Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #655 Turning ASICs Into Smart Home Heating with Tyler Stevens

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#655 Turning ASICs Into Smart Home Heating with Tyler Stevens · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

0:00
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
0:10
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
0:13
All the central banks going nuts.
0:16
So it's all acting like safe haven.
0:18
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency,
0:24
Bitcoin wins.
0:25
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
0:28
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
0:31
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
0:36
Are we going to distribute hashrate, Tyler?
0:39
Way more than you think.
0:41
Way more than you think.
0:43
I was refreshing my stats for you, Marty, before I jumped on.
0:45
Oh, good.
0:46
Because the stats are what I want to talk about.
0:48
You got fresh stats just for you.
0:51
I feel like every time I see you, we were in Georgia together.
0:55
Yeah.
0:55
A couple of weeks ago.
0:56
you're always making progress always more excited than the previous time i saw you
1:03
and getting me more bullish on mining waste heat as a consumer application the heat's a product
1:11
not waste but yeah yes yes yeah yeah it was fun to catch up in georgia um we're tinkering we're
1:18
getting hash rate heating online well let's um let's give the audience a little intro to yourself
1:26
for those who may be unaware what Tyler is up to.
1:30
You have CEO of the space,
1:31
but you're also started a company
1:34
using Bitcoin mining heat as a byproduct
1:38
to do the heating in homes, in home applications.
1:44
That company is called Exergy.
1:46
So why don't we get a little background on yourself,
1:50
how you came to Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining specifically,
1:52
and even further into the niche with a focus on using mining heat.
2:00
Yeah, the Bitcoin story. Thanks for asking. I moved out to Colorado after grad school. I was
2:06
studying mechanical engineering and it was happenstance. I'm one of the lucky few I was
2:11
listening to. I think it was Jordan Peterson and Saifedean for my 20 hour drive from the Midwest.
2:17
That was like one of my first intros to Bitcoin. And then I proceeded to listen to
2:21
19 more hours of Bitcoin podcast on my drive and immediately found the BitDevs community out here.
2:28
So I was fresh blood, but I avoided all the shit coinery. I was lucky in that case.
2:35
My first Bitcoin ever bought was at the all time high of 2021. So it was all down, but
2:41
I was surrounded by good people. I got brought out here to do aerospace engineering. So I worked
2:45
for a company owned by Lockheed and Boeing called United Launch Alliance. They're kind of the
2:49
the government version of SpaceX, let's say.
2:53
SpaceX launches 100 plus rockets a year, though.
2:55
ULA launches two.
2:59
In that time, I would spend more time with the Bitcoiners.
3:02
Obviously, I was working on thermal stuff, temperature predictions, heat rates,
3:05
had that kind of eye for things.
3:07
And it was at a BitDevs once where a friend of mine, Travis,
3:12
brought like an S19 kit that was converted with a Loki board from Zach Bomster
3:16
to run off 110 volts.
3:18
And that was where I really saw the light for Bitcoin heating.
3:22
And so I came in viewing these things as waste heat out the get go.
3:26
That was my entry point to mining.
3:28
Ultimately, I ended up leaving that role at the aerospace company after two years in January 24.
3:33
It was funny.
3:34
I actually was up till 1 a.m. in the launch control room watching the rocket I worked on for two years launch.
3:41
Went to bed for six hours, came back 9 a.m., quit, went straight to Denver International Airport, flew to NEMS.
3:48
First time I saw you, I think there at Bitcoin Park, met Rod and the guy, saw Schnitzel with his hash tub.
3:54
And I was just I had I didn't really have a plan, but I knew like this is what I wanted to do.
3:59
So what came out of that was that community from BitDevs.
4:03
We kept working to build our Denver Bitcoin community into a physical location that started the space.
4:08
Got 82 members now out here. Most of them are in Colorado.
4:12
So we do a lot of events and that's where my office is now.
4:14
And then in that time, I kept researching this Bitcoin heating thing and kept having calls with people, learning, tinkering, and ultimately just decided to tell the guys at Brains.
4:26
I was like, hey, I have a lot of notes on this.
4:28
Like, why don't we just put it into a book?
4:29
And they were helpful and a great partner in that sense.
4:34
And so I put together a book, Bitcoin Mining Heat Reuse.
4:36
I got a copy of it here.
4:38
And then the subsequent NEMS, 2025, that was where we met and I got you a copy, Marty.
4:43
I launched that book this past January.
4:46
And then really after that, come April timeframe,
4:49
started to ideate on how this could get turned into a company.
4:53
And so started at Xergy in April with my friend Mike Clear and Dylan Seib.
4:58
And our goal is really to decentralize hashrate, bring mining back home where it started.
5:04
Started in the homes with the laptops and the GPUs and transition to these industrial products,
5:09
which makes sense.
5:09
Like it's a story that you can follow all the steps.
5:12
Difficulty went up.
5:13
Got to have more power to compete.
5:15
The device is literally like morphed into ICM as heaters because the reason their shoeboxes and like the power constraint and the hash rate constraint, the efficiency constraint, they literally can't pump more power into them or they're overheat.
5:28
They're all like thermally bottlenecks.
5:29
So they're little heating boxes.
5:31
And we're trying to now use those for the main product they make, which is heat.
5:36
Only sometimes they get Bitcoin and bring it back home.
5:39
I love it. That's an incredible story. I didn't know that background that you found Bitcoin via Jordan Peterson and say, yeah, fell down the rabbit hole.
5:50
I'm sure many people were listening to JP during the COVID time.
5:53
Yeah. And then it takes balls to quit your job right after you watch your baby launch into space.
5:59
Six hours later, that's.
6:01
Yeah, it's funny working for the defense contractor.
6:05
My dad's a longtime Air Force vet. I always had that mindset in my family.
6:09
It's funny, my dad is very much like the straight arrow government guy.
6:14
I joke with him because he went right in after college.
6:17
So he's never made a free market dollar in his life.
6:19
Like every dollar he's made is printed or stolen.
6:21
Love you, dad.
6:22
But and my mom is very much like the opposite.
6:25
Always, you know, what kind of conspiracy theory?
6:27
I don't trust this.
6:28
I don't trust that.
6:29
So there was some pushback, but I'm glad I pulled trigger.
6:32
That's a good yin yang to have in the household.
6:34
100%.
6:34
obviously your parents did a good job to uh to foster an intellectual curiosity in yourself and
6:42
more importantly the confidence to go follow that which i think is uh common among bitcoiners
6:49
particularly those who are starting businesses you got to make the leap and i think that's
6:54
number one admiral um and two it's almost insane because it's like why won't you just
7:00
mine the fiat buy the bitcoin it's like no i i feel compelled totally to help push the ball forward
7:05
and in terms of what you're doing at extra g this is something that has fascinated me mining just
7:12
generally i've been in the mining industry now for seven years which is hard to believe um started
7:18
off-grid flare gas mitigation learned a lot of hard lessons with great american mining good
7:27
lessons, had a lot of fun times and learn more about energy over the course of four years than
7:33
I did in the first, uh, 28 of my life, which is, uh, which was a fascinating experience. And still
7:42
seven years into the mining journey, I feel just as ignorant as I was the day I started
7:49
really researching it because it is a vast rabbit hole. And I think one of the factors
7:56
that makes it such is just the ways in which people can apply mining
8:00
in their everyday lives. Not in their everyday lives, but the ways
8:04
in which mining can be applied, like you were mentioning. It's tangible.
8:08
It's industrial. It's very tangible.
8:11
For the longest time in Bitcoin,
8:16
there's been this meme of ASIC commodification.
8:19
The ASICs are a bottleneck, obviously, and particularly
8:23
between 2019 and 2022 i would say it was like just a race to acquire asics the top of line asics
8:32
whatever price plug them in because the advancements that bitmain and micro bt were making
8:39
at the silicon level were such where if you weren't staying with the top of line hardware
8:44
you're falling behind but it seems like we're getting to a point where the physical limits on
8:49
the silicon is beginning to approaching the limits of where you can really make step function
8:57
improvements and efficiency yeah and i've always thought that we were going to get to this
9:04
point in time but then when we get here i think that's what really unleashes the cool stuff like
9:12
you sort of had this journey with bitcoin mining where it started at home people running their
9:18
laptops or computers, GPUs, ASICs come, then it sort of goes industrial.
9:22
But I think with commodification, it'll go back to the home eventually.
9:27
I think it has to, to a certain extent, not only from an economic viability perspective,
9:34
but from a health of the network and particularly hash rate ownership distribution being sufficiently distributed.
9:41
I agree. I mean, I think it makes sense during that ASIC race.
9:45
And we're starting to see, I mean, people have been talking about Morris loss for years, but I think we are starting to see that plateau and year over year efficiency gains.
9:53
And in that time when each new generation of industrial ASIC was leaps and bounds ahead of the other one.
9:59
I mean, it makes sense to me again to just think like if that was your bottom line for profitability, there was no time to focus on anything else.
10:08
And that's kind of led to a lot of the bad acting, I guess you could say, from the Bitmains and the MicroBTs and just the inattention to customers.
10:18
You and I saw it when we were at the proto launch, right?
10:20
In one way, it's like, oh, wow, that's amazing.
10:24
Look at what can happen.
10:25
This must have been a ton of hard work.
10:27
But in the other way, you look at it, and this was part of my reaction there.
10:30
It's like, their competition wasn't very that hard to beat.
10:34
You're telling me a company as successful as Block, my competition is Bitmain?
10:38
And all I have to do is ask the customers what they want.
10:40
They've been screaming with pitchforks for 10 years.
10:43
So it's cool to see that now that efficiency,
10:46
year-over-year improvements are kind of plateauing,
10:49
some attention is paid to other areas for improvements and optimization.
10:53
And I think that will also transition, I agree,
10:55
to more unique applications for hashrate outside of the data center.
10:59
Yeah, and it seems like the Proto team has that in mind
11:02
with the modular nature with which they designed the rig,
11:06
which is a great name.
11:07
And it'll be really cool to see how people use that modularity to create specific and unique setups for their particular circumstances, which is, again, desperately needed.
11:23
But let's focus in on the particular part of the market that you're looking to take over with XRG.
11:31
And I'm trying to think of where to start.
11:34
Like maybe we should start with the physics of the machines and the thermal dynamics of the machines and why these mining machines produce heat and why not wasting that heat is a good thing.
11:52
Yeah.
11:53
My friend Rob Warren said it well, like the Bitcoin protocol mining, Satoshi invented a way to make a computer sweat.
12:01
Like that's what proof of work is.
12:02
So all they're doing is taking electricity and perform these hash operations as fast as possible, as many as possible.
12:11
It's power.
12:12
And the thing about electric heating and energy is you can't create or destroy energy.
12:19
It all has to be conserved.
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So 100% of that energy you push through your desktop or your laptop.
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And in the case of a Bitcoin miner, it doesn't have a screen.
12:27
It doesn't really, there's a small amount for the fans.
12:29
but all that electricity used to mine is converted into heat. It has to turn into something. There's
12:34
nowhere for it to go. And so they've gotten so power dense because they are computers that do
12:40
just this one thing and they sweat, they convert electricity into heat. Why would you not like
12:45
monetize that heat? And so that's really the blunt of it. From a physics standpoint, it's no different
12:51
than a typical resistive, you know, heater that just has copper traces or some nickel chromium
12:58
alloy and you're just sending electrons current through a very specific path instead of and so the
13:04
the resistor is this asic in this sense right and so all you're doing is the same thing as electric
13:09
heating but you're passing the electrons and the current through this special path and then you're
13:14
telling a network of other computers doing the same thing that you're doing it and that network
13:18
happens to pay you for passing the current through that path if you're successful in mining a block
13:22
So that's basically the blunt of the physics of it.
13:26
I mean, it's smart resistive heating.
13:28
It's resistive heating with protocol attached to it.
13:31
Yeah, I think the protocol that will pay for these computations is the real unlock for using the waste heat economically.
13:42
Yeah.
13:42
And one thing I thought of recently, which is why this is cool and makes sense now,
13:48
because like monetized heating,
13:50
you could have your 1200 watt gaming desktop
13:53
or you could monetize the heat
13:55
from a Grok AI cluster of GPUs
13:58
of NVIDIA A100s or whatever.
14:00
But because of the Bitcoin protocol,
14:02
it's the first time you can like distribute it
14:05
and decentralize it into chunks.
14:07
Like you can break up the data center.
14:08
You can't break up an open AI data center
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and make part of it your water heater.
14:13
It has to be on full time.
14:14
They need the uptime.
14:16
It doesn't make sense,
14:17
But because of the protocol, the rewards are proportional to the electricity you put in.
14:22
They don't do anything but mine this algorithm.
14:24
So all you have to do is turn them on and they immediately start doing it.
14:27
And that way you can actually control it like a heater.
14:30
When you call for heat, it's on.
14:32
And every watt of electricity that's turning into heat is also going towards the mining network.
14:38
So it's pretty cool to think of it that way.
14:41
No, it really is.
14:42
I think this sets us up for the next question is why should these mining machines replace incumbent heating machines that already exist throughout the economy?
14:57
Does it make economic sense?
15:00
Yeah, I was starry eyed and bullish on this from the guys that have taken S9 space heaters and, you know, made them quiet and put them in their living room and said, look, honey, it's cool.
15:11
This is mining.
15:12
Um but but how does that scale And where I was pleasantly surprised is a local to Colorado where I am I looked up in the mountains People are on propane heat in these high altitude towns that don have natural gas
15:25
lines drilled through the granite. Natural gas is cheap here in the U S we didn't blow up any
15:30
pipelines for ourselves yet, but, uh, we, the stored fuel sources, propane heating oil, uh,
15:36
in new England, old country, right. Which is essentially just diesel. They're expensive.
15:40
And I found that the electric price, like on a dollar per kilowatt equivalent, like natural gas is like two cents a kilowatt hour.
15:48
But propane and heating oil are like 11, 12, 13 on average.
15:54
If your electric rate's 15 cents a kilowatt hour, but you also get the Bitcoin mind, depends on the efficiency of the machine.
16:01
You can like energy arbitrage it.
16:03
and where I am in that high altitude climate,
16:06
you can find opportunities to save 80% plus,
16:10
100% plus on heating bills
16:12
if you're counting that Bitcoin rebate
16:14
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Do you think this market is constrained to areas that have high electricity costs with propane and oil?
18:11
Yeah.
18:12
There's a few variables that make you a good candidate.
18:17
Obviously, you have to have heat demand because a miner, at the end of the day, is an expensive, high-performance device.
18:26
It's complicated in a sense.
18:27
there's a lot of work that went into developing those ASIC chips. It's a whole nother conversation
18:31
talk about like retirement homes for old hash boards that have depreciated. But
18:35
if you use heat a lot, that's essentially your uptime. Because we're talking about mining not
18:41
100% uptime, and then you use the heat when it's convenient. This is hash rate heating,
18:46
as I'm coining it, is just matching your hash rate to your heat demand. And so if you use heat more,
18:51
then you're going to pay that machine off faster, you're going to reap those rewards faster.
18:55
they're kind of ticking time bombs in a sense because the rest of the network difficulty does
18:59
go up. So they're like heaters that pay, but their rewards are less and less each year. And so like
19:04
tangent to proto's modular hash board, that's a sweet way to like upgrade your heating element
19:09
of your furnace or boiler. But another variable that makes you a good candidate is the cost of
19:14
that utility. Solar plays a huge part in that too. I mean, I found here in the space where I'm at,
19:20
We are on natural gas, so the heat is like two cents a kilowatt hour.
19:23
But we have 20 kilowatts of solar right out my window here.
19:27
And so we're trying to prototype, demo site, this whole smart energy stack up where we're generating our own power.
19:33
We're going to store it in a battery power wall.
19:36
We're going to use the heat from Bitcoin miners as the priority.
19:40
In the summer, when we have generation, we are going to dump the heat outside.
19:44
So we're monetizing all the solar on the roof instead of getting like one cent per kilowatt hour credits back from the local utility.
19:52
And then we still have the natural gas heating system in place like worst comes to shove.
19:56
So it's a backup in that sense.
19:58
I think that's probably a way it will scale is really upgrading the whole smart energy stack up from a sovereignty perspective.
20:05
Utilities aren't going to like it in that sense because every home can serve as its own generation, its own revenue generator.
20:11
but it does increase efficiency and it decentralizes the network yeah and you've run the
20:17
numbers on the total addressable market in terms of yeah the arbitrage that exists between
20:25
where the market for home heating is now to where it could be if bitcoin mining as a heat source
20:35
were implemented um so that's the one thing that stuck out to me at your talk during nems
20:44
at the beginning of this year was what the opportunity looks like from an additional
20:50
hash rate perspective it's wild on bitcoin so one percent well i'll back up um like 50 percent of
20:58
the world's energy is used for heat a lot of that is industrial processes like melting steel and um
21:05
manufacturing things. But another 50% of that is what we call comfort heat. That's your space
21:11
heating, keeping your building warm, your water heating, pool heating, luxury heating, things
21:16
like that. And the comfort heat differentiator is important because that's the temperature range
21:21
that a Bitcoin miner can deliver. Their computers, they don't have flames inside of them. They have
21:26
electricity. It's friction heat at the end of the day. And 1% of comfort heat would add two Zeta
21:34
hash to the network if that was powered by hash rate. And I updated my stats for you today to get
21:39
a little more specific. This is wild. I was looking at the target markets more. Got my notes over here.
21:45
USA only furnaces and boilers. So just air heat, keeping buildings warm in the USA.
21:51
That's five zeta hash. If you got all of it on hash rate, the U.S. water heating,
21:55
water heaters in the U.S. 2.3 zeta hash. U.S. propane and heating oil. So if we just were going
22:01
after the target markets where we can offer these people a big savings on their utility bill,
22:06
another 1.5 set of hash. It's massive, hundreds of times bigger than the energy used for Bitcoin
22:11
mining. Which is funny for all the fudsters to say, you know, Bitcoin mining is wasteful,
22:17
the energy consumption is wasteful, and the amount of energy being used to make heat for people is
22:23
like 250 times larger. So we should just start calling them electric heaters, I guess.
22:27
we really should i mean in europe that's what they love that's what they all use
22:33
those electric heaters yep they don't like air conditioners but they like electric heaters yeah
22:38
um and with that being said i'm gonna share my screen okay you guys you've been building out one
22:47
of these systems at the space it's like a proof of concept and why don't we just describe i think
22:56
this is like the perfect tweet to bring up because you have the sure the heat map visualization and
23:01
then you have yourself we won't turn the audio on the video but you're you did the video so i'm sure
23:06
you can describe it anyway but what are we looking at here this is a good video to walk through
23:10
because it also highlights some of the challenges with doing this um that right there is the only
23:16
bitcoin miner that is hydro cooled which means it heats water hydro cooled water heating it's
23:21
kind of inverse the bitcoin or the miners out there are like it's water cooled and us heaters
23:25
say it's water heating. But it's the only one that's single phase power, which is what you have
23:30
in residential applications or a small business like the space here in the USA and North America.
23:35
So the European guys, they benefited from having three phase power in their homes. They can use
23:40
like a dozen different hydro miners from Bitmain and whatnot. But this M64 is the only one. It's
23:45
really unlocked the ability to do exactly this in the US. That is a heat core rack around it.
23:52
It's called an H-Series.
23:53
And he, of course, partnered with MicroBT.
23:55
They make larger racks for industrial use cases
23:59
and data center style mining operations.
24:01
But this tiny little unit just has one, a pump,
24:04
a heat exchanger and a little fan attached to it.
24:06
And it's sweet.
24:07
Like it's pretty simple to set up, plug and play.
24:10
All it does is dump out 80 degrees Celsius water.
24:13
It was ramping up in that video.
24:15
And then we had a plumber come and install
24:17
radiant flooring in our building.
24:19
We have the floor joists exposed.
24:21
So that's just PEX tubing.
24:22
through all the floor the thermal images do a good job and it was ramping up in temperature but
24:26
this is going to be our heat source in the winter we'll have radiant heated floors uh showed off at
24:32
the heat punk summit but that's one minor and uh it's enough btu per square foot or uh for the
24:37
minors listening like enough kilowatt power uh to service our building which is first floors around
24:44
um 3 000 square feet that's pretty crazy yeah they're super power dense like people don't
24:51
realize one big that one bitcoin miner is like five or six horsepower like i would have i would
24:57
have thought you need at least five five miners to to heat a building of that size 3 000 square
25:04
feet is not small they're so power dense and and that's ultimately like what i'm trying to help do
25:09
with xerg2 i i think of it as hand-holding right now but in the heating industry like what heat
25:15
bit's doing is awesome what canaan's doing with their mini space heaters and there's a couple
25:19
other ones like 21 Energy in Europe and whatnot. But when it's not a gadget, like a space heater
25:24
that you plug in yourself, you don't pick your own boiler. You call the heating guy. You call the
25:31
plumber and they tell you what you need and they install it for water heaters, furnaces, boilers.
25:35
So we were working in tandem with that plumber. We learned some things along the way. Sizing is a
25:41
big part of it for the Bitcoiners out there. You don't need as much as you think. So we help people
25:45
figure out what they need. But it was fun working with that plumber. Like I asked him, there's a
25:49
quirk about that system. I asked him for a mixing valve, which lets you mix hot and cold water. It's
25:53
like what your shower has, right? So it mixes the two knobs so you don't burn yourself. And he
25:59
installed it into the boiler. Like it was mixing the water going into the minor. And I was like,
26:04
why'd you do this? And then I realized from reading like these old hydronic heating books that
26:08
you do that because natural gas boilers, if you put too cold of water into them, they like
26:13
condense and start sweating and rust themselves to death. But I needed the mixing valve the other
26:19
way because the bitcoin miner water is actually too hot and it would warp the wooden floors
26:23
like 80 degrees celsius will melt the uh the adhesive between the laminate and the subfloor
26:30
and so we have to dial that back to like 120 f so we're learning we're figuring out we had to get a
26:35
demo site online and i mean this is coming back to the reoccurring conversation we've been having
26:43
over the course of this year it's like how does this market develop does it take somebody
26:48
like XRG to build an HVAC system themselves or as a partnering with plumbers, HVAC providers,
26:57
and really teaching them how to begin to incorporate this into their service offering?
27:02
Yeah, I think it'll be a big challenge and transition period. So right now we're very
27:08
much involved in the loop with, you can't call a heating company and ask them to size a hash rate
27:13
heater for you but you can call us and you tell us your home size and where you live and how cold
27:19
it is you give us some bills that helps or you show us how big your other boiler is or your furnace
27:23
and we translate we're translators we translate that into which systems work for you like i know
27:29
that that hydro miner is the only one that's single phase power the average person might not
27:33
know that um and and what it fits into to make it a good boiler um and then when it comes to
27:38
installation, the products are getting kind of better. Like that one just had hot and cold hookups,
27:44
power inlet, plumber could figure that out. He's not going to figure out plugging in the ethernet.
27:49
Well, he'll figure out plugging in the ethernet, but he's not going to like IP scan the boiler,
27:53
log in with root root, set up the mining pool payouts. And so that's where we're still hand
27:58
holding that part as well. I think ultimately if the products are good enough, another callback to
28:04
the proto launch, like I was super bullish to see the fleet announcement where they were like,
28:07
oh, it's a built-in software fleet management that has an IP scanner.
28:11
And you just press start and it finds the miner, logs in,
28:14
automatically logs into the credentials, gets it online,
28:17
gives all your notifications.
28:19
My heating brain was like, oh my gosh, that's going to be awesome
28:21
if I can just have Tradesman plug in systems and press boot on
28:25
and they authenticate themselves and get themselves online.
28:30
And I guess one other thing I'd say on that,
28:33
because incentives drive everything,
28:35
would be giving some hash rate splits to the installers,
28:39
which is one of the coolest things about hash rate heating.
28:42
And aside from the whole economic angle
28:45
to save and offset your heating bill with Bitcoin rebate,
28:48
you can imagine a future where a network
28:52
of thousands of installers across the US
28:55
were incentivized to recommend hash rate heated furnaces
28:58
over the other because they got 1%, 2% of the hash rate
29:02
of every system online.
29:03
and then if they were in a town of a thousand people
29:06
and they managed a fleet of them,
29:09
there are smart computers at the end of the day.
29:11
You can check their hash rate.
29:12
You can get notifications on temperature sensors.
29:14
These computers have notifications.
29:16
They have sensors, they have firmware,
29:17
they have smart software, all this stuff.
29:20
Essentially, you could have like water heaters
29:22
or heating appliances that notify your plumber
29:27
to come fix them before you even know
29:28
there's a problem with it.
29:30
And maybe it's like some passive income split
29:32
for them to come help you manage that.
29:33
And it flips the structure where it's like, I'm going to wait for your thing to break.
29:37
I'll come to your house.
29:38
I'll charge you 500 bucks to fix it.
29:40
To I'm managing this fleet of systems that's passive income for me.
29:44
I want to make sure they're all tip top healthy all the time.
29:48
That's an incredible flipping of incentives that makes a lot of sense.
29:53
And so you've said it multiple times now, like really to dig in, explain it like I'm five Bitcoin rebate.
30:00
So on the economic side of the thing, you plug that in, you guys are heating the floor at the space.
30:09
How does it like, obviously, you're still getting electricity bill.
30:11
The miners pulling electricity is very power dense.
30:14
You're pointing that hash rate at a pool.
30:16
What are the mechanics of actually realizing this rebate?
30:22
So for us, we want the Bitcoin.
30:24
We have our own datum gateway at the space.
30:27
XRG has one, space has one.
30:28
And it giving us daily payouts on CLN to our Lightning node But I realized that you know to scale beyond the average Bitcoin or even the technical Bitcoin or those are more technical things not I don think most Bitcoiners run a CLN node or datum You know there ways to get the rebate the and I call it a rebate
30:47
because I'm trying to flip the notion that it's like Bitcoin mining heat reuse, I view that as
30:53
the mega miner sites that sell some heat to a greenhouse next door, or the Finland district
30:59
heating project because it's a full-time Bitcoin mining operation. They sell the heat when it's
31:02
convenient. No, this is a full-time heating operation. Heat is my one commandment. And the
31:08
Bitcoin is just like a rebate. It's an extra positive. I think, you know, even with tools
31:14
like Strike and whatnot, it's becoming more possible to give the customer like the dollar,
31:19
the dollar rebate, if that's ultimately what they cared about. There's a lot of complexities with it
31:24
though, because, you know, I have a fear if it was a non Bitcoin aware customer, not a fear,
31:30
but it's going to be something worth solving is, oh, maybe your propane bill was 100 bucks a month.
31:36
And now your electric heating bill is $200 a month, but you're going to get back $150 worth
31:43
of Bitcoin. So you're actually like saving 50 bucks. But it depends on the timing. What if I
31:48
give them their rebate like two weeks after they paid a $200 electric bill, they're going to just
31:52
say what the hell man my heating bill just went up um and so there's a lot of nuance involved there
31:57
it should be possible um but that's what i mean by rebate i'm just trying to you know flip the
32:03
notion of like mining operation versus heating operation yeah this is where something um
32:09
like uh i always forget the acronym of the nvp rnc the hash pools the e hash pools oh yeah yeah
32:21
I uh I remember with Evan who was working on eHash and Gary at Thames um I think that would
32:28
be super that's another good thing worth diving into I need to study this more because heating
32:34
systems are um they're on and off um and their power depends on your heat demand and so what
32:43
does that mean for your payout structures and um like how much you're contributing like does it
32:49
does it mean you have to use FPPS to get the most bang for your buck
32:52
and get the best rewards because your share window
32:55
and you're constantly cycling your duty cycle on and off
32:57
or adjusting your power settings?
32:59
It's not steady state like a mining operation.
33:01
So I'm really excited about the eHash stuff.
33:03
I need to deep dive more into that.
33:05
Yeah, you can point hash whenever, get eHash,
33:09
share tokens and return and sell those for Bitcoin.
33:13
Yeah, automatically if you want to.
33:14
similar to fpps but with a different sort of mechanism it's crazy how creative you can get
33:22
with all these things and i think it highlights the fact that we're just banging around all these
33:27
ideas it seems like there's obviously some disconnection in the market um to make it a
33:31
a well-rounded like fully immersive experience where it's intuitive and you don't even have to
33:38
think about it but yeah i think it also highlights how different the mining industry could be years
33:46
on from now and we'll look back and look at the uh the bitmain world and the ant pool world and
33:52
the mega miners that you know we're just running their mining operations for profit without some
33:58
utility like i'm a big believer that you have to have some utility to stay afloat that utility could
34:02
be monetizing stranded energy. So off grid, that utility could be curtailment, demand response,
34:10
or even national security. I mean, that's an argument. For the BIDX guys, the utility is
34:15
supporting the network. That's what's useful to them. And that's why they'll do it for a sunk cost.
34:19
But I think hash rate heating is the perfect Trojan horse to just hide it in a heating utility,
34:26
a sunk cost that everyone pays. And they're not going to stop paying it.
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35:54
And then you get into the dynamics of how this could potentially not only distribute hash rate ownership significantly, but the pool layer as well, which is arguably way more centralized than hash rate ownership.
36:09
Inarguably more centralized than hash rate ownership.
36:13
and you can think of scenarios and ways in which these system operators operate,
36:21
where you have like an HVAC company that has their own little pool.
36:26
Thousands of HVAC companies have their own little pools.
36:30
It's way more opportunities to select your pool structure, your block templates, for sure.
36:36
Yeah.
36:37
What's one thing, what excites you the most about this?
36:42
Is it the heat side? Is it hash rate distribution?
36:47
I think the narrative of the market of HVAC.
36:52
Well, that is funny because the heating industry hasn't been innovated in 100 years.
36:58
So smart monetized heat is a fun angle.
37:01
There's a bunch of fun angles.
37:03
I think what gets me most excited is just clearly the demand is there to bring mining back home.
37:08
the open source miners united the bid x guys the little nerd x's everybody wants these little
37:15
products it's cool to see companies like canin make the nanos and the minis and
37:19
people want to get hashed into their house they want to support the network in a complete manner
37:24
and i think this is a really cool way to to do that from cypherpunk back to heatpunk
37:29
start in the home bring it back home at scale yeah and how do you see this market developing
37:37
Are we very early on in a trend that will be obvious five years from now, 10 years from now?
37:44
Or is the timing right to implement this widely?
37:50
I think the timing is right to start paying attention to it and building this.
37:59
If you would have asked me this 18 months ago, I would have said the hardware sucks, the firmware sucks, like this sucks.
38:06
but it can be done. Everyone that's doing it was strapping S19s in their duct work. And at the end
38:11
of the day, they were all just already Bitcoiners and already DIY guys that wanted to tinker.
38:16
But everyone on planet Earth, even in warm climates, uses hot water. They need heat.
38:23
The timing, what gets me excited is the fact that we now have commitments from companies like
38:29
Auradyne and Proto to give chips, you know, that's like a missing piece. I can't go. I mean,
38:36
I could maybe, but it'd take a long time and a life's worth work of dedication to go spin up like
38:41
an ASIC chip development in a fab. So that that's something that a heating company is never going to
38:46
do. I think that the 256 foundation efforts to open source the full mining stack firmware,
38:52
even the pool hydro pool setup the control board hash board is really outlining like mapping out
39:00
all the stepping stones to build hash boards and miners and completely new form factors and
39:05
different use cases and i think in at the same time it makes sense for me to be doing what i'm
39:13
doing with exergy which is trying to get the education out there and start the conversations
39:17
with the tradesmen and the installers, the trade organizations, because
39:21
I think that the space heaters
39:25
have shown that this is another cool way to mine.
39:29
They've had great success, but there's just this big
39:33
bottleneck to go from space heaters to integrated heating infrastructure because people don't
39:37
install it themselves. And so you transition from an engineering problem
39:41
to a people problem and a distribution problem.
39:43
and so for me with exergy like when i view my competitors in my head when i'm mapping out my
39:50
business it's like ream and carrier and bosch and general electric and then all the tens of
39:56
thousands of distributors that sell their products and go to their conferences around the country
40:01
yeah i think i don't know no the two of us weren't talking about it but i was talking with
40:08
somebody at the Proto event who's in the off-grid natural gas mining space and they were saying that
40:15
it's been much higher ROI for them to go to the oil and gas conferences compared to the Bitcoin
40:21
conferences and I imagine for a company like XRG it could be similar where Bitcoin or see what
40:26
you're doing they're like yeah this is awesome thank you we want more of this but it's not really
40:32
a needle mover in terms of finding an end client.
40:38
Whereas if you go to these trade shows and conferences
40:41
dedicated to HVAC systems and the heating industry,
40:46
if that even exists as a name.
40:50
It's a huge industry.
40:51
And we have to, right?
40:52
Because here's an example.
40:54
We were working on a proposal for a commercial project,
40:57
which you're excited about.
40:58
You're like, oh, it's a business.
40:59
Let's do it.
40:59
you get asked a question like are these miners ul certified and it's like shit i never thought
41:05
about that the mega miners don't care oh it turns out some of them are not oh um hey can you is this
41:12
insured as an electric heating system or a bitcoin mining operation because the premiums eight times
41:16
more if you if you call it a big but it's we already talked about the physics it's the same
41:20
thing um and then you know rebate subsidies where people have signs in their front yard in denver
41:28
here where I'm at, like this house has been converted to 100% electric. That's the whole
41:32
green angle, which I haven't even gotten into. And it's, it's obviously not what gets me up in
41:37
the morning, but that's a whole other arguments to make as well. So we got to start having those
41:41
conversations doing that groundwork. Well, what's the green argument?
41:46
The green argument is these are emissions free heaters. They're trying to get natural gas out of
41:51
the homes. The, the new proposition in Denver, the past is that new builds can't have natural gas.
41:57
um you know stovetops heaters um i think there was even one that didn't pass that your like lawn
42:05
care equipment if you bought in denver county couldn't like it had to be electric lawnmowers
42:09
and everything so they'll stop at nothing um it's just convenient in the sense that like
42:15
if they're if their efforts to um die on the the climate cultism hill also um integrate bitcoin
42:22
mining into people's homes yeah you gotta make lemonade with lemons it is insane that they're
42:28
doing that in fact if anybody tried to take away my natural gas stove and oven i'd be pretty pissed
42:35
yeah 100 yeah the uh i love talking to you and others like you because in an era of bitcoin
42:47
Somebody's been around the block for 12 years now where a lot of the dominant conversation of the day is focused on Bitcoin treasury companies and nation state adoption and what the Trump administration thinks, which.
43:01
I will say it's all interesting to a certain extent and definitely important to a certain extent.
43:06
But at the end of the day, the network is a distributed protocol that needs to remain sufficiently distributed for any of the other stuff I just mentioned actually makes sense in the first place.
43:20
It feels good to see people like yourself out there actually doing the hard work to solve that really hard long term problem, which is how do we keep this sufficiently distributed?
43:32
and it's even more fun speaking to someone like you because it seems like you're having a ton of
43:38
fun doing it it is a blast i appreciate you saying that um it feels like we're on the cutting edge
43:45
you know bitcoin's niche mining is more niche and then bitcoin mining heating is niche of niche of
43:51
niche which is a fun place to be for sure yeah and to any of the heat industry individuals who
43:59
may be listening to this like what pitch would you give to them to begin exploring this how are
44:04
you approaching yeah the sales to this what's been really helpful is showing off the demo site
44:10
we had a real estate developer come see it and that led to now their mechanical engineering and
44:18
plumbing firm is coming so when a new project is built they you hire the architect they hire the
44:25
MEP team and all the subs to actually design everything. And so that led to a conversation
44:30
with the MEP team, which is really helpful in a sense that these guys are pros at sizing heating
44:34
systems. That's their freaking job. And then I just have to translate that into Bitcoin mining
44:39
systems that work for the job. So that's really helpful to see it in the flesh.
44:45
And that's why I built the Heat Punk community forum too. So heatpunks.org. You can, you know,
44:50
if you're one of those people, you can go see some other systems, people post their projects,
44:54
their tinkering, their products. People, I saw a post this week, some guy was like, this is awesome.
44:59
I'm a blue collar tradesman. I can travel around. I'm happy to work on these. So that's really cool.
45:06
The other way I try to open with the tradesmen and those experts is really a way to level up
45:13
and outcompete. I mean, we've mentioned a couple of times, there's thousands of these
45:17
HVAC plumbing companies that all offer the same stuff, you know, and they try to get you on their
45:23
$200 a year plan so that they'll remind you with a phone call to come change your $15 air filter.
45:30
There's not a lot of innovation happening in that space. And so the handful of conversations I've
45:34
had with those folks being caught up next to one on an airplane ride home, this guy like installs
45:40
heated driveways in Aspen. And I told him about what we were doing. And he was like, dude, this is
45:44
awesome So I think it a really cool way to offer a unique new innovative heating solution and we just need to try out this incentive restructuring with the hash rate splits because it very doable right now It not glamorous It not like you know a plumbing heating iPhone app
46:04
that money shows up in yet, but we'll get there.
46:08
No, I think yet is the most important word there
46:10
because as we've been touching on throughout this whole conversation,
46:13
like incentives drive everything.
46:16
And it would be cool if an application like this
46:20
like forced pools to come to market that have the payment splits very intuitively designed and
46:28
it's very easy to get set up and start getting paid not that it's hard with
46:34
pools that i've connected to as an individual miner but once you start
46:38
thinking about um bringing multiple parties into a mining operation that's where things get hairy
46:44
and yeah being able to do auto splits and just set it and forget it would be perfect
46:49
That would be. It'd be cool to also have a future where the majority of Bitcoin transactions processed on the blockchain are, you know, it's just passively happening in people's heating systems managed by blue collar plumbers and HVAC techs across the globe.
47:08
And they don't care about hash price. They don't have a marketing team to pay. They never have to talk to investor relations. These are just sunk cost heating systems that offer them some rebate.
47:18
you get some modularity some slick integrations like you just said for payouts
47:22
your heater lasts 30 years maybe every five years you upgrade to the newest hash board and kind of
47:28
reset the the starting clock for um your rebate and rinse and repeat yeah and as a tradesman or
47:36
somebody running a small medium size hvac business like great way to build a bitcoin treasury
47:42
if you're willing to take those passive incomes.
47:46
Yeah, it's almost the opposite of the pubcos.
47:50
One of them said, I forget which one,
47:53
I probably shouldn't say even if I did remember.
47:55
I was reading one of their public press releases
47:58
and it was like,
48:00
publicly traded Bitcoin mining is not a capital accretive way
48:04
to increase sats per share.
48:07
It's capital destructive.
48:09
This is that.
48:10
I mean, if you can build a heating company that is essentially a mining company with passive hash rate splits with the aligned incentives that doesn't pay the energy bill, that's just sat accretive for all parties.
48:23
Yeah.
48:24
And that's, I mean, that's, I can go back to this sort of weird era of Bitcoin where the focus seems to be on the financials, the Bitcoinization of finance and public markets specifically.
48:37
I wonder if we're all going to learn a hard lesson
48:41
in terms of not all of us.
48:45
I'm not participating in any publicly traded Bitcoin treasury companies.
48:48
A lot of us out there, I'll put myself in the camp,
48:50
I'll put the flag up there.
48:51
I am skeptical that a lot of these treasury companies
48:54
are going to be successful.
48:55
It just seems like the left side of the bell curve caveman in me
48:58
is like, it's too good to be true.
49:01
You need to do the hard work, the proof of work
49:03
to actually have a successful business.
49:06
and what you're describing what you're working on just intuitively,
49:14
viscerally feels like higher signal to me
49:17
in terms of building a viable business in the long term.
49:22
I'm confident we can do it.
49:23
It's going to be awesome.
49:24
And people are going to be pumped about it.
49:26
You find a way for them to participate if that's their end.
49:29
Find a way for them to save on heating bills if that's their end.
49:32
find a way for them to reduce their carbon emissions if that's their end screw it i'll play
49:39
ball bitcoin's esg it's the most esg uh yeah it's the most esg friendly play you can make
49:45
it was funny when i was talking about house rate heating in alaska i went up to juno
49:50
and i really was pumped to go because that whole town the capital city of alaska
49:55
the whole town is surrounded by glaciers so there's no roads in or out so and they don't
50:01
have the natural gas pipeline from mainland Alaska. So the whole town is heated by essentially
50:05
diesel and kerosene heating oil. It's $5 a gallon. And the whole town is powered by hydroelectric
50:10
power with zero emissions. So all the emissions in that town come from heating systems. And there
50:17
was some protesters outside because the congressman was there as a keynote speaker.
50:23
And we offered them some tickets. Some of them came in. And some of those protesters that were
50:28
very adamant against Bitcoin mining.
50:31
I was successful in convincing
50:32
one of them that it's actually
50:34
just electrocating. And we had a nice conversation
50:36
after, which was cool.
50:38
Hey, you got to win them over.
50:40
Get the crazy environmentalists
50:42
on our side. I may not like them,
50:44
but they're effective at fear-mongering
50:46
people. We should fear-monger people into
50:48
using Bitcoin.
50:50
Exactly. To eat their houses.
50:52
Trojan horse, baby.
50:54
You touched on it earlier,
50:56
particularly in the context of
50:58
proto launching fleet but on the firmware side what doesn't exist today that you would like to
51:05
see to make these operations yeah smoother so a couple of things um in the sake for in the case
51:15
of micro bt the tuning is too long so traditional heating systems are controlled by turning them on
51:23
or off. And that largely has to do with the fact that you can't get like 30% flame. You're either
51:29
burning gas or you're not. And so the way you deliver the amount of heat you need is you just
51:34
turn it on and off. And if it's on 10 minutes out of the hour, instead of five minutes out of the
51:37
hour, you get a different amount of heat to the room. But Bitcoin miners are digital computers.
51:44
Like Bitcoin aside, they actually offer a lot of performance benefits. You could say run at 70%
51:50
throttle oh it's one degree too hot in here dial back to 65 throttle oh i overshot dial it up two
51:56
percent and so you have this resolution this granularity that is an option now because
52:02
they're computers but not all the firmers allow for that so um orodyne miners have kind of mastered
52:08
this um i i haven't played with it myself but i've seen it in some of the heatpunk telegram chats
52:13
and on the forum um and i'm hoping to test one soon but they have quick response within 30 seconds
52:18
and they quickly respond to the power because that's your your actual heating target the hash
52:24
rate remember is secondary i want the hash rate to tune you know pretty quick so that i'm monetizing
52:29
most of my energy consumption as best i can i don't want to take 30 minutes but it doesn't have
52:33
to be one second so that's one of them um there's some other things just with control like responding
52:39
to temperature so the aftermarket firmware manufacturers like luxor and brains for example
52:44
They have a really cool feature called Brain's DPS and Dynamic Performance Scaling, and Luxor has ATM, Automatic Thermal Management.
52:53
And it's essentially you can set a temperature on the chip temp, which is a sensor on the hash board, and the miner will ramp up and down in wattage according to the temperature of that sensor.
53:04
So you can think of it like a target temperature, which is cool.
53:08
the feature was built so that the machines don't kill themselves, right? So if it gets really hot
53:12
outside, all of a sudden the machines are overheating, they'll just like walk themselves
53:15
down in power. But when I want to heat a room, how you make that work right now to like heat your
53:23
living room is you have to interpolate like the difference, the delta. And imagine instead of the
53:29
thermostat in the wall in your house that says, I want it 70 degrees in this room, you're commanding
53:34
your heater to try and keep it 70 degrees in the room by how close the furnace is to blowing itself
53:40
up. That's essentially what that does. The temperature sensor is in the machine, but I want
53:44
to measure the temperature in the room. And so a firmware feature to like talk to that, just open
53:49
APIs. And, you know, smart thermostats are growing in popularity there in a lot of homes. I know that
53:54
Schnitzel at the 256 Foundation is even working on analog input conversion to digital. So you could
53:59
have an old Mercury thermostat that just talks straight to the control board, bang, bang, on,
54:03
off there's a lot of cool stuff to do that would be crazy yeah and is there a scenario like in the
54:12
future where you could have these miners always on you just underclock them to tilt to save with
54:19
that ramp up period that you were describing earlier or does that not make sense i think so
54:24
um i'm not an electrical engineer and embedded systems guy my understanding is there's like a
54:29
lower limit there's a floor just because there's a minimum voltage required to keep these things
54:33
like happy um and you can work around that by batching the miners and turning specific chips up
54:39
excuse me on or off to kind of have really high resolution there's hundreds of chips on these
54:43
things so if you could walk back which ones are on um that is an interesting idea though and what
54:49
you're alluding to is you know really just higher performance in your heating demand and in your
54:54
heating application which is really cool like i think you're going to have way less temperature
54:58
swings in the house like in that sense it's just a better performing heater you're going to feel
55:02
more comfortable in your house with a hashrate heater if we can solve these tuning and firmware
55:06
problems because right now if your thermostat like i said it turns on and off it turns the flame on
55:13
and off and it'll overshoot so if you're commanding 70 when it gets to 69 it won't do anything when it
55:19
gets to 68 there's like a two degree swing i'll say oh shit i gotta turn on and then it'll turn
55:23
on and then it doesn't turn off at 70 it turns off at like 72 and you're just bouncing between
55:27
these two temperatures. Bing bong bong bong. It's called bang bang heating. And a Bitcoin miner with
55:33
a smart thermostat in the room should be able to really fine tune that and adjust it, dial it in.
55:40
That's an efficiency right there. The cost of turning that net gas flame on and off.
55:47
Yes. That adds up. Yeah. And they're even less efficient when they're starting and stopping. It
55:52
leads to more wear and tear on the hardware.
55:55
Yeah, this is fascinating.
55:58
I know it's cool to think about.
56:00
I'm really pumped about the open source firmware
56:02
just because we're solving for a different problem.
56:07
It's fun to see what the megaminers struggle with
56:10
because it's led to open source firmware like Proto
56:14
coming out with all these software tools like Fleet.
56:18
But it's going to be a whole nother can of worms
56:20
when we say, actually, this is the intended use case for these machines.
56:24
Now let's optimize for that.
56:26
Yeah, and that's a business line in and of itself,
56:29
potentially for Xergy, where it's like, hey, we'll design, consult,
56:34
build the physical hardware, but then on top of that,
56:37
we've got the firmware solution.
56:41
Yeah.
56:41
I mean, my vision really, big picture, is what the term Xergy means.
56:48
it's um exergy the the thermodynamic term for me to geek out for a second is like the maximum
56:56
amount of utility usefulness or work you can get out of a quantity of energy as it settles with the
57:03
environment so as you come to equilibrium what's the most work you can do if you gave me a thousand
57:09
pound steel ball like what's the most useful thing i could do with that as it came to balance with
57:13
70 degree air. That's what Exergy is. And in that sense, what's the most useful thing I can do
57:20
with the sun pounding down on my rooftop? It's capture it, heat my house, store it in batteries,
57:28
power all my electronics, live my life, monetize it when I'm heating, monetize it when I have excess.
57:35
Yeah. And for each individual doing that, it's a rebate, definitely paying less. But when you
57:43
aggregate, if you think of this thing, the system being deployed
57:47
at scale, we're talking about tens of billions
57:52
of dollars in savings.
57:55
United States alone, potentially.
57:57
I had that up. I was looking back at my notes from the Alaska
58:01
thing, and I was like, what if 300 homes did this in Alaska? That's what I was
58:05
pitching it. I think the congressman was in the room. I had my pitch hat on.
58:09
And if 300 homes did it, they had this thing that the heating oil is so freaking expensive in Alaska, the diesel heating oil.
58:16
And they're so remote that they have this heating assistance program.
58:20
The government subsidizes everyone's heating bills.
58:23
They pay the utility directly.
58:25
And 300 homes would save like $15 million.
58:29
That's paid out by the Bitcoin network, not the U.S. government.
58:33
So a year.
58:34
I mean, it's crazy.
58:37
That's $15 million.
58:39
that's at 5,000 a house.
58:42
Does that sound right?
58:45
Probably.
58:46
Maybe it's 1.5 million.
58:47
I'd have to pull the number up.
58:49
But it was 1.5.
58:52
It's cool, man.
58:53
I mean, I have a friend who's heeding
58:55
a United States post office with hashrate heat.
58:58
The government doesn't even know they're mining Bitcoin.
59:01
This reminds me of my uncle.
59:03
He was running Bitcoin miners
59:05
at a school he worked at years ago.
59:08
Did he get caught?
59:09
No.
59:11
Yeah.
59:12
Nobody come looking for my uncle.
59:14
Yeah.
59:19
What's the biggest pushback you get?
59:22
Because to us it makes a ton of sense.
59:25
And like you mentioned many times,
59:27
it's a pretty vanilla industry now at this point
59:31
with little innovation over the last century
59:33
or maybe 30 years for being generous.
59:36
and you'd think that if you had somebody who was ambitious
59:40
and wanted to really make their mark in the industry,
59:43
I don't know if anybody has that intention or goal at the end of the day,
59:48
but I'd like to think that no matter what business you're operating in
59:52
or what industry you're in, you'd like to leave your mark.
59:54
There's a massive opportunity here.
59:55
Yeah.
59:57
I think the biggest pushback we've received are twofold.
1:00:02
For the energy-minded folks, they say,
1:00:05
why wouldn't I just get a heat pump for people that are kind of familiar how
1:00:09
these systems work.
1:00:10
And a heat pump is kind of like an air conditioner that works in reverse.
1:00:13
So it doesn't actually make heat.
1:00:15
It just moves heat just like an air conditioner moves heat out of your
1:00:18
building.
1:00:19
A heat pump moves heat into your building.
1:00:21
And even when it's cold outside,
1:00:23
there's some energy in the air helps if it's a humid location or it's mild,
1:00:27
not too cold,
1:00:28
not too high altitude because the air is denser at lower altitude and it moves
1:00:32
heat inside with a big refrigerant condenser.
1:00:35
looks like a big coil fan. But my argument against that is they don't really work in
1:00:41
high altitude climates where the air is not dense. It's really cold. Often they have resistive
1:00:48
electric heater backups inside of them. That could be a Bitcoin miner. Maybe that's a product in
1:00:51
itself. And ultimately, like a guy like me, maybe it's other people. I'd prefer an option to also
1:00:58
make heat. I don't want to just be able to move heat inside. I would like the option in my house
1:01:02
to also make it if I need it because it's really freaking cold outside.
1:01:06
But they are super efficient.
1:01:08
They have like 300% efficiency.
1:01:09
So for every watt of power you use to like spin the pump and move the
1:01:13
refrigerant around, you get 300%.
1:01:14
three watts of heat from outside brought into your house. So you can take your electric bill
1:01:19
and like divide it by three. But that only works if it's not too cold out. It's like cold,
1:01:24
but not freezing cold. The other pushback we get is why wouldn't I just buy Bitcoin instead?
1:01:29
Which I get it, like mining hardware is expensive. You can get last generation hardware. I think
1:01:36
there's a big argument for that. I'm a big believer in that, especially for the heating
1:01:39
systems because i'm not sensitive to i'm not trying to run an operation that is profitable
1:01:45
like i'm literally just offsetting a sunk cost so sure i'm going to try to get a pretty efficient
1:01:50
machine because that gives me bigger rebate but it doesn't have to be bleeding edge by any means
1:01:55
i can take to the appreciated hash boards so i know that's why i'm excited about the modular
1:01:59
hash boards um for upgradability of heating systems but the other response i have to the people that
1:02:04
say why don't i just buy bitcoin instead i mean there's a handful of responses there's the non-kyc
1:02:08
angle your your electric utility is your exchange it's kind of a gamified way to stack sats um and
1:02:16
ultimately it's a sunk cost anyways you're going to continue paying for heat you're not going to
1:02:19
stop paying for it i wager that if you went through the whole process saw what you could
1:02:24
say i've got a heat audit figured it out saw that the systems were getting really snazzy your plumber
1:02:28
talked to you about it and then you didn't do it and you were stacking sats another way eventually
1:02:34
you'd come around and you say damn i really wish i had that thing yeah why not both exactly why not
1:02:40
both you can support the network well i think it's important to like to highlight like it seems
1:02:47
pretty clear to me it's not like some altruistic endeavor to help the network even though it
1:02:54
certainly does i think like we were saying earlier incentives are important you can have people just plugging this in altruistically to support the network even though many of us are doing that in different ways
1:03:07
I like to run bid axes and I want to help the network,
1:03:11
but I also want to manifest a solo block mind where I get the full reward.
1:03:16
Totally.
1:03:18
But I think there's an economic case to be made here.
1:03:22
There certainly is.
1:03:24
Big time.
1:03:24
We have a hot spring up in the mountains that we met.
1:03:30
One of the part owners is a Bitcoiner, so that's how we got introduced.
1:03:35
It's a naturally heated pool, 40,000 gallons, kind of like a resort with tiny homes and Airstream campers.
1:03:40
You can take your family there.
1:03:42
And it's naturally geothermally heated, but they want all the pools, all 40,000 gallons, like 100 degrees hot tub temperature, so you can use it.
1:03:49
So they supplement it with propane.
1:03:51
They spend $22,000 a year on propane.
1:03:53
they have 13 cent power we ran the numbers for them their bill would go from 22 grand on propane
1:03:59
to 24 grand a year on electricity and then with those orodyne miners those hydros the a3880s they
1:04:06
need four of them and they would mine 27 000 worth of bitcoin a year not full time that's mapped to
1:04:12
their heat load so i actually looked at when their heat was on and that's like me only saying the
1:04:17
miners on when they're buying heat still make 27 grand a year so i mean that thing's going to pay
1:04:22
itself off in 30 months.
1:04:26
It seems like they'll make three grand a year from that.
1:04:30
Yeah.
1:04:30
Profit from paying 22 grand a year.
1:04:32
They'll be making three grand profit.
1:04:34
Yeah.
1:04:34
Yeah.
1:04:36
It's happening.
1:04:37
We've seen this with the bathhouse in New York.
1:04:40
That's right.
1:04:41
And it funny to see I feel like it was time magazine wrote an article and there was a bunch of other local New York publications deriding them for using Bitcoin mining to heat their pools
1:04:56
And it's like, how do you guys not get this?
1:04:58
It's literally lowering costs and being more efficient with your electricity.
1:05:03
They'll come around.
1:05:04
They will.
1:05:05
what um what can anybody who is listening to this who may have just had their interest peak do
1:05:13
to help what you're doing to get in touch with you to potentially implement what you're working
1:05:21
on into their business or their home totally i appreciate the question we need the data um
1:05:29
i think i've done a good amount of research on these target markets but
1:05:33
just last week we had a guy come to us and tell us his dad's house is heated with old oak logs
1:05:39
in upstate New York. And I was like, dang, I didn't even know people still did that.
1:05:43
And he wanted to know how much he could save. We figured it out for him. So if you want to support
1:05:48
us, check out what we're doing. Our website's exergyheat.com. We offer, they're basically
1:05:54
handholding services right now because the hardware is not there. The software is not there.
1:05:58
It can be done. You saw the system in our building that Marty showed.
1:06:03
But we got a handhold to you. If you need the help, we can help you out, figure out what you need.
1:06:08
It's probably much less than you think and actually help with the installation as well, because we kind of know the lingo and how it translates into tradesman talk.
1:06:16
So that's what we're doing. Our heat audit services. It's not free right now. It's a service fee.
1:06:20
We hope to make that free. I mean, ultimately, if the products are good enough, we shouldn't have to do any handholding.
1:06:25
right like the tradesman will just recommend this stuff because it a win for them and they love installing them because it so easy and it no different except it needs an internet connection And I think we get there But right now we kind of transitioning out of this proof of concept phase
1:06:40
We've done the research.
1:06:42
We have a couple of demo sites coming online.
1:06:44
We are trying to solve commercial right now from a tax and a liability perspective.
1:06:51
And now we just want to date the data and we want to kind of scale up this handholding process.
1:06:55
So if that's something that interests you, check out our website.
1:06:58
Maybe we can do a heat audit for you and get some hash rate in your house.
1:07:02
We'll link to all that in the show notes, Tyler.
1:07:05
Thank you for joining me.
1:07:06
This will be the first of many conversations as you build on XRG.
1:07:10
And this becomes more commonplace, more obvious to people around the United States, around the world,
1:07:16
that we should be using the heat produced by Bitcoin miners to bring down.
1:07:20
not bring down our electricity bills but uh in a way you're gonna pay for the electricity but
1:07:27
you're also gonna get bitcoin you're gonna stack sense whether you like it or not it's a beautiful
1:07:32
thing thanks man great to be with you thank you have fun that's right i know we will we will let
1:07:39
me know if you need some heat i will i will i'm gonna i'm gonna talk to you off air in three
1:07:43
seconds peace and love if you've made it this far i want to thank you for listening and ask you
1:07:49
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1:07:51
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