Are you still seeing that or do you think the education is finally starting to turn a little bit? People realize, OK, maybe it's not as bad as we thought.

unfortunately i think it's actually getting worse okay um and i think what has happened is like a lot of what we do is in uh rural communities um and we try very hard to be good citizens but we have a couple things working against us the first is that early bitcoin miners left a bitter taste in the mouths of a lot of people.

So there's a lot of people that came into communities in the early days of mining, which when I say early days of mining, I say early days of what I would call commercial mining, which I think commercial mining probably in the 2016, 2017, about when I got started, was that was the conception point of people starting to do things at scale.

And it got wild into the early 2020s, 2021, 2022, especially on the heels of the China mining ban in 2021.

And a lot of people came in, either poor business people or shysters or, you know people with poor intent and they would come into these communities they would put up pretty shitty operations they wouldn't care about sound they they wouldn't pay their bills they would you know you could make people were making enough money in some of those periods if you were mining in the summer of 2021 the fall of 2021 you were making unreal amounts of money.

It was a fabulous period for us.

A lot of people took advantage of that period um some of them were desperate with a lot of this equipment coming over from china and just like anything they could do to get it to run and um so they left a lot of what i'm saying is they left a lot of bad tastes in some of these communities um left town in the middle of the night without paying bills leaving environmental messes um they they left messes like really poorly designed not to code electrical fires things like that it's very difficult to get insurance even today as a bitcoin miner very difficult to get uh property and casualty insurance and um liability it's very hard and very expensive there aren't many carriers that will do it because these early people did that sure So there was that bad taste.

Right.

[laughs]

[laughs] So you know, and I, I've even been the subject of some of those, um, you know, which we can maybe talk about later with, with is Tether taking over Ocean or like there's some of that sort of stuff that has happened, uh, to me recently.

But I, I...

Certainly V30 was the impetus and, you know, I, if, if we kinda go to the root cause, there's, there's a fundamental belief, I think that still exists within Core and a lot of the people that have been very supportive of Core that, that it doesn't really matter and, you know, we shouldn't, we should just acquiesce a- as, as happened.

So BIP, BIP-110 came out of that and- You know, as you said in your preamble, I guess I'll give a little of mine too, is, you know, I, I was a supporter of BIP 110 because I-- there were several reasons.

Um, one reason, um, was that I think we needed a reset.

It was clear that there was a massive divide occurring, and I thought BIP 110 and the temporary nature of BIP 110 was an opportunity for us to maybe come back together.

[laughs]

this

point.

It requires a very low overhead operation.

It requires really attractive energy costs.

And You know, we measure ourselves by hash price.

You know, basically, that kind of dictates the economics.

And we have drifted down until recently.

I remain optimistic on that front.

Thank you very much.

So yeah, let's talk about on-grid and off-grid.

So a lot of times in the Bitcoin community, there's a lot of talk about how Bitcoin mining can work with the grid, provide base load, curtailment, demand response.

I think a lot of people in Bitcoin have gotten a little bit of an education on grids because of this, right? And there are places where this is a reality, that some really cool stuff has happened.

ERCOT's the poster child for it, right? All the mining in Texas.

There's a math problem, though, first of all.

And I think as a Bitcoin community, we should not oversell what we're capable of.

can you tell our tell our audience a little bit about that show and and why you uh like what it is and um why you're passionate about that and and educating the boomers

Have you guys already decided who's going to take, um, take the reins?

Yeah.

W-well, um, so, uh, first on the CTO role, uh, Jason Hughes, uh, who has really done the, honestly the vast majority of technical work for the last couple years.

He is the, uh, really inventor of Datum.

He, um, did the back end.

He will be taking the role of CTO for the company.

Um, I will be taking, uh, the chairmanship of the company.

... change.

Yeah, especially as it relates

to hashrate.

I think the article you're referring to and...

What I did was, you know, we saw in that era, but it's amazing.

It was 2021, Brady.

Wow.

Time flies.

And I think the, the way that you guys operate the pool, I think that, I mean, the biggest thing is that you could talk about more as data and how you guys allow people to construct blocks and why that's important.

Like I said, at a certain point, if it's centralized, while I agree with decisions being made today, tomorrow I may not.

Well, I think it is a serious problem.

Uh, you know, Ocean, Ocean's mission continues, um, to try to give people a chance to opt out of it.

But- It really comes down to template creation.

Now if, if- let's just say ...

So w- the situation we're in right now is, depends on the t- the, the, the, the certain window, but let's just say between four and seven pools control on the order of 80 to 90% of every block that's produced.

And of those, Foundry and what we call AntPool prus- proxies, I'll explain that in a second, control over half.

Wow.

How, how important is that for bigger institutions, uh, bigger companies, uh, nation states of wanting to control block space?

Yeah, that's a great question.

What I'm going to say is I believe it is so important that it rivals Bitcoin itself.

And I know this sounds crazy in the face of a period of time in which blocks are so empty and fees are so low.

we can think about it more clearly by taking ourselves out of today and moving forward, let's say 10 years.

So if we think about 10 years from today, if you're a person like me that believes that we will continue to see adoption grow, we'll see further institutionalization of Bitcoin, which I know I'm, I'm not saying I love it.

I'm just saying that what I think is going to happen.

But how do you see the PIP 110 debate?

of equipment, but most people

can't.

Probably almost anything on grid, those are untenable.

So we have an interesting thing where those kind of units, the...

the rate of obsolescence of the lower-end units is increasing, but we also had some of the really recent generation stuff also get decommissioned on an accelerated basis.

So I wrote an article for anybody that's interested several years ago.

It's in Bitcoin Magazine.

a propensity to

How are you?

Yeah.

Hi, guys.

I guess I'm picking this up midstream.

I actually caught it just when, uh, I think Lauren asked if I c- if I could join in, so I don't have a lot of, uh, uh, the, the history before that.

Just to comment on a couple of those things.

Um, uh, yes, the last comment about Samurai is correct.

You were, you were about to start speaking to what the development roadmap is for Bitcoin Knots, uh, as, um, the reference client.

So I feel like to witness another transformative technology like that, it should just remind you of the early computer days.

To me, absolutely.

And in fact, I think when you look back at the optics of what I would say are the two biggest technological revolutions in recent times, the first was the personal computer.

And we didn't exactly know it at the time, but what it was was the decentralization of computers.

So prior to that, when we had mainframe and minicomputers, and so if you wrote software, you literally had to ask somebody's permission to run your software because you didn't own the computer.

So what was the personal computer? It was the decentralization of that power.

Very, very powerful.

Yeah.