The Past, Present & Future of Bitcoin Mining - The Coin Dad (THE Bitcoin Podcast) - THE Bitcoin Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
When you make it as a Bitcoiner, you deserve it because you took the risk that most other people don't take because they're too afraid.

(00:08):
They like living in the safety bubble right here. This is their whole life inside the circle.
I wanted to bust out that bubble and see what else is out there. How can I make the bubble any bigger?
That's what my mind frame is. And if I fail, okay, so what? I'll earn something, I'll go back to my old job and continue on taking, but at least I tried.
I went online and found out that there is no museum for Bitcoin. I'm like, hey, why don't I be the first one?

(00:36):
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 860053 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up. Today, that guest is the coin dad.

(00:57):
He's the creator of the Bitcoin mining museum. We get into his fascinating history and how the museum got started.
Walk through the history of Bitcoin mining, talk about mining,
centralization risks, small town America mining Bitcoin, mining Bitcoin at home, and a whole lot more about mining Bitcoin and some other stuff.

(01:18):
This was a really interesting conversation. I think you're going to learn a lot. You didn't know before about the history of Bitcoin mining.
I know I did. Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast wherever you're listening or watching.
And do me a favor and check out my sponsor Bitbox in the show notes or go to bitbox.swiss.

(01:40):
Slash Walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet.
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(02:03):
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(02:25):
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with the coin dad.

(02:50):
Man, welcome. Good to see you've been not too long. We saw each other in Nashville. That was a good time.
Yeah, yeah, it was just a couple months ago. Time flies though. It does feel like it was just like two weeks ago.
It's yeah, I don't know. Time, time moves strange. You know, I got the young, young kid now, our son.

(03:11):
Congratulations on that.
I think I followed you.
You got it. You got it. Yeah. He's and it's wild because like time already, you know, the older you get,
the more you notice time speeding up because it's your relative sense of time, right? You know, a year for you when you're,
you know, when you're one year old, that's your whole life, but a year for you when you're 20, that's only 120, you know, and so on and so forth.

(03:36):
But it's like something about now having a kid, it's like time is just really, really flying by in a good way too, though.
It's like some seeing the milestones that he's hitting and it's like, man, just it's it's it's cool to see changes your time preference too.
That's for sure. Your priorities change and you have a whole new purpose on life now as a father that somebody's depending on you.

(03:58):
So you're you're investing more of your 24 hour day into him versus, you know, scrolling up and down on your cell phone and all that stuff.
Like a lot of other people do that don't have kids.
Yeah, I'm flies when you're dealing with children.
Amen. Yeah, it's a it's it feels it feels very good, though.
It's like your your time has more purpose to it. And even like the time you're not spending with your kid is like, well, this is time that I'm building something for my kid.

(04:27):
Like, you know, it's it's not just, you know, me and my lovely wife anymore.
It's like, OK, someone's going to be here after we're gone and I want to do what I can to build build for them, you know, long after I'm dead, but hope to be able to, you know, leave something there behind.
And, you know, thank thank God for Bitcoin in that sense.
Give them a better life. But don't make it too easy on them because they still have to learn their own way, become their own man.

(04:55):
And that process is like that. I don't believe like, for example, with me with my paperwork, like if I was to die tomorrow, my paperwork is set up in such a way that my son does not get everything that I worked for because I don't believe in free handouts, even for my own children.
I got two boys, they're grown now in their 20s. But like, he would have to show that he's got his bachelor's degree and like prove to the lawyer that he's not some gang member.

(05:21):
He's not locked up in jail somewhere. Like there's certain criteria that I set up in writing that you have to meet before you get anything from me, even after I'm gone.
I think that's actually a kind of a smart way to do it because it's like if they are building like it's first of all, it's good that you've got the planning in place.
Already because I'm sure you're going to be here for a long, a long time still, a good long time, you know, shit happens.

(05:47):
And a lot of people don't think about this stuff until it's really too late.
But I think that's a that's a nice way to do it is to have some have some contingencies in there because I mean, I know some kids like some kids I went to college with come to mind that like, I mean, nice parents you can imagine spent time with their parents and everything, you know, just very, very successful and everything.

(06:10):
And the kids nicest can be but like zero work ethic whatsoever, because they never they never had to work for anything.
But I mean, I know other kids that came from plenty of money and work their asses off and take nothing for granted.
And they're better for it. And not that their parents aren't there if they need them, but they want to make it on their own.

(06:33):
I think I think that's what it is. It's like, you want to instill in your kids that grit that desire to hustle to make it on your own.
And yeah, if you've got something to fall back on, sure, that's that's a privilege. That's very nice.
But you want to be able to do it of your, you know, on your own right.
I think that's that's the key. I mean, easier said than done, I'm sure I'm only, you know, I'm only a less than a year in.

(06:55):
So I can't I'm not an expert on this by any means yet.
But just know that this it is a very important year this year and next year.
It's very important because at that age or that phase in life, even though they physically can't do much except lay there,
their brain is a sponge and everything you say, everything you do, everything you act around them, they will duplicate that in a few years from now.

(07:20):
So they're already learning now.
Like, I actually remember the very first time that my son was only I think he was only 10 months old.
And I had my dad gave me a hand down car at the time.
And I just got married and I put him in the baby seat in the back because we were getting ready to go somewhere.

(07:42):
And I put the baby seat, the belt over him in the car seat.
And as I'm putting it over, he literally punched like hit my hand and said, no, like I don't want that over me.
Like he got a little aggressive at 10 months.
Like he didn't say no, but his actions, you know.
And as soon as he did that, it's, it's, it's, I, I, I spun him around and popped him in the diaper, not hard, but enough where he wanted to cry, but didn't cry.

(08:13):
Nothing came out of him.
He's just like, he didn't know what to do because that's his first experience from his dad of disciplining him and putting him in line and never have I had an issue.
As soon as I put that over his head after that, he just sat there and said, no problem.
Yeah. All right.
But it was a tiny, even though it was only 10 months old and I'm not abusive dad by no means this, there's a difference between beating up a child and disciplining a child because you love him.

(08:40):
You know, that was my, my tough love moment for my son, but it worked.
I haven't had growing up.
I didn't have much issue with him.
He's been a good kid, but it's, you have to start early because if you wait until you're three years old, four years old, it's almost too late by then.
You see some kids, you know, like you're out and about and you see some kids like I saw a kid the other day at I was at Home Depot and some kid was literally making must have been maybe four or three or four.

(09:06):
I saw him just smack his mom in the face and I was like, oh my goodness.
And just was, you know, was not, was not like in a, he was, I mean, in a tantrum of some sort, but he wasn't like crying his head off.
He was just, I don't know what, what his problem was, but then his mom was like trying to speak to him very reasonably and just like hauled off and smacked her.

(09:27):
And it's like, man, that's, it's not going to be, it's going to, it's going to keep getting worse there before it gets better.
I don't know.
Again, I don't know what I'm doing.
You're going to intervene, but you really can't because that's not your child.
But now it's like, oh, yeah.
Let me, let me, let me go, let me go get some charcoal and whatever else I came for.

(09:47):
And I'll see you later.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's a, what I, what I do love about it, like I thought I had an idea of what a low time preference meant before having a kid.
Then sure, you know, you, you, you were like, first time I encountered that term was reading a Safedin's book, you know, Bitcoin Standard.

(10:09):
And that, that was such like kind of a light bulb moment of like, oh, wow, this, this really makes sense.
And yeah, this is something to strive for.
And, and you can think these things kind of theoretically and like, yeah, I want to, you know, you know, push out my time horizon and everything.
But then you have a kid and you're like, wow, now I get it because I care about the time that will, you know, that will be happening long after I'm gone.

(10:35):
And I feel like it's, you can't have that true switch.
I describe it like having a kid, at least so far for me is like somebody flipped a light switch on and then they ripped that socket out of the wall.
And you can't turn that off anymore.
You're just, you're in it now and you are changed and for the better.
But there's no going back.

(10:55):
And in, you know, I mean, hopefully I think for most people it's a very positive change.
I don't, you know, not everybody, maybe it feels that way, but I sure do.
I'm sure you do.
It's a, it's a perspective shift.
Well, I'm raised old school.
I'm not an American immigrant.
And when I'm from Germany, I was born and raised there, but my parents are both Romanian.

(11:18):
So I speak German and Romanian fluently.
That's fluently as possible anyway.
It's been a while, but I remember that my grandmother from Romania named Bobby.
She was like, she was the most wholesome woman I've ever met in my life.
Like she, she was born with no teeth and died with no teeth, born with no money, died with no money.

(11:41):
And she just had a smile the entire 99 years in between.
Like she was the last person to eat at the dinner table.
She was the first person to serve everybody else.
And it's a huge learning moment from her.
But I remember when my parents both had to work because we moved to the U.S.
You know, it was tough.

(12:02):
So she was the one that was like my babysitter and I didn't really speak that good Romanian.
So I kind of learned it from her because she kind of partially raised me while my parents were working.
But I remember the word, vagoza, which this is a little skinny stick from a tree that's say on top of the refrigerator.
And if I got out of line, I got that little skinny twig, that branch whooped right across my butt or my back or wherever, my arms.

(12:27):
And at one point I remember eating dinner and I cannot stand Brussels sprouts.
To me, they stink and then I don't like them.
And she made me eat them and I didn't want to eat them.
So every time she turned around in the kitchen, I stuck them in my pocket, like in my pants under the table.
And then she turned around and she caught me putting some in there.

(12:50):
And then she came with this vagoza and then the vagoza broke because I got older.
So I was able to handle it.
And then she was like, okay, I got something for you since you're breaking my vagoza now.
She put uncooked rice on the tile in the kitchen and made me knee on it.
I was like nine or 10 years old.

(13:11):
But even today that would probably be considered some sort of torture for a child, you know?
But looking back at it today, it's like I thank her for it.
Like she kept me in line through moments when my parents weren't around.
It's almost like a village raising the child, which doesn't happen anymore nowadays.
Everything is just running free all over the place.

(13:33):
Everybody wants to do what they want to do.
Parents give their kids a tablet and as long as they're scrolling up and down on their whatever
is on there in the backseat of the car, then the parents can continue on with their own
life and do what they need to do.
It's frustrating.
Yeah.
Well, and meanwhile, the parents continuing on with their own life usually mean scrolling

(13:53):
on their own tablets at the same time.
It's so funny just the community aspect of family because I think that's something that
is it's really sad that a lot of that has been lost.
I think in modern America, I think you still see it a lot internationally.
You know, you travel and you see that more.
And I think it's such an important thing like for for children, no matter what age they

(14:16):
are to be spending time with the older members of their family or the other younger members
of their family, cousins, aunts, uncles, but grandparents especially, because that's that
that intergenerational bond I think is so important.
And we've gotten to this weird point in America where it's like, even though everyone can,

(14:38):
you know, not everyone, even though a lot of people can work remotely now, you still
and have the capability to basically live anywhere they choose, which is what a privilege
that is.
But you still don't see people live in oftentimes not even within a day's drive of their family,
you know, like you can't you know, you can't even hop in, you got to you got to jump in

(15:00):
a flight, whatever.
And I think that's so sad.
I think that's something that we need to get back to like, I've got my my parents here
right now, you know, hanging out with with my son and they I mean, they love it so much
and it's so great for him too.
And it's sad that we have lost a lot of that in America.
I think there's a there's a movement, I mean, at least from what I see with a lot of Bitcoiners,

(15:23):
which is who I spend the most time with online and a growing amount of time with in person,
there's a there's a change, I think, come in a positive change.
But we got away from that a little bit.
And I think that's like, I mean, shame on us, because that's something that I think
that's what builds a strong family.
It's not just, yeah, it's the mom and the dad and the kids, but it's it's the grandparents,

(15:45):
it's the aunts and uncles, it's all of that.
That's your first layer of community.
And I think it's so important.
I'm all for decentralized money with Bitcoin, but I'm not for decentralized family.
You have to stick together, especially through moments like when we had COVID and all that
stuff, you know, it's all you basically had was family.
And some of them weren't able to see each other because of the rules and regulations

(16:07):
at that time.
But that's something my parents are getting older now, they're retired.
As a matter of fact, they're coming up here in a couple of weeks and spending a few weeks
with us because of the blessings of Bitcoin, I was able to buy a large chunk of land and
build our retirement home here.
So my wife and I have been blessed from that.
But my parents still live in the city and they're kind of stuck there.

(16:31):
Their grandfathered in with property taxes, so they're playing a good rate.
They're there on their fixed income.
Took me a while for me to orange pill them and get some of that retirement money over
into Bitcoin to help them, which I'm glad they did because they got in that roughly 20 grand.
So they're already up with their retirement.
But being on a fixed income with retired people at that age in this world right now where

(16:53):
everything is moving up around them in price, my dad had to sell his car and downgrade down
size of the car just so he can get cheaper insurance.
I mean, you're kind of nitpicking at that when you get older, if you're still in the
fiat world and it's kind of sad and some people at that age are still actually going back
to part time jobs now, just to make ends meet.

(17:15):
But yeah, I'm looking forward to them coming up and spending some time with us.
And we all agree that we need to focus more on Christmases together with family reunions.
My brother and my sister, everything is all decentralized and it's very important to have
family time.
Amen.
I mean, it's the best, right?

(17:37):
There's nothing better.
And a lot of people, I think nowadays, that talk about not getting along with your family
or having not being able to stand your family because you differ on some political topic,
which I think is just the most ridiculous thing.
It's like, you should be the people you should be most easily able to debate politics with,

(17:59):
like really debate with your family.
Yeah, your family, they're supposed to love you either way.
So even if you guys get heated, that's great.
You know, hopefully you got some good ideas out there, but like that shouldn't be able
to break up your family bonds.
You know, they should be a little bit stronger than that.
I mean, one hopes anyway.
I don't know.
But well, speaking of family, with all the narratives being pushed down our throats through

(18:22):
every avenue of social media and news and stuff, it's kind of difficult nowadays, really
split families and split people and split everything.
And it's basically a look over here.
This is what we're doing, but we're really doing this over here.
We just don't want you to see it.
So just keep fighting amongst the family and they're happy with it.
I mean, if they can get you to fight your family, they can sure as hell get you to fight

(18:45):
your neighbor, you know, the like, and, you know, they're turning the people into enemies
that should be your closest, your family, your neighbors, your friends.
Those should be the ones that you stick with and try to work with more than, you know,
like if you trust your government more than you trust your family, boy, there's something

(19:05):
wrong there.
That's something really wrong.
Have more time every day with people that love you back.
Amen to that.
And you know, I wanted to ask you, because I like to start these things off just with
a general question.
And you know, you and I got to talking about this a bit in Nashville and, you know, a few
other times before as well.

(19:26):
But just you've got quite a quite an interesting story for how you got here today.
So I'd like to just start us off with who are you and how did you get here today to
be doing what you're doing to have a wall of miners behind you right now?
Pretty, pretty cool backdrop for those that are just, just listening and not watching.
It's a nice sight to see.
And I think it's just a small, small fraction.

(19:48):
It is.
Well, this is actually extra stuff.
This is not the museum.
This is actually just by staying in the office like backup, I guess, for certain miners.
But yeah, my name is Tobias Barbir.
And they call me the coin dad in the Bitcoin world.
I've been around since early 2017.

(20:09):
I basically, I don't even know where you want me to start from what?
Age two, age 10 when I came to the US.
I've got a lot of stuff in my life.
Let me put it that way.
Whatever feels right.
Well, like I said, I guess I'll start from where I said earlier around my immigrant.

(20:30):
I came from Germany.
I was still young around 10.
My dad, my grandparents moved here first and my dad followed suit.
So my mom and dad got settled here.
Started in a, I think my dad was making five or $6 an hour with his first job taking care

(20:50):
of us back in the late 80s.
It got to the point where I finished my green card paperwork under my dad, but then I turned
18 myself and then I was left on my own to have to deal with getting my citizenship.
So I was trying to figure out how to get that pretty quickly.
And then I found that there's a path through citizenship by joining the US Army as long

(21:14):
as you serve three years active duty.
So I signed up for the military and through that I ended up learning a career in logistics.
I spent through the process of getting my citizenship became a US citizen and in that
process I had to, I had to learn English from scratch.

(21:34):
I didn't know any English when I moved here.
I had to learn about the history of America.
I went through standing in line.
I remember for hours at a time just to get to the front to go and fill out paperwork to
turn into them and pay, I think at $1.2,000 I had to pay.
And it took, you know, a few years for things to come back and finalize.

(21:56):
So technically for what's going on today with our border, it's like, to me, it's like an
extra bothersome because I went through all the motions to do and everything to become
a legit citizen.
And then even from there on I paid my taxes.
I served, I served my country.
I've been to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Dubai, Bahrain, Qatar.

(22:18):
And then that was even after the Army when I got out, I did Department of Defense, DOD
job, and then I became a state employee in the state of North Carolina after that.
So I worked for the government for close to 15 years in and out, different parts of the
government.
I met my wife in the war zone in Afghanistan.

(22:40):
I actually met her online first on the dating website because I was on a tent in the desert
in the war zone and I was bored at the time.
It was at that moment was really nothing going on.
So I'm online like looking for somebody to talk to and somebody to get to know.
And I ran across her profile and I was intrigued by how she presented herself and her bio.

(23:03):
So I sent her a message and the crazy part is that she was in Miami 10 minutes away from
my parents where they live.
I'm in the war zone in Afghanistan.
And my message comes through at the very exact moment where she's on her profile in the app,

(23:23):
in the website, getting ready to delete everything because she was only being hit up by older
men and she didn't like it.
So she was like, her finger is on the way to the button to click delete on her profile
as my message popped up.
And she's like, who the heck is this guy?
So she instead of closing everything and hitting that button, which is just one second away,

(23:45):
she opens up my message and sees me and responds to me.
And that's how we started our interaction when we first met.
So it's like one more second would pass.
I wouldn't be married to 12 years now to the awesome wife that I have today.
That's kind of a crazy moment there.
But she ended up being ex military too, staff sergeant in the army.

(24:07):
So I helped her get a job in DoD and come to the war zone with us and work in Afghanistan.
And from the 120 bases that they had in the Middle East at the time, they actually assigned
her to my base.
So what are the odds of that?
Wow.
So you end up at 120 and you end up working on the same base as me.
So I'm in the logistics warehouse on one side of the airfield.

(24:31):
And then on the other side is her.
She was doing IT because she has a master's and bachelor's in IT.
And she was working over there.
And then in 2012, we got bond with mortar rounds right between me and her.
So I'm in a bunker.
She's in the bunker and we're like texting each other on the little Afghanokeo phones.
You know those doodly doodly doodly doodly doodly.

(24:51):
And then I'm like, are you alive?
You know, I'm like, I hope she's okay.
And then same thing.
She messaged me and from there, things to got more serious.
Jeez, one memory after another is just popping up.
So after like four months on that base with her, we decided to go home for Thanksgiving.

(25:18):
And we left the week early to give us time to make it home and adjust and all that.
So we flew on a Chinook helicopter from our base to Kandahar.
In Kandahar, we tried to get on a flight that got canceled.
And then they did priority flights for other people ahead of us.
So we got bumped back four days in a row.

(25:39):
So we ended up sleeping on metal benches in the makeshift tent at the airport there.
It sucked like we were doing bird baths in the bathroom because we couldn't take a regular
shower.
So we're just everyday wiping armpits and stuff like that with baby wipes and things
of that nature.
And then at two o'clock in the morning, the sergeant comes and taps us on a shoulder

(26:02):
to wake us up and says, we got an unexpected galaxy, the biggest airplane that the Air Force
has, I think that the Galaxy C5.
It landed to do an unexpected fueling.
So they were like, that's going to Northfolk, Virginia.
If you want to go to the US, you can jump on that one right now.
There's plenty of seats.
And I'm like, heck yeah, we're gonna air for four days.

(26:25):
So we got like two days to go to make it home.
So we take off and it goes from Afghanistan around Iran's airspace over Kuwait, Iraq,
and then right over ISIS territory in Mosul, Iraq, the pilot gets on the intercom and with
this, I never forget his tone.
Ladies and gentlemen, we just lost an engine.

(26:47):
We're going to do an emergency landing in Enserilic Air Force Base Turkey.
Please put your seatbelt on.
And my wife and I are like, because the plane is almost empty, we're sleeping across four
seats, like just spread out.
And we looked at each other like, did he really just say that we had lost an engine?
But he said it like it's his fifth time.
You know what I mean?
So we're on our way home and here we are doing an emergency landing now in Turkey.

(27:11):
We land and then they put us in the Turkey Army barracks there and they swapped out the
engine overnight and put us back on the same plane the next day.
Wow.
And from there, we fly to go to Norfolk to continue our trip.
But then we get to Rota, Spain, right when you get to the Atlantic Ocean, the beginning

(27:33):
of it in Spain, and then he gets back on the intercom and says, yeah, we're too tired to
fly over the Atlantic.
So we're going to do a, we're going to land here in Spain and get rest for the night.
Basically we had to find our all way home from Spain.
So now we're stuck in the airport in Spain for 11 hours until a charter plane showed
up that ended up going to Norfolk, Virginia to the same airport that we're going to anyway.

(27:58):
So we get on that one and we land on Thanksgiving Day.
But mind you, we're having tried to get to Miami, not Norfolk, Virginia.
So we're in Virginia and we had our bulletproof vest and our Cavalier and our PPE with us.
You have to turn that into an Army base to the, to the depot over there before you can
leave the Army base and go, go home.

(28:21):
So we land, but we landed on an, on, on a, I think an Air Force base.
There was no Army base around for us to turn the stuff in.
So I had to spend, I think at the time in 2012, $110, which was a lot of money in today's
money and probably 3, 400 bucks, 110 bucks for a taxi to drive us from the Air Force base

(28:41):
to an Army base in the Northern part of Virginia, further north, about an hour and something.
Then we get there and the place is closed because it's Thanksgiving Day.
There's parking lots empty.
So we're sitting here with all this gear that we have to turn in.
We can't leave until we turn it in, have a receipt.
And out of the blue, it's just us and the taxi.

(29:02):
And out of the blue of car rolls up where the sergeant who was in charge of that warehouse
for that turning process forgot a document on his desk in his office and just so happened
to show up at that very moment.
And he was like, Oh yeah, just throw your stuff in my office.
And he gave us a hand receipt with his phone number and stuff.
Here, this is good enough for now.
I'll send you something later in the mail.
So I was like, wow, what are the odds of that?

(29:25):
So then we go to the commercial airline and then I order tickets and fly to Miami and
we land in Fort Lauderdale Airport because we're closer to Fort Lauderdale.
And we made it to the dinner table 15 minutes before everybody started eating.
So we plan to leave a week early.
So we have time and we make it 15 minutes before dinner time with me and my wife.

(29:47):
After all that, that's a trip.
Well, and also thank you both, you and your wife for your service.
And I mean that sincerely because I may rag on the US government, but I think it's important
to separate the government and the bureaucrats who send men and women off to war with the

(30:07):
people who are actually doing the service in war.
And so I genuinely appreciate your service.
Thank you for saying that.
Like a lot of the people that I worked with, like are you right, are genuine people.
They want to do their job right and they're there for the right reasons.
They got their mind frame in the right place.
The people above us that made all the stupid decisions and I'm witness that when I was

(30:29):
there, the corruption of money that's being spent in the war zones is ridiculous.
I'm talking about, I was like I said, I was in logistics.
So I've watched where a unit was told to order 100 tires for a Humvee that needs one tire.

(30:50):
And it goes through like the KBR and the Halliburton's and the AE comms of the world, you know, the
contractors that are out there working for the army.
They're the ones that go through this whole order process and bring everything in.
So it's like, I'm seeing 100 Humvee tires sitting in the yard and they put one on the
Humvee that needed it.

(31:11):
It's like why?
Over in Shindan, Afghanistan, this was an Afghan base that I was on for a while where
they trained Afghan pilots to try to build an air force for the Afghans.
So they were training pilots there.
They didn't have a living facility or a training facility for helicopter pilots yet.

(31:35):
So our taxpayer money paid for a facility to be built and I was there when they built
it.
I forgot, it was a few million dollars that they spent building, I think 11 million or
something.
I don't remember exactly.
But believe it or not, they had the opening ceremony with the Afghan generals and all
that to break it open, you know, to further transfer from the U.S. military to gift to

(31:59):
them as a gift.
And they rejected it because they didn't like the way it was built.
It wasn't suited for their religious purposes in the way that they do things.
So they rejected the building that we gave them free with our taxpayer money and then
one mile down the street built another one.
It's the way that they wanted it.
It's just mind blowing.

(32:19):
It's frustrating.
It's insane because like just those two examples, like I'm sure I can't even imagine how many
more there are like that of just so much waste.
So much waste.
I honestly believe that it is my background from physically being over there.

(32:41):
I've been to 30 countries to date and I have seen a lot and I think that life experience
is what helped me to understand Bitcoin faster than some people that have a finance degree
that are in finance that still can't figure Bitcoin out.
Like I've tried to call her out, but my ex-wife is one of them.

(33:03):
Like I tried to explain it to her and she has a master's bachelor's degree back in
the early days.
But when I told her about it, like it was hard for her to grasp.
It took a while.
And then I hear stories or see people online through on X that some of these guys that
are experts in the finance field that make these stupid comments that make no sense to

(33:25):
me because I can see that they can't figure Bitcoin out.
But then I have no college degree.
I've got my high school degree and my military experience and life experience.
I've done some courses in college, but it was just a couple months here and there and
that's it.
But other than that, I don't have any master's or bachelor's degrees.

(33:46):
Most of my stuff is just life experience and common sense.
And I was able to grasp Bitcoin in such a way so early on that when I first figured
it out, I understood that I need to hold on.
Most people don't even understand that part.
They might learn Bitcoin, but two, three, four years down the line, understand what
HODL really means.

(34:06):
I figured that out, like I think within the first four months that I got into Bitcoin
back then.
Well, tell me about that.
No, it's true that there's a lot of folks just having a degree in finance certainly
does not make you...
I think in many ways it hurts you for really understanding Bitcoin because you don't...

(34:27):
Give you an extra that lens, you're a fish in water, but you don't know what water is.
But I'm curious, when or how did you...
What was your Bitcoin moment where you got it and then how did that lead into getting
into Bitcoin mining?
So my wife and I, when we first got married, we lived in somebody's garage that was turned

(34:52):
into an efficiency.
So we literally started from nothing.
A little tooth.
I actually measure life at the size of your Christmas tree.
Our Christmas tree was two feet tall and it was...
We were just in one room where everything was in the same room.
And then from there, we went to a duplex and our tree got to four foot tall and then we

(35:13):
got to our starter home and then we got a six foot tree.
Now we're in a retirement home and we just had our first 10 foot tree.
But the moment that we were living there, she couldn't find a job.
My job was the type of job that she didn't like.
I didn't like.
I wasn't happy.
We were in the middle of nowhere in San Angelo, Texas.
I was driving oil tankers to the oil fields where there's nothing but rattlesnakes out

(35:37):
the middle of nowhere.
GPS doesn't work.
You literally have a paper in your hand that says, make a right at these three large rocks.
Go a quarter mile down till you see a 10 foot bush.
Make a left.
That was the directions to get to the oil field to pick the oil up.
It was dangerous as hell.
I had this thing that reads the gas in the air.

(35:58):
If it goes off, you're supposed to hold your breath and then do this with a finger to see
which way the wind's blown and run the opposite direction.
It was a very dangerous job.
But I left from there with my wife to North Carolina and she found a job and we got settled
in.
But I couldn't find a job.

(36:19):
I was frustrated so I was online searching on ways to make money.
Through that process, I was doing things like going to yard sales.
I had a strategy down.
On Friday, I would look up Saturday morning yard sales and I would see this one opens
up at 6.30.
This one opens up 7.
This one at 8.
This one at 8.30.

(36:40):
I put the addresses line in sequence of the openings and then have my Google Maps ready
to go.
I literally would hit up yard sale after yard sale as they're opening up and catch good
sales, take beautiful photos, clean them up and repost them on eBay and double my money.
That's how I was helping my wife with the bills around the house at the time.

(37:00):
While I was going through that process, I found the documentary called Banking on Bitcoin
with Charlie Schramm.
Technically Charlie Schramm is like the first OG that I heard about.
Through this documentary, it sparked my interest to go down the rabbit hole.
As I'm learning and studying after that documentary, in the middle of a conversation with my cousin

(37:23):
in Georgia, I'm like, hey, have you heard about this Bitcoin?
He's like, yeah, I'm mining Bitcoin.
I'm like, what the heck is mining?
That's when he taught me about mining Bitcoin.
He sent me an old D3 in the mail, Dashminer, that he wasn't using.
He actually just started with S9s at the time and scaled his whole basement with S9s to

(37:47):
the point where the power, he was blowing his transformer in the street and they had
to come up, create his transformer and they're like, what the heck are you doing?
But yeah, I pissed my wife off with a loud D3 in the bedroom next door from us and ended
up getting a beer cooler and cutting holes in it, running a flex pipe out the window and
trying to bring the decibel noise down.

(38:08):
I got my first payout while I was laying next to her in bed at like two o'clock in the
morning and she's like, you know, what kind of chick is texting you?
Who's texting you at two o'clock in the morning?
And I was like, yeah, that's my first payout.
I got a ding from my payout, which was dope.
From there on, my passion just grew and I scaled in my garage and then I went to a shop

(38:30):
and rented the shop out, started my LLC and then I started doing consulting work and I
started from the bottom where I was selling myself as a service for entry level technician
work.
So mining sites in North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, even all the way up to upstate

(38:50):
New York hired me to help deploy the machines and to clean machines and I just started basic
stuff and from there I learned from other people.
And then I started to grow and next thing you know, I'm doing project management work
where I collected other people that I know were in the space that are doing technician
work.
So it's like me and seven, eight other guys that would go to like Core Scientific or the

(39:15):
CleanSpark facility in Georgia and we'd help like Core Scientific deploy 18,000 machines
and all four of their sites, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina.
So I got to see a lot of stuff, learn a lot of stuff through that process.
My shop in North Carolina started to, from all the refurbishment work I did, I started

(39:39):
to see minor, different model minors on my shelf and you know, I'm just sitting there
and I'm like, oh, that's cool.
So I cleaned them up, lined them all up in chronological order and then I started studying
online and I'm like, oh, there's another one I don't have on eBay, bought it, you know,
50 bucks here, 100 bucks there.

(39:59):
Started getting to the point where I got 10, 20, 30 machines in my shop.
Then I looked up museum for Bitcoin and it's nothing.
There's nothing out there.
So that's how I found a niche in the market.
I basically leaving my government job, by the way, was tough and putting in my resignation

(40:19):
to throw a pension out the window.
My family told me I was nuts, my friends told me I was nuts, you know, I took this risk.
And to me, this is also where I believe that when you make it as a Bitcoiner, you deserve
it because you took the risk that most other people don't take because they're too afraid.

(40:41):
They like living in the safety bubble right here.
This is their whole life inside the circle.
I wanted to bust out that bubble and see what else is out there.
How can I make the bubble any bigger?
That's what my mind frame is.
And if I fail, okay, so what?
I learned something, I'll go back to my old job and continue on taking, but at least I
tried.
So, well, sorry to jumping off topic here.

(41:03):
No, I love it.
Amen.
So, so I went online and found out that there is no museum for Bitcoin.
I'm like, hey, why don't I be the first one?
So essentially, I created my own job.
Like how awesome is that in itself?
Like nobody in the whole world can claim that they're doing what I do.

(41:23):
And right now, just for me sitting here in front of you in this podcast, I'm surrounded
by the backbone of Bitcoin and it's these machines behind me that created my job, that
created your job, that created what Michael Saylor is doing, that created what the Bitcoin
conference is doing, David Bailey, everybody.
Name it in the space that's all attached to these machines behind me.

(41:45):
If it's not for them, nobody else would be here with a job.
So from there on, I started to build the whole museum idea and then I contacted Michael from
the Mining Disrupt Conference in Miami and I showed him photos of what I'm building.
Now, I would like to show it to the community and he gave me my first opportunity to bring

(42:08):
the museum down to the conference in Miami and I had no idea what's going to happen.
Like we had these tables, like I had the whole hallway, they gave me a hallway by the VIP,
between VIP and something else over there.
I had this whole corridor and I put all these, I think at the time I had 72 machines or 75

(42:31):
and those three days were very memorable because I seen the reaction of the community
and the reaction that you get, and this is from every conference ever since, is when
people walk around that corner and they see, like today I have 123 machines.
So we've almost doubled since then three years ago.

(42:52):
To see all this, it's Bitcoin, you can't touch it and you cannot see it.
But when you come to the museum, it's the only tangible part of the whole Bitcoin network.
It's something that you physically get to see and we have newbies that walk around a
corner and see all this, they're like, holy shit, this is real.
That's crazy.
This is already a museum.

(43:13):
I thought this is new technology.
No, this is not new.
It's been around for 15 freaking years.
You're just a little late.
Well, I'm not going to say late because we're technically still early in the grand scheme
of things.
Whether you're mining Bitcoin, buying Bitcoin or earning Bitcoin, you need to keep those
precious sat safe for the long haul.
And the best way to do that is to go to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use the promo code Walker

(43:39):
for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only bitbox o2 hardware wallet.
Then of course, get your Bitcoin off the exchange and into your own custody.
The Bitbox team is honestly awesome and I just had Staticus from their team on my show
the other week.
If you wanted to get a deeper dive into their methodology and how they think about things,

(44:01):
they build easy to use secure open source solutions to keep your Bitcoin safe.
And not only is the Bitcoin in your bitbox safe from government confiscation, let's
say, but Bitbox is also one of the only two wallets to specifically address the dark,
skipy vulnerability.
So if you have one, you're in luck.
And if you don't, you can pick one up.

(44:22):
Plus, and I cannot emphasize this enough from personal experience, the Bitbox o2 is truly
easy as hell to use.
Whether you're new to Bitcoin and it's your very first hardware wallet or you are a well
seasoned psychopath and you've got more than you'd like to admit.
It is Bitcoin only.
And again, fully open source.
You can head to their GitHub and verify for yourself.

(44:43):
There is no need to trust me or to trust Bitbox.
When you go to bitbox.swiss.walkr and use the promo code Walker, not only do you get
5% off and it's off anything in their store, but you also help support this fucking podcast.
So thank you.
Oh, always still early.
No, I love it.
I mean, I've seen senior setup before and it's really cool.

(45:08):
Like it's cool because every time I end up talking to you, you tell me something that
I had no idea about.
Because I've only been around since 2020 when I started stacking the stats after ignoring
Bitcoin a couple of times, thinking it was just some nerd money online or whatever stupid
thing I told myself the time.
And then 2020 rolls around and you start stacking stats.

(45:30):
Yeah, the first time I heard of it and I remember my exact thoughts.
This is internet money for geeks.
Internet monopoly money for geeks.
That's what my first thought was.
Yeah, and like more power to the people who hear about Bitcoin for the first time and
decide to dive right in.
Like I have a lot of respect for that because it wasn't not the first or the second or the

(45:52):
third time that I heard about it that I that I dived in.
But you know, hey, we get we get into Bitcoin when we deserve to write when we're ready
to make ready to do some research.
But what I was going to say is, you know, seeing this history, I'd love if maybe you
could you could walk through a little bit, just kind of the evolution of Bitcoin mining.

(46:13):
Because I think a lot of people they see what it is today or, you know, like you said, if
they haven't seen your collection, even the idea of Bitcoin mining, maybe something like
what they know about it is what they've read in legacy media about, you know, oh, just a
bunch of data centers competing to solve a puzzle, you know, or whatever simplified
thing they do.

(46:34):
But can you walk us through a little like, OK, Bitcoin is created and and mining obviously
begins with the with the Genesis block.
But mining looked a lot different then and it changed a lot over the years.
Can you kind of walk through that evolution of Bitcoin miners from where it started to
to where it is today?
Well, the first phase was laptops CPU.

(46:57):
That's when Satoshi started with his laptop.
That phase was roughly about two years give or take.
And then you had switched over to to seek GPU.
GPU era was also give or take two years.
I didn't I mean, a lot of that GPU stuff also switched over to the shit coin world.

(47:23):
But the network was so small in the early days that you could mine with CPU.
Not a lot of people know this.
But December 7th, 2010, there was a Nokia and 900 cell phone that put the node that put
the whole blockchain on the cell phone.

(47:44):
And with the battery at mind Bitcoin, I think it was point four three Bitcoin or something
like that and sent the transaction of that Bitcoin to another and 900 cell phone because
the network was still small enough that you could use a cell phone to do that with.
But after that, Bitcoin shot up like literally days later to where you couldn't even do that

(48:04):
anymore.
But there is a moment in history on that day in 2010 where two people use two cell phones
to mine Bitcoin and send Bitcoin.
Wow.
That's a while.
That's still an era.
So from GPU, well, CPU and GPU, it's like, you know, you really only use 10 percent of

(48:27):
your brain to think GPU is like you can do gaming, you can go online, you can check emails,
you can do all kinds of stuff.
But mining on Bitcoin, mining Bitcoin on GPU only uses a fraction.
It doesn't use the whole GPU.
And we went actually to a short phase called FPGA and FPGA lasted not even a year, maybe

(48:48):
six months to a year.
And this was basically, it was, it was like ASIC machine that ASIC miner that you can
program.
So something between the GPU and ASIC.
So actually, let me show you.

(49:09):
I love that you've just, you know, you've got the examples ready to go.
It's beautiful.
This is the oldest miner in my museum.
And it took me four years to find, but this is an actual GPU.
And well, actually, let me just take it out instead of all that reflection.

(49:33):
So as you can see, it says Bitcoin FPGA.
That was the name of the company.
I found the founder that made this, he's staying anonymous.
I spoke to him for a while and had to build up my relationship and trust with him for
him to open up about this.
But I got a lot of information from him.

(49:53):
There's not even maybe 900 of these that were ever made back then.
A lot of them got thrown away or they're in the trash and recycle and obviously they're
not working no more.
So there's no telling, excuse me, but maybe there's only a handful in the world left.
He's got three and ended up negotiating with me and Bitcoin for me to buy one for the museum.

(50:16):
So these were at that time superior to what other people were running on GPUs.
Correct.
So this is 250 megahertz and this is basically one gig of hash, all four of them.
And you need over 2 million of these to equal today's S19 to put that in perspective.

(50:38):
That's how fast we have moved with efficiency.
Then after this on my right shoulder right there under the shoe is the Avalon.
Can you see it?
Yeah.
It's the Avalon one and that's the first ASIC miner that made it to market.
And at the time that that got plugged in, like Vitaly Buterin was the editor at Bitcoin

(51:04):
magazine and he wrote the first article with Garzik, Jeff Garzik.
Jeff Garzik received the first ASIC in the world and when at the time that anybody plugged
those in, they were making 20 to 25 Bitcoin a day on the blockchain and it was 110 nanometer

(51:27):
chips for the fourth phase, which is ASICs, which is what we're still on today.
So basically the invention of ASICs created the whole last decade of mining of the mining
community, but then the efficiency kept getting better and better and better to where I think
we're now at three nanometers in today's mining world.

(51:49):
So from 110 to three and dealing with building, like the process of just making a new miner
and getting the new chips is this huge deal, just getting the chips themselves.
You know what a wafer is from like TSMC?
Yeah.

(52:09):
Museum has one of those too.
Not many people know what they look like.
Wow.
I think this is my first time showing one of these on the podcast.
That's awesome.

(52:30):
There's 3,000 chips on this one wafer and they're all seven nanometers.
So they're S17 and early S19 era.
So we're in this ASIC era right now and obviously that various iterations of ASIC.

(52:52):
Wait, you got something else there?
Yeah.
So besides the Avalon 1 which made it to market first, so they get credibility for bringing
it out first to market, there's an unofficial first and that is these.
This is the ASIC miner made by Frycat.
Frycat is a very controversial name from that era.

(53:17):
I kind of consider Frycat is like this skinny Chinese kid who is a genius who built from
his own mind the design of the chips which is a 130 nanometer chip on here.
But he went to Harvard and then he figured Bitcoin out and figured that chip situation
out and literally quit the whole Harvard stuff and then just started building his company

(53:41):
and got into mining.
But the reason why he didn't make it to market first is because he was selling the hash to
the public and mining himself at the time that the Avalon 1 was being made.
So it was like the Avalon 1 and this was in the same time frame but Avalon made it out
to market to sell to the public first and then he came out just a few months later but

(54:02):
technically he was mining first.
You know what I mean?
So Avalon 1 is official, this is unofficial.
And then Butterfly Labs, they were the first to open their mouth officially but never made
nothing happen.
Like three different things all at the same time.
So what was I guess the first modern or what we'd call modern ASIC?

(54:25):
Because these Avalons, these are ones people aren't going to have heard of.
Is the S9 what you would consider like the first?
The legendary machine to me.
It's the cat with nine lives.
Bitcoin tanks and miners are cheap at the time and then people throw them away and then
Bitcoin takes off and then they're like where the heck did I put that miner and then put

(54:48):
it back online.
I remember that people ran those for quite a long time and they were beasts.
Like the miners that I deployed for Core Scientific at one of the sites, there was literally every
day 18 wheeler truck loads of S9s coming in from China and a couple of the loads were

(55:08):
used miners and we had to refurbish them before we put them online.
So I had this whole triage set up with my team with these eight foot tables where every
person had their own job and then the box shows up with the miners, they looked like
straight crap and then they go through the process of being taken apart, cleaned, reprogrammed

(55:28):
on the SD card and the control board with the SD card and then tested and then go put
them online.
But those miners went through a mudslide in China.
So they had mud caked all in them.
We literally washed them and then put them in the hot aisle and let them dry out, then
went and put them through triage and they worked.

(55:50):
They ran with no problem.
It's like mind blowing.
There were dead spiders in there that we found from China.
There was cigarette butts from people that were working on the site in China that we
found inside the miner.
Like all kinds of crazy crap from overseas that came through these machines.
So this is like a weird experience.
But they had S9 is to me the most legendary machine and I actually have one that's unopened

(56:15):
in the original box.
Never been opened.
I'm not opening it.
Wow.
I mean, that's quite a collector's item right there, right?
If you keep it in the box, you know.
I actually have the...
No, it's not in here.
I have the S1, the first Bitmain miner ever made.

(56:36):
Brand new, never used.
It's still in original box.
I just got that like a week ago.
I just tweeted about it for two weeks now.
So that's like...
And obviously the S9 had a pretty...
Has probably the longest run of any specific miners, is that fair to say?
Yes.

(56:57):
And now, I mean...
One guy told me that he made a return on his investment five-fold with the S9 because
he first bought them when they first came out and they just ran for so long that he
five-folded his money with that same machine.
Wow.
That's nuts.
How do...
For people with perspective, how does that S9 compare to the latest and greatest machines

(57:23):
that are coming out now?
I think as the chips become more efficient, they become more fragile.
Something like you put them in certain environments like hot West Texas weather.
There's the S19 XP, don't like heat.
I'm already hearing the S21s don't like heat.

(57:45):
The S9 is one of those machines that you could have ran in Canada in 10-degree weather or
even some negative degree weather in the hot weather in Texas, but no problem.
So as the chips, the nanometer, the chips become more efficient.
I think it's going to get more and more difficult to where air cooling is probably going to

(58:07):
go away and you're going to have to deal with hydro cooling and immersion cooling and things
of that nature unless they come up with a whole new chip design that has something other
than copper on the inside that can make it more efficient that way.
That's actually what I wanted to ask you too is, okay, we're in this ASIC era, right?

(58:28):
And I mean, is there an era after the ASIC era or is it just different iterations making
these ASICs more and more efficient, increasing the hash of these?
Is this kind of like the final stop?
Is there something that comes after this or is this just kind of what we have and we just

(58:49):
keep getting more efficient?
I think we're getting close to a plateau on the nanometer side.
Maybe we get to two, maybe we get to 1.5.
I don't know how much further we go after that.
I think efficiency is some of the focus right now.
Like there was one company that they got bought out by BitDeer, but it's called the SOWI

(59:11):
Miner.
I had one of their machines and the technology inside, they actually went backwards on the
nanometer chip.
Even though at the time we were at the five nanometer level, they went backwards to eight,
but they had better numbers than a miner with five nanometers.
And I'm like, how is that possible?
So we opened it up and did a whole, dissected it basically.

(59:35):
And through that process, we learned that they changed the entire heat sink process with
copper piping.
It's a little more expensive, but the technology changed and they went to putting over 1,000
ships into one machine.
Basically on average, a machine has three or 400 chips together, all in the whole miner.

(59:58):
These guys, they put over 1,000 machines, chips of the eight nanometer in there.
So they went for something that's more durable and easier to get on the chip side, but then
put more of them in the machine and then solved a better solution on the heat side for the
heat sink system.
And I kind of liked that because I had no issues with that machine whatsoever.

(01:00:20):
I kept that in my crawl space to keep my floor and my house warm through the winter.
That thing was a beast.
To be able to tell the future, to answer your question about anything after A6, I can't
really say.
I don't know.
Right now, I know that we're on solving things around whatever chips that we have right now

(01:00:42):
to make things better until something better comes along.
Because people are always inventing things.
And thank goodness for human creativity.
It's fascinating too because I think...
So we can do that anyway.
We can try anyway.
We can try.
But that's something I wanted to talk to you about too because if we talk about the pipeline

(01:01:07):
for Bitcoin miners, it is primarily right now that supply chain is pretty dependent on
China.
Fair to say.
And so, do you see centralization risk in that?
Obviously, miners themselves, you can mine anywhere in the world.

(01:01:28):
Even in China where it's been banned, however many times.
But the production process, that actual supply chain, it's reliant on pretty heavily centralized
group of manufacturers.
So do you see that as a risk?
Do you see avenues for that decentralizing a bit to spread that out?
Or how do you look at that?

(01:01:49):
All depends on how it wins November 5th.
From there, you can make decisions to say, okay, well, we want more productivity in the
US, so we're going to give tax breaks to companies that come back and to do things here.
I mean, at the end of the day, everybody's always chasing the cheaper labor, the cheaper
parts, cheaper this and that.

(01:02:11):
Yeah, it sucks that it's centralized in China for the most part.
But you have companies like Arardine, they're out of California.
They're doing things in the US.
I heard that What's Miner is actually at least piecing miners together with parts in
the US.

(01:02:33):
Then you have on the smaller scale, which is a good start, you have like Bid-Ax.
You have these home miners, these little small miners.
You're not going to get rich off of them.
You're not going to get payouts every week or whatever.
But if you have a million of them out there, you just help to decentralize the network
more to where it's not all controlled in one place.
These are people that are in the US making stuff from home with their own D3 printer and

(01:02:57):
things like that, as long as they have the base card with the chip in it.
I think that's pretty cool that that's actually starting.
You almost thought home mining was dead, but now people are becoming innovative with the
newer chips and making home miners again.
That helps to decentralize the network.
It is pretty cool.

(01:03:17):
I've been meaning to order myself a Bid-Ax because I think that's a cool project.
Again, that's one of the beautiful things about Bitcoin.
Like sure, does a massive mining farm have, are they going to be able to spin up more
hash rate than you and your basement?
Yeah.
It doesn't just because they have all that hash rate does not mean you cannot also have

(01:03:41):
hash rate yourself.
Nothing is stopping you as the individual from going out there and getting a miner and being
able to mine yourself.
That's a beautiful thing.
It doesn't mean it's going to be a fair fight on terms of scale, but the process of Bitcoin
mining, the actual hashing is about as fair a fight as something can possibly be if we

(01:04:05):
talk about actually trying to go through the process of discovering that next block.
At least we got that going for us.
I recommend that anybody mine from home, even if it's just to reheat something, your crawl
space, your shed, your greenhouse or whatever, you're not going to get rich off of it.

(01:04:28):
Just to be able to say, I'm a part of the network and I'm helping to contribute to the
network is pretty cool in my view.
A lot of the people that first get into mining at home are always like, well, what do the
numbers look like?
If I buy this for 500 bucks, then what am I going to make for it every month?

(01:04:48):
There's number one, there's too many variables involved to answer that.
These calculators they have online will give you a basic real time idea, but that will
change next week.
The numbers change, the difficulty changes, the price of Bitcoin changes.
What I do is I don't think about any of that.
What I do, and I put my mind frame on this early on, just for numbers sake, if my miner

(01:05:12):
costs $100 a month in electricity to mine, but I make $80 in Bitcoin, the average person
is like, damn, I just lost 20 bucks.
But that's the fiat mind frame.
I look at it and be like, hey, I got $80 worth of freaking Bitcoin, virgin Bitcoin that is
10x from now, that's $800.

(01:05:33):
So it's like, who cares about the $20 that I just lost last month in electricity if it's
going to be an $800 asset by the end of the decade or something.
So I'm looking at long-term play with this at the same time, but I'm using it to recycle
the heat in many different ways.
I think that's such a great mindset to have because you're right.

(01:05:53):
And this is the thing, as a home miner, you can have that mindset that obviously like
a publicly traded Bitcoin miner cannot have.
They do need to worry about like, what does it cost them on a month to month basis?
Are they profitable?
But as a home miner, you can say, okay, I'm just doing a little bit of mining on the side.
I'm getting a little bit of, as you said, virgin Bitcoin for it, which it's, I mean,

(01:06:18):
at least personally, I would say there's a premium on that.
If that's non, that didn't come from an exchange.
You didn't have to give, yeah, you didn't have to give your first born son and your
social security number away to the exchange to get that Bitcoin.
That's just game right to you.
And I mean, that alone has a premium on it in my mind.
But then also like you said, if you've got a long-term mindset, well, that Bitcoin is

(01:06:41):
going to be worth a heck of a lot more if you're just, you know, if you're, if you're
holding onto it and just doing this as something to help promote the decentralization of the
network and get some of that virgin Bitcoin on the side.
Like that's a, it's a beautiful thing.
I'm curious if you have a recommendation for folks who want to start home mining, but
are unfamiliar with mining more generally, you know, they haven't done this before.

(01:07:05):
What would you say?
I mean, you recommend they start with like with one of these bid axes or, you know, I
mean, depends on their budget, I suppose.
But do you have, do you have a, like when people ask you about this, what do you tell
them?
Um, usually the people that I deal with, I'm not, I have not been big on the home mining
when it comes to the USB stuff with, you know, the small things.

(01:07:26):
Uh, I'm usually S nine and above.
So I actually tell people go and eBay order a working S nine because those are, that's
basically the highest minor that does the most on one 10 electricity before you trans
graduate to 220.
So you can still plug that into a one 10 and consider that not that you're making Bitcoin

(01:07:51):
and you're going to do something big in the future with it, but that this is your GED
for mining.
You're buying this, my this S nine from eBay and you're going through the process of learning
the UI, learning how to troubleshoot it, test it, open it up, look at the inside.
Uh, how do you connect your wallet to it?
Go through that whole process of basically that's like your little high school diploma

(01:08:15):
that you're buying this S nine for.
And then from there you can make a decision.
Do I like it?
I didn't like the noise.
I don't want to mind because of the noise, whatever the case may be, you, you're going
to come up with your own reasons of why you want to continue or don't want to continue
from there on.
So I would recommend going to eBay and just find one of those one 10 outlet type minors

(01:08:35):
and go from there.
And then if you like it, then move up in advance to 220.
And yeah, there's a lot of tutorials and YouTube videos and a lot of, you know, bits be tripping
and hustle minor and brain fart.
There's quite a few of minors out there that teach this type of stuff that happen.

(01:08:56):
Plenty of videos.
That's how I did it too.
And that's, that's good.
What about, what about for somebody who, who wants to maybe get into the Bitcoin mining
industry?
No, because you've had, you've had a pretty cool journey doing it basically from the
bottom up self taught basically around all of this, not that there's like a university
for Bitcoin mining.
And at least yet, maybe, maybe we start to see that in a number of years.

(01:09:19):
Who knows.
But, you know, what's for folks that are maybe in a similar position to you where, where
they're, they're still working a fiat job and they're thinking, okay, I want to dip
my toes into Bitcoin mining.
This is what I'm, I think is really fascinating.
You have any advice for folks who want to, want to make that jump or just, you know, what
was your kind of final catalyst where you said, nope, I need to do this?

(01:09:42):
Um, I kind of stepped out to a broader view on a personal level because I, I, I experienced
the dips and the takeoffs of, I experienced the roller coaster and on when I had my LLC
when I started, uh, and I was doing the whole technician stuff.
I also learned brokering.

(01:10:03):
So like I've closed some deals here and there with publicly traded companies where I get
my little cut or I would close a host hosting deal with a company and they would call me
and say, Hey, we got five megawatts of racking space.
Can you find me some miners?
And then I call the people that I connect with or have a network with and find somebody.
Through that whole process, I'm like, I realized that selling miners is hot when Bitcoin takes

(01:10:28):
off, but when Bitcoin tanks, nobody wants any.
And then my company's kind of like dead in the water.
So I had to figure out other things.
So I was like that broad view of, I want to learn this, this, this and this.
So I don't care what price Bitcoin is on the roller coaster.
I'm busy.
I'm doing something.
And that's what I ended up doing.
And that's how I approach things.

(01:10:49):
So I guess you kind of have to figure out for yourself, like how much time do you have
to invest into this?
Are you willing to travel to leave your family?
Are you a single guy and you don't mind being at a mining site in Kansas?
And then two weeks later, North Dakota freezing your ass off at 23 degrees and then down to
Georgia, sweating your butt off.
Like, what are you wanting to do?

(01:11:10):
What's your capacity to be able to do things in the space?
But there's a lot of demand.
You just have to find it and network.
And that's where these conferences are perfect for too.
And that's why I love going to those.
Because you get this like me and you, you know, I've known you off the internet, never met
you until we went to a conference.
So and after you meet people, you can say, yeah, like I met him.

(01:11:35):
I know him.
I know that he's not some scammer on telegram.
He's legit.
Hey, come over and help me out.
I'll pay you 25 bucks an hour to deploy 5000 machines.
You know, so it's like, you just have to get involved in the community and network and
figure out for yourself what you're, what you want to do with your time and which way
you want to go.

(01:11:56):
Yeah.
Me, it was just a broad view of things.
I love it.
I'm curious, I wanted to ask you also just about, about mining pools, because this is,
you know, just on the topic of centralization in general, do you view this as, as at all
of, of a risk in terms of a lot of hash power being pulled into just a, you know, handful

(01:12:23):
of pretty big pools?
Or is that something that is not so worrisome because, okay, people still have the option
to, to not, you know, mine with one of these pools or to start a new pool.
What are your thoughts on that?
Cause I see, you know, a lot of people that are saying, we really need to pay attention
this, this is a, you know, a potentially big threat.

(01:12:43):
And other people saying, yeah, you know, it'll work itself out.
Um, I know that ocean pool is not a pool that's very much liked by some people in the
community, but I think that it's a, a need in the community because the options that
they provide to help exactly the topic that you're talking about.

(01:13:06):
Cause you have the foundries of the world and the ant pools of the world that have a
lot of hash power.
The whole thing with like using, uh, block space to put other things outside of transactions.
I'm, I'm still kind of on a fence with all that stuff.

(01:13:29):
Uh, I understand both sides of point of views.
Uh, but with, with, uh, the hash rate being centralized, I don't know if this is true,
but somebody told me that some of the Asian ones that even though they're different name
pools, they still are somehow connected to each other.

(01:13:49):
Uh, I don't know.
Some podcasts that I was listening, not a podcast.
It was a spaces.
Somebody was saying something like that.
I mean, yeah, that's, that's kind of nerve wracking.
I'm hoping that, uh, you know, if, uh, the right person becomes president and we have
the right cabinet and the office where they have the right mind frame that some of that

(01:14:10):
stuff starts coming on, not just the mining parts and the mining themselves with the machines,
but also the pool side, uh, has be based out of the U S two to start taking things away
from the Asian side.
But it's not just a control very well experienced person when it comes to the pools themselves.

(01:14:31):
I just, me, I'm more in the mining and the museum side.
I just know, Hey, I plug into this pool and I get my payout.
Uh, I joined, I joined Ocean from the very beginning.
So I was part of the first few blocks that they ever made.
And it was pretty dope to get larger payouts than what I'm used to because the network

(01:14:54):
was small and to find blocks that quickly at the beginning was, that was a cool experience.
Oh, that's awesome.
You know, again, it's, it's cool that there are these other pools spinning up that are
starting to get more hash rate.
And you know, I'm, I'm curious, just cause you mentioned, you know, the election, obviously
Trump has been much more vocally pro Bitcoin and crypto granted.

(01:15:20):
But talking about Bitcoin as an industry at the Bitcoin conference.
And I, you know, I think again, it's, it's not so much, at least in my opinion, it's
not so much what he said.
It's the fact that he was there at the conference saying it because that means that it forces
people to pay attention a little bit more.
And even if the only result of that is that a few more people who really need Bitcoin end

(01:15:41):
up finding it because they didn't think about Bitcoin before, but because Donald Trump talked
about it, they started paying attention.
Well, then I think that's a positive thing, but zooming out a little bit, you know, how
do you see the, you know, the, the future?
And obviously Trump said stuff like we want every Bitcoin mind in the future to be mind
in America.
Of course that's impossible.

(01:16:02):
But you know, I think it's a, perhaps a good sentiment, even if it's a little nonsensical.
But how do you see this working out?
Cause I mean, really what we're talking about, you know, at the, at the core is you need
cheap energy, right?
And so, you know, how do you see this, this shaking out, you know, let's, let's say it

(01:16:24):
does it come down to we're going to drill baby drill and there's just going to be, you
know, we're going to drop energy prices.
So it's going to become a lot more economical to mine all over the U S versus just in some
of these areas like in Texas where obviously they have ERCOT and they're doing a lot of
load balancing down there.
How do you, how do you see that shaking out, you know, to be in these next few years, assuming

(01:16:47):
Trump does win?
So I was there for Trump's speech and like somebody made the comment saying that from
the way that he's spoken to speech, you can tell that he really doesn't understand Bitcoin
well yet.
I mean, it's fairly new to him.
So I don't expect him to know a lot, especially that comment at the end about play with your

(01:17:09):
Bitcoin.
It's like, whatever, you know, but like you said, and to me, what I consider for that
moment to be is like, and not just the moment, but last night, no, today he spoke about Bitcoin
again, whatever he did event at lunchtime.
So he mentioned Bitcoin again.
To me, he's the world's largest billboard for Bitcoin.

(01:17:30):
And it's just like, that's freaking awesome.
That helps mass adoption.
Rather he personally likes it or doesn't personally like it.
The other thing that I pay attention to is who does he surround himself with that is
into Bitcoin.
And you have RFK that's supposed to be joining you.
I got Elon Musk this talking about joining you got VP Vans who admitted that he owns

(01:17:51):
a million dollars worth of Bitcoin, roughly a million between ETFs and personal Bitcoin.
So just that alone is awesome.
Vivek.
Vivek.
Vivek and a Bitcoin.
From when, if I'm hoping that he wins, I'm gonna lie.
But if he wins and he has that type of cabinet and they do drill baby drill, then yeah, you're

(01:18:16):
going to have energy in Texas and the Dakotas and other places where the prices are going
to drop.
And then I see an incentive being pushed out to where they say, okay, let's just say,
you know, we're on this grid and this substation over here has 60 megawatts in the middle of

(01:18:36):
nowhere and it's not being used.
If you miners come with your own capex and bring containers over here and connect to
this grid, then we're going to give you a certain mining rate that's cheaper than anything
else because we would rather have 3.5 cents than nothing.
You know, so there's a lot of substations out there on the grids.

(01:18:58):
He's not being used, just sitting there wasting.
So I see things like that happening.
But you still have certain parts of the world and sad to say we're kind of in my own backyard
with this problem, but Duke Energy is our grid provider and you still have some of the
old school fiat heads in charge and who have monopoly and whatever they say goes.

(01:19:25):
And there are some of them are in a learning curve right now and some of them are still
stubborn.
But like if you go down to Georgia Power, for example, you could sit down at the negotiating
table and have three, four energy companies that they're fighting for your service.
So you can actually negotiate a rate if you're starting from the ground up.

(01:19:45):
But in Duke, it's like, this is what you get, take it or go somewhere else.
So that has to change because you have these utility commission folks that make the decision
about what the energy company does and they have these relationships and it's all political
behind the scenes.
Prime example, Duke Energy made $6 billion in profits last year, but then they raised

(01:20:09):
their rates a few months ago.
It's like, why are you raising rates if you made so much money in profits last year?
And then they say, well, because of AI coming in, we need more energy, but we need more
money to build new sites for new energy.
So it's like, why don't you just bring miners in and then balance it that way?

(01:20:30):
You can balance the grid with mining.
It's so funny whenever I hear things, sometimes you'll see a headline that's like, oh, this
much, there's this much flared methane every year and we have to do something about this
or some other such headline or like this case, we need to build out more energy infrastructure,
but we have to pay for it.

(01:20:51):
And it's like, huh, if only there was a way, if only there, and it's like, well, you know,
Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining, it's there, it exists.
In North Carolina, we have tobacco plants that are shut down 10, 20 years ago.
You have upholstery shops where they made jeans or whatever.

(01:21:12):
And these plants, they have substations on site, but the grass is six feet tall and the
towns are so small, they don't have enough money in their account for them to go and
keep it up and make it look pretty.
You can literally just have miners come in and clean the whole thing up and start mining
and give jobs.
And then you can have some money go back to the city to fix potholes and things of that

(01:21:36):
nature.
So it's like these rural towns in North Carolina can be revitalized through Bitcoin mining.
And this is something that I'm actually a part of with something called the North Carolina
Blockchain Initiative, NCBI.
So it's me and a half a dozen other people that are all experts in their own right, rather

(01:21:56):
it's be a crypto lawyer or Dan Spooler from Washington, DC, he's heading it all.
But we're under Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson and what we're doing, we've been educating
politicians and we've been working with Duke Energy and some of the people that are working
at Duke Energy to try to orange peel, basically.
So through this process, we're kind of hoping that we can make a turn here in the future

(01:22:21):
and get things on the right track.
Do you think that that kind of is the, that's the optimistic future for mining in America
is a lot of this, these cases like this, these towns that are all over rural America.
I mean, you know, every state has these types of towns that used to make something and now

(01:22:42):
they don't anymore.
And those towns have gotten run down, but they may still have some of that infrastructure
in place.
They do.
Do you see this kind of, you know, almost a rural renaissance happening enabled by Bitcoin
mining if we, you know, as long as we don't make make life hell for Bitcoin miners?
It all depends back to politics and which side of politics you're on.

(01:23:06):
Like I said, I was a truck driver.
I used to do well tankers, but then after that I did deliveries with box trucks and other
18 wheeler stuff.
So I got a lot of miles under my belt from my early days where I would go through small
towns and I would go through, I could tell just from driving through.
That's all I did from the beginning of the entrance.
It says, welcome to whatever the name of the town to have a good day at the end.

(01:23:30):
I would go around the courthouse and you could see for rent, for rent, for rent and just
three cars parked over here, two cars parked over there.
And I'm like, this is a democratic run city.
And sure enough, you look at the leadership and it's on that side of the house.
And then you get to the Republican side of towns and it's like these small towns are
booming with flower shops with whatever, like the local farmers market is super active

(01:23:56):
and there's cars, there's little, there's traffic throughout the day in these small
towns.
They're booming.
Those are the local community leaders that are making the right decisions about where
to spend money and where do they make money from.
And it's technically, those are the towns that are more friendly towards an open dialogue
to the mining community and learning and saying, hey, you know what?

(01:24:22):
It doesn't hurt to give it a try and see what happens.
Let's do a one or two year contract with these people.
And then from there, they see money flowing in and they're like, hey, this is, this is
dope.
And they, we got five new jobs.
They opened up and one town in Georgia, it was crickets.
They had one police officer and that one cop couldn't, it is like, I don't know, I think

(01:24:43):
1500 people were living in this town.
But because of the minor that they accepted to come in, to take over this, this facility,
they made enough revenue in one year to where they bought a new police car and hired a second
police officer and upgraded their fire truck.
So it's like, miners did that, you know, that's dope.

(01:25:03):
Like we're helping to revitalize these small communities that are open-minded though.
And for right now, it's sorry to say it's between these two political parties, rather
or not, they're open-minded about it.
You know, it's a shame because I truly believe that Bitcoin is, is apolitical, right?
Like if you are, let's, you identify someone who is a conservative person, there's a lot

(01:25:25):
to love about Bitcoin, right?
This is a return to sound money.
This is something that is, is incentivizing a hopefully smaller government and more localism.
But even if you identify as a progressive, there's a lot to love about Bitcoin.
This is a fucking revolution here.
This is a, this is literally progress.
This is, this is what progress looks like.

(01:25:47):
This is what progressing looks like.
And so I think it's so, it's a shame that folks on the left have not embraced Bitcoin
more because it comes from a lot of media brainwashing that's out there and I'm paying
too much attention to that.
But you know, I think we all know from personal experience that what does it take to understand

(01:26:10):
Bitcoin or to start to understand it?
Well, it takes an openness.
It takes a willingness to admit that maybe how you think things work is not how they
really work and that there's a lot of shit going on behind the scenes that you just wanted
to cover your eyes and not pay attention to.
But if you're willing to admit that, you know what, maybe I didn't understand how money
works very well.
Maybe I didn't understand how this political racket game of kleptocracy works very well.

(01:26:34):
If you're willing to admit that to set aside your priors, well, then you're ready to start
learning about Bitcoin.
And I think that maybe folks on the right have been more willing to do that because they're
starting from a position of less trust in the government to begin with, you know what
I mean?
But I hope, I mean, I sincerely hope that Bitcoin ends up being something that is accepted

(01:26:56):
and loved by folks no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on.
And I think that it is at a small level, but when we talk about the national conversation
or even to your point, a local conversation, there's still, I mean, you're talking about
this from experience.
You've seen a difference in terms of their receptiveness to Bitcoin miners coming in.

(01:27:17):
And ultimately, it's a, it should be a pretty easy yes.
It's like Bitcoin miners want to come in here and they want to bring us more revenue and
bring us more jobs.
Why the heck do you turn that down?
So I hope that we see a little more openness to this on the left side of the aisle.
And ultimately, I think maybe Bitcoin is something that brings folks a little bit closer together,

(01:27:40):
closer to the center at the end of the day, because it's something that we should all
be able to agree on.
At least, you know, I hope because Bitcoin doesn't care, right?
That's the beauty of it.
Doesn't care if you're red or blue, Bitcoin just is.
And that's a beautiful thing.
And I hope that that's something that brings folks closer together.
I'm looking forward to a future where the country could almost be like the conferences that

(01:28:01):
we attend.
I don't care if you're gay, black, fat, skinny, short, white, it doesn't matter.
Everybody's there for the same reasons.
And it's to me, Bitcoin conferences are like a neutral zone.
And I think as a nation, it would be nice to be that way, you know, where everybody
understands, all right, we need to do things the proper way.
We need better money.

(01:28:21):
At the end of the day, all the problems we have in this country, they all lead back to
one freaking thing.
And that's the money.
And if we can fix that, then from there, trickle down everything else will fix itself over
time.
So, yeah, no, I agree.
I mean, yeah, fix the money, fix the world, right?
It's not just a cliche.
Like, it's a, we really have to, anything else that we do, any other political solution

(01:28:45):
that doesn't start with fixing the money.
Well, that's not a cure.
That's just a, you know, it's a bandaid on a chainsaw wound.
Like, it's, it might, maybe makes you feel a little bit better, but it's not doing much.
You know, you got to get down to that base layer.
And I think that's, that is also why I have so much hope in the future, though, because
I see things like, that's the great thing about going to conferences and being with
Bitcoiners in person is that you see people, they may not agree on one damn thing, but

(01:29:11):
except for Bitcoin is good.
And that's enough.
No, we, we need more things like that, that, that bring us together instead of tearing
us apart and creating these artificial divides that just, what do those divides do?
Well, that's just a tool for us all to be controlled.
Cause like we said earlier, you're too busy fighting your neighbor or fighting with your
family to realize that you're being robbed blind by the government.

(01:29:33):
You know?
Yeah.
The whole tax side of things.
That's a whole, yeah, we, we could have a whole nother show about that.
But hey, I want to be conscious of your time here because this has been a great rip and
I just want to check.
Is there anything that you wanted to cover today that we, that we didn't get a chance
to talk about at all?
Yeah.

(01:29:56):
There is something that I think is pretty dope in the Bitcoin community.
I don't know if, yeah, you can do it to a bottom cause you're actually involved in it.
Those Bitcoin trading cards?
Bitcoin trading cards.
They're, they're dope.
Like I got all into it.
Like this right here is a $1,200 pack because it's from the first series.

(01:30:18):
Like they're, they're, the reason why I got into it is because when I went to the conference,
you know how you had all the booths over there and you got two people here, five people here,
10 people here, but then I look at this 40 people standing around this small little booth
and I'm like, what the heck is going on over there?
And then everybody's buying these and training cards and they're all involved in it.

(01:30:40):
And I bought a deck and ripped it open and I ended up getting a box.
And then the owner Aladdin, he was like, yeah, I asked about a Michael Saylor card because
I, you know, I had my, my will banned and I wanted to see if I can get close to Michael
Saylor to get him to sign it.
And he was like, yeah, nobody's been able to do that yet since we started this.

(01:31:02):
So that was like a challenge to me, a challenge accepted.
So I ended up taking my sneaker right here.
Basically these sneakers are, I bring them to all the conferences and I get a lot of
the Bitcoin, the big shots on the Bitcoin space to sign them.

(01:31:23):
So you got like Jack Dorsey, Michael Saylor, Adam Back, Tone Vase, Alex Gladstein, Alex,
I mean, Max Kaiser, but I didn't have Michael Saylor on the shoe.
So I took the shoe and I finally intercepted him between him and his security.

(01:31:45):
And I was like, sir, I've been trying to get you to sign the shoe for a few conferences
now.
Can you please sign it this time?
So he's like, okay.
So he signs it and I get it on video, but then I had this Michael Saylor card right here
and it was in my top pocket and he was about to walk off and I'm like, sir, can you please

(01:32:05):
sign one more thing, please?
And we're in an open space though.
You know that the place for the conference was pretty open.
And he was like, well, there's no table.
Where do I even put it?
So I flipped the shoe upside and put the card right there.
And he looked at me like, that's some slick shit.
So I actually got two of these signed.

(01:32:27):
I had two of them on me.
I got two of them signed in there.
The first ones in the world signed by Michael Saylor.
One of them the owner of the company has and the other one I have from my museum.
But I've had into it ever since and now I have like binders and stuff with all the coolest,
some of the coolest cards ever made by them.
Because if you think like getting into Pokemon early, like I looked it up online.

(01:32:50):
Pokemon has printed 64 billion cards since they came out with a B.
There's 8 billion people on the planet.
And out of those 64 billion, you still have super rare, expensive cards that are rare,
collector stuff, you know, on the highest scale.
Here we are with cards and including you guys that are on yours because you're in it.

(01:33:15):
He has not even, I think he's close to only 1 million printed.
Compare 1 million after two years of doing this to 64 billion.
Like we're very early on this and like look how beautiful these cards are with the hologram
glitter stuff and the designs that they come up with is pretty dope.

(01:33:36):
And I see this like kind of like Bitcoin.
You got the serial number in the back that says one out of 21.
This is this card right here.
I think right now is six, 700 bucks, but it'll four, five, $6,000 in a few years.
Who knows?
And it's just fun, right?
Like it's just a lot.
Yeah.
And that's the big thing.

(01:33:57):
Like, you know, they've done such a good job over there.
Aladdin's an awesome dude.
And the fact that they build education into everything that they're doing, like they're,
you know, we're not talking about, you know, baseball stats in the back of these things,
you know, or made up, you know, a Pokemon characteristics.
We're talking about really great distilled Bitcoin knowledge on the back of these.

(01:34:18):
So if you got, you know, kids or adults are trading them around, it's like you're learning
something.
I just, I think that's beautiful.
I have them in my truck.
I have them in my truck.
I have them in my pocket.
And every time I run into somebody and I have a conversation about Bitcoin right before
the end conversation is done, I pull this out, I hand this to them and I was like, there's
all kinds of information with hope.com and other websites in the back of it.

(01:34:40):
These cards, please get educated.
And then I also now tell them, watch God bless Bitcoin.
I think that's a pretty dope documentary that helps understand newbies.
So like my neighbor, he just moved in, bought a house down the street.
I caught him walking his dog and I told him about Bitcoin.
Orange peeled him and I said, Hey, go watch God bless Bitcoin.
And he just finished watching it yesterday.

(01:35:01):
And he was the one, one of the ones that said, now the US dollars the strongest thing in the
world and, you know, pull out a $20 bill.
I can touch it.
I can see it.
I'm not going to stop using that.
You know, it's like, now he's got it.
He opened up his mind to at least watch the documentary and that opened up his mind to
continue down the rabbit hole now.
And now he has a different point of view on it in just one day.

(01:35:25):
That's an effective orange pill right there.
Yeah.
And you pair that with a cool back.
It's something physical that you can hand them and then they see it sitting on their
desk later or whatever and like, let me look at it.
Cause if you just tell somebody something, most likely they'll forget about it.
The people that don't have nothing to see when you tell them about it are the types
of people that usually have to hear Bitcoin three times from three different people in

(01:35:47):
three different places before they start taking it seriously.
It's kind of a psychological thing.
I don't know why, but that's one reason why I also open my mouth and public like I'm
at public, some grocery shopping.
And I literally just do something like a small as making a joke to the lady in front of me
asking the cashier, do you guys accept Bitcoin?

(01:36:08):
And that's all I say, but my comment might, I might be the third person to that woman.
And then she goes home and she's like, dang, that's the third time I heard somebody say
Bitcoin.
Let me go look this up.
I might, I had no conversation with her except that, Hey, you accept Bitcoin?
That's it.
But I might be the second person or the third person or the first, I don't know, but it's

(01:36:29):
a part of the mass adoption process.
Now it is so important.
It's just, it's those, those continued touch points because you never know when something's
going to be this bark that makes somebody say, you know what, I need to look into this thing.
And it's beautiful.
And you know, I want to say thank you for your time here today.
This was, this was fascinating.
I appreciate the history of, of the, of the mining industry too, because that's just cool.

(01:36:51):
Where do you want to send people?
I'll link, make sure to link in the show notes to your social media, but should they head
to the museum website?
Where do you want to send people to on X?
It's BTC mining museum.
And then the website, which we built from the ground up, shots out to Tyler and Parker
and Lance.
I have a five man crew with the museum that helps out.

(01:37:14):
They helped build the website.
That's called Bitcoin mining museum.com.
Right now I do want to point out that these conferences, I'm learning now that as the
museum grows in size and value, because there's value in all this four years of life.
This legwork of building and putting it all together and having the history to show when

(01:37:38):
I drive from here to a thousand miles to Miami, or I've drove it all the way to Austin, Texas
with it before a three day trip, you're pulling a trailer, you know, it's, I had the experience
of a flat tire and a miner fell off the shelf.
Even though I've got custom shelves with foam in them and stuff to protect them.

(01:37:59):
And the leaf spring hit the ground and it smacked so hard that a miner fell off and it broke.
Luckily it was not a very rare miner.
I was able to replace it.
But then I get to the conference and somebody drinking alcohol and give bumps into it on
the table and another one broke.
And then I'm thinking to myself, what is if I get T-boned on my way home a thousand miles

(01:38:20):
back home and all of my history is gone in one freaking accident?
Then what?
It's like I'm at that brick and mortar moment now where I have to preserve and it doesn't
have to be me.
I can pass the baton to somebody that has the capex that has a facility in Miami or in
some popular place like Nashville or whatever that has a lot of Bitcoiners that can take

(01:38:43):
the baton and then I'm a part of the process with the transition with my team where we
can still continue to help out or whatever, but for it to grow in a centralized location
and then maybe even build a small mobile one to take the conferences that's extra like
these behind me, these are extra.
These can go to the museum to the conference while there's the main ones stay put and are
protected because like imagine Apple Steve Jobs, he made his first 200 machines with

(01:39:12):
the Apple One computer in his garage at home.
That's what that Avalon One is for Bitcoin.
That's an Apple One for Bitcoin basically.
If that breaks and there's only a handful left in the world and I don't know how to
replace it because I don't know anybody else that has them but me, what do you do?
So it's like we have to preserve this history.

(01:39:32):
The people that are the kids that are coming out today and they have their Apple 15 or
whatever number we're at in S24, that's how they're starting off their technology is with
this new technology.
How do they know or learn about the history if it doesn't exist of where Bitcoin started?
So I would love to put the word out there that if any Michael Saylor's of the world

(01:39:53):
or I don't know Jack Dorsey that might have some of the capex to help preserve some of
this stuff and come up with something cool.
It doesn't have to be a boring museum either.
It could be the world's first Bitcoin event center where Bitcoin Maxis can rent the place
out for their wedding and be surrounded with a history of Bitcoin and have these mission

(01:40:15):
impossible laser lights shooting over this thing back here and have the Genesis block
all over the floor with S9 LED lights hanging off the ceiling.
It sounds pretty badass to me.
I've renewed my vows there with my wife.
That sounds like a blast.
Field trips for schools.

(01:40:37):
Schools that start getting into Bitcoin, they can do a field trip to this event center during
the day and get educated over there and then even have a bar with some grill on the side
or some steakhouse that serves drinks that are called creme de la chreme like Charlie
Shrem keep the legacy alive for some of these grime.
Some Bailey's Irish cream creme de la chreme.

(01:40:59):
I don't know.
You got to start a menu already.
Yeah.
I love it.
Well, I hope somebody takes you up on that and if you're listening and sounds like you
might want to be that person publicly or anonymously, reach out to the coin dad because it's a beautiful
thing that you're keeping this history alive and educating people on it.

(01:41:20):
And so I thank you for that because it's something that needs to be preserved and I'm glad that
you're doing it.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
It's not a lot of people out there on a stage that appreciate this yet because I feel like
even though Bitcoin's early, I'm even earlier with the idea of a museum.
But the conference events of the type of people, I've had a 10, 12 year old kid come up with

(01:41:45):
his mom and ask questions of how he can start mining at his mother's cabin in the mountains
in Virginia because it's cold and they want to have some heat in there while he's making
Bitcoin and the kids just became a teenager.
So it's like, and then having a 80, I had probably 75, 80 year old grandmother that came through
and asked questions about mining.
So it's like this wide range of people at these conferences that see the museum and

(01:42:09):
start asking questions and wanting to get involved.
So I think that's important to preserve the history and that's what I've been working
on.
I can imagine.
But now I'm at the point where I can't do it anymore on my own.
It's time for the next phase and if anybody's out there listening, reach out to me and we
would love to make something else happen.

(01:42:30):
Well, that's a perfect note to end on.
Thank you so much for your time.
Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for coming on this one.
Sharing your scarce time with me.
This is a pleasure.
Appreciate you too.
Thank you very much for having me on.

(01:42:51):
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast.
If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
head to BitcoinPodcast.net slash sponsor.
If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast, consider giving the show a five star review wherever
you listen or sharing the show with your friends, family and strangers on the internet.

(01:43:13):
Or don't Bitcoin doesn't care, but I always appreciate it.
You can find me on Noster by going to primal.net slash Walker.
If you want to follow the Bitcoin podcast on Twitter, go to at Titcoin podcast and at
Walker America.
You can also find the video version of this podcast at youtube.com slash at Walker America
and at Walker America on rumble, or just go to Bitcoin podcast.net slash podcast and find

(01:43:40):
links everywhere.
Coin is scarce.
There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.

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The Past, Present & Future of Bitcoin Mining - The Coin Dad (THE Bitcoin Podcast)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Past, Present & Future of Bitcoin Mining - The Coin Dad (THE Bitcoin Podcast)