Curiosity Freed the Cat w/Business Cat: Central PA | Ep. 031

Yeah, Bitcoin mining, I've always kind of, well, not always.

I've come to think that like maybe, and maybe this is like a total tangent, but maybe the reason why Bitcoin mining got so centralized in terms of its deployment, right? Like why do we have these like mega mining farms? And I kind of think that like what if it's because of the subsidy? Right.

Like what if it's because of the Coinbase? It's like because that's what subsidies do.

Right.

Subsidies cause you to overbuild.

That's like the whole point of a subsidy is it's trying to stimulate a certain particular region of the economy or something.

And in Bitcoin, we actually have the subsidy.

Right.

It's actually caused in the early days of Bitcoin.

It was actually causing massive amounts of inflation in the supply.

that's down below 1% now and will eventually tail off to zero.

But in the early days, it wasn't necessarily like that.

And even still, it's like a significant fraction of the mining rewards are the subsidy.

And so, I mean, I think, I assume as the subsidy goes down, what will happen is we'll find the actual natural balancing point for what the Bitcoin mining should actually be.

How do we balance out? How useful is it to the network? Which is literally how much people are paying the miners for their services in the form of transaction fees.

Not necessarily just the miners being subsidized by debasing the currency of all the existing holders.

So I think especially if you think that that's going to happen, then I think definitely these seasonal fluctuations and other much more natural responses back into the mining ecosystem, I agree.

I mean, I think those will become very apparent.

So since we're talking about mining, and you had mentioned that you do some home mining some home heating with mining.

This is something I have heated my basement with an S9, but it was always kind of just like, I don't know.

It was there just to be there, right? It was like not costing that much to run it.

It eventually started getting me like almost no sats, like it was doing very little.

And so this year now, because home heating oil has gotten so expensive, right? Now I'm starting to think I should invest in like a better miner that's going to get me better returns.

And it makes all these numbers look a lot better.

And so I guess I'm just curious, what do you have going on for home heating when it comes to Bitcoin mining?