We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC163: A Bitcoin HVAC & Hot Water System in the House w/ Michael Schmid (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

In this insightful episode, we dive into the dual role of Bitcoin mining rigs in both generating cryptocurrency and heating water at home. Our guest, a skilled Bitcoin engineer, shares the technical nuances and environmental considerations of his unique setup. The conversation also analyzes the strategic consequences of the Red Sea conflict, discussing its profound effects on international trade, maritime security, and the stability of the US dollar in global finance. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 01:27 - An analysis of the Red Sea's role in global trade and its geopolitical significance. 01:27 - How the conflict in the Red Sea region affects international maritime trade and shipping routes. 01:27 - Discussion on the influence of the Red Sea conflict on the stability and dominance of the US dollar. 01:27 - Insights into the broader implications of maritime security issues on global trade. 01:27 - Understanding the complex interplay between geopolitical events and their impact on global trade dynamics. 14:54 - How Bitcoin mining can be integrated with domestic heating systems, particularly for water heating. 14:54 - Understanding the environmental considerations and sustainability aspects of using Bitcoin mining rigs. 35:54 - Exploring the potential and challenges of using renewable energy sources for Bitcoin mining. 35:54 - Latest trends and technological advancements in the field of Bitcoin mining. 39:35 - Insights into the technical setup and operation of at-home Bitcoin mining rigs. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Michael Schmid’s Twitter. Michael’s Website: Nakamoto Heating Solutions. Check out the books mentioned in the podcast here. NEW TO THE SHOW? Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. Boy, what a fun and exciting show I got for you guys this week. Today's guest is Michael Schmidt, who is a home miner and that has taken the Bitcoin mining rigs that he owns and harness the heat from the rigs to heat is home and to fill his hot water tank. If this is something that you've heard as possible, you will not want to miss this incredible deep dive on all the interesting possibilities here. Additionally, we open up the conversation for the first 10 to 15 minutes talking about some

of the kinetic attacks happening around the Red Sea and Suez Canal and why it's important from a global macro perspective with shipping lanes and the petro dollar system. So with all of that, I hope you guys enjoy this chat with Michael. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with Michael Schmidt, and like I said in the introduction, this is going to be a two-part

kind of discussion where we're talking about some of the things that are happening over in the Red Sea up front, and then some amazing stuff that Michael has been doing from an at-home mining perspective. So, Michael, welcome to the show. Great to have you here. Thanks for having me. Just for the folks listening, we both have a bit of a military background. Michael and I got to know each other a lot better back in the fall out in Colorado. And just, you know, in back channels, we started talking about what's happening over in the Red Sea right now with this Operation Prosperity Guardian that the United States Navy is trying to run. Let me just give, Michael, let me give a background for people that might not be familiar with this

scenario. And then let's talk through just kind of a little bit what we were trying to have in the back channels before I was like, let's just have a real conversation on the show about this. So just to break this down, so we're talking about the Red Sea. This is, you know, to the west of Saudi Arabia, in between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan. This is obviously really important because of the shipping lanes and the amount of commerce that needs to happen through this canal, the Suez Canal, that goes right through Egypt area. People that aren't familiar with the Suez Canal, about 30% of Egypt's revenue comes from this shipping lane coming through here. Some other really interesting things about

this area. So this is 8.8 million BPD of daily oil transit through this area with nearly 380 million tons of daily cargo that transitioned through this. Very interestingly, there's been 17 incidents right down by the Yemen area that the Houthi drones, and these are Yemenis like a Yemeni rebel group, that is now either attacking with drones or doing really unique thing. But there's been 17 incidents just from the 26th of November. And it's shifting a ton of commerce out of this region. And it's forcing ships to now go around Good Hope, which is around the South Africa, up to Europe, which is about a 40% additional voyage distance if you're not going through the Suez Canal.

We were talking about this and why we think that this is a really important thing to kind of highlight is we often talk about how the world is de-dollarizing and how there's this discussion more about like the rails between the banks. But what's rarely talked about is the physical breakdown. I saw Luke Roman literally today just said that 20% of all oil in the past year was settled in something other than the dollar, which is way up from what has. normally been. But now you, part of this like dollar system is the U.S. Navy guaranteeing that shipping lanes are intact and not being disrupted. And now you have more naval vessels and ships that are having to come over here. They're disrupting it in a major way. I'm pretty sure that a lot of the result is what's happening in Israel and Palestine of why these attacks are ramping up. But Michael and I got into a conversation about this via direct message.

And one of the things that we were talking about was how Spain, Italy, and France and Australia are refusing to participate in this U.S.-led coalition or response to all these incidents that are happening there. And so, Michael, tell me some of your perspective, where it comes from the context of why you have this point of view of maybe why some of these European countries. countries are not participating in this. Yeah, I definitely can. Yeah, like you said, I've been following all of this, what's going on around the Babel and

depth, which is this specific, it's quite a small, it's just a couple of miles wide. So it's a choke point for industrial container oil ships, tankers and all these other stuff. And yeah, what is really interesting to see is that this militant group, without actually a lot of work can cause massive disruptions in the global trade. There are estimations that just because now, I think the last couple of days, more than 300 ships have diverted down to South Africa. There is estimations that this will reduce the global shipping capacity by 10 to 15%. And for anybody that remembers the ever given that was stuck in the Suez Canal just for six days. So that was just six days. We're already almost two months in all these issues. It caused

massive disruptions. And so it's interesting that this is not very widely reported right now. And I think the implications specifically what we talked about in the background, what is actually going on. So the US actually had, since 2022, they had this combined task force 153, which is a naval task force to protect the Red Sea that was literally made for that specific reason. And part of this are 39 nations all over the world who held. with that say, hey, we're interested because like you mentioned, it affects globally.

So through that specific route, there's a lot of European nation traffic that goes through. Obviously, like these big shipping companies like Maersk, Hopak Lloyd and all these, they are not, they're not US at all. They're all European. And so it was a good idea to create this task force. Interestingly, what then happened in the beginning of December when these first, so maybe from a timeline point of view, it already, like you said, it started in November already, but just very small.

And actually at the beginning, it was only attacks to ships that have somehow a connection to Israel. So the Houthi clearly say they are supporting of the hammas. And they said, we will attack or will basically stop Israel from trading. And if an Israeli ship wants to go through, we're still going to, we're either going to divert them,

hijack them and attack them. And actually what was crazy, in 19th of November, galaxy leader, which is a car transport, ship that has the owner, it's partly owned by an Israeli businessman. So it's not sailing on an Israeli ship. It didn't go to Israel. It's not owned only by Israel. It's just like a tiny connection. It actually got hijacked. And it's still hijacked. We still don't know where all the

people are, the crew. And so that's still going on. And so during the time in beginning of December, we had more and more attacks again, always connected to Israel. And then suddenly other ships got attacked that had no connection at all. to Israel. And yeah, when we say attacks, yeah, these are either drones, kamikaze drones that are flying into these, but they also have ship missiles, meaning they fly just a little bit over the water or ballistic missiles which go into the air and fall down. So the Houthi definitely have a lot of different weapons and it's very clear that they are supported by Iran. They're trained by Iran because all the weapons are Iranian. You can literally see what types of drones and or our military

equipment that they use. And so around the 12th to 13th December, when more and more non-Israeli ships got attacked, the companies obviously said, hey, we need to do something. The companies themselves cannot do anything. Ships are not armed in normal. Because the problem is imagine an armed ship from Germany would go to the US. Like, how do you handle this? Like this would suddenly, so people always say, oh, just put weapons on these tankers and that's not that easy. And so if you really need something in terms of protection, like during the Somalia attacks on boats, what companies usually did, they had literally armed guards on the boats, but they went on their boats after they already were in international waters. They sail through the affected area, and then they

go off again. In this case, though, we're not talking about people hijacking boats. We're just talking about missiles flying through the air. And so can't really do a lot of guards on board. And so they called for help to make sure. And obviously, everybody looked at the task force. And the US said, okay, we're going to do this Operation Prosperity Guardian on the 18th of December. But it took six days to actually get anything done. And that's, if you think about, like again, if you look at at Evergiven, the whole thing took six days. And it took the US to create the operation, get all the nations on board.

And like you say, most big nations like France, Spain, Italy, they said they're going to help, but they're not going to be part of the operation itself. Basically what they're saying, we don't want to be commended by US command. And France weren't actually so far that they started to escort their own ships before that operation could actually do something, which by itself is quite a big move, if you understand a little bit of how these operations, usually work is that it's really important that everybody works together. If individual countries or teams start to do anything, the stuff gets actually more dangerous. It's like if in a company, like different teams don't know what they want to do. Yeah, then maybe things are not very efficient. But if we talk about military operations, this could actually go really bad. And the fact that France went along and said, look, we're going to just bring these ships now through because

what the operation or what the task force wants to do, it takes way too long. It's for me, with my military background, that's quite a bold move. And it continues.

The US has now started to escort ships, interestingly, only from Maersks, which are, is an American limited. So Maersks, which is actually a Danish company,

they have ships that fly under US flags because they transferred DOD containers. So the US uses this Maers limited, which is registered in the US, flies under the US flags, and they only escorted the US ships so far. But they started this now many, many days later. And so today we are in

the situation that it's very, very unclear what is actually going on. The attacks have been a little removed, but they still was one two days ago on the 26th of December. And a ship from MSC from Switzerland got attacked. Again, even though the Americans are there, it doesn't really seem that we have really a grasp on what's going on. And every major company, they're still sending all their ships down through South Africa. And what is scary for me is really that it seems like, hey, we don't have it under control. That's one problem. But the fact that these nations, and specifically the US all at front, and not really get these different countries to work together. And that's scary to me. Or it's just, if I think about, like, if you look back into

the history of how other events unfolded, that's usually when these first cracks are happening, that countries don't work with each other anymore or they have disagreements, and that's usually when bad things happen. I'm going to read something. This is a little long, but I think it's pertinent to this whole topic that we're talking about. This was written by Zoltan Polzar. He was a former Credit Swiss analyst, really renowned in the financial circles, and he's

talking about the difference between like bailout. and financial security when you're talking about treasuries versus it actually happening in physical markets, like what we were just talking about with trade. So I'm going to read this and then we'll move on to the next topic, Michael. So here it is. Protection is a conceptual counterpart to par. When you decide to take money out of a site deposit, you expect the same amount back when you put in par. When you sail foreign cargo from port A to port B, you expect to unload the same amount of cargo that you unloaded. Banks can deliver par on deposits most of the time.

When not, central banks step in to help. Commodity traders can deliver foreign cargo from Port A to Port B most of the time. But when not, the state intervenes again. Not the monetary arm, but the military arm of the state. When central banks are to protect the PAR promises the military branch is the protection of the shipments. Foreign cargo needs the sale on sea routes and through children. point like the Straits of Hormuz and PAR in this context. What I think people, what's lost

on so many people in finance is it's so digital, it's so separated from physical reality, but in the background of like all economics, you have these very, very physical things taking place around the world. And a topic and a theme that I've tried to really address for the past year is this idea that you have the world that is delivering things. physical things in surplus to a world that's consuming these physical things at a net loss. And when you look at the parties that are at each other or battling each other, what I find so fascinating is those two sides, when you look at what's happening inside of these countries of these two major battle that are taking place in the world, it almost always comes down to one

of them is a net producer and the other is a net consumer. And this is kind of just further, as Luke Roman would say, this is another signpost to pay attention to the world that's changing right before our eyes and desperately looking for a new settlement layer to adjudicate these, the exchange of physical things. So that was me talking a lot. Let's move on to the next topic here, Michael, because, man, you have such a fascinating story to tell here that I just love. You are taking mining rigs at your house. You're converting the excess heat to heat water tanks, to use this in a dual purpose kind of way. Not only are you making money from mining, but you're also reducing your heating expenses and things like that. How in the world did you get into this? Like,

what was the year and what drove you to do this? And yeah, just give us how it all took place. How did it all start? I love to. Yeah. So actually, recently, I checked when I got the first time in contact of Bitcoin. And that was 2011 already, so very early. Wow.

But at that point, I originally from Switzerland. I live in the U.S. now. So I wasn't the tech scene of Zurich active. And actually, a lot of cryptographers. And cryptography was something interesting. And so we looked into Bitcoin just for the fact that I can send you something and I cannot use it anymore. Because in the internet, everything was about copying.

So Napster and Kazah and all these things were about easy copying. And here comes a person and claims, oh, I figured out a way that I can send you something digitally and you cannot use it anymore. And that was fascinating because up until that point, that didn't really exist. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately at that point, living in Switzerland, like, we didn't really know how broken the money was because Switzerland is very very. stable, low inflation, the government cares for you, things like that. And so while I understood Bitcoin, we looked at that point as like, hey, wait, you can do seven transactions a second.

That's the max. And already there, credit cards, it's way more. And so we like wrote it off and said, like, it's a nice experiment, but it could never become the satellite layer for the world. Of course, completely forgetting that things are building layers, like the internet itself. That's what I learned, the different layers. So I don't know why, but I didn't really know the monetary background or the banking background to really connect the dots. Like I knew the Bitcoin over there and the money over there, but that they could actually be solved and like layer two and layer three levels.

So for me, Bitcoin was like, was a cool thing. Of course, you actually bought some because at that point, like the only way is to mine is like you just ran your computer overnight. Yeah. And the next morning, like, if you were lucky, you had 50, 50 more bitcoins. That was literally like. And then we sent them to each other just for fun. But we couldn't use them.

Like, yes, in the US at that point, you could start using them a little bit. But in Switzerland, like there was nobody that wanted them. So we just sent each other with them for fun. Then Mount Cox came and, yeah, unfortunately, when Mount Cox collapsed, they was like, okay, for me, that was like, okay, there was a nice experiment. Let's forget about it. And then it came back, like in life, everything. Like, it comes back.

You meet friends again. And so I met Bitcoin again. actually during the pandemic because living in the US and learning about all this helicopter money or the stimulus checks, I started to doubt like how is this actually possible? How do we produce

all this money? And your podcast was actually one of the major things that I learned about money and how it all works. And having some time during COVID and doing some side projects, I started to look into mining again. I bought like a very old

S3 miner. That's even before the S-9, found one on Facebook marketplace and started to heat my garage because it was cold. So I then switched to S-9s because I, well, the S-3 didn't really make any money. So got the S-9s, realized how loud they are. But I didn't care because most of the time I'm listening to music while working. So I heated my garage a little bit. And, yeah, I was happy with that. Then my wife and I, we decided to go on an airstream trip.

So we have an Ashtim trailer and we traveled all over Colorado and obviously it's very cold there. And one of the things is you heat, your rigs, they're all heated with propane. The problem is, though, you need to get the propane. And they're not very well insulated. So basically every two days I had to find a place to fill up propane, you hold the tanks and all that stuff. But there is electricity on all these RV parks. I can see where this is going. And a lot of times have 30-50 amps.

So we have a lot of power. So what I did, people can see it on my Twitter feed. I took an S9 outside, piped it into the airstream, plugged it into the electrical that was already there, and started to heat my airstream trailer with S-9s, basically for free. Because in these RV parks, you just pay a daily fee, and it doesn't really matter how much electricity you use. Actually, one place I tried to offer them, part of the Bitcoin.

I didn't want any, so I was like, okay, well, then if you don't want, but that worked. I was able to delay the amount of propane that I used through like four or five days, because during the night, it was still pretty cold. So I still had to use the propane to kick in when it was too cold. So I already had to learn how to measure the temperature inside the upstream and decide, does just a minor run or does the propane still run? But basically, I was able to extend all of this.

And that was something I built. I put it on Twitter and people completely freaked out because nobody ever seen this. already people started to ask me like, what are you going to do in summer because you don't need to heat the garage. And so I actually went to Bitcoin Miami. That was 22. Yes. And I saw all these immersion cooling systems. So the really big, the industrial ones that have like hundreds or thousands of miners. And what I saw there was that you can quite easily take out the heat from the miners, put it into the oils, the oil flows through the miners. extracts the heat

and then you have the heat in a liquid. And as soon as you have a heat in a liquid, you can easier transport it, you can confine it, you can run it through heat exchangers. Because if you have it in air, if you have hot air, it's very hard to transport it or to use it again

because it's a lot of volume. But a liquid like oil or water is a small volume and you can put a lot of heat. Anybody that ever boiled some water on a stove knows how long it takes. That's how much heat that the liquid can actually store. So I was looking into, okay, could I actually heat my water in my house for the shower? And with some YouTubeing and looking into alternative heating solutions, because there are people

out there that do this already with wood fire stoves. So people that live in woods and have a lot of wood, they use the wood to heat up the water instead of electrical or gas. And so I used the systems that these people use for these alternative heating solutions. And I connected my miners through immersion system and got it running quite well. Not at the very beginning. Like there was a lot of issues like usual. These are completely new things. So yes, I took a shower in immersion oil. That was like 100 degrees hot and stuff like that. But you learn, you fail and you fix. And yeah, that's basically it took its turn. I started with the water. Then I looked into cute else. I hate the hot top. So my wife and I, we have a hot tub outside, looked into that, figured out

how it can build diversion systems to actually send the hot oil or the water to specific places. And last winter, I also started to look into how to actually heat the house. Because our house luckily is a hydronic system, meaning it pumps hot water through radiators and baseboards. So that's already there. There's a regular oil furnace that heats up the water. So I basically just disabled the oil furnace plumped in a heat exchanger. And now I can heat the house as well. And yeah, so that's what we currently, what I currently do at home is basically I disabled all the other heating systems that I have and I use my miners to heat the house, the water and the hot tub.

I love this. As an engineer, I absolutely love this. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on. on the Oslo Fjord. And every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future.

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today at Shopify.com slash WSB. Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. Where to even start here? First of all, the immersion is way quiet. There's no sound.

So that's one of the most beautiful parts of this is for anybody that's ever heard a minor on that's being cooled by air, they are very loud. Very, very loud. And so the immersion, I'm curious about the reliability going from air cooled to liquid cooled. Do you get better reliability out of the rig? Is it going to last you more years that way? What's your thoughts on that? Yes, it actually does, because one of the issues with air is dust or particles or even animals.

So, like, box and stuff. When they get caught in the airflow, it can destroy fans. there is like all these cooling systems. And if they get clogged up, the air cannot properly flow over anymore. And your miners are going to die if you cannot properly remove all these things. So you need to make sure that like there's no light, so no bugs, getting to the systems. They need to monitor the temperatures. With the oil, there's none of these problems.

All you need to do is to make sure that nothing goes into the oil. But that's it. You can just cover it up. That's very simple. The oil actually has a much better way to remove the heat. from the miners than what air does. And so you can actually overclock these miners more than you normally can with air. That, of course, is not very good for the hardware, because the more hotter they run,

their lifespan will go down. But in my specific case, where I actually use secondhand or thirdhand miners anyway, I can run them quite hot to really get the heat out of the system. Gotcha. You had mentioned that you went to Bitcoin Miami and you saw some of this. Was it the following year that you had an exhibit at Bitcoin mining? Yes. Okay.

The next year, you go to Bitcoin Miami and tell people this story because this story is hilarious. Yes. On that point, after Bitcoin Miami, I found other people online. We call ourselves the plat miners that use them for heat reuseage. and stuff like that. And we really went, or there's a couple of telegram groups where people exchange ideas about that stuff.

And I really started to build this and looked at other people, what they built, like these alternative heating solutions. And the piece that I was really wondering all the time is like, how can we actually show this to people? Because a lot of times people think miners are really big systems.

Like they see these big setups, data centers of all the company, like riot marathon and all these and they think this is how you mine but in the end a miner there's literally for the people that are in the video there is one behind me it's like a shoebox size of device

and these big systems they just have thousands of them but if you want to start small you can and interestingly in my experience with friends of mine I obviously tried to orange pill them and some of them get it some of them they don't want to know about it

but as soon as I told them that I get pay to shower now. Because literally every time we take a shower, my wife asked me, like, how many sets did I make now with the showers? And I can prove that the showers take longer now. So we also wanted to offer friends to shower in our house. But this is a bit weird. So we're still in the US and Europe.

That would maybe work. But I can see, like, people that don't really like Bitcoin. Now, suddenly they are like, okay, wait, so this produces money. And can I have this in my house as well? So I basically reached out to Bitcoin, Miami. I saw some people at other conferences to say, hey, why don't we show people? Why don't we bring my system? So I disconnected my complete system from the house.

I live in Virginia. So Miami is like 18 hours away. Put it all in a car, drove down to Miami, and installed it all there again and heated a hot top. So there are these inflatable hot tops that has space for like three to four people. And we were able to convince first the organizers. and BTC Magazine, which organizes the conference. And then also... You got to tell that story.

You got to tell that story. Yes. So up front, it was always very clear that these conference center for anybody that ever organized a conference, you have a lot of people that need to approve what's actually happening on the show floor. Usually you have a production company, but then you also have the fire marshal and you have maybe police and other stuff. And we started quite early and I sent them pictures.

And for people that have seen my system, it's not polished. Like it looks like somebody built it in their basement. I always call it the steampunk version. Like there's exposed wood and there's some exposed cables, but it works. And so I very cool people from the Bitcoin magazine started like very early to convince the Miami exhibition people to like to allow that. And first they said no. And then later on after I show the video, how it works and stuff like that, they were like, okay. bring it and will decide there.

And again, if you hear that, this is actually 94%, not 95% no, but there's a 5% chance that you can do it if they tell you, bring it and we'll decide there. So I'm driving down there and rolling all this stuff in and where the place is, while I'm pushing all these things in, they're like six people standing there from production house and other people to the fire marshal to the head electrician. They're all there. And the first thing I do is I take out my box and inside of the miners. with a liquid and there's an electrical cable

that goes in and it's transparent. The oil, if you don't know that it's oil, it looks like water. And the first thing the electrician says, no way, you can move it out there right out again. And I was like, okay. So then a long time of just showing these people, because again,

even though they're electricians, even though they have never seen any of this. So I basically had to explain them how it works, how each system works. They wanted to know what the oil. Luckily, I brought the original oil containers, which have all the see the labels on it, and that explain that the oil is dielectric, means it does not conduct any electricity. It's made for that specific purpose.

We talked about that we have to distance each other, because of course there's a risk if the hot tub would leak and it would leak into the oil, or then the oil suddenly becomes conductive, and then you have a problem. So we talked a lot about that, but basically it was me trying to. over three hours to convince the people there that we can run it. And we went from, okay, you can leave it there and you cannot run it to you can run it, but you need to use the original heater from the hot top and not actually the miners, because the hot tub itself also has a heater, but we didn't want this.

You got to fake it. Correct. Yeah, you can fake it to then I actually just started it and I showed them. So it was really like I basically had to do what I usually can do for a long time. We had to do over three hours. And after three hours, they were like, okay, you can run it, but don't start it because we don't want the fire marshal to see it while it's running. So it's just like all these things. But yes, at the end, we had a hot top that was heated up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit or 40 degrees Celsius, which is the regular temperature of a hot top, completely heated by 1S19J Pro, which is like the standard today. It produces around 3 to 4,000 watts.

and people could not believe that this is it. Like we just had a hot tub there. We ran the bubbles all the time because then steam comes out so you can actually see it. We had a little display of the temperature and the miners there and people walked up and are like, what's that? And you said, oh, there's a minor over there. And yeah, there is like, I've never had, like I do other conferences in other tech stuff, but I never had a line of people standing around the booth to wait to talk to me.

That was the craziest. I could not eat lunch because I had so many people asking questions how this works. They wanted to touch the oil, which they obviously could. Like, you can touch the oil. It doesn't mean. Would never happen, unfortunately. Nobody ever wanted to go into the hot tub. We then at the last hour of the last day, we, a couple of friends of these Plet Miner community,

we then just jumped in. And actually during that time, even more people came over and wanted to know what it is. But yeah, we had a minor heated hot tub. at Bitcoin Miami, and I'm actually building another version right now for Bitcoin Nashville because we want to do it again, hopefully a bit bigger hot top. And also, hopefully with people in it all the time, we'll see. If anybody wants to be in the hot top, talk to me. I love it.

Okay, so most of the time when people hear Bitcoin mining and they think about this potential to harness the heat that's coming off of it, a lot of the times people are not thinking that chilling air is possible. So smash that with a sledgehammer for folks. Yes. So there is a technology called absorption chilling, which basically can take a hot liquid or a heat source and it can convert it back into cold air or cold water.

This technology is used today mostly where you have a lot of waste heat. So like data centers, for example, They have massive amount of waste heat or like metal, metal smeltering, like when you melt down metal and reform it and stuff like that. This creates thousands of degrees of temperatures because the metal is obviously very hard. It needs to be heated out. I won't go in specifically how chemically it all works, but you can basically extract the heat from, let's say, hot water,

and you can use it to cool down water and you can reuse it. And if data centers, what they do is they take out the hot air, run it through absorption chillings and send it back in and use it to cool down the system again. And what I think should be possible is to use the exact same system also with the miners. And one of the problem is that for these absorption chilling systems, usually the hot side needs to be 90 to 100 degrees Celsius. And with my miners, or at least the miners that we have today, you can get water to 60 degrees Celsius, 70 degrees, is usually a problem and not no problem, higher than that. So 80 to 90 is quite hard because the chips are not made for it.

What we have to understand is all these chips are usually made to run at 30, 40 degree temperature, room temperature. So that's normal or maybe a bit harder room temperatures. Celsius. Celsius. Yeah. All Celsius. Unfortunately, we're not there yet. Now, there's two ways to fix this.

one is to actually build chips or build mining rigs that can go much harder. And there are rumors or I've talked to some of the mining companies that are actually working on this. To have systems that can get water that you could use or the oil up to 80 degrees Celsius, which would be very good. Or there's also ways that we can actually get it harder. The problem is then suddenly we create specialized rigs for this purpose. And one of the major things that I'm doing and other people are doing that build these systems, we use second or third generation. We can maybe talk about this a bit more, why we're doing that.

So that's a problem. Like if we build brand new systems, it does not become affordable anymore for houses, or for home miners. Or the other way is you could actually use a small heat pump that then can take the 60 degree water Celsius and can put it to 80, 90 or 100. So that's one thing that I'm looking at right now is how can we use the miners to basically free warm water, use a heat pump to bring it up to higher temperature, because then we could also cook with it, like that would be cool.

Or we can then also use it through absorption chilling again to actually cool down a house or buildings or whatever you like to cool down. And I feel then we would really have an awesome system where you basically have a mining system inside your house. And in winter, you use it to heat your house. And in summer, you use it also to cool your house. because then we would have efficiencies and we could generate, we could reduce the costs for people's houses massively. I want to talk about the challenges that, because what we're really talking about is just a lot of complexity.

When we look at what a normal person can do just with the way their house is today, without any of this in there, I would argue most people have to always hire somebody to do any of this work, even though they can watch a YouTube video or whatever and probably do a lot of this themselves, it's already kind of exceeding what a normal person can kind of handle as far as their technical competence to even fix simple things around the house. So I want you to tell the story about you were away on a trip, your wife was at home, and there was a major issue with this setup. And I want to do this to illustrate kind of where we go after that story. So tell the people, tell everyone this story. this story is hilarious.

Yeah, so my wife, since she knows me, we're now 10 years together. She knows that I've always been a tinker. And when we bought our own house a couple of years ago, one of the exciting things for me was that actually can work on the house. Because compared to Europe, in the US, you're actually allowed to do most things you can do by yourself. First, legally, you're allowed in Europe. You're not allowed, for example, to even open, like, an electrical block.

It's already like, this is already no-go. So first of all, you can and also legally and also you actually have access to all the tools and the materials. That's the other thing. Like a lot of places in Europe you can. So that was very exciting. So I do all the stuff in the house that we need ourselves. Like we move wiring or my wife wants a lamp somewhere else or we, whatever, we do all the stuff ourselves. And when I started to initially do all the stuff and build the miners in there and usually I build everything in my garage.

I have a detached garage. So that's my workshop. I built it all there and then we moved it over. She was skeptical. But one of the things she said is like, I just want to make sure that whatever something happens, we can like, we can redo it to the original state. I was like, of course I'm going to build it that way.

My Fiat job still brings me to Europe sometimes. So I went over there and one afternoon, which is Europe afternoon, the US in the morning, I get a text that said there is no hot water. Dot, dot, dot. And that was probably the worst case that I was worried about because I'm like six hours at least flying away. Like I wasn't supposed to go back to the US for a couple of days and there's no hot water at home. So what do you do?

Now in my system, I can actually, a lot of things I can remote control. So I can look at all the different stats of minor temperatures, when the miners ran, the water temperature, all the different things I can look at. So I like log into the system and there's, you know, There's like, I just see like graphs that just go up and they stop and there's no data anymore. So something went horribly wrong. And in hindsight, the minus didn't turn off and I can go a bit into deeper what actually happened. But there was no, it was clearly, I know that it's not going to be easy to undo this. But so I basically, I document everything on Twitter of my stuff.

So I used pictures that I took off the system and I created a documentation. of what she has to do. For anybody that knew or know how water heater works, they're connected. They have 240 volts, so it's dangerous. And she basically had to take the screwdriver,

remove some 240 wiring, and put other wires the original mounds back in. So I sent her pictures of what she had to do, step by step. We had a FaceTime call. She was ready to kill you. She was ready to kill you. Oh, 100%.

And there was swearing involved. Yes. But we got it done because it's, I always say, like, it's not very hard when you know what you have to do. Tell everyone what caused the issue here. I find the issue to be really fascinating what caused this. Describe what she saw. And then I want people to think about what they think the issue might have been because it's not what I was expecting when you told me this. Yes.

I told her when she told me like, there's no hot water. I looked online in my system, and like I said, I just saw temperatures rising. And I told her, can you send me a picture of our, we have like a utility room where the water heater and all that stuff is in it. And she sent me pictures. And usually pipes that should be straight, they literally were bent and like bent like a lot. And the first thing I asked her is like, is there oil on the ground? There was not. But somehow what happened is the oil got much hotter than 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

so almost to the boiling point, which is 100 degrees Celsius of water. The oil luckily boils way later, but all these tubes that I use, they're pecks, it's like plastic tubing. They're only made for like 100 degrees Celsius, 200 degrees Fahrenheit,

so they all started to melt. And they also started to like sack. So basically it looked like there was a fire first, but we couldn't find a fire. And yeah, at one point I realized, okay, we cannot continue with the current system. let's redo the old one, and that's when I did all of this.

Turns out in the end, and I only learned this later, and I also learned this with other people that had the same issue, is a miner itself consists actually of two arts or two electronic, or actually three, let's say three. So there's a power supply, which converts the 240 volts into usually 12 volts DC, because these miners, they run on DC current, not on AC, which we have on the wall. So that's the power supply. and then you have a little computer that learns a Linux on it,

that actually is the piece that talks to the pool or that receives all the stuff to do actually the hashing. And then there's the hashboards, which are actually the pieces that do all the hashing. They're connected through a wire to that central computer. Now, what happened, what I believe happened in my system, is that because both of it is in oil. So the whole system is in oil, the hashboard,

the power supply, and this little control board, that the control board lost the connection to the hashboard because it got too hot. So all these connections like these communications protocols, they start to glitch at specific temperatures. And so what happened is that the miner tried to tell the hashboards to stop but couldn't anymore because it was too hot. And so the hashboard just went on, mined more. They used all the electricity.

And even though the hashboard tried to tell it to stop, it started to glitch out. I could actually see from my data that my central control system tried to talk to the hashboards, to the control boards, to tell them to stop. And they also didn't respond anymore. And so basically the system just ended up in a loop and got to get harder and harder and harder and harder until they actually completely stopped. So the hashboards at one point, luckily also stopped to mine. And the solution to the system is today, what I do is I'm actually physically disconnected.

the miners if they don't need to mine anymore. So the technical term is a contactor or a relay that is physically able to disconnect the miners. If the central system says, hey, you have heated enough, we don't need you anymore. And now I have this newer system with this contactor. And I obviously, like I'm an engineer, so I actually try to reproduce the same issue. And I was able to and I was able to show that the miners now disconnect physically if something like that happens. And so this specific case cannot happen anymore. But yeah, these are things that nobody really knows because nobody has ever built these things or used the miners this way.

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One of the things that I find really interesting with a lot of this, when I talk to people about the cost for them to get back because these miners are not cheap. So if you're going to buy a minor, I mean, there's a very large upfront cost. So yeah, you're taking a shower for quote unquote free or you're getting paid to take a shower, but like your time to recuperate your upfront cost for the hardware is actually pretty fast. Like people that put these solar panels on their house, the repayment period is typically like 20, 25, 30 years for them to recuperate their cost because now they're not having to pay for an energy bill. But when you're dealing with this stuff, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're talking like five years about three to five years somewhere

in that ballpark. Is that correct? Yes, yeah, that is correct. It highly depends, of course, A, what types of miners you're buying because there are the brand new models, there are older models. It also depends on how much you actually pay for electricity. Now in the US, luckily, we have an average rate of 12 cents per kilowatt hours. In Europe, we have like 30, 40 even in some places. So then your recuperation time just takes like four or five.

times longer just because the electricity rate is higher. And it also depends on how long are you running the miners. Because in my system, when the house is hot enough, the hot water is hot enough and the hot tub is hot, I can't use the heat anymore. Like I have to literally stop the miners from heating or the whole system will overheat, which was the problem of the system in the beginning. There are ways you could have like a force system, let's say a radiator outside to just vent the heat outside. But depending on what type of miners you have and things like that, you maybe actually pay more for the electricity than the Bitcoin that you generate at the same time because there are all the systems. And the fourth is the Bitcoin price itself.

And then technically also a fifth one is how fast you want to actually sell the Bitcoin. Like I, the Bitcoin that I mine, I don't sell them to pay for the electricity. For me, that's like DCAing every second or every hour. So I'm happy. to pay the electricity company. I pay them money, and the miners that use the electricity create me sets. So for me, that's my DCA. It's actually pretty much the only way today

that you can do K.YC. Bitcoin's, is to do mining, because nobody knows that you do it. Nobody knows the history through all of them. And so it highly depends on these multiple things. But yes, in my system, what I have with 12 cents, and I right now, sorry, yes, 12 cents per kilowatt hour.

And also I have two, US 19 J-Pro, so they have like both each 100 terrahashes. And now in winter, where the system runs, yeah, I easily make 10, 15 dollars a day through that system. And the whole cost of the whole thing is around $10,000 material only. And so, yeah, you can you can calculate. We write three to five years. And but of course, also knowing that Bitcoin will probably go up, it could actually be in half a year. Like depending on what the price, the whole system could be paid off in half a year, no problem at all. I think the thing that, like, we understand all these variables, but we talk about this nonstop, like all day long. So, you know, it was like, oh, yeah, that makes, that makes sense, that variable there, there, those, you're laying out all these variables. But for somebody who, A, doesn't even understand why these crazy people on the internet are trying to collect these magic internet money Mario coins, let alone all these other very technical engineering,

type variables and introducing all of this complexity into their house, do you see this becoming something that we fast forward five, ten years into the future? Is this something that eventually makes its way into every household? Or like, I'm thinking about like the sustainment and the maintenance of like, who do you call when something like this goes down? And let's just say we're living 10 years into the future right now. What does that world look like as far as you? You you can kind of muster up. Yeah, so the easy answer is, yes, I do believe that in the future, wherever we generate heat for whatever reason, in industrial or residential areas,

that they will be generated through Bitcoin mining. Because it does not make sense anymore to generate heat with resistive heating, so electrical, because a miner, and maybe that's the most important thing we have to understand, And if you put, let's say, a thousand watts electrical energy into a computer, any computer, and mine specifically, a thousand watts of heat come out of it. So the computer, the computing of it does not consume energy. It does not use the energy and store it in the digital code. It uses the energy to run the electrons through the chips and that generates resistive and that is a resistive heat. and so it generates heat.

So wherever you today generate anything through electricity, let's say your water kettle, like to heat water in the morning to make a tea or a coffee, you and Miner would use the exact same amount of electrical energy to generate the same amount of heat than your water kettle or your electrical water heater or your hot top heater, your pool heater, anything. Because of that fact, it makes basically no sense,

sense anymore to put resistive heating elements into anything because you should actually use a miner or a computer that also uses the energy for something in our case to mine. And the really cool thing about mining is you can turn them on and you will be immediately mining within seconds and then turn it off and you don't lose anything. Like these miners upload their share that they've done multiple times a second. So if you turn one off, it's not that like you lost the video processing batch and now you have to start again or things like that. So you can turn them on and off immediately.

So yes, I do believe that we're going to have in the future any type of heating system will be done through mining. What I also agree though is that this will take some time. But what I like to do actually, I like I go to YouTube when I look like

old videos of like the first phones. Like people had these massive bricks in their cars and they had like these videos where somebody was on the phone while driving and making fun. Like, literally it made fun of people that put car phones that had car phones. It's like, this will never work. Why would we ever need this? This is so complex.

Like all the things that we are now saying about this, it's all there. But I believe this will be much, much, much easier because people, A, will learn how these things work. Nobody knew 20 years ago. Nobody really knew how to use a touchscreen. Now you have people that don't even know anymore what a regular keyboard is, because they're so used to type on mobile phones or dial rotary telephones, like give any kid a dial rotary phone. They have no idea what to do it anymore.

So I think people will learn about all these things anyway. And of course, it needs a lot of engineering to make all of this much, much simpler. Like my system today, yes, there's exposed things and stuff like that. But that's what I'm working on also to actually make it nicer looking, to package it in nice systems that plumbers, electricians, HVAC people also understand all of these things. So they could take a system that I'm building, install it in somebody's house, and then you can call these people on Sunday morning. If you don't have hot water, you could call a plumber. They could come out and they know how this systems works. But that's not something that is going to happen from one day to the other.

it's probably also not going to happen in a year. That's going to be many, many years. But yeah, if you look at other technologies, how they were adopted by humans, like smartphones, the internet, electricity itself, it will take time, but it's going to happen because it just makes sense. And specifically also about one of the things that I don't see a lot of people talking in the Bitcoin community today is that we generate a lot of waste with these miners. Like every year, new miners are coming out. And these big mining systems or mining companies, they always want the newest model because they have to.

Because only then, they're profitable because they only produce Bitcoin. Like they don't reuse the heat for anything else. The first one are starting now. They're talking to black miners like me to actually try to learn about this. So it's interesting that you talk to like CEOs of big mining companies and you explain them how your system actually works because they realize that they could make even more money with reusing the heat. But today, they just purely mine for Bitcoin. They don't use anything else. So they always need to use the newest models.

And the older models, they maybe still use, but the third generation of them, so two generations before, nobody wants them anymore. Because if you just purely mine for Bitcoin, they will not generate enough Bitcoin for the day or of the sets. You get back every day. But we as homeowners that anyway would have spent the electricity. So in my system, if I just heat the water heater with the Bitcoin mining rig, I pay the exact amount of electricity. There's no change in my electrical rate. The difference is, is I get Bitcoin back every single day.

So I can take a five-year-old miner, put this in my system, and I can still make free sets. It's not going to be as many sets if I would use the newest model, but the newest model is also 10 times more expensive. What I believe is these house systems or these residential areas are actually going to be the market for the older minor generations to soak them up

like a sponge because they are super cheap. Like even today, miners are actually very, very cheap compared to the bull run when we had two years ago. Like the miners that I use, you paid up to $15,000 for one device. I just

bought some for $800. Wow. So the price massively dropped because, A, of course, we're not in a bull run anymore, but also there's newer models that came out. And the newer models, yes, they're still $5,000, so they're still five, six times more expensive. But they don't have five or six times more hash rate. They maybe have 50% more or maybe 100% max. So it's not linear to the hash they generate to the price. So the older ones that nobody wants anymore, they're quite cheap.

And we as lab miners or residential, we can use them, we can install them. And so we can give these systems a second or a third life even to use them. And that's where I see this whole going. So that the big miners, they're going to always buy the newest models. They're going to then sell them to the market. And we're going to install them into people's houses and generate sets. And of course, also secure the Bitcoin network through that in a very decentralized way, because that's another risk is, as we're having this consolidation and all,

all these big miners, that's also a massive risk for Bitcoin itself. And I believe, as we always say, that like, not your key, not your coin, so you need to store the Bitcoin yourself, you should also run your own note, but actually you should also mine at home, because that's really the whole way then you're properly using and contributing back to the Bitcoin network when you're on your own note and you're on your miners. I absolutely love this topic. And I think you're very early in what is going to potentially be just a major change to how people operate their homes. And if people, I know there's going to be tons of people that listen to this that are going to want to talk to you and interact with you. What's the best way for them to do that?

Just reach out to you via DM on Twitter or how can they get in contact with you? Yes. So there's two main ways. Mostly on Twitter. so you find me under the name Schnitzel, like the German dish. My DMs are open. Reach out if you have specific questions, if you want to talk. I'm happy to help.

But I actually started a little company with a friend of mine. We call it Nakamoto Heating Solutions. I love it. You can find it on Nakamotoheating.com. And we do have a forum there for people to actually fill out that are interested in building such a system. Now, I do want to say is that we're very, very, very. early. We don't have these systems built yet. There's not a warehouse of thousand units that I can ship out and I have plumbers or installers that in every major city, like we have none of it. But we are at

the point that I have now built my own system. So we are now at iteration three of my own system. I ripped it out twice and rebuilt it completely. So I feel very comfortable. I've went to the major issues. We had now a summer and a winter and I can prove that it works. Plus, I've also already helped other people build their own systems at home. So if there is out there people that know about plumbing, no about electrical systems, this is totally possible. I actually have a complete parts list of every single piece that I use. I have schemas of my system.

I have videos that explains how to connect all of it. We try to do everything as open source as possible because Bitcoin is open source, the whole community is open source. So the knowledge behind of this, I really believe that knowledge should be free. And so that is completely open source. So if you're a person that knows around this, you can totally build this. And I'm happy to help all along the process. We have done this now twice already.

So I have a friend of mine. He now hates a pool in his backyard. It's like a 30,000 gallon pool. It's a massive thing. And he's the only one that runs it all winter long, that is warm. And so he's now the best, all the kids from all the neighbors. they always come over because he's the only one that has a 90 degree pool in winter, heated through miners again. And I have other systems.

How many rigs? How many rigs on that? It's just one, one S-19. Oh, my God. It's 4,000 watts. It's a lot of electricity. It's a lot of heat that goes in it. And he closes it during the night.

Like it has a little like roll over cover. And then they just, yeah, it keeps it at 90 degrees. No problem at all. That's unreal. If there's people out there that want to build this, it's all there. Like I learned everything myself. Like I said, I'm not from the US. I've never went to any, and I'm a software engineer. Like I, everything that I know, I've learned myself through YouTube. I always say, people ask me about like, why do you know all these things? I was like,

I don't know anything. I just have a YouTube account and a screw driver and no fear. So it's possible. But of course, and like you say, there is millions of people out there that just want this installed. And that's what we're working on now, is to actually find solutions or build systems, kids also teach plumbers, HVAC people, electricians, how to install such a system. And what we're looking for is people that are interested in saying, yes, I want to install this in my house,

that they're willing to pay for it. Like I said, we're talking just $10,000, just material. There's no labor yet. So such an installation will be around $20,000 to install it. And we're looking for people that are saying, yes, I'm interested in paying this. I'm interested in opening up and trying this in my house, or maybe your second house or wherever. Right now, we're also going to look at specific locations.

I myself, I'm in Virginia, a friend of mine, he's in British Columbia. We have other people of the platmining community that could do other places. So location is also important because the first ones are going to be built by me. I'm going to come to your house. I'm going to install it. So we're looking for that. But there is a form on the website that you can fill out where you're located, what type of house, what type of heating systems, what type of your interest,

interested in building and the idea is really to slowly roll this out, build one or two systems, and then use these existing systems obviously to improve, but also teach more people that can then install these. Because it's not, like, every time that I build it and I look at it afterwards, it's like, it's no rocket science. Like, it's literally just plumbing a couple of pumps, a couple of pipes, just cleverly connect together. And that's it. And so I believe we can run this, we can create a system that we could do in every house in the US. That's the end goal. I love it. All right. Well, we're going to have links in the show notes to all that stuff. So if people do want to check it out, they can. And Michael, it's just a pleasure to talk with you.

As an, like I said, as an engineer, I just, I can't get enough of these kind of conversations. So I appreciate your time and coming on the show. Thank you. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. and it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do

to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.