The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - Zack ₿omsta, Ple₿ Miner Passion

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES This week we welcome from Zack ₿omsta, the person behind the Loki Kit and other projects. The Loki Kit is a board which "tricks" a S19 control board to think it has the proper amount of electricity (220v), but in reality you can mine from home using a standard 120V outlet. Efficient home mining has never been easier! You can find Zack on Twitter at:   / zbomstaz   or go to his website at https://pivotalpleb.com/ to see the suite of products he is offering. 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.com⁠ Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX #Bitcoin #bitcoinmining #bitcoinmines 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/cbp⁠⁠⁠ The 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.

Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Mighty CBP app, Len, and Joey has the night off. He's been running, he's been running hard lately, he's been doing a marathon of shows, so it's, he's taking the night off, good for him, and he's actually going to be at the Canadian Bitcoin Conference, so if anybody's going to be heading over there in the next few days, say hello to him. I'm not going because I have, well, family obligations to take care of, but either way, I want to talk to Zach, but before I could could talk to zach there's two things i got to do i got to talk

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Now to bring on the man of the hour, Zach. Zach Bomstow. Hopefully I pronounced your last name correctly. How are you? Nailed it. Nice. Not many people nail it right the first Zach. Zach Bomsta. Hopefully I pronounced your last name correctly. How are you? Nailed it. Nice. Not many people nail it right the first time. So good job. Thank you. That's good to hear. I like the way you have the Bitcoin B in the Bomsta. That's really, it's a little bit of a nice little flavor you put on there. But Zach, I just wanted to like, before we dive deep into LokiKit and other type of things that you're working on,

I want to talk about your background first, because you have a very interesting background from what I've been researching on you. I see you were into baby monitors at one time, for instance. Electrical engineer, from what I understand. So, I mean, you have a very interesting background. Maybe you could just give us like a real quick overview of who you are, because we could introduce you to our audience. Sure. Yeah. So I'm a small town boy from Idaho. Grew up surrounded by a bunch of farmland and cows, youngest of eight. I come from a large family. My dad was a small country doctor that was a Bitcoiner at heart. Unfortunately, he passed away before Bitcoin, before the white paper was released. But just all of his, you know, we were raised very much with his libertarian views. And, you know, he was a small country town doc that would

barter with his patients for payment, right? So he was accepting, taking payment in honey or chopped firewood or garden vegetables. And so kind of set the stage, I think, for some of my guests that aligned very well with the Bitcoin community. But yeah, so small town boy from Idaho, went to school, University of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, studying electrical engineering. I have a passion for electronics and hardware and really love working with hardware and firmware. I love the intersection between hardware and firmware. While going to school, I was involved in, I don't know, a half a dozen startups. A few of them took off.

One of them was on Shark Tank not too long ago. Another one was sold to a robotics company. But really, the biggest success was Owlet Baby Care, where we developed a smart sock that goes on a baby's foot, detects heart rate and oxygen levels, and then relays that information to a parent's smart device and can alert parents if baby stops breathing. That one, actually, that one got my attention because I had a three-month-old. And at the time that I was approached with this idea, I had a three-month-old. My wife and I were, you know, brand new parents, pretty young parents. We married young, had kids young. And when I was approached with this idea, it was just like light bulb moment, had to

be involved, got involved through my passion for electronics into it. And yeah, started developing this baby monitor that became pretty popular. And over the course of about 10 years, we serviced over a million and a half parents with peace of mind with this smart sock or this baby monitor. And I eventually went public back in 2021. And so unfortunately, during my time involved, I was the CTO and one of the founders of the company. And I was working 100 hour weeks for nine plus years. And unfortunately, didn't have a ton of time to, I didn't make time to study Bitcoin. When it was first brought to my attention, my first thought was, one, I don't have time for this. And two, it sounds like a

government spying technology anyway, if it's a public ledger that anyone can see. And I just brushed aside. And it wasn't until really after Outlet went public, I was able to take a step back, go on sabbatical and really dive down deep into the Bitcoin rabbit hole that I came across this amazing technology and just, you know, got really passionate about being involved and figuring out how to hyper decentralized Bitcoin mining. So you're relatively recent into the Bitcoin sphere. You've been in it just for a few years, but you've made an impact in that very short period of time.

I hope I'm not making an impact. I think so. I've talked about your products a few times, more than a few times, in fact. The reason why I talk about it is because S9s, I think, up until very recently were, they're very inefficient, let's be honest. And after the last halving, it made it 50% less efficient.

But still, people were using them for heating their homes, especially here in Canada. It's, you know, the winters get kind of cold. And Quebec is a region that has cheap electricity. So there, you know, there's opportunities to heat your area, your heating your environment with an S9. But now it just seems to be no longer the case. But with the devices you have created, and I want to talk about them it's giving an opportunity to use more efficient equipment out there like an s19 for instance and you could mine them using 120 volts so i want to hear about these low-key kits like how did you and hopefully i pronounced

it right too yep that's right yep low-key how did you come up with the name number one that's that's something it's kind of um interesting for me to understand the roots of that. Actually, can we talk about what it does? Because then I think the name just makes sense. Absolutely. Go ahead. Cool. A little bit of background story here. So, you know, I was I was getting in with a passion for hardware. I was when I was first getting into Bitcoin, I was a little disappointed, I guess, in because what I perceived, you know, wanting to be involved in Bitcoin, what I perceived is that most of the opportunities to be involved in Bitcoin

had to do with software development, or, or kind of a more of a sales type role. And, well, you know, as a CTO at Owlet, I did a lot of software, I'm able, you know, I can, I can, I can write software, but it's not my passion. And so when I came into the space, I'm able, you know, I can, I can, I can write software, but it's not my passion. And so when I came into the space, I was like a little bummed because I felt like, how do I, how do I really employ my passion in this space? Well, naturally I was kind of, I kind of gravitated towards mining. And I really liked this concept of reusing the heat, right? I had seen that there, okay, we've got these big, these big miners that have these big publicly traded companies that have these huge centralized mining farms, and they're just wasting all this heat. How can you know if the plebs are going to have an opportunity? First

off, we're going to hyper decentralized, we have to engage more and more, more and more plebs we have to get uh yeah more people involved and so as i looked at this space i i love the idea of recapturing the heat um i was like all right i'm gonna do that i'm gonna i'm gonna start mining with heat well that was you know the s9 was kind of on its last la it was kind of starting to phase out and s19s were, were most of the minor. Yeah. They were, they were the kind of the state of the art miners. And so I bought an S19, didn't do my research enough and lo and behold, it needs 220 volts. You must've been bummed. Yeah. So in my house, I, I have 220 volts at the stove and 220 volts at the dryer.

And, um, you know, I, I was like, all right, well, I guess I'll just go and install. And I'm an electrical engineer. Not an electrician, but electrical engineer enough. Uh-oh, we lost Zach Temporuk. Sorry, now you're muted. Can't hear you right now. Yeah, you went blank for a second, and we lost your voice. Sorry about that.

No worries. Can you hear me now? Absolutely. I forgot to put my phone on do not disturb and i got a call coming in so um yeah so so i was just about ready to go and install my own 220 volt outlet you know all right cool i'll make this work and i thought wait a minute i bet that i'm not the only interested bitcoin miner that has the same problem. And, you know, while I could just go and install this 220 volts, not a lot of people are going to be able to do that either because they don't have the skillset or they don't have the permission, right? There's a lot of people that are renting. There's a lot of people that don't feel comfortable just punching holes in their walls and running 220 volts around. And so I thought there's an opportunity here to solve a problem for others that, you know, might not have access to 220 volts.

And so I started I started I took this minor that I had bought. I actually bought a little pigtail splitter so that I could power it from the same outlet as my dryer. And I opened it up and I started sniffing around using some hardware tools. I started sniffing around and and trying to understand what was going on inside the miner. And I came to the realization that the hash boards inside the miner, they just want 12 to 15 volts DC. They don't need AC voltage. And so the power supply is, you know, taking in 240 volts and converting it to 12 to 15 volts. And so I thought, there's got to be a way to be able to get these hash boards. If I can supply the correct voltage and sufficient current, I should be able to power these hash boards from a power supply spoofer that would allow the, essentially it would

trick the control board into thinking that it was paired with the proper power supply. And then that would allow the control board to signal the hash boards to start hashing. So that's essentially what the Loki board's doing. Now you asked, where does the name come from? My, my heritage is Norwegian. And so I kind of have this like, you know, this tie to kind of Norse mythology, Norse culture, and Loki being the god of mischief or deception. I thought, hey, what a what a fitting name, you know, because this little chip is deceiving the control board into thinking that it's it's running from a bit main power supply when in fact it isn't. So that's it. Yeah. There's also the Nord cloud or New York cloud line. I see there. So I can understand the, the, the link to, okay, sorry. You mean the intro? So New York being the Norse God of wind and sea and you know,

with it, we'll probably get into a little later, but it controls, you know, an AC infinity fan. So those are pretty cool and yeah i definitely want to get into that weren't you like when you first were plugging it in and you were just using the pigtails uh straight from the 220 volt into your into your s19 and figuring things out i don't there probably isn't a huge amperage draw i'm guessing around one one and a half amps drawn to the minor I could be wrong. But you mean before you start hashing? Yes. Yeah, before you start hashing, it's it's almost nothing. So there wasn't any concern on your part because 220 volts,

every time I hear that number, it's like, Oh, man, I don't want to touch that or get near that. But I mean, given your pedigree or electrical engineering, you figured out how to do that. But you weren't concerned at all or anything? Yeah, look, there's that. You guys probably seen that old poster from the 60s or 70s with electricity, a lightning bolt holding a knife and it says electricity kills.

Like you never want to get too comfortable working with something like that. So yeah, my heart rate's a little elevated. I feel the adrenaline running when you're opening up a new high power box for the first time, like you don't want to take it lightly. So yeah, it was definitely nerve wracking. But you know, again, with my passion being in hardware and having worked around this stuff a while, I ventured to do it. Well, I've gotten few uh 400 volt surprises because these these power supplies have large 400 volt capacitors in them and when you touch them they i actually just got one yesterday luckily it just touched my feet i touched it with my fingers made a dumb move touch with my fingers

and i you know it hit me really hard in the elbow but luckily you know holy wow i'm like the hair is standing up my arms right now just thinking about that. So, okay. I want to make sure I have it correct and everybody understands what it is. So you have the power supply, and right now you're using, ideally, the S9 power supply, the PSU. That is powering the control board. And on the control board is the loci kit and the loci kit then and the hash board connect to the hash sorry the control board to the hash board so basically you're using 120 volts to your power supply unit that was from an s9 that's powering

your control board and then that's powering also your um. And then that's powering also your hash board. And it's a single hash board per Loki kit per control board. That's the way it works. You can't power more than one at a time. So first off, yeah, you're so you're tying this all together. And what I like to call a Loki rig, right? You're describing all the different components for a Loki rig. The Loki board itself is just this little tiny circuit board that plugs into the control board, but then it enables you to build a Loki rig. So now that we can hash from any suitable DC power supply, you can start to part out an S19 into smaller, lower wattage miners

that are much more efficient than the S9, right? So you can kind of build a Loki rig that's similar to the S9 in power output and in heat, but it's giving you, you know, three to four times as much hash rate for the same power consumption. And so, yeah, to do that, what we end up doing is we need to grab a DC power supply that can run from 120 volts. There are lots of DC power supplies out there, but probably the most ubiquitous one in the Bitcoin mining community is the APW3++, the old F9 power supply. There's that one right there. There's lots of them out there.

You can actually open up that power supply. There's a guide on my website that teaches you how to modify that power supply to put out a higher voltage so that you can hash faster or a lower voltage if you want to hash more efficiently but you can take this power supply now you can do the modification if you want to target your hash strategy and then you can pair that with a loki kit a control board and a hash board all inside of your choice of enclosure and build up this little loki rig now you can you do have an option and I explain this all in the Loki user's manual that gives some suggestions on how to build these Loki rigs, but I explain that you can power one, two, or three hash boards from an APW3++, depending on a few key factors. The first, and by far the most important important factor is you never want to try to

you need to know what outlet, how much current your outlet is rated for. And you never want to draw more than 80% of what that outlet is rated for. So if you're running on a 15 amp circuit, I'm not super familiar with what's common in Canada and the US. 15 amp is typical. Yes, you have 15 and then newer homes will have like 20 amp circuits, right? So if you're running on a 15 amp circuit, 15 times 120 volts, you're looking at 1800 watts. Discount that by 20%. You never want to draw more than 1500 watts. And I take that even further and say, really, you shouldn't be drawing more than 1200, 1300 tops. So that's the first thing to know. Now, when you're building out these Loki rigs, you can think about your strategy, do you want to go for max efficiency? Or do you want

to go for max utilization, right? So if you've got maybe you maybe you want to just get as much hash rate out of the thing as you can, for as few overhead costs or part costs as possible, then you maybe you're going to put three hash boards in one and just significantly underclock them. And sorry, that's going to lead actually to the most efficiency, but it's going to cost a lot of hash boards, right? But instead, maybe you want to, you don't worry so much about efficiency because you're not worried about, or because you're reusing the electricity for heat or the power usage for heat, in which case you're probably going to want to max out your hash rate and in that case you'd want to split up the hash boards if you get

you know if you buy an s19 or an s19k pro you're gonna you're gonna want to um if you're trying to maximize the hash rate you can get out of that single you'll want to break it up into three individual loki kits or loki rigs that are run on three individual circuit breakers in your home so sorry somebody kind of technical detail there but yeah no no you can build those out so somebody in a chat and i'm just going to say it once because he he's asked me to say this is it the hulk is greater than loki he's saying he's saying something to do with free disney that's beyond me but the the question now i would have for you what is the lowest amount of power draw you could have per board before it just simply fails? Yeah.

So you can actually, there's, there's actually not a lower bound. You can draw, you can target 50 Watts on these. You can target an insanely low amount, but the problem is your efficiency just tanks. So you,

depending on the variant, the Bitmain S19 variant, you'll start to see efficiency roll off significantly. But that being said, if you go to altertech.io, they're selling what they call the Erlacher, which is a variation of a Loki rig made popular by Avrola Altair Tech and David Urlacher, a developer from Luxor Technology. And they essentially said, hey, we can take an S19K Pro, leave all three hash boards in there, and run this thing from 120 volts. And they're using a Loki card, and they're just swapping out the PSU and

putting in the APW three and running all three of them. It ends up, it ends up consuming about 1200 Watts. Um, and you know, you get close to 60 terahash from that thing. So 60 terahash, 120 volts is pretty incredible. Yeah, that, that is. So in your eyes, then if somebody is willing to go through this, they're going to order the low keyboard and they're going to order the power supply unit. Which is the best S19 in your opinion? And this is, you know, they have to do your research. So don't don't we're not going to hold your feet to the fire here. But which is the best S19 model you would say for somebody to do this?

You know, I so I'll tell you what I've done. I'm working on building up a fleet of space heaters to go and deploy to friends and family and people that need heat in the winter. And because I'm not super worried about efficiency, I'm going with the S19s because you can get them for $400 a piece, right? You're going to get 33 joules per terahash when you underclock them and you can get a good 40, you know, you can get about 38 to 42, just kind of depending joule or sorry, terahash on 120 volts. And so I really like the S19s right now, but the S19GA pros have probably been a favorite. If you've got a little more cash to spend, the S19K pro is a great device as well. I haven't seen a ton of Loki rigs built with the S21 yet, just because they're kind of top of the line, right? The Loki rigs are usually hand-me-downs, so to speak, or second market or secondhand miners that people purchase. And so we haven't

seen a ton of S21s yet, but in theory, if you want to just maximize the hash, you can get from 120 volts. The S21 at 15 joules per terahash when underclocked, you're going to be able to get, on a 20 amp circuit, you're looking at 100 terahash. Wow. Now we're going to dive deep into that, but Tarop is saying in the chat,

he's saying that the power draw is about, actually the average or below a microwave running. So just to give people a context about the power draw here for one of these, if you're going to be underclocking and using the 120 volts to power a single hash board, it's going to be at or below a microwave running it. So, you know, it's not very power. It doesn't consume too much power. I didn't know that you've figured out S21s. I thought you were only targeting at this. I know you probably were expanding to the S21s,

but is that something that just you recently did or was that always a possibility? You know, I actually didn't have to do much work for it because, and I'm a little bit at the mercy of Bitmain here, but Bitmain decided to make the S21 work with any APW12 power supply. It's not like, so most S19s want a very specific variant of the APW12. But the S21, they decided to allow you to run it with any variant of the APW-12. And so because it can run with an APW-12, the Loki board is just spoofing an APW-12. So it actually works with S21 out of the box. That is funny. Wow.

There's two models right now, I believe, of S21s on the market. Is that correct? There's the S21, there's the T21, and then they've announced the S21 Pro. As far as I know, that one isn't available to general. It doesn't have general availability yet. Are you planning to do anything that's non-Bitmain? So I do have, on the Loki board, not yet. I don't have any plans for the Loki board, but the Njord board, I do have plans to have it work with the What's Miner as well, among other miners. Well, you mentioned the Njord board.

Talk about what it is, because we haven't really touched on it too much. Yeah, so kind of going along with this theme, right? My motivation here is to how do we now enable plebs to participate in mining so that we can really hyper decentralized mining. And I've got to say, Canada punches way above its weight when it comes to pleb mining. You know, some of the numbers I see from my website, you know, Canada's population wise is a fraction of the US, but I sell just as many, just as many plug miner parts to Canada as I do the US. So good job, Canada, you guys are really bringing the fight in this. We love Bitcoin. Yeah. Well, and you got that you got the cold

weather, right? So it just makes sense to be to be uh heating your home with bitcoin miners so um yeah so on this theme of trying to develop equipment and technologies that will allow pleb miners to continue to compete or you know play this mining game um i as i was kind of wading into this space i noticed that a lot of club miners were replacing in order to make it more feasible and palatable and less intrusive to run a miner in your home. The first thing they do is rip off the stock fans and they put on these inline duct fans that are much quieter. And the most popular one is the AC Infinity, which, you know, coincidentally was designed for to meet,

really to be used in marijuana growing in California. And they did a fantastic job developing a really quiet, really high power fan. And so, yeah, a lot of, I was noticing a lot of pleb miners were putting these inline fans on, but the problem is the miner, the miner's control board wants to, its fan control protocol follows the four pin PC fan protocol. And the AC Infinity fan has a totally different control protocol. And so what a lot of plebs were doing is they're just setting the fan to a fixed speed and letting it run at that fixed speed regardless of the temperature

of the chips. And, you know, it worked fairly well. But the problem that happens there is as ambient fluctuates up and down, you know, a lot of people are running in their attics or they're running in their garage in the middle of winter, it can get really cold. So as ambient, you know, in the daytime, it's warm and nighttime, it's cooling down. And as ambient temperature can fluctuate by 30, 40 degrees in some places, your chips are going to be fluctuating by that much as well because you're holding a steady airstream with different ambient temperatures. And those chips really don't want, they don't want to see those big temperature swings. That temperature cycling is actually really, really strains the electronics a lot and can really accelerate their life cycle.

And so when I looked at this, I said, hey, wait a minute, I can develop a little circuit board that will translate the control board's control signal into something that the AC Infinity fan can recognize. And so what the Njord board does, you plug it into the control board, and then you plug the little AC Infinity fan into the Njord board, and it will allow the control board to now control the speed of the AC Infinity fan, thus keeping your hash chip temperature that also work with aftermarket firmware like, say, Brains OS or Lux OS or anything along those lines? Yeah, it does. It works with all of them. And it's just basically plug and play and it's just going to work seamlessly? There's not much tinkering you have to do aside from entering some variables you want to achieve in terms of heat? You know, you have to access the control board.

So you have to open up the top, what they call the top hat or the control board cover. And then you have to unplug the stock fans. Usually there's, you know, people will either 3D print their own shrouds or they'll go to somewhere like Crypto Cloaks or in Canada, you've got Nakamoto Mining that has a great shroud kit. And you install those shroud, you remove the fans, the stock fans, you install got Nakamoto Mining that has a great shroud kit. And you install those shroud, you remove the fans, the stock fans, you install those shroud kits, but really easy to install, right? A few screws, take out the fans with a few screws, take them out and then a few screws to install those shrouds. You plug the fan in. But yeah, I mean, it's really about as plug and play

simple as you can get. The one thing I will say is depending on which firmware you're running each each third-party firmware has a slightly different PID controller I guess you know each each company has their own developers that they want to take their own crack at developing a PID controller to try to maintain the temperature of those chips and so because the new board because the AC Infinity fan is different than the stock fans, it produces a lot more airflow than the stock fans. It actually detunes the PID controller. And so what can happen is you can start to get these oscillations where the fan will ramp up and then ramp way down and ramp up and ramp way down. It's called ringing in PID controller terms because the PID controller is expecting,

it's not expecting as much air as it gets. So let's say the chips are getting hot. So it says, hey, give me 10% more fan speed. Well, the PID controller was tuned expecting a certain airflow and it's getting way more. So it calls for 10% and then the chips cool way down. So anyway, what I'm describing here is what's known as ringing in the PID control world. And so what does it mean for someone installing a Njord board? You need to be aware of which firmware you're running, and then you need to configure the Njord board just by putting these little configuration jumpers on the Njord board. You need to configure them to run with the firmware you're running. So the Njord board comes with a little quick start card that has the correct configurations, right? So if I'm running Venish,

I need to, or a Venish variant like ASIC.TO, there's a handful of firmwares that all kind of are derived from Venish. I need to go configure it to run Venish so it doesn't ring as much. If I'm running Brains or Stock, I actually don't need to do anything. LuxOS is another one.

I don't need to do anything. They just, it just works out of the box. So you have to have some technical knowledge. Look, if you're going to be doing this anyways, you're going to have to have some capability of taking stuff out, plugging it in, and unscrewing. To do this, to make the New York board work with

the AC Infinity fan and to properly configure it, I don't think it's going to be too far outside the capabilities of whoever's doing this. It's really cool. Somebody's asking in the chat and i i want to sorry go ahead i was just going to say you've got to be comfortable opening up the miner but that being said you're not accessing any of the high voltage parts of the miner it's all the weight place you're accessing is low voltage um you know it's it's kind of like when you open up your computer's motherboard, and there's some

little pins you need to remove and stuff. That's about the level of technical ability. Well, at the very least, even if you're just going to plug and play something like an S19, you're gonna have to clean it periodically. And that's going to require you opening it up and doing so you're already there, right? You just might as well just change a few jumpers here. So it's not like it's so far out of the realm of possibility but somebody's asking about the longevity and you're talking about um the longevity of the a6 because the heat uh you know i know the s9s are legendary in terms of their ability to sustain heat and just have a long lifespan but the s19s they have that same type of just robustness to them or are they like finicky

when it comes to heat cold cycles like what are your what's your experience with them yeah so unfortunately they're not near as robust as the s9 um and it's it's a function that the t21s are even more temperamental they don't they don't tolerate temperature swings as well as the s19s and it comes down to channel width in the actual ASIC chips themselves, right? So the way that they drive better efficiencies is narrow and narrow channel widths at the actual gate level. And so, you know, you hear them talk about, oh, well, this is three nanometer technology. The T21's, you know, three nanometer versus five nanometer versus seven nanometer. And, you know, I forget what the S9s were, but they had a lot wider channel width.

And that channel width makes them less finicky when it comes to temperature. So unfortunately, it's a tradeoff between efficiency and temperature robustness. And so as we march down further and further in channel width, chasing after higher efficiencies, unfortunately, it's a reality we've got to live with that these, these machines are going to get more and more temperature temperamental. And so, you know, in theory, if you can keep them at a constant temperature, they should be happy. But if they get too hot, they don't like that. And what, you know, I think that one's pretty intuitive. Like most people realize like, yeah, okay, I can't, they don't like that. And I think that one's pretty intuitive. Like most people realize like, yeah, okay, I can't,

I don't want to fry the chip by getting it too hot. But maybe one that's not as intuitive for people is temperature cycling. What happens as you cycle the temperature on these hash boards is you get temperature thermal expansion coefficients of all the different materials on the boards are going to dictate that different parts of the board expand and contract at different rates given the change in temperature and so as the temperature of the hash board goes up and goes down and goes up and goes down what happens is you have all these parts just at the micro level expanding and contracting and really torquing on each other and it just starts to kind of eat up you know just kind of starts to tear

apart the board at the inside it stresses out a lot of the solder joints, stresses out a lot of the silicon wafers inside the components that are, that are bending. And so, you know, it's, it's not a guaranteed failure, obviously, you know, it's not like, oh, you do one temperature cycle and this thing's going to break, but you want to limit the number of temperature cycles. And so really that's where, that's where trying to maintain a tight temperature range while running these boards and then keeping it there is really important. So I had, I had a customer of the New York board that was up in Wisconsin running a barn full of, of these, of S19s. Barn full, I love it. It was literally a barn full. Yeah.

Great guy. And, uh, you know, he talked about, you know, up in Wisconsin, pretty cold, probably not as cold as what you guys get, but, um, you know, he'd say that, you know, sometimes he'd, he'd get these like negative 20, negative 30 degrees nights and his minors would, were not happy the next morning. Right. And so he was asking me, is the New York board, how's the the newer board going to work in that scenario? I said, well, in that scenario, the newer board will probably go down to about 3% duty cycle, maybe, maybe 10% duty cycle, but it's going to tune way, way, way, way down to try to maintain. Well, and sorry,

I need to mention that, you know, he was running the AC infinity fans at constant speed. And so then he'd get hit with a 20 below night and he just, you know, all the hash boards are running it you know maybe five degrees celsius there's a frost building on it yeah and so and the miners are just really cold and then and then it starts to heat up and they go back up to the you know 65 70 degrees celsius they don't like that that huge temperature swing so with the new board in in line there you know now he can just finish this first winter with all of them outfitted with New York boards,

and he doesn't have the same problem, right? When those cold nights hit, the New York boards are modulating the fan down really low. Yeah, Torup Hoddle is saying that S9s were a 16-nanometer chip. Oh, thank you. Thank you for giving that. So I'm just curious, in particular of the OSs that you're putting in it or the firmware,

any particular one that you're fond of that works well or just everything seems to work fine? I just want to know if you seem to have, you know, if you would like to suggest one over another if somebody's going to do this. You know, I've played around with, I think, every firmware now. Got a lot of hash cycles on all the firmwares. All of them have their own strengths and all of them have their weaknesses and setbacks.

And so you kind of got to pick and choose. I wish that I could set all of the, you know, I think the three big ones that I've kind of settled in on are Venish, Brains, and LuxOS. I wish that I could sit the three of them down in a room and say, hey, guys, let's create the, you know, the ultimate. Let's take the best of all of these and put them into one. But I will say that I, when I'm running a miner, I'm usually looking at, I usually reach for Venish first. I've just found that it's, Venish is kind of the AK-47 of firmware, I feel like. Brains has been pretty good, but I would say that Brains is kind of the Swiss army knife of firmwares and sometimes a little too smart for its own good to where it can you know it can it

wants everything to be just right um lux os i think my biggest complaint about there's a lot of good things that lux os does um i really like the team there as well extremely responsive really smart guys um you know very very uh in tune with the pleb minor community which there's a you know that that gets a lot of bonus points. I think the thing I struggle with there is their metrics in their firmware dashboard or in the miners dashboard just aren't very accurate thus so far. So, you know, and they're not, I think they fixed this, but there was one point where they didn't play nice with a lot of pools. They worked great with the Lux pool, but they had a hard time getting workloads from other pools and stuff. And so, you know, but anyway.

That's fair. That's a great answer. Like, I mean, you've more than answered it, and hopefully it's going to lead people down the right path in terms of what they do with this. So the low-key kit, I'm curious. You said this is, in your eyes, you wanted this to target home miners,

pleb miners. Is there any application for this in an industrial setting, or it just doesn't work there particularly well? I've had a few people reach out. I think that probably the most compelling industrial-scale application is solar. So when you're mining from solar, because if you think about what's happening with solar, right?

A lot of people go from solar panels that produce DC, right? And then they put in an inverter to convert that to AC. And then they run that through the power supply that converts it from AC back to DC. And you're, you're taking efficiency hits all along the way. And so some of you that are listening might be familiar with, I think it's dirty shot. Yeah. I think it's how you say it on, on Twitter. He's, you know, he lives out in Wyoming. He's, and he's, he's kind of living off grid with solar and wind and he mines from solar and wind and he has this hash box

that allows you to go solar direct to ASIC so you can cut out all the stuff in between so he has he's been able to show that you can actually get a lot more efficiency going solar direct to ASIC and he's using the Loki board to help him accomplish that. Somebody's asking about how about mining for a hot tub? I guess you're just using the excess heat for heating up the water. So it works fine. I guess even also for a pool as well,

but maybe there's not enough heat coming off it to make a huge difference for a hot tub. Maybe for a pool you might have. No maybe there's not enough heat coming off it to make a huge difference for a hot tub. Maybe for a pool you might. No, there's absolutely application there. Yeah, there's a few other people in the space that are developing hot tub heaters specifically with Bitcoin miners. They're building Bitcoin miners into hot tub heaters. It's not a huge application for Loki because those hot tubs are usually equipped with 240 volts. Yeah.

I'm curious. That's right. I was just going to say, that being said, another interesting application we're seeing is over in Europe. They've got 220 volts everywhere in Europe. So you think, well, it's not going to be an application there. But interestingly, there are a few different people that are working on building space heaters with single hash board units. And they want to use the APW9 or sorry, they want to use the power supply for the S9, which is the APW3 to help, you know, cut down costs. And so so that's another application where it's like, OK, even though they have 220 volts, they're still interested in the Loki because it allows them to use cheaper power supplies and break them out into single hash boards.

Yeah. So I'm curious then what's next for you? Do you have something on the agenda that maybe, I mean, I don't want to, it's something secretive, obviously don't bring it up, but I'm curious what's coming up next for you. Yeah. So right now I am working on Loki V2. So I need to explain some of the limitations of Loki V1 in order for the features of V2 to make sense. So with Loki V1, it's literally just a power supply spoofer. So it's telling the control board, yep, everything's good. So the control board, what kind of happens here is the control board goes out to the power supply in a normal setup,

and it does a digital handshake and gets the information from the power supply, verifies that it's a bit main power supply. And then the control board will tell the power supply what voltage it needs to set, what it needs to set its output voltage to based on how much hash rate you're trying to get out of the miner. So if you're trying to go higher hash rate, you need more voltage. If you want more efficiency, lower hash rate, you need lower voltage. So the control board will send that communication back and forth. Well, Loki V1, all it does is when the control board does that first digital handshake, the Loki board says, yep, I'm an APW 12 power supply. And then when the control board says, hey, set your voltage to X, Loki says, got it. You know,

it confirms and says, I set the voltage to X, but it doesn't actually change the voltage. So you have a static voltage, which from the Loki customers that have, the feedback I've gotten from my Loki customers is, it'd be nice if I want to change my hash strategy and I want to go from max hash to max efficiency. It would be nice if you really want to get max efficiency, or if you're changing between those strategies, you have to manually go in, open up the power supply and adjust the resistor value in there to get it to output more voltage or less voltage. And it's just, it's not feasible. So the goal of Loki V2 is I figured out how to make it so that an APW3, which is a static or fixed voltage output power supply,

I figured out how to make it variable voltage. I can get it to go anywhere from 12 volts to 14 volts on demand. So the idea with Loki V2 is the control board will tell it to go to that voltage, and then with a single wire connection back to the APW3 back to the power supply I can change that voltage up and down so it now allows us to have dynamic voltage control using an APW3 so is there something you're actually putting into the APW3 I mean you said you're touching a wire from the Loki kit to the APW3 but are are you actually putting a different board inside it to make it all worthwhile? No, I mean, you'll have to open up the APW3. Yeah. And instead of replacing,

I have a guide online of how to modify the voltage by replacing a resistor. Well, instead of putting a resistor in there, you'll instead solder a wire where that resistor would have gone. You'll solder a wire to it and bring that wire out to the Loki V2. And then the Loki V2 will sit on the control board just like Loki V1 does, but it'll have this little wire, a single wire going between the APW3 and Loki V2. And so now the output voltage of the APW3 will be adjustable. In addition to that, the Loki V2 will also work with the APW9, which was the power supply used on the S17, which you may remember the s17 was a nightmare it was it it was a terrible miner very finicky um very bad quality um the nice thing is those miners i i bought a thousand of them for 20 bucks a piece and so i get the control board and the power supply for 20 bucks like you can't

get that's super cheap power supply and control board. Are you going to start selling some of the power supply units with the soldered cable on it? Because I can imagine some people being reluctant to do that, like soldering it themselves. But are you going to start selling that to people directly? I don't have plans to do it myself at Pivotal Play. I want to continue to focus on the... I need to guard my time so I can continue to focus on developing the next, you know, next hardware piece. But I do have partners that have started to, or I shouldn't say partners, I should say distributors and other people in the space that are taking the, you know, taking the Loki board and kind of creating their own business opportunities to go and do that as a value added service for club miners. I know here in Canada, we deal with D tech.

I know you're, you're, you know them. So yeah. And in fact, we had Jonathan on the show not too long ago and yeah, great guy. I love chatting with him. So I just wanted to mention them as well for people in Canada looking to buy equipment, but in terms, I mean, I know we're getting kind of long here. I just got a couple of questions before we wrap up. Thoughts right now on the hash rate continually going up because we had the halving just take place last month. And since you seem to have a much closer connection

to the mining industry than any of us do, what are your thoughts on this hash rate continually going up? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's first off, it's an incredibly bullish sign for the Bitcoin network at large. And I think it's, it's a reality that we're just got to, that we've got to prepare for. You know, one thing I, we haven't talked much. I know most of what we've talked about has been around PivotalPleb and the products that Pivotal Pleb offers.

And we probably don't have time to get too much into it on this episode. But another company I'm working on in the Bitcoin space is called Unbound, where our goal is to heat a million homes with Bitcoin miners in the next five years. And we've got some pretty cool technology that's allowing us to identify energy arbitrage opportunities where we can convert homes that are heated, usually rural homes in the U.S. that are heated with propane. We can save a homeowner several hundred dollars a month just by switching their heat source from propane to electricity because the price of propane in the U.S. has gone up, has outpaced, you know, the price increases in propane has outpaced the price increases in electricity. You know, 20 years ago when a lot of these homes were built, the propane electricity were a cost parity, whereas now propane costs quite a bit more and homeowners don't realize

that, hey, if you just start heating with electricity, you can save a bunch of money. So we go in, we own the miners, we go and deploy the miners in their homes. They save several hundred dollars a month on their heating bill and they pay for the electricity. We get the Bitcoin. They're happy to pay for electricity because they're saving money. We get the Bitcoin. But the reason I share that in addressing your question about the hash rate is, you know, when we started working on this business model for Unbound, it was in the depths of the bear market when hash price was way down and hash rate just kept going up. And I was actually really glad to be starting a company and working on the business model in a bear market because that gets baked into the company's DNA.

Right. It causes us to say, hey, it's not going to work for us to just go waste all this heat or to just go try to compete with the big pub co miners. Like we have to be smart and nimble and figure out how to make it work with super low hash prices and so i think that that's you know as we think about hash price or hash rate and what it's going to be doing and consequently hash price you know barring the the god candle that uh that's some you know a lot of bitcoin twitter people talk about barring the god candle i think we're we're going to look at just a continually falling hash price um because we're going to see a continual a continually increasing hash rate and so i think anything we do we need to be thinking

ahead and saying okay it makes sense today but does it make sense three years from now does this does my effort the efforts i'm doing or does a model I'm working on make sense, you know, three, five, 10 years from now? And I think as long as you have a need for the heat, the answer is yes. Now you can go and, you can go and tweak your model or tweak your operations or tweak your strategy to try to make it more efficient, to get more Bitcoin. But at the end of the day, like it still makes sense. If you're, if you live in a home that's heated by propane in the U S it still makes sense to run an S nine Bitcoin miner and just, just stop using propane and start using electricity. Cause you're going to save money and you're going to get a little Bitcoin. So that's kind of how I think about hashrate going up. Sorry. I know it's long-winded and convoluted. No. And how far, how far into this unbound project

are you? Have you, is it simply just a concept right now, or you actually are rolling out product for people to put in their homes and have them heat their homes with it? So we did a small pilot this last winter. We distributed a pedahash among about 25 users. So nothing huge, but we wanted to go prove out the business model and the concept. This next winter, we are, I'm currently sitting in my garage, the only quiet place away from the kids in the house. But you know, I'm surrounded by boxes of equipment that we're using to build 200. Our goal is to get to now 10 petahash this next winter. So about 250 homes. And yeah, so you know, it's we're bootstrapping it. We're taking it one step at a time. I'll mention in my last startup outlet, you know, we raised $250

million of capital over 10 years. I've done the whole VC thing, raised the money. And one of the takeaway lessons I learned was venture capital money can dilute your perception on reality as you kind of chase this mantra of growth at all costs. And I saw that it distorted our decision-making abilities at Owlet to where we did some funny things we wouldn't have maybe done if we were growing a responsible, low-time preference business. And so that's kind of the approach we're taking with Unbound. We'll roll it out. One pet a hash this past year, 10 pet a hash next year, hopefully 100 pet a hash the following year, and then one extra hash the year after that.

Sweet. The question is, is it open for investors? But it sounds like no. It seems like that's not an option right now. I wouldn't say it's not open for investors. Not currently, but we are not going to take the traditional VC route, you know, where we go and try to raise a couple million dollars in a seed round and give up 30% of the business and then get pressured to grow at all costs and make bad business decisions. So that's the future of Bitcoin mining in your eyes. You're going to have people heat their homes on scale and uh that's going to be you're like decentralizing mining making people take

control of it although these people are just simply heating their homes and you're you're going to be collecting the bitcoin you're still mining is still decentralized in a way so that's in your eyes it's almost the future of bitcoin mining there's one more aspect to it technically if it was just unbound going distributing these miners to a million homes, we're not decentralized because Unbound is a single legal entity that might find themselves on the wrong side of the Department of Justice like Samurai did. So that wouldn't be decentralized. And our mission is to hyper-decentralize. We share a lot of the same ethos that DTech or Decentral Tech shares there in Canada. In fact, I know Jonathan has spoken to him a lot. We've collaborated on several things. And we both share this deep-rooted mission of we need to hyper-decentralize.

And so the other aspect of the Unbound business that I didn't talk about was our goal is actually to be able to eventually sell these miners into, our goal is to go out and find Bitcoiners in these small rural communities that want to develop their own decentralized Bitcoin network. So we sell the miners directly to, to these Bitcoiners, and then they go and find friends and families in their communities and they get to build out their own network, you know, 40, 40 terahash at a time. Right. So they can, the goal that we're aiming for is about seven to eight hundred dollars for these for each of

these miners so pretty good you know 40 terahash at $800 pretty good low scale price per terahash and it'll allow it allow bit coiners in these rural communities to go and build out their own decentralized network at their own pace you know they can do it in the moonlight hours the with the idea being Bitcoiners in these rural communities to go and build out their own decentralized network at their own pace. You know, they can do it in the moonlight hours with the idea being they get these distributed to friends and families in their small communities. And now, you know, my hometown in Idaho, 3000 people, everybody goes to church. Everyone talks to everyone, talks to church on Sunday. You know, and if I can get into three people's homes, I can get into the whole community.

And now the whole town is heating with Bitcoin heaters instead of propane. It's a Bitcoin mecca, Bitcoin mining mecca over there. Somebody's asking in the chat, what to do with the heat in the summertime? Do you simply just vent it out or you really just throttle down the ASICs or any other options? So the business model has to work here, which is why we're so focused on getting the price per terash for these rigs down. Our goal is to make it so that these miners can pay for themselves in one heating season. And that's only six, you know, the short answer is you unplug them in the summertime. But our hope is that the unit economics, our goal is to make so that the unit economics work out to where they'll pay for themselves after, you know,

six months of heating. So then any, you know, any, any heating seasons after that is, is, is profit. So this has been awesome.

And we're getting close to an hour. I know you have a growing family. You're taking time out of your schedule to come here. And I really appreciate that. I think it's time we wrap things up. But last thing I have for you was to, if they want to learn a little bit more about Unbound, is there a website they could go to or Twitter page or whatever?

We're still pretty stealth. Unboundnetworks.net. I think you can put in your email and subscribe, but we're still pretty much in stealth mode. We wanted to get through this pilot program this last winter. We want to go into this kind of slightly larger scale we'll select maybe a half a dozen to a dozen what we call network owners people that will go and try to build out their own networks but for the most part we're

going to stay pretty small this next season and for the loki kits and the newer boards you can get them from pivotal pleb.com is that correct that's right yeah you can you can get them from pivotal pleb.com. Is that correct? That's right. Yeah. You can, you can buy them directly from pivotal pleb.com or really what's probably better for the, for Canadian listeners is to go to decentral tech. You can buy them there or Nakamoto Nakamoto mining. And the reason I say that is because you're going to avoid international shipping charges and you're going to avoid customs that unfortunately Canada wants their, wants their share of it. Right. So so um by by work by buying through one of my canadian distributors you know you'll avoid those but for people who want to go to pivotal pleb.com you could buy it with bitcoin if you wanted to is that correct that's correct yep 15 there you go so uh just want to just hand

over the baton to you where people could reach you if they don't have any questions or anything. The floor is yours and we can just sign off. So I think first off the I'm not prepared on it. Maybe I can send this to you. I don't know if you have show notes or something afterwards. Oh, yeah. There's a there's a telegram group called Loki plebs. We've got almost 200 almost 200 Loki builders in there. If anyone's interested, but isn't quite sure that they're ready to take the plunge or doesn't feel quite confident or don't quite understand everything

about building a Loki rig, come to the Loki plebs channel. Lots of people in there doing lots of cool things that, you know, if I'm not available to answer questions, there's always five other people that are ready to jump on and answer the questions. So that's the Loki plebs group. I had, unfortunately, I had to make it by invite only because we were getting a lot of scammers in there, taking advantage of some of the Pleb members looking for cheap hardware. But I can get you an invite link if you want to share that with the community.

Absolutely. Provide me what you want. In addition to that, on Telegram, I'm at ZBOMZZ. And on Twitter, you can find me under Zach Bomstow. Well, there you go. Thanks so much for coming on, Zach. I know you took time out of your busy schedule. You do have a growing family, and congratulations. I think you have a new one that just came not too long ago,

like two or three months ago. Hopefully, you're finally getting some rest. So there you go, ladies and gentlemen. Zach Bomsta, if you have any questions, you have places to go to. So with that, take care, and you'll see us back on Monday. Awesome. Thanks, Len.