass and take a shower pretty close yeah i'm not sure if it's the greatest analogy but maybe you have to learn

how to wash your hands on the internet and take care of your private keys yeah never thought about it in uh from this direction that was uh that was first posited by santiago siri on this podcast a couple years ago but it does make sense yeah it's like a learning like you said like ideally kids will start learning this in school and that's another thing like so we were born in this inflection point people our age and older where we're sort of like the bridge between the world before the internet was mainstream and the world that the internet is now mainstream and you know I like I had my nephew's birthday party as a young kid last I'm looking at him and the way he's

interacting with stuff I'm like there's no way Bitcoin isn't a thing yeah it's the exposure to the core concepts and there needs to be some critical mass of people understanding the concepts and talking about it but for newcomers for especially the younger people the concepts would be ever-present like normal thing they didn't have to understand the technical details but it's much easier for them to get it because it's nothing completely completely different than they are used to because they are hearing about the concepts already yeah I think one more one more area that's slightly changing

already is the privacy concerns you know we had a few years ago we had people saying like oh I don't care where you know put my photos and I use this service and you know example it's and now people do realize that those services that are for free are not that free as they look like as they sort of you know track what you're doing and they try to sell you things that you may not really need but and I think this is already changing in the population we're people do realize uh that the their privacy is the concern and once you start caring about your privacy uh it's very close to what you're getting with cryptocurrencies specifically with bitcoin or

others uh bitcoin has some obviously some privacy issues but it actually makes you think about those uh issues so yeah i think it's getting a little better it's getting a little better but excuse me we're at like a crossroads right we can either go full full-fledged train down the tracks towards a china-like future dystopian future or we could go towards a future where people take extreme ownership of their data and it's like an open battle for dystopia versus sovereignty uh right well i definitely want to go for the second one yeah well obviously that's why we're all here right do you do you are you worried about like a traditional state control like having too much of a head start yeah it's it's actually happening i mean you see we're in

europe and we we see this uh tracking also from the governments already they want to know like everything that you do um one interesting thing today uh yesterday when we were flying from Prague to New York we were flying Delta and at the check-in desk in Prague on the airport we would scan our passports it would know the name of our hotel yeah so where does the booking comm submit the data so they probably have in their terms and conditions like oh yeah it's not saying they did something against conditions it was just like yes okay and then we had to ask like 30 questions by some guys from Delta because we are going to enter us and similar questions

by the gate and we're like okay I try to troll the guys are you guys at a fintech concert or a conference right now there are a lot of fintech when you're talking to when i travel typically i would say fintech oh he was like uh trying to really unveil the thing in layers it was like it was like the onion method right so he would be like why are you coming to the states i was like well i'm coming to a conference which conference is it well it's an it conference what kind of it conferences i was like well it's called mcc and it's a bitcoin conference okay so you're into bitcoin i was like yes i'm into bitcoin and then he would try to find out if i'm like consistent and he'll be like so how is the bitcoin doing now i was like you mean

the exchange rate it's like well yeah i was like well it's like 6 000 and he would be like so it's been going out no i was like well yeah but it was like 20k last year so you know like he was really trying to find uh if anything i'm saying is consistent but what was like funny for me internally that we got really discussing about about the bitcoin stuff uh at a security improv yeah i have a story when i was crossing the border from canada to us to visit some mining corporation and i have met uh a policeman or some guard and he was really pissed about bitcoin because he thought he missed the opportunity i thought you're gonna say it's like quadriga yeah so so he asked me so many questions and i i i tried to make the case for bitcoin and

trying to try to uh pour some positivity uh on him so that he can let me in uh it was a great conversation but i didn't expect to have it uh at the borders right well it's crazy at the borders and the airports i've said this before like airports are like the testing grounds for dystopian like orwellian features here in the states since 9-11 has gotten particularly bad like around like going through security and sniffing dogs all over the place you have to go through that scanner now and it came out a couple weeks ago that some woman was flying jet blue and she had a boarding pass on her and she thought she was gonna have to hand that in and she didn't they'd like literally use facial recognition to check her into her flight without

her without her permission and so like that is like another step forward and in the airport sort of orwellian dystopia is like stepping in it's like uh people for some reason while going through airports just have no problem giving up their their privacy and their their their freedom they're like oh yeah we'll just listen to you it's difficult to get to the another continent in 10 hours and not crossing any airport yeah so did you guys fly into jfk yeah how was that how was customs there particularly bad it was it's the great experience i hate it so much coming back in like i came in from regal last year and it was after like a 12-hour flight 16-hour travel day it was the most miserable experience of my life you

have to wait like 45 minutes in a line with a bunch of pissed off people and the shape of the line is i i didn't see anything like that i want to say sorry for the uh the people who work at the airport they're never nice they're always rude uh i'm sure they yell to you or to move along and stuff like that yeah too much people um we're almost an hour in here how much time do you guys have you guys in a rush to get anywhere no we're okay okay um so let's what's it like being uh having mined over a million bitcoin as a pool what's that do you guys feel responsibility like being the arbiter of of divvying out the rewards and stuff like that We never thought about the feeling because I mean that's being divided to the miners and I don't know.

It's a nice marketing number obviously but we tend to not keep the coins longer than it's necessary. We want to send them to the miners as fast as possible because of security reasons obviously. so yeah we're not a bank so we're not really uh holding yeah yeah well it's crazy like the first the number one miner or pool to mine the most bitcoin btc guild they're not even around anymore are they yeah i think they they got uh they get bankrupt they weren't bankrupt but i think yeah yeah yeah i think mine i'm not sure it's long here 1.5 million yeah it was at the beginning it was the largest school at the time I think I hope I remember correctly but I think they used some kind of different payout scheme and they had a buck and

they just paid too much or something like that I hope I'm not mistaken but I think it was it was roughly this no but it's just crazy yeah it's crazy well it's crazy to see the churn and the mining pool industry in particular so how do you how do you guys survive that churn you're saying to stay focused and build but what else are you constantly looking over your shoulder at competitors mining pools entering the market we don't look at the competition too much it's difficult to make something really special and not been focusing on your stuff is better in general I think and the competitors are

arriving and then there's something to mine we don't know why it's pretty funny right yeah that's one thing that's actually a principle i have here like the podcast and the newsletter i write is uh i watched dr dray jimmy iovine documentary series on hbo from like last year there's one a part where jimmy iovine in particular says like when you're working on something just you gotta have like blinders on like a racing horse just like don't look to your side just to keep focus and it seems like you guys are a perfect embodiment of keeping focus on your core competencies and basically building better uh better software for bitcoiners to run which is uh which is awesome yeah at the end it's a service so the service needs to be stable people expect it

runs all the time and so from this perspective it's wrong it's very similar to running a banking software it has to be on 24 7 even though like banks or internet banking or sometimes down this can be what's that like you guys up at all you guys have like we have duties uh spread across the team um and it just means like most of us are pretty much like 24 7 online um just in case something happens yeah when i can take my cell phone and put it outside of my reach it's completely a lion feeling yeah I'm not used to not have my cell phone all the time by myself for the last six years so it's a really strange feeling to not have my cell phone by myself because all the time something can happen and we

have pretty strict like rules who can access the production servers really strict because there's a lot of money flowing and you cannot reverse Bitcoin transaction as we all know so so there is only a couple of people who can like connect to the core pool infrastructure so we need to be always ready to do what's necessary to run the operation yeah do you guys ever gonna go on vacation yeah but it doesn't it depends how you define the vacation if it's a place with 3G 4G service or you can be online within minutes then you can go anywhere so like I like I personally like sailing so for me I cannot go

sailing too much off the coast but within 20 miles how many hours you have for reaching good internet connection and we the most critical points are when we fly together so we always buy a lifeline you guys have separate flights on the way home sometimes we do um no it's i can't imagine like the stress of having a to be up and available 24 7 you get easter egg yeah and then not being available is the strange part i think this is the stressful part if you know that um or you're not available that's the problem because that's where i could have helped something maybe something yeah interesting i love what you guys have built let's talk about uh better hash better hash is something that i've been

uh uh championing i've been uh championing better hash not championing but trying to make more people aware of it because matt corallo has been on this podcast before he's explained that he seems to think that better hash uh would help decentralize bitcoin more you freak so i've listened to this podcast and have heard me describe better hash you probably understand it already but i'll do it again better hash simply takes uh what you guys do now in stratum is construct the block template and divvy out the reward better hash would allow individual miners within the pool to uh construct around block templates and you guys would simply divvy out reward you seem to think that uh it's not as as great as advertising there may be a middle ground

to be reached so let's jump into that um yeah well one thing to say is that we're in close contact with matt corello um and we've been discussing all the details about better hash and what could be done differently so that this could be like the next industry standard like for us the The current proposal doesn't fulfill some criteria specifically on latencies and performance that you would expect for such a big protocol change. At the same time, the ideas of ensuring security and allowing this work selection process on the miner side possible, that's obviously a very good idea and that's something that would like to integrate as well so the current status is that we have some

kind of proposal that's already like formula written and we were really working together with Matt to come up with the best solution for for the industry that would be like quality changer you could I mean it's simply just too many devices and you cannot just roll out some prototype it has to be really well thought so I think it's very useful to take the time for the development and like really make the right decisions and it's still we still have a time ahead of us where this would be like you know openly discussed and we'll see what comes out of it because you guys have a lot of sub cost and to

the to the software that you're building now what what would that mean to like try to take on an endeavor like implementing a better hash or something similar to it like what would you guys have drop everything work on that or and we would love to do that but from the experience with Stratton for the last years there is a lot of different cases to cover so it needs to be right it's super difficult to change it in the future and there are some tweaks of the version one of Stratton and it makes so large confusion so every firmware can have slightly different dialects of the protocol so it takes time. Better hash in

general is a great idea in principle because it brings a new possibility to miners to allow better distribution of work selection let's say or choosing which transaction should be put into block so this idea is great but there is a lot of technical stuff which needs to be done perfectly or we think it can be done better than in BetterHash and one particular problem we had with the proposal was it created too much risk on the pool side in the sense that if the miners with their firmware or software are misbehaving either probably because of the bug we would not be able to double check it so we would blindly need

to just accept the data from the miners through the protocol and we try to find a way how to make it no-brainer for pools to like bring the new protocol in life so there needs to be zero risk for them it needs to be more efficient more secure and there needs to be some good outcomes even for pools to implement because it's obviously work. Yes so they're like obvious like pain points within BetterHash that you think you could tweak and make better or do you think it's... Yeah we already had a proposal before we understand there is BetterHash but we didn't incorporate the port selection before so we tried to

marriage duty principles or point of views to one protocol and I think we are pretty close to nailing it but there are some still some discussions with Matt because obviously we would like to be as as good as possible for everybody so that there is a high chance that it's gonna be supported by as many people in the world as possible because it's the only thing how it can substitute the protocol the first protocol yeah he seems to think that uh bitcoin bitcoin's potential decentralization would be severely uh reduced if a protocol like this isn't implemented are you under the same volition i don't think so uh it's it's a great thing to have so that you as a

miner has the chance to use the feature still I think most of the miners would be profit driven so they would like to mine as valuable block as possible by the fee amount so all the pools or majority of pools choose the blocks by fee amount. Once you start to make different block, you need to make the block less valuable. So you can have individual miners running a better hash protocol, sort of bringing down the potential fees for everybody else in the pool? Yes, it's one of the problems. You need to calculate this properly on pool side so that if somebody wants to mine 300k blocks and not one one megabyte blocks

he can but obviously there are not going to be as many transactions in the block as a normal block so the miner needs to be paid less because other miners who would like to mine normal blocks needs to get the the reward they they expect so there is a lot of maps involved so i don't think it's going to be ever like really must used feature but it's great to have it so if somebody wants to have the control it has the possibility sort of like a security measure that you don't want to use but you can you have an option to use it and that sort of prevents the attackers yes and right somebody decides for the censorship if if the current um mining protocol was like really massively used by the pools for sender chip if if the if the mining pools would collude then

this would allow the miners to toggle it on right yes that makes sense that's not as the pool of deciding right the instructor the the the transactions that's something we talk about too the bitcoin core trying to make that more modular and you can even make this this pool software more modular as well it seems right um that seems like it seems like a great metal ground in my opinion um and that's uh not yet you don't want into that that's the first time i've like thinking through this the uh individual miners with the fees not getting the most fees out of it um the corner case is what if i as a miner decide to mine uh empty blocks like yeah i have some special preference i just

want all blocks to be all blocks that i make to be empty so that means like that's zero fees for for the other miners that also have the share on this block yeah they're expending energy right right so this has to be properly calculated so that it's transparent and fair for everybody yeah that's the I would say this is the difficult part the technical part about the negotiation how to do it properly it's that's the easier one yeah it's actually making it happen because like we were talking about earlier like you have some miners who can't even run on full nodes and it would be hard for them this was the reason why we we really want to be able

to double check the work because firmware or software in general have a lot of bugs in it and we can we can like fix the box really efficiently and we are responsible if our service doesn't work as it should be working uh so we are we have the greatest incentive to do it right but we cannot say everybody else is gonna do a good job and other miners would pay for mistakes of different miners if we cannot prevent the error so there are these kind of problems we need to solve in the protocol and it's a lot of other small nuances which just need to be right and I think it's it's pretty close to uh be finished but yeah and has these uh these small externalities that that rear their

heads out of out of nowhere it seems it's crazy i mean it goes back to incentives as well um you guys have brand recognition that's almost 10 years old at this point so you you have a very high incentive to protect that and provide the highest quality service that you can anybody wants to do shitty work yeah and we need to deal with the firmware or the protocol every single day I was actually good upon that nobody wants to do shitty work you know when individual miners doing shitty work in your pool basically anything anything that you do should be in line with solving some problem that you have right I mean when Linus made Linux kernel he had a problem that he

didn't have free open source Unix distribution or Unix system and this is very similar to like we were facing with various firmware issues so we came up with the idea okay we know how to make the mining protocol we can have the firmware the firmware is open source and become sort of like industry standard for for this era it would be very easy to roll out for the community any changes in the protocol because it could be tested it would like single source audited by the community so that that's the the idea behind all this that we're doing we try to come up with some compact solution to to all these topics

sort of like between core is audited and open source but nobody really cares about the mining firmwares which are actually it's an issue like whatever there's a what if there's some dead man's switch in the in the firmwares out there that can shut down but there's like I don't know yeah right but there could be others I don't know so it should be our responsibility to try to educate people think about their minor and if it's not their firmware it's not their minor right yeah yeah it's a very good way to review process as thorough as it is yeah but you have to have something to review right how's how's

How has Brains been received by the market overall, how has the reception been in your opinion? I think the community likes it. They like the idea of really having something as a reference and standard implementation and something that's being taken care of. So yeah, I mean it's a new project so we'll see what happens in the future but we really try to maintain it and on the long run we want to add more obviously, more mining devices. one of the features we would definitely bring to the firmware is the protocol

implementation right great thing that we can implement it on both sides either on pool or in the firmware as well so that it works and yeah it could help with adoption a bit yeah that's so it seems like things are progressing pretty well for you guys what uh like what do we what do we see going forward what do you um like you said the progression of miners we've gone from cpu to gpu to fpga we're we're now a6 um is there anything above a6 do you think eventually no just smaller a6 so i think i think the current challenge is the euv technology of the extra ultraviolet uh what's this um you know that how the chips are being manufactured right you have a mask and you have your wafers and you use

some ultra short length light but it is not light at these levels that you use for enlightening the the mask right and that creates the footprint of the chip at that point or something yeah maybe well they are foregrounds and the problem of the current technology once you start making the chip smaller and smaller and smaller, the wavelength really starts mattering and this is the basic problem with the seven nanometers with the current sources of the, I don't want to call it light, but the thing that makes it very difficult to create the chips and with the EUV the length of of the light is very small i think it's like 17 nanometers which is already comparable with what you're trying to create uh as the structural sizes on on the chips

but um the problem is that this technology is not mature yet so the old seven nanometers were not using the 17 nanometers light but it was using something like 100 i don't know 70 whatever which is like uh two orders bigger than what you're trying to create on the chip and that makes it better yield big variances in the production quality and so on so this this would be like the next step in the asics when this euv matures and it's like widely used and becomes cheaper uh and then obviously somebody started talking about five nanometers and even like three but i mean this is crazy huge on an atom level so we should be following the ev progression once that gets cheaper and more fleshed out yeah and then maybe 3d structures on the chips which

already do exist but uh sort of like 3d super costly yeah and there are no uh like how do you like quantum computers uh quantum computers are not going to uh break bitcoin mining that's interesting because a lot of people think lately that quantum computers can do crazy stuff and they can or yeah but they're completely useless for Bitcoin mining. I had an access to a quantum computer a few years ago through some university doesn't matter. What was that like? It was really interesting I didn't know if it can be used for Bitcoin mining so we really tried and it was immediately obvious that it's it's not gonna happen so we are going to go with

and with a safe direction and it's it's great thing once everybody is on the physical limits it can help you with the commoditization yes what what is what is the Bitcoin mining landscape look like when we get to that point what in your opinion I think it's gonna be pretty similar mm-hmm and it's a good think I I don't think it there needs to be some some drama and it's good money it's a core thing what needs to be done properly for the network to function but no big news is necessary I think like for the Bitcoin itself obviously there is a lot of interesting something you can do in the bit between mining sub

industry but for normal users I wouldn't guess and a big news if there is enough manufacturers of similar chips it's gonna make it more accessible more decentralized at the end of that because anybody I'm sure once there is enough manufacturers producing similar chips it's easier to compete and yeah well once it's boring it's great well one thing that's limiting is the resources or the natural resources that you have you can produce only a limited amount of silicon right and you have different parties interested in this silicon that it's being used for the way first in order to produce chips we have cell

phones we have laptops computers everything and the amount of these gadgets is growing right and within this industry you still have to fit in with with the mining part so the limiting factor would be all these resources and one day I saw the foundry comes in yeah when yeah once we have a Bitcoin foundry maybe it's gonna be it's gonna be a shared resource so you would have the same like issues right um but i mean once once i saw a chart of um chip technology versus the amount of companies that are able to uh manufacture on this technology and it's like exponentially going down like initially there were like 100 companies that were able to produce chips

but they were like at 100 nanometers or whatever i mean i don't know the exact scales but it eventually goes down to like three or four uh foundries uh globally that can work with the cutting edge technology including intel so i mean if even if you have like different chip manufacturers they still have to go to the foundry that have that has to source the wafers and that produces the chips so and if everybody is interested in the cutting edge technology and obviously mining is interested in that because of the efficiency then we have to race for the resources yeah you're gonna drive rent rent prices up on those founders uh now it's fascinating you're you're not only competing with other miners you're competing with other

people building hardware at the end of the day and then it comes to the physical components as well i'm talking about those yeah these are big names like bitcoin mining already is the same process and uh foundries as amd or nvidia or uh companies like that it's it's crazy in a sense because you're still a really small industry or it's it's interesting uh it proves that there's something worthwhile there though right yeah a lot of money the incentives are aligned um some people say it's uh um it's a problem of wasting energy but when you look at what's going on with the exchange rate versus the amount of hashing power connected to the network um it directly reflects the exchange rate and miners already do search

for places on the earth with the cheapest energy so the economical model of the whole ecosystem is not that simple no i mean this is something i've been pontificating about on this podcast i think we should be incentivizing bitcoin mining as much as possible to become as energy efficient as possible um like steve barber what he's doing up in alberta uh basically going to natural gas fields which are flaring methane into the atmosphere capping that and mining that like we should be trying to do that everywhere if possible yeah yeah this is a great example yeah it's um but again you gotta get we gotta go to the education like pick winds boiling the oceans did you hear we're using the same amount of energy as a small country do we have to comment it

I guess before we wrap up here I have an interesting question for you guys what's the most stressful like week or couple days

or experience that you guys have had while working at Slush Pool like having to be on 24-7 what's like

the craziest emergency call the first two days it was 48 hours being up and like

transferring the pool server that was like compromised and everything into

different data centers so we were like i mean like the first day when we got involved it was at the time when something like went really bad so we were like up for 48 hours and working on the thing to to make it run again uh because i mean you cannot shut it down the hash rate is gone how are you going to convince the miners to connect again i mean some somehow you could but so i for for me it was the first two days yeah and then like any other incident after that it I mean we do remember incident that would last for like a day or half a day but I don't

remember like 48 hours anymore yeah so the first two days were the worst yeah it was exciting we made an agreement about the whole pool and stuff like that and then this incident came the big hack of compromise of the single server of pool at the time and it was just okay now and we jumped in and yeah it's it's the history from the time so every single day is actually better than the first one that's uh that's a good that's a good way i think i would rather have like the worst day of my job to ever be the first day of the job you get it over with and then yeah it's all rosy from there um one thing we didn't get to maybe we could touch on here then too is like coinbase messages like what what's going on

there like the unknown uh the unknown blocks with nobody's sharing messages in the the coinbase um starting to rise like as like during the the fork wars the segway 2x people were using the coinbase to sort of signal that they were willing to go for segment 2x or user activated soft fork as a pool uh putting stuff in the coinbase why are you guys doing this are you ever throwing people off your scent by putting somebody else's name in the coinbase or do you do this to signal to your clients or your users like hey we have this and could prove it with the coinbase you're basically allowing uh websites or other parties to understand who mind which block you can obviously say it from different sources you can monitor what what jobs the pool provides but the easiest way

for everybody is to just reading information from coinbase uh but we we learned as the users or or the community we all learned a lesson from uh the drama about signaling uh segwit so i don't think there will be any similar situation in the future uh we try to let our miners to choose what they want to signal but in general it's I think it's not a miners job to decide the direction there is obviously a good thing about signaling that the mining industry is ready for for a change but most of the hash rate is already company-based or their professional teams running the operations so if there is a change in the protocol they will do it properly there needs to be some

communication but if the whole community decides about some future change I don't think miners would have a technical problem with it and whether they should have vote or not it's a difficult or different question but I don't think community should be take as a hostage for miners. It's an interesting part of Bitcoin like being able to signal and put a message into the coinbase like as you mine a block. Signaling is one thing but being able to like vote messaging or what's the what's the name if you can prevent some change from happening it's something different at voting that you want this or you want

something else I didn't study all the details on some game theory level but I don't think we would like to be in the same situation as with a secretary back in the day when there was the segwit wars going on with the signaling even though people were signaling and we had the bit 91 already deployed i mean the the patch we were not sure to the very last day that this signaling was not false so even though you have signaling you just don't know i mean you cannot say that this is going to happen was it f2 pool with everybody like signaling for one way and then the other like everything oh running so many centers what can happen so so like signaling is just uh there is some probability that they're really running the

software that would uh you know keep the rules and follow the signaling once it become active but yeah you're not miners are in no way sort of uh held to what they signal at all they could signal we'll do something there's no no cryptocurrency oh sorry there's no cryptographic um force making them switch the feature on yeah so um that's fascinating it's been a fascinating hour and a half i'm pumped you guys came through here uh i want to let you get get on with your blockchain we have to explore new york explore explore brooklyn uh i guess before we leave you have like a parting note a parting message for the freaks out there uh the thoughts on where Bitcoin is right now worth going optimistic pessimistic it's your time to

take the floor I'm really optimistic like I I can see so much effort put into the right direction and so many people doing right stuff with Bitcoin and promoting and trying to push it the right way so I'm really optimistic my message is if you didn't get into Bitcoin just get some Bitcoin before you retire so this is the right time we're always stacking stats here at tales from the crypt it's a good way to end it uh gentlemen thank you for joining me thanks for having us here thanks for coming bye thank peace and love freaks