The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - skot, Open Source Bitcoin Mining w/ Bitaxe

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES This week we welcome skot9000 (https://twitter.com/skot9000) to the show to discuss a variety of bitcoin topics, including the Bitaxe (https://github.com/skot/bitaxe). The Bitaxe is a fully open source hardware Bitcoin ASIC miner, which allows people to start mining from home without consuming too much electricity. 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 Mighty CBP and all part of the CBP Media Network. And today we'll be talking to Scott about the BID Act. Now we talked about the BID Act some time ago ago i think it was last week or two weeks ago with jonathan from d tech central d central tech sorry that's about a d central tech and uh there has been a lot of um a lot of people like that and now we'll be able to dive deep a

little more into the technicals and the history of the bid acts so if you're into home mining if you want to start dipping your toes in mining, this is a good episode to listen into. And maybe you'll learn something. I'm certainly looking forward to this one. But before I go any further, I have to do a couple of ad reads. So number one, we have EasyDNS. And we talk very fondly about EasyDNS because they helped us out at the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast, set up our own very own website, the Canadian Bitcoiners.com. Thank you very much to the team at EZDNS for doing so. So if you have a website, you can go to EZDNS and you can migrate over to them.

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to your question to your account no questions asked now for the man of the hour we can talk about bidx and we'll talk to scott scott buddy how Hey, hey, I'm doing good. Thanks for having me, Len. It's good to be here. I know we talked about doing this, it seems like months ago, and it's finally arrived. I'm excited. Yeah, it had. So the genesis of this all was I heard you on a space. Now I'm looking at my timeline in the DMs. It was January 26 that I reached out to you. So that was when I started. So you're right. It was literally months ago.

Eternity, really. So it's been a long time. So thank you for being patient because we're booked solid. And the reason why I wanted to bring you on, when I initially heard you, you were talking on a Twitter space or an X space now. And you were talking about home mining, specifically with the BidX. And that's why I want to talk to you. But before we go any further into that, I want to talk to you, Scott, tell us a little bit more, introduce us to who is Scott before we go any further into the world of Bitcoin mining. Well, yeah. So I'm Scott. Let's see. I am an electrical engineer by training. So I've kind of spent a lot of time doing this. Been into Bitcoin since, I don't know, I guess I first heard about it in like 2011, something like that.

Oh, wow. Wasn't really smart enough to buy any then, of course, but you know. And actually, right after I got out of college, I kind of got into Bitcoin mining and then, you know, kind of just through that, like discovered how Bitcoin like really worked, like really, really worked because it kind of requires a little, discovered how Bitcoin really worked, really, really worked. Because it kind of requires a little bit more in-depth study to actually build and run a miner, especially back then. And yeah, I dropped it for a while. And then I guess just 2020 kind of got into it again. It was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And one of the things that really, really got me to dive in, like fully into the rabbit hole, I guess, was kind of this realization that Bitcoin mining is sort of my passion for electronics,

hardware design with Bitcoin. It's like these two great tastes together and really diving into that and just play with it. It has my, my Bitcoin passion, I guess, to to, to fully develop.

And yeah, I've been pretty, pretty well into it since then. I actually quit my job at the beginning of this year to work on Bitcoin mining full time. So I am all in. That's quite a leap. And good for you. Because a lot of people, depending on what you're doing, I don't want to dive into that.

That could be a very ballsy decision. Now, I just want to step back a little bit. You said you got into Bitcoin mining shortly after when you got out of college. What was the landscape at that time? How did it look like when you were Bitcoin mining at that particular moment? Were you was it still a GPU type situation, CPU, or was it ASICs? Was that the name of the game back then? So it was actually right as ASICs were coming on the scene. I had done a lot of digital design and stuff in college and actually specialized in that. And in that field, you do a lot of work on FPGAs. And so that was sort of my introduction to Bitcoin mining was

on FPGAs. Field programmable gate arrays, they're universal devices like GPUs, they can be used for a lot of things. But I'd say, as far as Bitcoin mining goes, the worst is CPUs, and then there's GPUs. And then FPG can be are probably depending on how you set them up a little bit better than gpus at bitcoin mining definitely not as good as asics but um so i i i started with uh fpgas and the this is we can get into this more but when i when i was like getting into it you know i just went online and found an open source um they call them bit streams it's like the source or the binary that you load onto an fpga to run the the application on it um i went online got an open source uh

hdl design and generated a bit stream and loaded on my FPGA and was up in mining with my own like custom miner just right then and there and that that was well at the time I didn't realize how special that was but that's how I got into it but I remember as I was doing this I was also like on bitcoin talk um forum you know trying to figure out how this thing works. And, um, there was a lot of people on there who were stressing about, um, butterfly labs, which was one of the first, uh, Bitcoin ASIC manufacturers. They were famous. Butterfly labs was famous because they like essentially rugged all their customers and like left with the money. And I think like the, the sec or something like find them. and there was this huge

like multi-million dollar like judgment against them but it was a total it was a total shit show but uh i remember reading about that i didn't buy any of them i was like still screwing with my fpgas so the landscape was um was still pretty diy like there's a lot of open source firmware software um you know we hadn't gotten into this whole uh dynamic we're in now where there's like these major players and you just go buy it from them and that's kind of your only option butterfly labs and just taking a look at it right now yeah they eventually reached an agreement with the u.s federal trade commission the ftc in 2014 so that's quite a story there to be honest i wasn't even aware of that that's way before my

time i got in when i first started uh getting into bitcoin it just was buying for number go up in 2017 and i didn't really dive deep into it till about 2020 so this was long before my time now in terms of the fpgas where you created one of those custom miners, was there any advantage to doing so? Did it give you some sort of leg up on the competition? Well, it did in my circumstance, because right after college, I went to work in the electrical engineering department at the school where I went to school. And we actually had a surplus of these FPGA development boards. They were kind of everywhere. And so actually my boss and I, we were loading up, we were basically turning all these unused FPGA boards into Bitcoin miners and running them like in labs in the university basement at night.

With their, with their consent, of course. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you know, it was, it's like, you know, these, these aren't like you think of miners now and they're these like three kilowatt beasts, right? And that guy like went to jail for running them in the basement of the school or whatever. It wasn't like that, right? Each one of these things was probably like, I don't know, 50 watts or something, right? Like they're significantly smaller.

And I kind of, you know, at least justified it in my mind because in these labs, the university, they would leave these boards plugged in anyways at night. So they were just running anyways. We were just changing what they were doing. They were running full throttle. But, you know, if you look at it, if you're explaining it's 50 watts, that's an old school light bulb, essentially, right? Like that's, you know, minimal. It's hard to gauge that's an old school uh light bulb essentially uh right like that's yeah it's you know minimal it's hard to gauge that's something i don't want to talk about anymore

about that you know they left the lights on all night anyways it was fine it was fine and you know what like when i was doing this i was telling my boss who's also a cool dude like you know what we're doing and he was like oh bitcoin that sounds crazy and we talked a lot about how it worked and like nerded out on it. Um, but you know, he was like, all right, so you're getting, you're getting real money with this. And I'm like, well, yeah, in theory, um, if I do it, right. And he's like, okay, cool. Well, you can do this, but as soon as you get enough money to buy a pizza, you're, you're getting a pizza for us. And like, we had not heard of the whole Bitcoin pizza incident or any of that lore. It was just sort of like this natural thing of like,

all right, well, if you're getting money, you're going to buy pizza. So long story short is we never got the pizza. I was mining with this pool that was called 50 BTC. The block reward was 25 Bitcoin back then, but it was still called 50 BTC. And we were mining to that and I had saved up, you know, some amount of money or some amount of Bitcoin. I don't know how much it was, but it was all on there. And that mining pool got hacked and we essentially lost it all. So it was was fun. I guess at that time, you were more apt to keep whatever it is you mind on the mining pool, and you're going to withdraw at a

later time, right? Is that? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, everyone else was putting it on Mt. Gox, which was also a recipe for disaster. So so you get to pile a where you get rugged and pile B that you got rugged. But I guess the end result is rugged was going to be in the cards either way. Now, I'm curious, though, because there's a bit of a gap then, a bit of a leap between where you were there to where you are today. Because right now, I mean, I would associate you with the guy behind the Bidax project. And I want to talk a little bit more about that. How did you come to the point

where you wanted, like, just talk about, I mean, I'm curious to know the genesis of this Bidax thing, because I'm sure a lot of people, including myself, would like to hear about it. Well, yeah. So, you know, I did that project while i was working for the university and um i didn't work there for all that long and i went and did other jobs totally unbitcoin related and you know obviously i didn't forget about bitcoin but didn't really think about it for a while until i want to say 2017 maybe 2016 something like that, somewhere in there. I was doing some work for my day job and I developed a, like a, a solar powered gateway that just sat outside and collected sensor data from all these wireless sensors. And I was, I was kind of thinking about that and I was like,

you know, this is, this is pretty cool. Um, this is powering this thing from solar panels. And I had been reading about ASIC Bitcoin mining, which by this point was becoming a big thing. And lots of people were talking about the power use and how expensive it is and all this stuff. And so I was like, well, I should make a solar powered Bitcoin miner, right? It'd be so cool. You could just put it outside in the sun and it just mines like, you know, for free from the sun. Um, and really just kind of geeked out on that for a while. Um, and thought, all right, well, you know, I've, I've got some free time. I'm going to try and build this. So I'll just go online and get an open source design for one of these ASIC miners, just like I did before with FPGAs, and quickly realize that there's no such thing. There basically was no open source mining anymore.

The scene had just vaporized and there was nothing. All there was was miners you could buy off the shelf that had closed source proprietary firmware where no one tells you how it works. Brains had an open source firmware that they made for the S9 in there, which they later canceled. But there was that. And so that was kind of like the only thing that I could really wrap my hands around and jump in and see some source and stuff. And there was kind of all the old software, like Luke Dasher's BFG miner and CG miner, which is software that people used to use with their GPUs and their FPGAs and stuff. And so you could kind of see how Bitcoin mining works with that. But just dug in and started futzing with it. I actually bought some hashboards on eBay for an Antminer S2, I think it was.

These are old at this point. So I got them for real cheap and I started just poking at them, taking them apart, kind of maybe theorizing slash kind of dreaming about how it would work to make my own miner with those chips that are on there. Because those ASIC chips are really hard to make on your own so the goal kind of shifted pretty quickly to like I'm going to take someone else's ASICs when I say ASICs I mean the chips themselves um I'm gonna take someone else's chips and like make my own circuit

board put it on there and do my own firmware to uh to communicate with the chip and power it via solar panels. And that's going to be cool. And I sort of farted with that for a long time, just kind of like on my off time. When I had the chance, I would drop it and pick it back up and screw around with it. And it wasn't until I think 2020, lately 2020, 2021 in there when I was like,

all right, I'm going to do this. I'm going to make one of these things like it's time. And so I bought myself an S nine and you can actually get the chips for the S nine. At this point you could get them on chips for the S9. At this point, you can get them from the Chinese sellers. You can get the chips themselves for the repair market. Got some of those, futzing around with them.

There's a guy who runs Gecko Science, and he actually makes these USB stick miners that use single chips from the Ant miner. The new packs. Yes. The new packs, compacts, and he has a couple of pod miners, the R606 and the R909. So did a lot of reading on that.

And those are sort of, in my mind, frustratingly closed sourced. It doesn't share how they work. It's all proprietary, and he only sells them through certain sellers. So I did a bunch of computer science work in school as well. And I was definitely impressed by open source and sort of the progress that open source made. And just kind of, I don't know, sticking it to the man. Like, this is something we're going to do and you can't stop us kind of thing. And also impressed by Bitcoin, which itself is an open source project, right? Satoshi in like the first ever post about Bitcoin was like, I've developed an open source money.

So Bitcoin, totally open source, my interests, open source. It was sort of natural for me to open source this project. So I just started posting everything I was doing to my like 10 followers on Twitter and like put it on GitHub and had like no, no followers on there. It wasn't a lot of interest in the beginning. A couple, a couple of pings here and there, but I kept, I kept hacking on it and kept just kind of posting what was going on. And slowly but surely, we got a couple people that... Most people came from Bitcoin Talk Forum initially and just started being like, this is cool.

I want in and started helping. And that was when things really accelerated because they were able to help me and fill in my gaps in knowledge and really kind of like add just excitement to building it like when you're working with someone else. So there's a couple people that showed up early on that are just fantastic individuals who are also like had this vision and wanted in on it. There's a lot of people that are like minded and they are as passionate as you are. Because just looking at you in the background, it looks like i see an s9 sitting on the floor yeah that's right so yeah it just goes to show you like how passionate you are about mining with mining bitcoin with asics

it's uh the picture is is just a it speaks it writes a thousand words but do you have a dart board of jihan wu where you throw darts at him? Because it seems like he's the guy that, you know, he's leading the charge for the closed source Bitcoin miners. Is he the guy that is the one you want to see slam it in one way, shape, or form or another? I don't know. I have definitely respect for what they've done. Bitmain is a juggernaut in Bitcoin ASIC mining. They've taken ASIC mining just the fastest and the farthest anyone could have, or at least that I could have ever imagined.

And it's a very expensive endeavor. It's millions of dollars to even think about making one of them. And you'll be way into it before you actually get a chip and that chip probably won't work. So I can respect the time and effort that they've put into it. But yeah, I really wish that it was open source. I don't understand why.

I mean, maybe I'm sure they have their business reasons, but I don't understand why they don't at least open source the firmware. I mean, this is'm sure they have their business reasons, but I don't understand why they don't at least open source the firmware. I mean, this is ridiculous. Come on. Like, all we're going to do is sell more of your chips. Like, don't you want to sell more chips? It's an old way of thinking, right?

Yeah, it seems a little antiquated and it seems a little bit anti-ethical to Bitcoin. I really think that if Bitcoin weren't open source, we wouldn't be here talking about it. It would have just gone the way of those other earlier cryptocurrencies. Agreed. I got a message here in the chat from Decentral. He says, he's talking about Sealex.

Are you aware what the Sealex is? Because I have never heard of this. Is this something that's in the pipeline? Is this... He said, we'll reverse engineer the seal asics expect a seal axe i don't know what that is what's it yeah maybe he could give some more information i've never heard of this a seal axe just kidding he's saying okay he's pulled her. Thanks a lot. So to go back now. Jonathan's rad, dude. He's great.

You were doing the solar paneled S2s at one time. At least you were trying to figure out doing that where you could make it solar. And then as you migrated to the S9s and figured out how to use that, is there any opportunity still today to have a setup where you're using a Bitcoin miner and still take advantage of solar power? Or is that simply just not possible because you can't generate enough power to actually function an S9 or any ASIC to a decent degree? Well, there's a few projects underway to use off-the-shelf miners with solar panels um i've talked with a bunch of people that are doing it some there's there's people doing it commercially um i've i've worked with a guy who's using um bitcoin mining asics uh or machines mining machines to um essentially finance solar installs uh both for residential and there's another guy doing um sort of larger solar farms finance with with bitcoin mining it

makes a lot a lot of sense um but i think i think you're probably more asking about about home mining with solar yeah i mean that's the people listening into this i think they're more into that they want to at least dip their toes or learn a little bit more into that. So, yeah, I'd like to hear your thoughts on if that's even feasible. It's totally feasible. It's totally feasible. There's a number of different ways to do it. One of the problems we have right now is that all of the Bitcoin mining machines are designed to be used in a data center.

Every aspect of them is designed for use in a Bitcoin mining farm. Like the fact that they use 220 volts, the fact that they're super loud, they're hot, they're meant to be mounted on a rack. They connect via ethernet. They're just not made for these stranded energy applications, for solar power, for use in the home, for

any of those things. So that's kind of what all of us home miners are up against. You know, it makes sense. I mean, at least at the moment, it's a small market. Why would they build these? Why would they invest tons of money to build the ASICs and build these machines to sell to a small market like this? But we're going to change all that. There's a couple of cool things that you can do with solar power. And the BIDX, for example, is only 15 watts. So that's, and I can run, I have run it from a solar panel.

Like plenty of people have run it. There's a, there's a guy posted on Twitter, a cool picture of like, he's got this solar panel in the window of what looks like his house and a bid act sitting on his desk. And it's just running. What's the hash rate at 15 watts? It's about a half terahash, 500 giga. 500 giga. Yeah. Yeah. It's more like 12 watts. You know, we have the same efficiency as the, as the big miners, cause we use the same chips. It's just lower total hash rate. So there's a lot of opportunities there. You know, we get smaller miners. You can, you can start to use smaller solar panels and the, the bid X for example, is DC powered, which is exactly what solar panels output. So there isn't necessarily that, you know, having to convert it to AC like for that S9 behind me into this because I wanted to make a solar-powered miner. My goal initially was to have a solar panel with this Bitcoin miner strapped to the back of it.

Like this would be a completely wireless solution, like a Wi-Fi-powered Bitcoin miner strapped to the back of a solar panel. You could just literally take this thing, put it out in the sun. It would turn on when the sun hits it. It would connect to Wi-Fi and it would start mining. And I still think that's totally doable. In fact, the Open Source Miners United, which is a group that we should talk about that I'm a part of,

we have a contest going that's to design a solar native Bitcoin miner. So it's pretty open-ended, but the idea of the contest is to do exactly that. Just make a solar powered Bitcoin miner in whatever way you think. And we've got like probably half a dozen people seriously working on it. And we're going to have cash prizes and stuff. It'll be really cool.

Is it one particular project everybody's working on or are they doing their own individual projects i know they're going to submit it for the prize it's yeah everyone everyone's doing their own individual projects i mean there's there isn't really any rules we're just going to kind of at the end be like all right the cash prizes go to the the sort of coolest uh solar powered bitcoin miner so you know you could team up and split the prize or you do your own thing whatever do you remember i think it was two or three bitcoin conferences ago in miami somebody was pictured wearing an s9 strapped to their back and they were mining on the road do you remember were you affiliated in any way with that particular project or i'm pretty sure that was uh that was mags and i think that was the um the brains guys were doing that um they had like a a big old car battery and like an s9 and like a huge inverter and it was like this big like hiking backpack yeah i uh i always

thought that was kind of silly because it's uh there's a it's really easy to run a Bidax on a battery pack. There's a guy who ran a Bitcoin miner on an airplane. There's people who do it in their cars. There's a group in Indianapolis that does a lot of racing racing and we were talking about running it in the race car uh so anyways i i thought that backpack was was cool obviously it's very cool but it's also kind of ridiculous because there's a way better way to do it a lot lighter for sure yeah that's that was like uh alpha version of bitcoin mining undergoing we're now at a much more advanced stage. We're now beta, but it's light years ahead. That was funny, though. That's one thing that just stuck to my

mind from when I forget which Bitcoin mining conference, sorry, Bitcoin conference it was, but that was just making the rounds. Yeah, I definitely remember that. I think I was there and saw it and was like, that's cool. It looked very heavy though in terms of the centralization with respect to the mining equipment the asics that are being generated because we recently had intel express interest to generate and create their own asics but then dropped out shortly thereafter and at the time when they said that they're going to investigate and look to make their own ASICs, I was jumping for joy

because having a company that's based in North America, in this case, United States, and potentially manufacturing everything within the United States, I think that's a rather good thing rather than having it all right now centralized within China. I want to hear your thoughts about this

because it sounds like obviously having an open source changes, you know, it's taking it centralized within China. I want to hear your thoughts about this because it sounds like obviously having an open source changes, you know, it's taking it away from China. But I want to hear like, what are the perils from having all this equipment, the mining equipment being created, R&D, everything done

in one particular neck of the woods in the world? I don't love it. I think it's a big risk to have it all centralized. And especially with it being closed source and proprietary, right? If they have some reason they can't continue because the government shuts them down or whatever reason, and they just stop, then there's going to be some pretty big problems. There's a bunch of different ASIC manufacturers, right?

Everyone knows about Bitmain and MicroBT. Those are probably the two biggest ones, but there's a bunch of other ones. So it's not just like one factory gets shut down. Although maybe if TSMC stops making Bitcoin mining ASICs, then we'd be in trouble because they make a fair amount of them. I don't like it at all. I also know that designing your own ASIC is a huge task. You have to have really deep pockets. You have to have connections.

You have to have tons of talent to do it. And so I am definitely more focused on decentralizing Bitcoin mining by just sort of repurposing the ASICs that already exist, of which there's a lot of them, a lot, a lot of them. Like even if we're talking about previous generation stuff, like you could get just boatloads of these things out there. And if we ever got into a situation where Bitcoin mining equipment wasn't as freely available as it is now, I think we would be in a much better position if we have that diversity in the manufacturers of the actual mining machines who can make use of what's out there and what people have. I'm not sure if you could answer this question.

And let me know if you can't, because given what you're doing, I'm sure you are ruffling some of the feathers of the people that are right now creating and doing all the bitcoin mining so did any of them reach out to you and say buddy put the kibosh which whatever you're doing because you're gonna create some problems for us moving forward or have they just left you alone for the most part no no one has i mean i i've talked to some of the smaller manufacturers and they are very supportive and interested um and but the bigger ones i just ghosted. They don't care. I love that. You're like a fly in the wall right now. And eventually you'll become a tiger ready to just a pounds. This is really good.

Yeah. It's, it's definitely really neat though. Like, you know, the couple of manufacturers have, have sort of been quasi interested. Although you can tell it's, it's more like a, a single champion maybe inside the company who's interested in what I'm doing and not necessarily like official company policy. And so I don't know what can work there, if anything, but there's sort of this secondary level of manufacturers. And I have met several fantastic people working in that scene who have reached out to me and have been very helpful and are totally enthusiastic. That's awesome.

It's good to have support within the community that people are reaching out to you. It creates a, it's an added energy that doesn't didn't have, that wasn't there before. Because I know every time everybody reaches out to me, it just, it just makes me more happy.

Like, and I just get more energy for the project.'m ready to keep going let's you have a bitax sitting next to you i'd like to show it off if you do yeah let's let's talk about this let's go let's dive deep into this we did it a little bit quite a bit actually uh with decentral is on he's in the chat thanks for there's the bitax talk about it let's let's let's show yeah uh, this is a BidX. This is actually kind of an older one. It's revision. It's a BidX Ultra. So that uses the chip from the S19 XP.

It was sort of the latest and greatest when we designed this. And this one's actually featuring a cool stand and a bit halo. So, man, maybe I can see if I can. How loud is it when you plug it in? Because it looks like it just has like an old CPU, like an older style CPU fan. I would see on like a 46 or a.

All right, I want to plug it in. Hold on one second. I got to move the plug. Sure. No problem. Yeah. I'll just try to describe it. It's just looks like a very small circuit board, a little bit larger than what I would describe a Raspberry Pi.

Scott is going around trying to plug this in behind the scenes. And yeah, it's relatively small in terms of the footprint it takes up, but on it, there's a fan. It looks like it. The only way I can describe it is it is a CPU. This one is especially cool with a bit halo when you plug it in.

Okay, here we go see those lights it's right up against the mic like it's on yeah it's nothing it's super quiet like so it's time let's plug in thousands of these together and let's let's set the um it's been running next to me like right next to me this whole time. They're super quiet. They aren't hot, right? 15 watts is like a cell phone charger. It's not hot at all. So this Bidax is a Bidax Ultra and it's got the Bit Halo on it, which is a community designed accessory for the Bidax. It straps those cool lights. It blinks every time it finds a share. It's really cool. This IMGPO of the Solo Mining Co. built this. And he sells it on his website. Also, the stand that goes with it. Oh, there. So we just found a share. It just blinked orange or gold. So there's another one every time we get a share.

And yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it. There's a little like power brick, like, I don't know. It's a small power brick that you just plug in. You can get them in international voltages if you want, because it just outputs five volts that you plug into the back like right there. And yeah, that's it. That's the Bidax. If you go to bidax.org and click on the Bidax legit list, I have a list of sellers on there who follow the open source license. And there's sellers all around the world you can go and uh you can buy one yeah there's a select uh few vendors that you've identified as legitimate resellers and one of them i have to give uh a plug for them decentral yes not only has jonathan been on a show a week or two ago but he's in the chat right now so if you are in canada and looking to get one of these

check it out on the decentral tech website and you can order one from directly from him and he's in the chat right now. So if you are in Canada and looking to get one of these, check it out on the Decentral Tech website, and you can order one directly from him. And he's mentioning that the fan was a 3D printer style. It looks like it was specifically created for this, for that board itself. So it's a one-off. It's quiet. It's incredibly quiet here.

And in terms of, you're talking five volts, you're talking fuck all in terms of amps, right? Yeah, yeah, less than three. Yeah, because it's a total of 15 watts, you said, right? So, yeah. Yeah, 15 watts is like the max. Let's see, what is it running at right now? I'm going to wait for that screen to come up.

But it runs at like, you know 10 to 13 watts it kind of depends on if you're overclocking it or what let's see what do we got right now over at 10 watts so this one's running at 10 watts it says on the screen kind of cycles through the the stats so dave bacon's asking for a link for us i'm just posting the one to decentral and and because I believe he's in Canada and I'll also post in just a moment the list to your website which lists the recommended vendors you suggest to buy this from in case he's not in Canada and anybody else wants to yeah yeah bidx.org and while you're on there you know you can actually go and get all the design files for this. Right. So you don't have to, you don't have to buy one. You can make one yourself.

And I want to like throw a pitch out there for that. It's, it's a complicated build, but first timers have done it. You can go and buy all the parts. You can buy the PCBs. You can solder it together and program it yourself. It's very permissionless.

I see it. It's on the GitHub. That's the hardware files. Yep. And there's also a link to ESPminer, which is the firmware that runs on it. And I'm going to put a link in the chat for that as well. The ESPminer, talk a little bit about that,

because I'm not too familiar with it. So ESPminer is the firmware. So on the Bidax, we have what's essentially the control board, which is this silver square here for people that are watching the video. It's ESP32, which is just a kind of 32-bit microcontroller. It's actually a Wi-Fi microcontroller. So it connects to the network via Wi-Fi. It gets the stratum mining information over Wi-Fi. It gets the stratum mining information over Wi-Fi and

then sends that to the ASIC to be processed. But ESP Miner is the name of the firmware for the ESP32. That's so interesting. That was largely developed by the community. It's all totally open

source. You can get in there. You can hack on it. You can make sure we're doing it right. Don't trust verify. I don't know. People have gotten in there and do cool things. You can change what it says. You can try and hack the system if you want. But yeah, it's all written in C. So take a look if you're into that, and we'd be happy to have anyone's contributions too. I actually talked. I had an interview with one of the godfathers of C, Brian Kernaghan. No, really? Yeah, I interviewed him in August of last year.

Incredibly, he agreed to come on our show. On this podcast? Oh, my gosh. On this podcast in August of 2023. I was so happy to talk to him and talk about Bell Labs and talk about Unix. Holy moly. I can't believe I'm on the same podcast. Kernighan and Richie, that's like how all of us learn C, right?

I mean, that's the C book. I have a knockoff version right here, the green one. And if only Richie was still around i invite him to i even tried to invite ken thompson to if you know who he is yeah i'm on the show he uh he never replied back to me so i wrote to him after kurt again was on our show i was thinking maybe we could springboard that into bringing on uh ken thompson to talk about unix development and stuff like that but never worked out maybe i Maybe I'll try again. Oh my God. That is so cool. Yeah.

There you go. Legendary stuff right there. You know, I mean, I don't want to sidetrack too much. The fact that he talking about Brian Kern again, he's still around and he's still sharp. Like he's in his early eighties,

still teaching a Princeton and the guy is, is a sharp as a tack. And Oh, it's just so happy to talk to him because you know there's only going to be so much more time we're going to be able to ask him questions before something you know he's not spring chicken right but he was just talking about bell labs and stuff like i was so cool but back to the book like i've definitely like read books about about bell labs um and that's that's a really like interesting concept right it was it was a think tank um it was private and and government-funded think tank where it was

just like basically get smart people together and and think about these hard problems and like what can you come up with right and we got some pretty fantastic inventions like, you know, the transistor and other things like that. Like the, the, we don't, I don't know if we have anything like that anymore, which is kind of, uh, I was talking to somebody today and we've been talking the past few days, his grandfather worked at bell labs and he has some material that his grandfather gave to him. He showed me pictures of it that was like incredible and he's talking about all the different uh labs like the one at murray hill and a few others that they're just being mothballed either repurposed into something else or eventually going to be demolished because they're not being used anymore and the maintenance cost

just it's like it's sad to see like these historic buildings just fall by the wayside, given all the work that was done. And essentially what we use today, that's why I wanted to bring Brian on the show, is because without his work, we probably wouldn't have Bitcoin. Because you needed C before you needed C++, and C++ was used to write the majority of Bitcoin. So there's a lineage here that you can see. So what his work, not just like the team over there at Bell Labs, it helped define what is Bitcoin today. And so I just wanted to alert and inform our audience about that. So it's too bad a lot of the buildings over there are just, you know,

it's just not being recognized as historical landmarks or whatever. It's just, you know, oh just not being recognized as historical landmarks or whatever it's just you know oh well this is yeah yeah i mean bell bell labs or you know uh ma bell essentially just got you know just broken up and spread to the wind like uh i don't know how i feel about monopolies but like it was just decided that that was no more. And the ironic thing is that, you know, they split off from all the baby bells and who they've all gotten back together. They all bought each other. Right. Like 18 is now like a monster telecommunications company. Once again, it's so weird, but like,

they're definitely not doing anything cool like bell labs. So. Yeah. Agreed. And you know, it was almost when that was an operation in in full swing that was the heyday of the united states and since then it's just been slowly you can just look at comparative what's going on right now in the united states and i don't want to talk about all the what's wrong but you see homeless encampments you see uh so much divide you know if you ask i mean i can ask you like what what are you proud of right now of united states like is there anything right now you can say definitively with the united states

that makes me proud um i'm on the outside looking in i can't really answer that i mean is there i would love to hear your answer because there's anything that makes you proud that the united states does right now nobody else does in the world. It's just, yeah, I'm proud to be American. Like, yeah, there's a lot of like really disappointing things that happen, right? Like sort of with the like control over the world through, through the dollar and like disappointing development, you know, pseudo helping developing countries around the world is really, really bad. But I will say that one thing that seems to be holding true in the United States is this concept of at least the freedom of ideas, right? Like Bitcoin is still totally legal here, right? There's obviously different politicians and things

have had different attacks on it, but those things get, uh, get debated and they get fought by the opposing side and are allowed to continue. So, uh, I'm, I'm at least encouraged to, to see that kind of thing still happening. Right. It's not like, it's not like China where it's like, Nope, it's illegal. Right. And I,

I would like to think that we wouldn't stand for that kind of like overreaching action. I guess we'll see. I mean, it's probably coming, but you know, there there's a, there's a strong sort of opposing side to anything that limits kind of overarching laws like that.

Do you think that this new proposed 30% mining tax, it's not really a mining tax, it's electricity used by Bitcoin miners. What are your thoughts on that? It's just something that's being proposed. Nothing is concrete. This may fall by the wayside, but yeah, I'd like to hear your thoughts on that? It's just something that's being proposed. Nothing is concrete. This may fall by the wayside, but yeah, I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, my understanding is that it's just a proposal by,

was it the Justice Department or the executive branch? And it was just some small faction has kind of proposed it. It made a lot of headlines. It's totally bullshit. That is no way to do it. We need to have this concept of electricity neutrality. It doesn't matter what you use the electricity for. If you're doing something illegal, then that's illegal and you shouldn't do that.

But assuming you're not doing something illegal, you should be free to sort of use that electricity that you paid for how you wish. And this is a thinly veiled attack on Bitcoin, which I can understand why they might be fearful of Bitcoin. It kind of comes after everything the establishment has come to rely on. But it's totally nonsense. It seems very hard to enforce. I read the sort of proposal and it said that you know there'd be a tax on any firm you know using electricity for cryptocurrency or digital asset mining um well home miners aren't firms so you know part of me is like all right pass this law then home mining will flourish so let's come back first full circle then to the bidx what who would you recommend

that product to like which particular bitcoiner or soon to be bitcoiner would you suggest yeah this is something you should consider buying i mean anyone who's who's interested in bitcoin mining but has felt like by the current offerings. A lot of people say, oh, you want to get started in Bitcoin mining? Get an S9. That thing's ridiculous to run in your house. Super hot, super loud. So if that sort of overwhelms you, get a BitX.

It's going to be way easier. So far, it's a very new product that you can see it's, it doesn't even have an enclosure. Like it's just a circuit board. So it's a little bit, it's a little bit techie, right? You have to kind of want to like, you have to kind of want to do this, but it's not hard at all. Um, and anyone who's interested in sort of like working on Bitcoin mining, like, do you want to develop for it? Like we have all, you know, the whole way that this Bitcoin miner works is out there in the open. And so you can tinker with it. You can play with it. You can overclock it. You can, you can burn it up if you want, but it's,

it's a not very expensive, uh, way to get into Bitcoin mining. And, um, when I, when I was initially working on the bid X i was uh you'd see these people getting these gecko science sticks and there'd be people that would get like a dozen of them and plug them in right and just i saw that there's this like thirst for home mining and like people want to do this there just isn't a lot out there that's really practical to do it with. So, you know, one of my goals is to develop a new, even easier to use bid X, right? It's going to have an enclosure, but truly plug and play and to sell a million of them. There'll be one terahash each.

So that's an exahash, right? So if we sell a million of them, that gets an exahash out there. Now we're not like small potatoes anymore. Right. If one exahash is solo mining, that means that one of those users would hit a block like every five days or something like that.

So, you know, there's a million of them, but you can imagine a BidXer hitting a block and getting the full block reward every five days. Like that's not nothing. And I think that will actually sell the next million right away. But we even have a comment here. Solo mining is saying that my grandma has one and she loves it so even people that are you know i'm not exactly sure what is her expertise and that was her her technical knowledge but she's running a bidx and she likes it so there you go there's other people that are doing it i'm sure duncan's grandma is a badass just like duncan so um but yeah it's

you know it's it's still a little bit technical it might be tough for grandma depending on on uh sort of your level of of uh familiar unpack that i want so i get the bidax i buy it it comes to my house i open a box how do i use it well so you uh you open it up it comes with the power supply. Um, just go ahead and plug it in. It's like a barrel connection. Like, you know, you just, just plug it right in. Um, and so it has a little screen on it and on the screen, it will say a, uh, it'll say an, um, like a Y a wifi address. It'll say bit X and then four random digits. And so you then pull out your phone and use your phone to join that wifi network. It'll show up on your list of available wifi networks. You join that,

a screen will pop up that lets you configure it. And so from there you can, uh, probably the first thing you want to do is get it on your wifi. So you would type in the name of your house, your home wifi, you type in your password, and then you can just hit restart and go. And it will then make a dashboard. So it shows an IP address that you can visit in your browser to pop up the dashboard. And that's where you can put in things like the Bitcoin wallet address you want to mine to, username for your pool. You can pick which pool you want to mine to, and you can do things like overclock it and things like that on there. But just sort of the bare bones setup is just join that Wi-Fi network with your phone, put in your pool address

and wallet, and get it on your Wi-Fi, and then it restarts and goes, and that's all there is to it. So it sounds like it's very similar to the block clock. I'm not sure if you set one up before. I haven't. I've been intrigued about that. How does that work? It's the exact same thing. When you plug it in for the first time, it has its own Wi-Fi that you connect to with your computer or your phone,

and from there you configure it to then connect to your network, restart it, and then you pick whatever information is displayed on the screen, you have a number of different options. So it's the exact same setup in terms, if you can set up a block clock, you can set up a bid axe. Yeah, it's, it's, I think they use the ESP 32. As well. If you look on the backside, you'll probably see that little metal can, but it that's a that's a really common sort of paradigm with IoT stuff. Like if you ever want to set up like a smart doorbell or a light bulb or any of those kinds of things, it's a pretty common way to do it. So it needs to be easier. to some people and they're like okay cool so i'm supposed to put in my bitcoin wallet you know which is a long intimidating string of random uh digits like they're like uh you know i feel like

that's a stumbling block for some people they just they don't have a bitcoin wallet or if they do they like are unclear about where to go get that address to copy paste it in here's the comment from uh solo mining and he's basically saying his grandmother just followed the pdf setup and she got it so you might be saying yeah there might be challenges with copying that the long bitcoin address into where you want to send the bitcoin to whenever it ever if it ever finds a block but apparently his grandmother was able to do it with relative ease. So that's, I'm so glad to hear that. I'm so glad to hear that. Like that's, that's like, it's not a very complicated process.

It certainly doesn't need to be as hard as it is for some of these off the shelf miners. But like I said earlier, those, those are meant for data centers. They're going to be setting up hundreds of these. They're going to have administration tools. It's just not meant for us. Yeah. See, something like this. I have the Loki kit here, for instance. There you go. All right. There's some challenges with that. You have to understand how to crack open the power unit,

and then you have to get the lug set up to the right gauge wire. It's just, it's a little bit more complicated. So you could do 110 volt mining with the S19, but there's challenges or just get a bit ax, buy one of those, plug it in. And where you go, you're doing 500 giga hash for a second. And it's not too bad. It's,

and the draw, it's very small, very just sipping electricity. And it's quiet as heck because Scott has one running right now and we can't even hear it. So there's, uh, it used to be sitting right next to me. I wonder what I did with it. What is it? I mean, we have a new one. Uh, it's the bid X hex. It actually has six chips in it. So it's around three Tara hash.

Um, and like 60, 70 watts. That's really efficient. Yeah, it's right over there. I'll grab it. Yeah, because if you think about it, if you are to say underclock an S9, you're still going to drop probably for three terahash, I'm going to guess four or 500 watts. For people that are listening in, it looks like a very

tiny S nine, like an S nine. That's just been like, I don't know, half the size. Yeah. Less than half the size. It's pretty small. Um, you know, the S nine has hundreds of chips in it. This just has six, but they're better chips than are in the S nine. Those are the chips, same chips that are on the bid X ultra. They're the ones out of the S19 XP, but we've got six of them on there. And it's kind of a reference design in a way. I mean, there's some additional work that had to be done to figure out how to chain the chips together, both power and data. It actually cascades through a chain of all the chips. That's how they do it on all the big miners. And so we wanted to unlock that for everyone and sort of encourage people

to start building bigger and bigger miners. And so the BidX Hex, it works. It's working now. I think it might get sort of turned into a product that you can go and buy at some of these resellers. But, you know- So it's not, it's still in a development stage right now yeah yeah it's still being developed um there's probably only like three or four of them in the world uh but it um it works it works great um actually it's it's pretty neat it's it's got a bigger fan on it so it's

it moves more air but it's actually not that much louder. I'm sure here's the Generally a bigger fan is quieter because it doesn't have to go as fast. Yeah exactly. It moves more air quieter doesn't make as much sound. Yeah this was

largely developed by an OSMU member, MacFyder, who just is someone who just showed up and was like, hey, I'm an engineer. I'm into this. Let's do it. And so I had kind of started a design on it, and he just ran with it. And so there's a bunch of contributors to this. But I think this is going to be really cool. It's for people who want just kind of a little bit more hash rate, but it's a little bit more technically challenging. What do you anticipate the sell price for that to be? If you were to gauge, I know it's not for sale yet, and so just if you could ballpark it just for anybody that might be wondering in the future. I don't know. So I actually don't sell any bid axes myself. All the prices that you see out there for bid axes are set by our retailers. Gotcha. Okay.

Well, they're set. There's people that manufacture the bid axes. I don't manufacture any bid axes myself. There's people out there that manufacture them and sell them wholesale to the resellers. Decentral actually makes and sells them. Yes. who the resellers uh decentral actually makes and sells them yes but places like solo mining co they buy them from a from a manufacturer uh who sets the price and so they're kind of like in the i don't know 150 200 range for the bidx i think gosh i don't even i don't even know where i'd go with the the hex it's it's not going to be six times more expensive, right? It might be like $300 kind of thing.

It is a little bit challenging with these chips because we can't get them in bulk. We can't get them from Bitmain, right? We have to buy the chips from the repair market uh resellers and they're just not really as cheap as they should be because it's still being used if if they have a need to plug them in because a board has a few chips fried they're going to plug it in because the person that has that particular rig wants it back fully functional so they're not going to have too many of these chips just lying around you know actually something really cool so we we just released the the bitx super i know you

talked about this with john yeah we did uh it's the chip out of the s21 so that's the latest and greatest bitman chip it's probably one of the best chips you can bitcoin mining uh a6 you can get now and so but it just got released, just started shipping in January. And so there actually is no repair market for these chips or for these miners because they're all still under warranty. So no one has chips. You cannot go and buy bare chips from anyone. So people are buying brand new S21s and taking the chips off. Like imagine buying a brand new S21 for, you know, nearly $5,000 and just taking a soldering iron to it right away.

It's almost sacrilegious. It's like chopping up a newly built car, like a Ferrari or something. But you figure there's, there's actually like 380 chips in an s21 and now when you're selling a bidax supra for 200 250 dollars for one chip it actually like you'll make your money back yeah i see your point it almost seems like you just have to send a homeless person over to just pilfer one from a mining farm and uh you in California, but it's over $1,000.

So it wouldn't work because there's no slapping the wrist for stealing over $1,000 there. So screw that. So yeah, there may be opportunities out there for people that are adventurous and looking to find ways to fill the market. But yeah, Decentral is saying about the HEX. He says there's one running right now on the public solo pool and he also mentions that that particular unit the the hex will be a perfect release for the upcoming upcoming lightning payments on brains and oceans ocean mining yeah 100 um because then you're basically you know three tera hash that's not too bad it's a decent hash rate for such a low draw of power too by the

way i'm wondering is there going to be an appetite to have more than six chips is it going to be like somebody will say i want 10 i want whatever number yeah absolutely absolutely and in fact um there's a an osmu member who uh has taken to making his own miners he calls them, the first one that he made is called the pie ax. It's actually a, a hat for a Raspberry Pi that has, I think a single chip on it. His next one was called the the QX cause it had, it was, it had four chips. But his newest one has 16. It's called the flex ax. It's actually modular. Like it kind of almost has like little hash boards that you can plug into a carrier board. So yes, yes, it's totally doable.

It's totally possible. Like I said, these chips are a little bit expensive. You know, you're gonna look at paying, you know, nearly $15 for each chip. So it's expensive, especially in the beginning when you're prototyping and it doesn't work. Uh, but, um, you know, there's going to be a point in which it just makes more sense to get a, um, an S19 hash board. Uh, so, you know, if you're getting like a K pro hash board, you can get that for, um, uh, I think that has like 70 chips on it and you can get it for, well, I think around a thousand

dollars, um, you know, for people who are parting them out. Uh, and, and so we can't really compete with Bitmain, um, because we don't get the deal on the chips obviously that that they they do so there'll be an upper limit to where these sort of projects make sense um but we'll we'll find out where that is because people are definitely really really excited about and building lots of different uh cool things tell me what you think is going to happen in the landscape say the next five years with open source mining. Because I have no idea where this is heading, but you have your thumb

and a pulse here, so I want to hear your thoughts. Well, at this rate, I mean, we've only been at this for like a year. And really only seriously at it for probably like six months. But like at this rate, we're going to absolutely take over the world. You know, just if you just project that line forward we'll absolutely

take over the entire world in like a couple years so that should be fine uh i you know i i know where i would like to see open source mining going which is is just growing right i want to i want to see uh to light a fire underneath sort of all the institutional miners, all the people who are developing new miners, everyone who's thinking about going after stranded energy or any of these kind of really cool use cases for Bitcoin that it can be done open source. It can be done better and faster, leveraging open source mining technology. I think that it is exponential growth. Once you get this community involved, it grows really, really fast.

We've seen, I don't know, one of my favorite analogies is like, I don't know if you remember back in the day, but Microsoft used to make a web server. IIS, right? Yes, exactly. IIS, right? I don't think too many websites are run with IIS anymore, right? Apache and Nginx came along and just completely wiped the floor, right? Why would you bother buying IIS from Microsoft when you can get a perfectly good web server? You don't have to ask anyone and you can just start developing your web applications right

on top of that. And so it's really, really hard to compete with that. I think open source mining is poised to do the same thing and just take over. It'll be very hard to compete with come to compete with this this like sort of rate of development so this goal of taking over the bitcoin mining world is there anything that could stop you any challenges that could prevent you from reaching your goal that you could foresee right now and maybe get around it or is it going to be just you just can't foresee anything and you're just gonna have to deal with any problems that come up as they do well you know there's the challenge of like having the time to do it right like

you know we need we need smart talented people to to pick up the uh to pick up the ball and run with it here and lots of people have but there's sort of always this like, you know, battle for time with the day job kind of thing that a lot of people are up against. You know, hopefully the Bitcoin price goes up and up and we find ourselves in sort of better positions to spend more time on things we're passionate about. But there's also, there's also, well, to answer your question, yeah, I think that that's one of the big challenges is like getting the time to do this. I really, really want to make it clear that doing open source mining or working on open source mining is not a vow of poverty. It does not have to mean that you just can't make money because you're giving away everything for free.

That's not how it works at all. Like hardware will always have a price. People will always have to buy it. You can make plenty of money doing this, but it just takes a little bit of momentum to get going. I actually received a grant from OpenSats to- Ah! Yeah, so that was,

that was happened the beginning of this year. It was, I mean, absolutely fantastic. This is like funded by Jack Dorsey and it's run by some of the people at Bitcoin Park and others and they're tasked with funding open source Bitcoin projects. Yeah, Odell. We donated.

So just to give you a heads up, we are on Fountain. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Fountain, but it's a place that you can listen to our podcast. And through there, you could stream sats per minute or send in like a boost. And all the sats we collected through that, we just donate it. And we just find a cause and then donate it. I think the last time we did open sats it was so yeah um so yeah i'm not sure what we're going to do next we'll figure it out but that's yeah we tend to do that and i see on your website

um it's bitax bitax.org uh there is a on the bottom if you want to do donation you just on chain and lightning so if you are supportive of this and you want to do donation you're just on chain and lightning so if you are supportive of this and you want to make a donation check out that website and there's an opportunity for you to give some to this give some bitcoin to the community to help develop because you're no longer fiat mining you're now totally in yes yes it's both nerve-wracking and amazing at the same time but it's like wake up every morning like so fired up to work on this it's both nerve-wracking and amazing at the same time but it's like wake up every morning like so fired up to work on this it's really really cool now if you could have redone that decision would you have done it any earlier or it was it was it the right time did you did you

choose the the right time in your life to make that choice yeah yeah i mean there's there's a bunch of things that sort of came together to make it work. I mean, getting the grant helped a lot. Um, that was sort of that, like legitimizing this sort of idea that like other people thought it was worthwhile to, um, and we're willing to commit some money to it. Um, but previously I ran, I was a co-founder and ran sort of a company, uh, that was doing IOT consulting. Right. So I wasn't really working for the man. I was pretty much working for myself as well. And just sort of where that company was and or is and and where I was, it just it just made sense to step away from that. And the opportunity came up to do it.

So a number of things came together to, you know, to make this work. I didn't just kind of like, you know, drop the mic, like storm out of there. Yeah. No, I wish you the greatest of success because that is quite a leap of faith to do. Because if you have a fiat mining job that provides you a steady stream of income every two weeks or whatever it is you got paid to go into something that you truly love but there is an unknown about how it is that you're going to get paid moving forward that it takes a lot of balls to do that so i i wish you like the greatest of success here and again i want to encourage anybody that if they want to make a donation check out the website because this type of work

it's it's done you know know, nobody's paying for it. This is all done through community-funded stuff, right? Open stats and people saying, yeah, here you go. Here's a little bit of Bitcoin to help continue to do this. We've got to chop the knees of these bit mains and shit like that because, you know, this closed source garbage, we've got to stop this one way or another. And, yeah, this open source. You are so right. We do got,

we do have to stop this or at least provide a very viable alternative. Yeah. Bang on. Now it's, this is going on a little bit longer than I thought. I apologize for taking up your time here because I thought it was going to go, you know, 45 minutes to an hour.

I'm enjoying it. It's all good here. I know. So am I, but before I just like i think it's a good time to just wrap things up but before i do i just wanted to like pass the baton to you um is anything else you wanted to like discuss anything else you want to bring up before we we just sign things off because i want to make sure you come here and talk about everything you

want to talk about so the floor is yours you can talk about whatever you want if you if we miss something that you think we should have talked about i mean go nuts here this is yours to talk about. So the floor is yours. You can talk about whatever you want. If we miss something that you think we should have talked about, I mean, go nuts. This is yours to talk about. I've been on a bit of this crusade lately about mining pools. If we're going to get miners, mining machines into the hands of home miners all around the world and sort of contribute significantly to the network cash rate and to Bitcoin. We can't ignore mining pools. And so it's really concerning the centralization we have in mining pools. We have Foundry and Amp Pool. They're at 60 of the the network hash rate and this is not good this is not good at all and so i've been doing a lot of work uh on sort of what bidax is mine too because

you know you you can you can solo mine which i think is a great option that's that's where you uh aren't mining with a pool you're actually just mining on your own, and you don't get anything until you solve a block. And then if you do solve a block, you get the whole block reward. Plug one. I think I know which one you're going to plug, but plug it anyways. So there's a fantastic open-source mining, solo mining pool called Public Pool.

Yeah. Public-pool.io, check it out. It's made by a contributor, a Bidax contributor and a sort of founding member of the Open Source Miners United. Ben is the guy's name and he developed public pool. You can actually, I've got a node running on that Lenovo machine behind me.

And you can run public pool on your own node and mine to your own node. I'm doing truly, you have to go over everything. This is top to bottom self-summary, like no one can touch me. It's really, really cool to do it that way, to understand how to do it that way and not have any middlemen um you know i haven't gotten a single set out of it because i haven't solved the block yet but sure that's you're not a mining farm one day when it happens man i'll be there you're broadcasting your own transactions you're verifying everything and you're mining all in

house like i just just wanted to to stress like that is truly quite a feat to achieve like you know and you know what's like when i first heard about bitcoin and i guess a while after when i first learned how bitcoin actually worked like that is one of the most amazing things about it is that it is designed to do that, to do exactly what I'm doing here, where some dude just runs Bitcoin himself and does it all. And it's completely permissionless. No one can stop me from being a part of the network. No one can censor my transactions. No one can stop me from mining or what transactions I include in my blocks.

The network is designed to let you do this, which is really cool. It's a computer science miracle in decentralized computing. So Bitcoin is designed to do this. Go do it. You can do it. It's not hard. And it's how it's meant to be done. So, I really, really encourage anyone to do that. And I think that anyone who's out there mining, even if they're big miners, they should consider mining to their own node in their own pool and not joining up with these big mega miners. The reason why people do that, joining up with the big mega pools is because they offer more consistent payouts, but that comes at a price. It comes at a price that you will make, that low variance in your payouts, you pay for that,

you make less Bitcoin. But also it is not good for the Bitcoin network. So I really, really want to encourage people to avoid that. And there's this other kind of sneaky thing going on right now, which is proxy pools um this is a number of bitcoin mining pools that you know that plebs are using to mine to that just forward hash rate to bigger pools um like i don't know that's the case yes this happens all the time i mean it it's really sort of um shift it's really sort of done undercover. They don't advertise that they do this. And so it's hard to like nail down exactly what they're doing, but it absolutely happens. It happens, you know, it's suspected brains, link coin, um, all forward hash rate to much bigger pools. Right. And I think not enough

people know that, um, which is something I'm trying to help people become aware of, right. Ocean is, is sort of unique in that they mind themselves, right. They don't forward the hash rate onto anyone else. And it's tough because these smaller pools, they have a tough time competing with bigger pools. And so they actually, in order to offer like FPPS shares or more consistent payouts to their miners, they'll do deals with these bigger pools that have a much lower variance so they can pass that on and still like stay in business. It's really, I don't know, it's kind of a shame. I wish that that didn't happen. And I'd like more people to get away from doing that. Like if you don't absolutely need that low variance payout, that consistent payout, consider mining with a truly independent

pool or solar mine. You know, I never heard of that proxy style mining. I've talked to the people of LinkCoin. I've talked to, I think, the CEO. And I've also talked to the person that started Brains. Maybe I should dig into a little bit more because I'm curious to see if indeed they're doing it. I've never talked to Luxor, not a fan of them, so I have never invited them on this show for personal reasons.

But in terms, you're right, like in terms of getting these bigger mining companies, these bigger mining farms to dedicate their hash rate, not to the big, like the F2 pools and so forth. So we could take away their monopoly in terms of the hash rate to something, what you're suggesting, where they could do it all within house. It makes sense, but it's going to be harder to try to convince them if I would imagine if they're publicly traded, because they have their shareholders, they have to listen to, I think you'll probably have an easier time still an uphill battle when it is totally privately funded and owned because then you could just deal with one or

just a few people and if they have the same ideology as you do then you might be able to convince them to maybe do what you're suggesting and it could be possible and it's again this is all due to it's all open source so and it gives, you know, it's like you said earlier, it's all part of like the ethos of Bitcoin. So it makes sense that Bitcoin miners should do that, but we'll see if that's going to actually. Yeah. I mean, you know, we're all about giving them options,

you know, getting it out there, making those options attractive. You know, like the Ben, the guy who runs public pool came up with this great idea where he has referral links to buy bid axes. And then he, he gives half those referral rewards that he gets to the miner that mined the best share that that month on the pool right so it's it's actually a negative uh fee pool so regardless if they if they found a block they're still going to get some sort of reward yeah the best share for the uh for the entire month gets 50 of his referral rewards for that for that month um so is it always the same person that tends that tends to do it because they have

the most hash rate dedicated towards public pool? Or is it luck of the draw? I mean, it's definitely luck of the draw. With a bigger miner, you have more chances to win. So I think statistically it would go to a bigger miner. But I don't think it's actually – it's probably been just about a month. I don't think it's been quite a month yet. So I don't think the first one's happened yet, but we don't have a lot of data to draw upon right now.

We don't have a lot of data. It's cool. Cause public pool shows you like a high scores list though. So you can see which minor submitted sort of the, the top 10 shares or whatever for, for that month. And you know, there's a lot of bid axes in there um i think bid x probably has like the highest total uh amount of hash rate on public pool

but it's also like there's also like 20 000 nerd miners on there so that's amazing those nerd miners too are like they're they're really inefficient. But in terms of electricity draw, it's next to nil. Nerd miners are fine, man. I've got one right here. I'm nerd mining, man. I love my nerd miner. I talked to the gentleman behind it. He's from Spain.

I forget his name off the top of my head. But yes, he was on a show, gosh, three months ago. We had a long discussion about that. And yeah, it's another interesting way to dip your toes in the bitcoin mining you're unlikely to find anything but you're not spending anything it really you know the running costs are nil next to nil and yeah it's it's a good project but it's it's it's the it's the easiest way to like get into mining it's like no no barrier to get into it and it's's, you know, it's a gateway drug. So, you know, if all goes well,

you'll just head down this rabbit hole and we'd love to have you. And then shortly thereafter, you'll be purchasing up a warehouse where you could then store a whole bunch of S21s and just go down that. Within the month, I'm sure of it. Now, Scott, I guess it's pretty much a good time

to end things here. Just want to give you the floor. Where can people find you? Make, you know, anything, any last thing you want to talk about just in case people need to reach out to you with questions or anything, like where it is people can reach you.

What's the best place to get in touch with you? So bidax.org. I've got links on there to my Twitter. I'm pretty active on X. So you can find sort of, that's where I post sort of the latest news. I also post on Noster. There's one of the,

man, I haven't even mentioned it. We've just been talking about so many different things, but one of the, there's a link on bidax.org to OSMU. That's the Open Source Miners United. That is a Discord server that has popped up sort of around this movement. We've got like probably almost 2,000 members at this point. So if you're at all interested in this, I would encourage you to join the OSMU Discord.

I'm on there all the time. I'm on there all the time. Ben's on there all the time. You can talk to any of the people working on this. You can get involved to whatever degree you feel comfortable with. People just get on there and show pictures of their bid acts or their nerd minor or whatever. It's a fantastic community.

It is genuinely fantastic community. I cannot stress that enough. It's so cool. So yeah, if, if you're interested in all in this, get on OSMU. Um, you can, you can message me on there if you want to talk or, or any of the other, uh, like truly excellent people that are on there working on this stuff. So it's pretty inspiring. Highly encourage that. Um, we um we all uh most of the big resellers of bid axis contribute money uh back from their sales to osmu um and so osmu does uh sort of regular giveaways and contests and we we sponsor and we don't have a ton of money,

but we sponsor some developers too. So, you know, if you have an idea, kind of pitch it on there and we'll see what we can do to help. But it's a fantastic community. So check it out. Well, I appreciate you coming on the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast to talk about it.

So Scott from Bidax, check it out. I have in the show notes below on the video and audio, it's going to have his Twitter Scott from Bidax, check it out. I have in the show notes below on the video and audio, it's going to have his Twitter and the Bidax website. So you can check it out there. And yeah, Scott, I appreciate you coming on, buddy.

Thanks so much for having me. This is great. Cheers. Just ending. Don't forget, everybody, lots of other stuff on CBbp media network including two whites in the blue me joey my brother-in-law mike and our friend will talk about all the problems millennials are having with finance romance and just getting by uh if you'd like cbp if you like the nhl 94 podcast i guarantee you'll like that one search for it two whites in the blue anywhere you get

your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you.