The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - D-Central

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES This week, we welcome D-Central to the show. D-Central is based out of Montréal, Québec, Canada, and they provide customers with equipment for mining bitcoin. If you are interested with setting up a garage miner, this is the show for you. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠Discord: ⁠ ⁠⁠https://discord.gg/ESRCZWpb ⁠⁠ A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠⁠EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠⁠The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. With their new kyc-free options, there's never been a quicker, simpler, more private and (most importantly) cheaper way to acquire private Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

The Canadian Bitcoiners podcast is just two guys and maybe a guest or two discussing Bitcoin, Bitcoin equities, and the related macroeconomic space. It's not meant to be financial advice, so please, if you're doing any investing, after listening to our program, do your own research, do your own due diligence, and understand that any money you invest can be lost. The show is meant for entertainment purposes only, and we hope you enjoy the program. Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast, the mighty CBP, all part of the CBP Media Network. I'm Len, and today I'm going to be talking to Decentral because we have, well, anybody that's interested in mining, home mining, or even expanding their mining operations, we might be able

to get some information here, maybe source out a new place to order some ASICs and equipment. But before we go any further, there's a couple of things I have to just check off my list of things to do. And those two things are sponsor reads. And well, number one, we have EasyDNS. And we talk fondly of EasyDNS because Mark and team have been very helpful for us and to us. And he comes in the chat every so often. I want to thank Mark for pumping up our views by coming into the chat. But nonetheless, EasyDNS, it's a place where you could buy your domain

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So, that would be Jonathan. Because it's written, as I saw it in the invitation. So, Jonathan from Decentral Tech, thank you for coming on. And this is going to be an interesting discussion. I know that you guys, well, Decentral Tech is a sponsor of the KM Bitcoin Conference. You guys are going to be there. You're located in Montreal, and it's actually going to be taking place in your backyard this year.

But before we go there, I want to talk about you, Jonathan. Who the heck are you? Can you give us some background about you, how you became a Bitcoiner, or maybe how everything started up with Decentral? Yeah, so it's such an interesting question because actually I'm going to do another vouching for one of your sponsors that would be Bull Bitcoin. Because Francis Pouliot is actually one of the person that influenced me a lot into my early days into Bitcoin.

So since you're asking how it all began for us, well, you know, at Decentral, it began first in our, you know, apartment, just a four-room apartment, me and my roommate back then that is now the co-founder of Decentral. And we started with just one ant miner when we saw an opportunity, you know, for mining. And we just, back then, I mean, it was in 2015, I think we got interested.

There was a lot of mining centralization in China and most talks were about mining centralization in China. So it was a way for us as enthusiasts to start doing our, you know, our part and also to make maybe a return over investment because we were seeing all the interesting economics around our energy rate here in Quebec, which is pretty decent. So it started a bit like that, obviously. So that's the mining side of things. And that's where we specialize. But the Bitcoin side of things, and I always felt there was a divide

between Bitcoiners and miners at least until now so the Bitcoin side of things Francis you know was a definite how to say lighthouse for us and he really mobilized us even when there

was the fork wars we would mine UASF uh vip 148 um back then so all that kind of stuff we went to a very interesting route and i think a very unusual route for most miners and it's brought us really to uh you know so we started by our own um needs and and so we would first start by finding a location for our own mining, but then we would have friends that also want to mine with their units. So you start to ask, okay, well, how can we answer to that kind of need? And obviously today it looks obvious, but back then, again, nobody was speaking. Everybody was keeping everything. You know, in Quebec, nobody, you know, showed any mining facility yet.

It's in 2016 that the largest broadcaster here in Canada, CBC News, came to our mining facility. And, well, you know, we just had 40 units back then, but they called us the largest mine in Canada. I still have that article that's ranking when you're looking for Bitcoin mining in Canada. And so funny because it was really just a super modest mine, but we were the first one to be out there. And that's how it all started. We have no like business equity. My first time I have a business. So we learned a lot on the spot and we probably lost a lot of opportunities. There was a

lot of bad moves. But through all of that, I mean, we managed to keep our passion for what we were doing. And I think when you're passionate about what you're doing, work turns into fun. And when you're having fun, you don't count the hours. And so that's essentially what happened to us for the last, I'd say, eight years. And here we are. So we've focused a lot on our roots. We did serve, you know, some mining, so large mining institutions, public companies, stuff like that. We did a lot of repairs, especially in 2020 when there was that, you know, that the huge supply chain shock, COVID and all,

and the mining ban in China. So we had our share of work with public institutions, but really getting back to our roots for us was where it was with the plebs and how it started for us. So, you know, fixing issues that we faced ourselves and it's easy for us to find solutions to problems we have ourselves when we want to mine at home

and stuff like that. So that's where we put our focus and it's doing pretty good. I think we're, and especially now, I think, me, I always say, it's now the cycle of the plebs because mining, I think, is going to evolve into something that

becomes more profitable when you do it as a dual purpose activity than as a you know industrial scale activity where you just copy and paste the model right so the whole mining that the garage miners i think i want to focus a lot of of our talk on that today but before we even get there you said that when cbBC came by your facilities, you had 40 units that were hashing away. Just curious, what units were they in 2016? So we had the S9 and we had, unfortunately, a few L3 Plus in there.

So GPU mining was long gone at that point. There was, no, there was a GPU mining, but we weren't, like, we touched a bit so we did a bit of you know ethereum mining when it started i think it was like 10 ethereum something like that and uh but we quickly got out of the gpu and focused on azik because to us it really bitcoin really became the the main focus for a big while l3 plus to be honest like we already had them and they were still pretty profitable at that time. So that argument

stayed for a while for us to keep them plugged. But as time went, we got our focus strictly on Bitcoin and now we only have Bitcoin hashing units. We do have a few customers that will have a few altcoin miners, but we only take Bitcoin

payments and focus on Bitcoin. All our products are based on Bitcoin. Now, in terms of what's going on in Quebec, I hope you give us a boots on the ground perspective of what's going on there. Because in the rest of Canada, I know in BC and Manitoba, I think it's Manitoba, they have put a kibosh or stopping any new mining operations plugging into the grid. And I know in BC, they actually took that up to the BC Supreme Court. And it's unfortunately wasn't in favor of the Bitcoin mining operation. Now, in Quebec, I know that there was in the past,

some issues with the province of Quebec, or at least the people administrating the power, they were trying to stop more mining that was going to be plugged into the grid. Is that the case? Is Quebec still relatively neutral or borderline hostile towards Bitcoin mining operations, or are they just letting things go as they can? Yeah, so I won't say hostile because they did regulate around it. They didn't come and try to shut us down. But there is still that moratorium

you're referring to in place, a bit like BC, I believe. So new connections are refused right away. And the pretext for that is that there is not enough energy. Now, I think it is mostly due to miseducation, right? Because in Quebec, the reality is most of the year, almost all of the year, we have enormous surplus of energy, but due to it being hydro, right? But during the winter, we have those peaks and essentially consumption in Quebec will double. Like you go from 20,000 megawatts hour to like 40,000 megawatts hour, and we have to buy from other provinces during those peaks. So those peaks are very costly for Hydro-Qué hour and we have to buy from other provinces during those peaks. So those peaks are very costly for Hydro-Quebec and they want to avoid that.

So having a better base, a better production base to cover those peaks would be helpful. But the reason they won't do it is they don't have the customers for the rest of the year. And that is why I think and this is where Bitcoin mining can be really useful have the customers for the rest of the year. And that is why I think,

and this is where Bitcoin mining can be really useful and have a good synergy with the energy producers there. So there is definitely some mis-education because obviously if they would perceive that, I'm sure there would be a lot more action on the ground to actually get Bitcoin mining going. And we'll probably see that because AI is going to go through the same, you know, the same struggle, let's say,

because there's going to be that same requirement for energy and the same scares about this being a new industry. So I think AI and Bitcoin mining will probably work together in the future as a, you know, computing industry and as a huge energy consumer. And there is going to be, you know, when you're connected to the grid,

there is going to be that synergy you have to aim for. Now, in Canada, I think the best is to look for more decentralization and go for private-owned energy. So, for instance, in Alberta, there is a lot of flaring and methane mitigation that is taking place. And we've started to expand there because we've been active in the Quebec file since 2018 on that moratorium. And we went to Régis de l'énergie audiences and stuff like that. We deposit documents that are public for the public to view. And despite all of this, we're still having those issues,

that moratorium in place. So I think our focus should be on, we still have to educate them because if not us, nobody will. But in the meantime, our focus is really on going for the private energy. So in terms of having somebody in Quebec just plugging in an S9, S17, S19,

I suspect that's not going to cause too much problems with the energy producers. They're not going to come knocking on your door. No, no, no. And they even have a rule for that. It's not too bad. I mean, for the plebs or even for a small commercial operation, it's 50 kilowatts. So anything over 50 kilowatts has to have a permit. You know, that special rate they'll apply.

But anything under 50 kilowatts is just the standard rate, so they don't bother too much about that. And the rate is still good. I know the energy cost over there is phenomenal. That's why there's a demand to set up shop within Quebec. If you compare the energy rates that the consumer pays in Quebec versus other jurisdictions in Canada or even North America,

it's really competitive. So there's an understanding why people want to flock there for this type of system. But with respect to the units which you sell, I want to be more specific here. Now, because you sell ASICs, I mean, I don't want to get into the consulting

or the hosting or anything else just yet. We'll talk about that in a moment. But what are some of the more popular products that you sell? We'll be talking about the Bidax. We'll be giving away that just momentarily. And I want to thank you very much for offering it. But I'm curious, what is the big ticket item these days? What are people coming to you and asking of you for purchasing?

I'm just curious what it is. So I'd like to give an answer to that uh really it's a bit of everything um so you know we started just this season we started the the space eaters um so last season we saw a rig from crypto club you know with the s9 space eater edition version and we were really interested by that box i like when i saw it i immediately understood this is the thing that's missing for it to make it sexy to use an azek at home for eating because we've been having that speech you know year after year but it never really truly sticked and when i saw the box to me it was it was it so we reached out to rick from crypto cloaks and um we also had the huge inventory of 17 series.

We figured out we could run them on 110 volts. We figured out to make them run quietly. So we know everything was coming together. And so we decided to sponsor right in the summer, sponsor Rick for creating that box for 17 series. And when he did, Rick, for creating that box for 17 series. And when he did, essentially he also gave us the right to resell the

S9 version as well. So we listed everything and it's a very, very popular product. I mean, in just one season it became one of our best-selling items from all times. We're selling from the S9 with not-so-fans

to the S17, to the S19 Pro, even to the S19K Pro. We've just lately launched Antminer Slim Edition. So this is a custom miner we've made that's essentially a one-hatch board miner running with the Loki kit from Pivotal Blade. So if your viewers want to go and have a look, Pivotal Blade tech. I have it right here.

I have the kit right here. I just ordered it. That's it. I got that and I got, oh gosh, there was a Nord kit or something. Here's the Loki. Yeah, that's it. For the Cloudline fan. So in terms of that, I want to pick your brain on that. So it's a single hash board,

but theoretically, could you still keep all three hash boards in there and just keep, they won't be powered, they're just sitting there just taking up space, and the fans themselves would just cool the single unit and it doesn't really change anything. I've seen some setups where they take out the two non-

hashing boards and put in foam or something just to take up the space. But can't you just still leave it in there? It doesn't make, I mean, it doesn't do anything. It doesn't do any harm, does it? No, no, it doesn't do any harm. And in some cases, in some setups, you'll hash with the triage board. So it really depends.

With the 19 series, it's a bit more complicated. With 17 series and under, you always have your triage board and you just undervolt to meet your needs. With the 19 series, the hash boards, the chips are a bit more peaky, right? So they require a voltage to work. So going too much under is going to just stop hashing. So because of that, let's say an S19. S19 right now, you can't really stay stable under 1700 watts so having this on 110 volts at 15

amps you're essentially killing your breaker so in north america that will cut it for a standard outlet and this is where you have to reduce the amount of hash boards so then you have one hash board sorry one control board per hash board if you ever wanted. That's interesting, and that's actually something I want to start looking into myself. For a friend that sent me his S19, I still want to hook up this Loki kit. You have to pick your brain about how to finish this up. For sure, for sure. Very cool.

Now, in terms of the unit we want to give away, do you think we should just do that right now, or do you want to just... Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I'll just take your time, just two seconds to show off the first Bitax Supra. Explain what it is for you. This one is the one that's running from the S21 chip. So the firmware just released and we've assembled it and flashed it

with the firmware that's available now. And so this is the one that's in pre-order right now with the S21 chips. The only way to get those chips is essentially to extract them from a working S21 dashboard. And then we have this one here. This is the 204. So this is the Ultra. So we have this one with a fancy fan. So there are a lot of ways, you know, to make it display.

So the one we're having as a draw today is the Ultra. It's with the S19 XP chip. And it's rocking about 500 giga hashes. So if you put it on the public pool, for instance, you have a chance to win each month. There's a draw for the biggest difficulty. And there's also a chance to win a block, right? Absolutely.

Every 10 minutes, you have a chance to win a block. Now, I'm just curious. How does one power up one of these units? Is it just zipping? Really super simple. also a chance to win a block, right? Absolutely. Every 10 minutes, you have a chance to, on average, you can win a block. Now, I'm just curious, how does one power up one of these units? Is it just zipping? Really super simple. So we have, here you have that socket. It's a 5-volt adapter. And plug it in. That's it.

Plug and play. Is it Wi-Fi or is it RJ45? So you have the, so essentially, if you look at a Bitax, let me get a better view like this. So if you look at the Bitax, this chip right there, this is the SP32 chip. So it's essentially working as the brain of the unit.

So it's the control board and it's like if it has an embedded Wi-Fi in it. So that's the way you can see it. This is the control board from the Bitax and it's receiving signal from there. And then beside it, you have more what would qualify as the hash board part of the Bitax.

And this big thing here that's being cooled is essentially the YASIC chip. So all of this is just for that tiny YASIC chip that's needing to be cooled down. And if your heroes want to see what a chip is looking like, it's those little things like this here. Those generate a ton of heat, eh? Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. And this is why, well, this is why it's actually useful to use them as space heaters. And touching on the BITX and the space heaters,

you know, that same crew, Open Source Miners United, that's working on all that crazy stuff. There's so much that's being released. There's the PyX, which is essentially a hat that you connect to your Raspberry Pi. So from here, Hirlene, I'm sure you can understand

that where we're going is to essentially go back to a full mining archival node. So you have your, every pleb can, you know, get back to the true roots of Bitcoin where everybody, every node is also a miner.

So one hash, one vote. And there is also the BitCard, which is coming with the BitCard is essentially an open source control board. So this is going to be very useful for our space eaters going forward. There are some like pci express hash board that's being designed for anybody to insert the pci express hash board

inside their pc and hash from there so like decentralization is coming so what are the prices of the units the ultra and the super i'm curious how much they each yeah so the super i it's all listed in canadian dollars it's 200 canadian dollars and the ultrara. I'm curious how much they each do. Yeah, so the Supra, it's all listed in Canadian dollars. It's 200 Canadian dollars. And the Ultra, if I remember correctly, is 175. And the goal here, like the more volume we do,

the better the sourcing for us with the parts. And our goal is not to make more margin on it, it's to actually lower the cost to get more plebs, to get this more accessible in the ends of the plebs. Yeah, that's decentralized hashing. That makes it all worthwhile.

So let's do the giveaway right now. And I'm not sure if you have any particular person you want to give it away to, because I asked for comments and the best comment was going to be winning the prize here. Do you have anyone in particular? Because I have one in my mind. I want to know if...

Please go ahead and choose. This is your podcast. The one I like best is from Maximus Maxilistis. I hope I pronounced his name correctly. He writes, I want a bidax to help decentralize Bitcoin mining and use energy sources that are cheap, like biogas from food waste.

I like the comment. I like the initiative. I like everything surrounding that. So he is the individual that, in my opinion, should be winning the BIDX and I'm going to get in touch with him and we'll make arrangements for how to send out to him. Hopefully he's local, so the shipping isn't too much. But yeah, I love that comment and

hopefully you agree with my suggestion. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a good comment and it's a really good use. This is how we're going to win. So I have a comment in the chat and somebody is asking, will you guys have an S21 Slim Push Edition? So that's the goal. Obviously, there's still some testing that needs to be done here. So what we did so far with the S21 is we, so we managed to run it as one hash board.

And the way we managed to do it is with the EPIC control board, the UMC control board. So this is the only way we have right now to customize the S21. And the reason we need to, you know, to have some custom firmware or the source, or even maybe the bit cart at some point is because most of the units in the 19 series and 21 series, they'll have what we call no pick. So like the hash boards,

they don't have the microprocessor anymore. It's all the control board that's giving the work and the control board is refusing to give the work if there's any missing components. So if you have one hash board that's dead, well, the whole unit is bricked. So if you have one dashboard that's dead, well, the whole unit is great. So when you're trying to make one dashboard minor, obviously the firmware will fight against you.

So using the UMC was the way to do it for now. And we managed to push a good performance. Let me see if we have it on our solo pool now. Sometimes when we have a spot in the test room, we plug it. And yeah, it's in the test room right now. So if you add over solo.decentral.tech, it's essentially an instance of public pool that we're running ourselves. And you can see there's a few miners there.

Some of them are ours. Some of them are just the public that decided to point there. And the PowerPlay BM, there's only one unit like this. You can see it's doing about 37.3 Tera ashes. And this is one S21 ash board that we're testing different configurations right now through the UMC. How much power is that? How many watts is it consuming for that? I don't recall on top of my head, but it's projected at 18 watts per Tera ash.

We see more like 20 watts per Tawatt-hour as an average, but it's still very super decent. That's efficient. Yeah, and we're going to be able to run it at home. So this is where I think, again, all those big institutions right now, they're all racing against each other to convert and become more efficient than one and the other. But at the end of the day, they all throw,

like you're making Bitcoins and ETH, and they all the end of the day, they all throw, like, you're making Bitcoins and ETH, and they all throw half of their output, their ETH, outside. This is where Plebs can actually be much more efficient than mining institutions. And that's a narrative that I'm fighting a lot because most people will say, oh, it's not profitable to mine unless you have that big,

huge-ass facility. But actually, the way I see it is the other way around one thing i want to know is how loud is it if somebody wants to have this in their bedroom for instance or adjacent to their bedroom how noisy is this is this something that's going to cause people a terrible night's sleep or if they're working adjacent is it going to be impacting their workload like i'm just curious if you could sort of give an idea how loud is it? How is it? Yeah.

So when you're running it stuck, like, I mean, it could provoke probably earring loss. But when you run it as a space heater like we do, our goal is to really make it as quiet as possible. And one thing I realized at some point, we have here at Decentral in our, you know, in our, how we say it, when you come in, you know, the reception. Reception. Yeah, reception.

That's it. So when you come in the reception, we have convect air over there. And I noticed that it's actually making more noise than our space heaters. So that's how quiet our space heaters are. So that's a sign if you're looking to get something to heat up your home. And if you're on a fence, because it might be a little bit noisy, there you go. It's not going to be that. It's something that you did. If you're going to use electricity to heat your home, you might as well get one of these units anyways, and try to win one of those blocks or get into a mining pool and get a portion of blocks that are one in the pool.

So this is something where a lot of people, I think, is going to be transitioning moving forward. I know the S9s, they've done this. A lot of people were doing this with S9s up until recently, but now they're just too old, too inefficient, too obsolete. So it's good to see there's a lot of work being done with the newer models, the S19s and also the S21s. Where do you source those S21s?

Do you get them straight from the factory and you're pulling the chips? Because there's no second-hand market for this, right? No, so the chips, no, we have to extract ourselves and we actually plan to do it at some point during live stream to show a bit how it's done. The sourcing

is a bit of everything. So we don't order from Bitmain. I think we haven't ordered directly from Bitmain since 2018 because we're not that relevant for them. So even if we process a lot of stuff, I mean, hundreds of units, we're a very small player in the mining game. Well, you're the largest in Canada, according to CBC.

Just point to that article and provide it to them. That should be sufficient to twist their arm. One thing I'll tell you for sure is I'm definitely very confident in saying that we are the largest expertise center in Canada. I truly believe that Decentral has the most qualified

mining technicians in the whole country. Are you one of the only two in Canada that can actually work on Bitmain products? I think Bitfarms is one of them and you are the other. Am I correct in that? Bitfarms is a repair center for micro BT. And I wish we were too,

but they didn't have that need since Bitfarms is already providing. Bitmain don't have any interest in having warranty centers in Canada. They rather have their customers ship back to China and pay $600 in shipping fees while we do it for cheaper. So that's what it is. And who knows for Canada?

We'll see what the future can bring. Talk about your pool. I know that a lot of pools right now, they're transitioning to different ways of doing payments. Now, Brains Pool, for instance, they're starting this new pilot project where instead of meeting a certain minimum and there's fees attached to that, they're looking to experiment with paying out in Lightning. And this will be instant payments and there'll be no minimum and no fees associated with it. So as a consumer, one would look at that and say it's a good place to point your hash rate because you could potentially maximize your profits.

Are you, is your pool also going to be looking into something along those lines using some creative ways to try to lure in customers? Or is it just because you are very specialized, there's not much opportunity to make those changes just yet? Okay, so for the pool, well, we just have a solo pool and it's really just an enthusiast project. So it's like we're not looking

into bringing ASHRAE to our pool or nothing like that. We don't have that kind of scale, at least for now. We'll see what the future can bring. But right now, this is not in the plans. And definitely,

we're very enthusiastic to offerings like Brain's offer. So the integrating Lightning, I think it was about time. There's also Ocean Mining that's planning to integrate it a bit later this year. And I believe there's Lincoin. I think they're like more ashrate brokers than a real pool, but they're also providing Lightning payouts.

So all of this together is definitely good offers for blood miners that are looking. And especially when you're looking into micro devices, like right now we have the Bitax and we're talking 500, 600 giga ashes, but there's also, let's say, more serious contenders with the Bitax X, for instance, that's going to try to achieve three-tier ashes.

So when you're getting there, you can start to think into pooled mining instead of just solo mining, right? And when you start to think about pooled mining at that scale, well, the fees and all of that stuff, the minimum payouts is all very distressive. So having that barrier that just fell is very, very bullish, actually, for blood mining. Yeah, I like that. I like that there's now there's opportunities for people out there to choose different pools that offer different ways to do payments. And this might entice other pools to actually implement them as well, because if it's something that people want, well, they might as well implement it across the board. But there's another service that you offer as well under Decentral, and that is hosting services. And talk a little bit about that and where it's located and how one could take advantage of this.

I want to go a little bit deeper into this topic. So it really started, like I mentioned, with that, almost with that CBC interview, right? We had a few friends back then. And then with the CBC interview, right? We had a few friends back then. And then with the CBC interview, we started to have people reaching out. Again, we didn't have that business equity back then. And there was a moratorium that came into place. At the same time, we were scaling. So we actually didn't pass.

Our project didn't pass for where we were going. So it almost killed us when they passed that moratorium. And what happened is we started to shop around and we managed to find another company that a bit like us was struggling because of the moratorium. But they had that grandfather clause. So they have that access to that energy. So we managed to buy that company and use that company to get that access to the energy and launch our new hosting facility in Quebec that way. So this is how we managed to secure some hosting in Quebec. But again, we filled it in essentially six months

and it stayed full since then, right? So really, and it's only at the end of last year, beginning of this year, that we started to, you know, like enough is enough. We won't wait anymore. We had a few like partners here and there. So we have a few sites we're managing in Quebec. So like we could go and grab maybe 200, 300 kilowatts of capacity here, 200 here,

300 there. So we managed to scale a bit this way, but it wasn't nothing serious. In Alberta now we have our operations that have started to scale quite a bit. We have two containers now aiming on two others in the next two months. And so this is based mostly, so it's going to be stranded gas, methane mitigation. So this is stuff we're putting our hands into. We're not the oil and gas expertise, So we don't have expertise in that. We have partners that are taking care of the oil and gas side of things. And we're taking care of

all the technical mining and customer support kind of stuff. So that's how we're skinning the hosting operations now. And the end goal to me really with hosting is to essentially put ourselves out of business and people always find that funny when i say that but my real goal is for our products to you know to take over and to have the plebs be mining and make you know hosting you know mining hosting unfrustrable over over time so my goal eventually over the decade is to put myself out of business so that's it i I love hearing that. And I think Francis also talks about that with Bull Bitcoin.

His goal would be to have Bull Bitcoin out of business. I forget why, but I think he's mentioned that in the past. But anyways, we'll go into that. But in terms of people that want to get on board and use your hosting services, what sort of equipment do you offer? Do they have to buy it themselves and provide it to you? Or do you have it for sale for them to take advantage of? I'm curious how the arrangement is set up. It's going to depend, right? So sometimes we can put our hands on good lots.

We'll do. And we'll get those lots available for new customers. But most of the time, the customers will get their machines themselves and this is really important for us is to especially with hosting we like the we're just like uh just like your rent you're just paying your rent and like we're not we're not doing nothing special we're not custodial nothing so it's your own machine it's your own mining pool it's your own account it's nothing. So it's your own machine. It's your own mining pool. It's your own account. It's your own management. It's your own coins, your own wallet.

Like we don't do nothing. We take your machine, we plug it. We tell you if it works, if it doesn't work, we give you an access to a dashboard and that's it. And I guess they pay a monthly fee for the, for seeing the administration to the electricity net. Yeah. Yeah.

So the next thing you guys offer is consulting. Yeah. What is this this so it's a bit of everything right so uh we receive all sort of calls uh so sometimes it's going to be just people that that need to uh the first steps to understand mining so really it's not it's a bit of everything so if you want our attention and you like you want to come and pick our mind, you take the consultation and you come and have a chat and we're really open to discuss anything. So it can be really early talks. It can be really serious talks. We did some reports, 45 pages reports for companies that wanted to bring that, I guess, to their board or stuff like that.

So there's a lot of different projects where we can help. For instance, I'm thinking here in Quebec, there was a project in the north with the Crees at some point. They wanted to look into reusing that heat because it's very cold up north. And they wanted to... There's a lot of fast food and all that stuff, but they don't have vegetables and fruits. And so they wanted to

build those greenhouse and use mining to eat the greenhouse and stuff like that. So they'll come and reach out and see if it's feasible, how it's feasible, what the economics are. So it's, you know, really a bit of anything that goes into consultation. Yeah.

You just mentioned that this project up north about using it for heating a greenhouse. I have read this a few times in the past about a few different companies trying to look into that. That's one of the really amazing things you could do because the amount of heat that's being generated by these units, in most of the cases, it's wasted heat and if you could repurpose that for not just simply drying your clothes or heating your home but heating an area to grow food that could create a lot of opportunity to even provide nutrition to the immediate and local like that there's a lot here that we're looking at bitcoin mining it's not using too much energy and there's a lot good that could be done for Melissa. No, when I'm seeing like the coming decade, I think is really the era of dual purpose mining. And you can see already, like it or not, there's players even like Marathon right now, you can see there, I think they're doing that,

eating that like a fish tank to grow fish in there. There's, well, those projects I've touched on, methane mitigations, trended gas, all of this is essentially dual-purpose mining. The plebs with the heat, the greenhouses. So all of that is ways, are ways in our very capitalist ways to go ways to decentralize Bitcoin mining as well.

There's like the incentives are all well aligned, in my opinion, for the future. Now, throw your prediction hat on. What do you think is going to happen moving forward with regulation with the federal government? Because at least I don't want to talk about the United States. We'll talk about here in Canada. Do you think there's going to be any push from the government to try to make it more difficult for mining operations to expand within Canada? Or do you think they're going to leave that alone? They always make things more difficult. So you can't expect that to happen, right? It's just the way government operates. It's

the way they are. And it's, you know, it's a bit of their mandate to make things more complicated. And it's all about status quo with government and we're all about the opposite. So obviously there's going to be a clash here. And I think there's going to be some policy put in place and for better or for worse, I think we'll just have to deal with it. But in terms of your customers, I didn't touch upon this earlier. Do you primarily serve Canadian customers or is it North American or do you even deal with people worldwide? Oh, yeah, it's absolutely worldwide. I mean, Canada is really a small portion of our customers.

It's really funny to me. We're holding up our weight, though. We're just a lot of Bitcoiners in Canada. There are a lot of Bitcoiners in Canada. And see, I think it touches a bit on that divide I was talking about. Like, I always felt like there was the Bitcoin community and the mining community. And the mining community, you know, like every time I go to a mining conference, it's the same thing. I see everybody talking about profits and this and that and that altcoin.

And did you see that NFT and stuff like that? And it's so annoying. And there's like, I remember when I went to mining disrupt, there was like this one person, one person I had talked with that mentioned how Bitcoin was, you know, transforming their life in Argentina. And a part of that, it was just like talking about profits. When you go to a Bitcoin conference, you like speak with Bitcoiners, you like really understand how it's transforming their lives, like how it influenced them or how they're transforming themselves to work on Bitcoin. So there's that big clash. And I feel like it's finally coming together. I feel projects like the Bitax are bringing that divide

and removing that gap between the two. And it's going to be very interesting once there's that clash between Bitcoiners and miners because there's definitely a clash in culture. So, yeah, what was the initial question? Because to be honest, I lost the track a bit here. Actually, I want to go to the next part. You touched upon something and I want to make sure I don't forget this part. Yeah, go ahead. There's a Bitcoin conference in Canada taking place in Montreal.

You guys were at the Toronto one last year? Yes, yes. You guys were running a session on how to build your own mining equipment, right? Correct, correct. So it was to build that small device here. So people actually came to the workshop to learn how to build their own BitEx. Now we're closing the loop here. Okay, I remember that.

That was a lot of people attended and a lot of people enjoyed that. Now, in terms of what's going to happen in Montreal for the 2024 Canadian Bitcoin Conference, which is taking place, by the way, May 2024. Anybody who wants to attend

to check out the website. And if you use the promo code, I think BOGO, you get the second ticket 50% off. Just FYI for people who want to get the ticket. What is your role? Because you're one of the official sponsors of this.

Are you going to be doing a similar type of seminar? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So we're having two sessions this time. It's actually bigger this year. So we are up to 24 attendees that can come and participate to the open source mining workshop. And so it's two sessions of 12 students. Last year, we did one of 16 for reference, but it lasted a bit.

You know, we planned for three hours and I think we stayed for five hours. We were still at the hotel with all those hardcore Bitcoiners with us until like 20, so 9 p.m. or 10 p.m., I think. I was long gone that night. I was home. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Holy cow. And us, we still had the seven-hour drive because we were leaving that night. But yeah, so it was a crazy, crazy night. But it was very, very fun. Hardcore Bitcoiners. And really, everybody expressed the fun they had to that workshop. So I definitely expect, we expect to have twice as much fun this year. And if time permits,

we announced it for the Ultra, but now that the Supra is ready and working right now on my desk, we might be building a Supra Gitax miner instead. Very cool. Oh, and touching on the Supra, I have to show, it's a small 3D model we're working on right now. The Toyota Supra. This is an actual Supra. And have to show it's a small 3D model we're working on right now.

This is an actual Supra and if you can see here, the bitax is going to go inside. So imagine you have the fan coming out of the hood and this is where you're going to plug it and you'll have your screen with the stats on the plate here. So this is a small something we're working on right now

as a case for the bitax. I don't even know something we're working on right now as a case for the Vitex. I don't even know if they sold the Supra anymore. I'm old enough to remember when it was here in the 90s. The Supra was a high-end Japanese car. The performance was great, and obviously the S21's performance is great as well.

It's a good name you picked. I like the Toyota Supra. I think a lot of people did as well. Yeah, the name is not, it's really all that's to Open Source Miners United and all the good or hardworking mining hackers that are working in that group. So are you going to give one of your sessions in French or is it only in English?

No, it's only planned in English, at least for now, unless we have a popular demand and there's like a way to group people who are going for English. Obviously, anybody that needs to ask questions in French will do. For that conference, you've said it, it's happening in Montreal.

We're based in Montreal. We definitely plan to bring the party with us. All our inventory, all our stuff is 30 minutes away from the conference. So, I mean, there's no excuse not to have fun. So definitely be a part of that conference because us, we'll give it all we got.

I'm sure you will. You know, it's a shame I can't attend because May is a difficult time for me. It is a shame. I have so many birthdays to attend. So it's hard for me to leave this area for an extended period of time. Got it. Joey, my co-host, the real host of the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast, I'm just the ass of the show. He'll be attending, which is great. So hopefully you'll be able to meet him.

I got one question, like one final question that I just wanted to dive really deep into. Now, if somebody is looking to start mining at home and there's constraints due to they don't want to consume too much power, too much noise. Like, give us an idea of what you would suggest people look at in terms of their first equipment if they want to do mining at home in their home. Well, first equipment, if they're unsure if they'll be doing that, I guess the S9 is still a relevant choice in that case. Especially because the S9 has a lower ticket price. Everything that's

uncomfortable from running a higher-end unit like 17 Series, 19 Series, or even 21, all the things that are uncomfortable, you're going to leave it to the S9. If you're not comfortable with your S9, at least you don't have that big span that you need to recoup.

Sorry about that. So I guess it's a really good way to start. Now, if you're more sure of yourself, then you might want to go for something more efficient. And I think something like the Slim Edition, the S19K Pro Slim Edition is one of the most efficient and best price minor plebs can get right now at home.

If you are going to get an S9 too, here's one of the power supplies to come along with it. I can't believe I have one sitting on the floor with me. This could at least be repurposed for using one of the low-key kits. So that gives you an option. So if you are going to go for an S9 and you want to ramp up later on, you have options, especially with the equipment you have.

I mean, the S9 itself, you're going to have to sell, but the power supply unit is still usable. But in terms of those Bidax units, is that something that you would recommend for just somebody entering the game? Is that something that somebody... Definitely, but not for the same reason. So the way I see Bitax is more like if you want to have technical understanding and more like interacting with mining.

So what's really interesting with your Bitax, you open your logs, you see all the exchanges with the pool. You can start and Googling, like what's mining in Notify? What's this? What's that message? What is this for? And you can start to really understand, you know, like what's mining notify? What's this? What's that message? What is this for?

And you can start to really understand like the exchange that's going on between the hashing unit and the mining pool. And so that's super interesting. Like understanding, like having your Bittax and understanding the role of each of the components. It's not for everybody, but some geeks like me will definitely enjoy that. So it's a different, I'd say it's a different crowd and different purpose of learning. It's a different way of learning. The S9 is more gonna be, let's say, useful

because you can use it for repurposing, but you won't necessarily want to interact with it as much. The logs are not as complete. So it's not designed the same way, right? So yeah, it's really what I'm seeing as an ideal at some point when I'm looking at different products, let's say I like to go and navigate on Amazon to see what normal consumers would like to consume. How they like, what's the pattern?

And when I look into mining, you obviously have all that altcoin offering that will show up too. And what I came to realize is most of the miners that are designed with BITON in mind is going to be around 300 watts. So what I'm thinking is the perfect BITAX version is going to be the one that we reach 300 watts. So it's probably something like, I guess, what would it be? 24 chips, something like that. So when we get a Bitax with something around 20, 24 chips,

I think this is going to be a sweet spot for a serious home miner, where you can actually point it at a pool. You can use it as a space heater, but it's not too deep as well. And you can have all that customization, all that personification, and that same breakthrough that you have when you're playing with a Bitax.

Is there any opportunity to almost emulate the gecko sinus you know they have those usb i think s9 chips one of them i think per usb is there any way to emulate that to have uh one of the s19 or even the s21s put on a usb chip that'd be plugged into the computer or is that just not possible no it's possible possible. It's like there's going to be some limitations, and I think that's why it's not done this way so far. Although I have to see because the NerdX, which is a variant made by, I have a blank right now. Let me see if I can find them.

You're talking about the NerdMiner? Bitronics. So you know they have the NerdMiner, yeah? So this is just a ESP32 chips, and it doesn't really have a chance of finding a block. But there's the NerdAxe, but it's still a useful learning tool. And there's the NerdAxe that's coming. It's essentially an extension board where you're going to be able to plug in your NerdMiner and it's going to turn into a NerdAxe.

And the NerdAxe is essentially a Baxe board without the ESP32. So you plug in the two together and you're merging essentially nerdminer with Bittaxe, it becomes one. So now your nerdminer has one ASIC, has a real chance of finding a block. It's still very low and you can go to solochance.com if you want to, you know, have an estimation of the time it can take. But that said, so he seems to be powering that with USB. We did some experiments here and we can power the Bittex with USB, but we had to lower the hash rate.

And I think it's because the limitation of the power delivery chip. The power delivery chip, if I remember correctly, was not able to deliver more than three amps. And the ideal for us would be like some, something like four amps. So maybe there's a workaround. I'm not, you know, electrical engineer myself. So I really work with what I understand and know. But from my understanding and from the experiment we did so far, it's possible, but you'll have to lower the hash rate of it. Is that three amp limitation from the USB from the computer or is that from a powered USB, like a USB hub that has power to it? So I'm wondering if that has a higher average that you could draw from.

Yeah, so it seems to be with the actual power delivery chip in that very case. And the power delivery chip is that chip that's going to recognize how much watts, how much current it's supposed to send to your device because all those devices now have different needs. So there's going to be an exchange at the beginning to try to figure out which voltage and current

it should be sending to your device. So somebody's asking, he wants this for his nerd miner. He says, when is it coming out? It's already out. So Bitronix actually, I think he tweeted about this like maybe two or three hours ago. And it's open source. So it's all going to be available. It's already, I think, viewable from the GitHub.

I didn't have a look today. But in any case, I know it's planned to be open to the public. So if it's not already available for download now, it's going to be in the coming days, weeks. So we can have some people out there that are listening. This is breaking news to them. And they could be guinea pigs in this whole process. And they may report back.

I want to hear how it works. So yeah, we're getting close to an hour. I don't want to take too much of your time. Is there anything else you want to talk about? anything that you want to discuss related to your business that I totally missed that you want to just inform the public because I want to bring as many people as possible to Decentral and just want to make sure I covered everything you guys do and yeah the floor is yours just talk about your business anything I well I appreciate that you know one it's funny because one of the things that that really frustrate me is when a customer comes in and says if i knew if i found you before right

and it happens so often that customers are going to tell us that and what i like it made me understand at some point that the biggest issue and the biggest struggle we have at the central is not you know with our service not with the not with our service, not with the quality of our service, it's not with the speed of execution, it's with our visibility. Because each and every time people will tell us, like, if I knew you were there before, I would have done business with you earlier. So I really appreciate the tribune you're giving here. And really, I think we touched on most of it. We're doing mining hosting, we touched on it. We're doing mining repairs. So maybe a bit of that

and a quick history of how it started. It's really in 2019 when we had our own, you know, issues with those boards stacking up that would break. So I would, you know,

start to, and back then it was just the founders still in the team. So I would go on Russian forums, Chinese forums. There was like no education, no certification for easy repairs back then. So again, it's a bit like playing the pioneers there. And so fixing our own issues, we started to offer again to the friends and then

from the friends to the customers. And at that time, because of the mining ban, it came to the public institutions. We got to a team of 30 people and yeah, so it was very, very big. Then there was also obviously the coming back to the roots, the coming back to the reality. So a lot of those public miners were over leveraged when the market changed. Their needs changed drastically as well. So they all dropped at the same time and they had that big liquidity crunch.

We came with a few creative solutions and they're definitely good for the plebs that are listening. We have the Ashno Cash program, for instance. Ashno Cash is essentially made if you... So in mining, what we figured is at some point, it's not going to be necessarily profitable for you to pay for the repairs of your units. You'd rather use that money to buy new units.

So instead of having to use your liquidity on repairing your old stuff, we say keep your money, buy new stuff, ship us all the old stuff that's not working. And the ratio is going to depend on each unit. So for instance, an example could be you ship us two units. We keep one as a payment. We ship you one back fixed. And again, the ratio depends on the model there. So 17 series, you can expect something more like two for one.

So we'll keep two and we'll ship one back fixed. And there's definitely interest, institutional and interest from the BEBS with that formula. So it's something we had success with and it's allowed us to recycle and make space heaters, cheap space heaters, accessible space heaters. That's the goal of it is to be that overall repair and recycling center. So this is one of the things we do and we merge it together with our Frankenstein products. We worked through the space sitting project. We got a lot into 3D printing. We now have our own in-house design as well. And we're designing all those crazy products,

even the mini bit for the bitax. I don't have the funds right now, but all those, the Supra, the Slim Edition, we have the partnerships. So we have a partnership that extended now. We even sell the CryptoCloak shells as well. We give them a small kickback for each sales. Same goes for the Bittax.

We provide the kickback to Open Source Miners United for all their hard work. We have that partnership with Altair Tech where we have the Earl Acre, also that's, you know, or the BitChimney, our Altair Tech variant edition, let's say of Space Eater products. So you can have a look on his website or ours. So really we're looking into putting to availability every little product like this that is super useful for plebs, have that diversity. And I think we have the skill to do it. We have the skills to do it. I did say we're a team of 30.

We're not a team of 15. So it's still a pretty decent amount of people here that are working on all that stuff. It's not the same number. It's closer a pretty decent amount of people here that are working on all that stuff. It's not the same number. It's closer to reality. But also, it's something that you have to appreciate from the beer markets. It's a good time to work on your efficiency. And I would say that today, with 15, we do probably as much, if not more, than we did when we were at 30.

Oh, man. So you guys are very busy. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, you know what? Before we sign off, I guess there's something else I want to ask, and I'm sorry to bring this up so late. Somebody that wants to, say, buy a unit and heat their home, their room, whatever it is, with one of these space heaters,

how easy is it for somebody with limited technical knowledge to get one going? And once it is set up and get going, is it easy for them to change the settings to make it warmer and colder? Just talk about somebody that has very limited technical knowledge that wants to try this out. Yeah, so limited knowledge obviously is going to require more work,

that's for sure, from the customer and from us. But it's something we did in the past. There's a few examples that come to mind where I know some customers require a bit more handling, but it's something that my team is equipped to do. Sometimes it can take a bit more time. We have to set up a meeting and everything. And some customers, they have to come.

So when they're lucky enough, they can come to the shop. It's even easier because we can actually show hands-on. So we're open Monday to Friday. People can walk in anytime from 8 to 6 p.m. So that's something that locals will appreciate a lot and let it be known that for the Bitcoin conference is going to be the same thing. And we're also thinking maybe of opening the weekend,

especially for this one. So anybody that wants to come and visit, how it's done. I mean, we have a two floor and a huge warehouse. It's something that's still relatively impressive to, to visit. I think even though we're a small player in the, in this industry,

we have a decent place. So, so yeah. Any final words before we sign off? No, that, that would be it again. I appreciate the,

the tribune you gave to us. I appreciate everybody that's going to be listening. Anybody that has questions, don't hesitate. Give us a shout out. You can come and touch with us. We have our own Discord channel. We have Twitter. We have Telegram, WhatsApp.

I mean, everything. Facebook, we don't use so much, but we have it as well. YouTube, just like you guys. So yeah, any channel, come and talk with us. We have our support if you need any sales-related support. So in the show notes on YouTube, and it's also going to go on the audio side of things, there is the link to your Twitter account.

I'm sure I think you're the one that's managing it, Jonathan. But also, there's the website for Decentral. So those two are in the video, and it's going to end up in the audio. So if you have any questions, you can just click on any of those links, and you can find many different avenues to get in touch with them if you have any questions. So, Jonathan, I just want to thank you very much for coming on the show, spending time discussing your products. And hopefully, we've enlightened some people. Maybe we'll have some new space heater enthusiasts setting up shop in the next little while. I sure hope so.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, and thanks to everybody watching. Good. Good. Are you a fan of the old-school NHL 94 game on the Genesis or SNES? Why not check out my show, the NHL 94 Podcast, from tournaments and tactics to the people who

make up this community check it out wherever you listen to podcasts or find it on youtube