Bitcoin mining and diesel engines with Travis Bitckle

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

Now, what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back. Today's episode of "Pleb Minor in the Wild" is with Travis Bickle. This was a really great conversation with John and Travis. They talked about all things mining, different types of setups, and when put deep on diesel engines, Volkswagen's especially.

This is a special interest of mine, so I particularly enjoyed this. At the end of the episode, John put Travis on the spot and kind of set him up to fail here, unfortunately. He asked him who has influenced and who has helped him in his mining journey.

At the end, Travis wrote back and said, "Fuck, I've messed up here. "I didn't say my wife, that's the most important. "His wife and his family." So Travis wanted to share a special thank you to his wife, mother of his children, washer of his underwear, and the one who's loved him into the successful person and Pleb Minor he is today.

Thank you to Travis's wife, and thank you to all our loved ones who suffer through our Bitcoin mania. We love you all. As with being all sweet and emotional, I wanna say a huge thank you to everybody who has helped me over the years.

My family and friends, and so many of the listeners who have become friends, the people who have reached out and helped to show in so many different ways, and the ones who are particularly close to me.

You know who you are. You really have helped me more than you can ever know in the last few weeks. Things have been particularly tough, and those of you who've stepped up and come and help me, that won't be forgotten.

Right, because we've got all mushy, we haven't got so long for the ad reads, so I'll do them quickly. Firstly, everyone who's boosting, huge thank you. It's fucking amazing. We're the top show on Fountain, we're the top episode on Fountain.

I can't believe it, we're always up there, and it's down to you guys, so thank you. Also, a huge thank you to Foundation Devices, not only for sponsoring the show, but for making the easiest to use, best looking, fully open source hardware that makes any fuck we're able to secure their sats in a private way.

So if you haven't checked them out already, go to foundation devices.com. You can use my code, ungovernable, and that will get you three months VPN access with IDPM on top of having a beautiful new passable.

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So that's what they've done. I love it, it's absolutely amazing. So check them out at RonanDojo.com, you can use the code ungovernable. And finally, sx6.store. If you haven't already checked them out and you are in the market for a seed plate, you've got literally no reason I didn't buy one of these.

I put a tweet out about it yesterday. They're $16.99, $16.99. If you have a file or a flood or any of those problems that you would have with paper where you lose all of your sats, you wouldn't have that problem if you just spend $16.99.

So check them out at sx6.store. They're fucking amazing. And you can ask me if you have any questions. Right, on with the show.

Today, we have the privilege of observing the elusive and often misunderstood pleb minor. If you listen closely, you'll hear the unmistakable sound of its mating call. To others, the sound is offensive.

But to the pleb, it's a rousing beyond measure. These creatures survive by scouring the earth for energy and scavenging hashrate from others whose over exuberance cost them dearly. The pleb minor may not be at the top of the food chain, but make no mistake.

Its ingenuity, scrappy nature, and unquenchable first for sats make it a force to be reckoned with. Listen to you, fuckers. You screw heads. Here's a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the central bankers, the cunts, the dogs of war, the filth that is the global elite, the shit who devalue our currency

and steal the fruits of our labor. Here is someone who stood up and took Bitcoin mining into his own hands. Here is Travis Pitkel, our pleb minor in the wild. Hello, sir. Good morning. You have been a Bitcoin mining home heating aficionado like myself for quite some time.

My first memory of one of your builds was you do this wall-mounted thing with the S19, then you're exhausting vertically, pulling the air through an inline fan, and then it's ducked it directly into your HVAC.

So tell me about that. That's one of the first builds I've ever seen you do. Can you describe that for everybody? Sure. Well, it's important to take care of your family and keep a happy family and the stock fans on amp miners are just not feasible to have in living space at all.

So I forget who gave me the idea to use the inline fan. One of the telegram groups, Home Mining Wizards, or something like that. And I did a little research on those fans, and they're expensive, but they're high quality.

And so far, I've been running some of these fans for a boy over a year, I think, now. And they work great. So you need to tune it down a little bit, right, or to make it quieter. And I forget what the stock fans produce.

I want to say something like 400 CFM. And I think these AC Infinity fans are 800 CFM, something like that, at full loss. And they work pretty good. They work excellent, actually. And I found-- so I was looking for a 3D printed duct to connect the fan to the miner.

And Mr. John Fruits produces one that has feet. So you can bolt it to a wall or mount the thing vertically. And I like that idea to save some space and keep it nice and tidy. And I guess the rest is history.

It just works. I started running those machines in the basement connected to the HVAC system, just with the stock AC Infinity controller. And then our friend Mr. Baumsta came out with the Njordboard Cloudline Control Board for those and upgraded those machines further.

Instead of just letting them run at 60% or 70% all the time, you have fluctuation with your chip temperature, depending on the ambient air, right? Well, now they run on auto. And we can hit a target set point.

So right now, actually, I'm home right now, and I'm trying to get reconfigured for, let's say, winter mode, right? So I had some of these machines in the garage, and I'm in the process of moving them back to the basement.

So right now, I actually have two out of the three in position, and they're running in low-power mode and hitting a chip temp of 55 degrees Celsius. And the fans are running at about 60% or something like that.

So actually, it's pretty hot right now. And I've got those two machines on low-power just dumping into my HVAC right now, but it's hot out right now. We've got the air conditioner running, and the air conditioner can overtake that.

And so I'm sure it's running a bit more than it needs to be, but I don't care because we're only home for a short time here for a visit. And then I'll be heading back out west for work again for probably three months.

So they can just run on autopilot, and I can remote in and control them up and down, or I'm on a demand response program with the utility. So 50 hours a year, I get a demand response call to power down, otherwise I'm at $1.17 a kilowatt hour for those demand response times.

So they ran for basically all summer in the garage, and my dad was coming over to cut the grass and stuff like that and take care of the house and check things over. And I mean, knock on wood, they just ran all summer.

No issues. So I'm gonna get reconfigured for winter mode and by moving a couple back to the basement, that opens up a couple more welder plugs, or some 220 plugs up in the garage. And so I actually, with miners being so cheap as they are, here more recently, I have a couple new machines.

So I'm really close to maxing out my panel, I have a 200 amp panel. And right now I was running some tests with what I have right now with the AC kicking on and a few things running. I think I was up to like 138, 138 amps on them, on the main leg coming into the panel.

So that's like getting close, right? But I have one more machine coming, a new M50. What's mine or might be my first what's minor? And that's gonna run in the garage while I'm gone. And since we don't have, we won't be here for a while, you know, this is my excuse to, you know, fill up those slots and just let them run, you know.

- Can you explain the details of your demand response program? A residential demand response program isn't particularly typical if it's not like a, you know, a disconnect from your AC or a particular appliance in your home.

So can you give us the details on that? - Well, I was just surfing around the utilities website and they have, it's really called small, let's see here. I think it's called small business response rewards.

And if you're over 12,500 kilowatt hours in a month, I had to be that way for three months. If you had that amount of usage over three months, then you could enroll in this program, right?

And what they do is I get an email, I get a phone call when the demand response times come and I can log into my home network and just power the miners down, right? So I'm, I don't remember the numbers right off top my head, but I'm saving a little bit there.

I wanna say that my on peak costs are down. Let me think about this for a second. I wanna say I'm saving like a five cents on peak, something like that and three or four cents off peak. So yeah, I mean, I'm hanging in there right now, I mean with the hash price being where it is, you know, I'm not getting rich doing this.

It's a hobby, it's for fun. You know, I hope that when I'm an old man and the grandkids, I'll, I'm doing it for the glory. Let's just say it that way. And I hope the grandkids will be like, grandpa had a pet of hash out of his house in 23, you know, or something like that, you know.

So as long as, I mean, I think it's cool as long as you can just barely eco to profit, you know, you're mining for less than you can buy it, right? So that's all I'm looking for. So right now I'm looking at, well, I'm home here, I wanna set up, you can, there's a Linux program called PiASIC and you can set your miners

to run on a schedule. And I think what I'm gonna do is set them up so that they for on peak time, move to low power mode during that period. And I think I'll, I'll mine a little bit less Bitcoin, but I'll, you know, I'll save a little more fiat that way.

- Sure. You can also use Rails by Linkcoin. I'll do a little Linkcoin commercial at the same time. - Right on. - Get it in whenever I can. So you're on a small business response reward program and you have to be under 12 kilowatts.

But if you're gonna add machines, you're gonna be right there at that border. - I need to be over 12. - Over 12, okay. - 12,500 kilowatt hours in a month, right? - Okay. - So that's just what they have here locally.

Now they do have another program. If you get over 25,000, it's even a better deal. And I don't know if I can cram that much to that, get to that 400 amp panel and you'll be cooking. - That's right.

That's right. So like, I don't know if I can squeeze that through a 200 amp panel. I just, that would really be pushing it. - That would be a no. (both laughing) So you do this for the glory.

You know, in a lot of home heating, home situations with home heating and the right price that you can be profitable, but it's not easy, especially given that now the average price of residential electricity is probably 12, 14 cents kilowatt hour.

You know, when I first started mining, I think my home rate was seven cents straight up. You know, that was with, I'm in a deregulated market. So my supplier charge was four cents, I think, at that time.

And then I got like another three cents on that with distribution. The only reason I'm profitable now is 'cause I have some kind of unicorn scam deal with this green energy company that charges me a flat rate.

And then couple that in winter time, where I can crank these machines as far as they'll go and pipe them into different sections of my house. I don't have, I have central air, but it is a high efficiency system.

And the intake, you really can't be messing around with pumping air into that because the, this high efficiency system, it's more of like a pressure thing. You know, the air kind of stays in there, pressurized longer to pick up the heat or pick up the cooling.

So I tend not to pipe that directly in. I'll pipe the heated air near it, near the, the intake. And I do something similar with inline fans and have for a while where one of my designs was I had two S19s in a very large box.

And the bottom of the box had filtered air coming in and then a top was ducted out with two inline fans on the top. The same thought process that you have with pulling the air, instead of putting the inline fan on one end.

I know you have an opinion on this and I'd like to hear you describe it to other people. You're a polar, not a pusher. So I can do describe your thoughts on, on why you pull the air through the machine as opposed to pushing it on the other side.

- Suck versus blow, right? - Well, I didn't want to be crass. - Okay, sure. - Yeah, right on, so there was somebody who had a YouTube video on this and they had a FLIR camera on the minor and they set it up in the blow or the push configuration.

- You could say below, I was just kidding. I mean, you know. - Yeah, I believe I said cunt and shit in the first in the intro, so we're good. - It's all good. So like in the blow position, this guy had a camera, FLIR camera on the minor and what he had shown there was that the gaps along the hashboards

into the control board space was pushing hot air from the hashboards into the control board enclosure. Now, I don't know if I don't think there's any issue with that or, you know, from what I understand, it's not gonna, you know, melt your control board or anything.

- Yeah, control boards are pretty tough. There's not much to them. - Right, so, you know, I just saw that and I thought, well, why not, you know, the Suck configuration or the discharge side put the fan on and you'll accomplish mostly the same thing.

Now, I think you lose a little bit of cooling efficiency that way. The pressure is gonna be lower around the heat sinks and the hashboards and that in that configuration, but I've found it, it works just fine.

So like maybe the fans running 5% faster or something. I'm just guessing I don't have any real evidence with that, but my only thought was, yeah, let's just not blow heat into the control board enclosure.

That's the main reason. - Yeah, some of these newer shroud configurations that you mentioned that you use the, was it John Fruits and Associates? - Right. - Shroud. Rick has one, another guy that we know auto with Nakamoto mining have all these new shrouds and they're connecting up to the power supply also and capturing that.

So it does really work in the Suck configuration 'cause then you get to pull the power supply heat off as well. - Correct. - You're a gear head, right? - Yeah, I guess, you know, recovering gear head.

I, I, for the last, like I've been driving Volkswagen diesels for a number of years, I don't know, like 15-ish years, something like that, but I converted an old Volkswagen jetter to run on straight vegetable oil and then I had a Passat that I did the same thing with but I refined the system and I traveled for work.

I'm in construction and the Passat I drove all over the country, I drove to South Carolina to Kentucky to Louisiana and I, I had an external, well, an additional fuel tank in the trunk of that car and it was a 15 gallon tank for the waste vegetable oil filtered and it was completely heat traced fuel system.

I had a heat exchanger in there and a heat, a heated fuel filter and the time I went to Louisiana, I brought a bunch of jugs of oil, filtered oil with me and I drove all the way to Louisiana from Wisconsin, worked for a month down there and then made it all the way back to, I think, Indianapolis before I had to buy any diesel.

So it was a dual fuel car, basically, to run a vegetable oil or diesel and I had a range just with the two fuel tanks of about 13 to 1400 miles, you know? So that was, I was always been like a tinkerer with stuff like that and so like, you know, that was my previous hobby and now I'm, you know, now I'm invested in these miners.

Then the last, I still have this car, it's a diesel Volkswagen, a sport wagon and I blew up the engine on that one twice and, you know, big, big turbo and can't put in these camshafts that were allegedly drop in safe, right?

And they were not, they were interference so I had some valve to piston action and some spectacular engine catastrophes there but I've got it dialed in now and it's stable and I enjoy driving it and it, you know, does burn on some stuff and it's good enough for me right now.

So I don't want to mess with it really anymore and I'm just driving it, my wife hates it though. She's like, you were in this car, it's terrible, you know? - She has on a drive and I'm sure.

- No, but you know, now that we're back home here, this is our one car we have to peel around, you know, for this week, but, so, but she's driving. - This is the dual fuel vegetable oil car or this is just some soup, no turbo.

- No, when we moved to our new house, we, I got rid of all of my vegetable oil infrastructure. I actually built a centrifuge to filter the oil out of stainless pipe and it was creating this, like mist of oil so like you'd run the, you'd heat the oil up to filter it and it'd run through this centrifuge

and it would like create this oily mist that like coated everything in the garage. It was, you know, sticky goo, everything and I didn't want to bring that into my new, my new place, my new garage.

So I ended up giving away a lot of that stuff and then I sold the vegetable oil car, which was getting terribly rusty. And so I've been out of that for probably five years now. - I went down that rabbit hole for a long time.

There was a guy named Stephen Chastain, I think was his name and he had a company called US Filter Max, like M-A-X-X and he did black diesel. You know, take old oil and cut it with kerosene and filter it out and run it straight.

Your dual fueled vehicle, did you have to switch anything? Was it some kind of different filter or different injectors or you could just put any, could you mix the diesel and vegetable oil in at the same time or what was the configuration to go between the two?

- Yeah, so it was a two tank system and you have solenoid valves that switch between the two fuels, right? So you always want to start up and shut down on diesel so you don't have vegetable oil in the injectors or they'll mean plugged, right?

- Okay. - That's cold. - Look it all gummed up. - That's right. So you warm up on diesel, once you're warmed up and the engine's hot, then you can switch over because it's using the engine coolant to preheat the oil, right?

You don't want to put cold oil on the engine either. I heard it described this way. Imagine a cast iron frying pan on your stove and if you put that pan cold on the stove and you put some oil in it and then you turn the burner on, the oil will begin to smoke and then burn to the pan and it'll be like all caked out of the pan.

Now, if you put that pan on the stove, turned on the stove and got that pan nice and hot and then you dump the little oil on it, the oil will bounce around and it will not adhere to that metal and burn to it and cake it all up and gum it all and destroy your, you know, get carbon attached to all the internal parts.

You want all those internal parts at full temperature before you put any oil on it. So there was a completely heat traced fuel system that was like a counterflow heat exchanger that used engine coolant.

There was a heat exchanger in the tank and then a heated fuel filter that preheated the oil. And what I found with that, the last car that I did this with, it would take like 30 to 40 minutes for that whole, like if they're, imagine if the car was parked outside and it was 20 below zero, that's like an ice block,

a 15 gallon ice block in the trunk, right, that you're trying to warm up. And so that's a lot of thermal mass to, you know, you got to dump a lot of BTUs in there before it, you know, so I didn't have good heat in that car.

We'll see it that way. You know, it took about twice the amount of coolant so it was like two gallons of coolant in the system instead of one gallon, right? So you're heating more coolant up to and then you're heating up all that oil.

And so, I mean, there were drawbacks, right? There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs, right? But it worked really well. Other than that, I drove it all over the place. - When people start talking about the vegetable oil car and, you know, the cute thing, like, oh, you drive around town and you smell like French fries.

- Mm-hmm. - You know, they pretty people kind of get off on that. I had a buddy that had an old Mercedes and did the same thing. But eventually, he just got sick of it, too, that it's not practical.

But is it practical for Bitcoin mining? We had a diesel generator, you had access to all this vegetable oil or you had access to used motor oil or like, I get a guy down the street on a farm that has a pump jack in his front yard that is always full of crude oil.

You know, like we've said to him before, like, hey, why don't you get that thing empty? And he's like, oh, somebody's supposed to come by and take it and then never do. So do you think it's practical to get old diesel engines and hook them up to a generator and use black diesel and vegetable oil or crude

or whatever the hell you can burn in there? - Yeah, there was a guy, wasn't there a guy in like Costa Rica that was doing this? And he had just a handful, he had a small generator and some miners.

This was a while back. - Well, there was a logo's Bitcoin and I think that's in Guatemala. - Okay, there you go. - 'Cause Chet was down there, actually, and worked with them for a little bit.

Bitcoin Lake is what it's called and they were using the vegetable oil, like the locals were dumping the vegetable oil in the lake to get rid of it. And they were like, well, why are you doing that?

We'll just take the vegetable oil and they're mining Bitcoin. But it seems like a pretty exhaustive process. You'd need some kind of structure around where people just happen to use a lot of vegetable oil, but is it practical in the sense of driving around town and buying that used oil from McDonald or not McDonald's,

but you know, a local restaurant, or, you know, going around to discount auto parts or local shops where they have used waste oil and filtering it and mining Bitcoin with it. - If you can get the source, so I had a sweet hookup for oil.

I had a friend who worked at like a Fiat food plant, right? - Donut shop, sweet hookup. - This place that I was getting oil from, what they were doing is like making like frozen jalapeno poppers and french fries and stuff like that, where they pre-fry that stuff.

Like before it. And if they got a contamination, like something, the operator screwed up and burnt something in there and it made the oil kind of like burned or whatever, they dumped the whole thing and I was getting like 500 gallons at a shot.

I sense have lost that hookup, you know, that's five years ago, six years ago, I would go and collect two totes full, like, you know, those 275 gallon plastic totes and had a pump and I'd go there and I'd pump it out and fill my totes and like I was done for a while.

You know, so that was highly efficient and I wish I still had that resource because yeah, why not? But the other thing you have to remember though, is that you really need, if you don't want to destroy the engine that you're burning this stuff in, you need to make sure that it's filtered properly.

There's no water in it. A lot of times there's like, I've seen, you know, I started just collecting that oil from, you know, bars and restaurants and stuff like that. And you know, if they fry chicken, there's like a lot of chicken fat and stuff in there.

And you can actually tell the quality of the oil just by looking at it. Like, if it's dark, that's okay, but it's got to be transparent. Like, if you hold it up a jug to the light and it's dark, but you can see through it, it's not opaque, it's probably okay.

And then you can filter it. Now, if it's cloudy, there's probably water in it or there's chicken fat in it or something like that. And then that's a different issue to get that stuff out.

So you need to let it settle for a long time and you'll see that the water, my process was something like collect the oil, let it sit for a month after I stirred it up and pumped it, right?

Then you pour off the good stuff off the top, which may be dark but is transparent. And you'll find the stuff on the bottom is the cloudy, goopy stuff that's fat or water. You just keep separating that out until, and what I had was a 55 gallon drum that was like the preheater feed to the centrifuge.

And I dumped that stuff into that 55 gallon drum through a barrel filter on the top, which was like a 400 micron filter to get the bigger chunks. I'd let it sit in there for a while, then I'd heat it up and then I'd run it through the centrifuge and then it would go through another filter

into, I had a repurposed a 275 gallon fuel oil tank and then I had a pump and a little gas pump handle on that and I could just back my car and just fuel up. But the process to filter the oil is really important.

You can't forget about that. Like if you just try to just dump the stuff in, you're not gonna have a good time. It's not gonna work. So there's a lot of work to it. - There's a lot of time input in this and a lot of labor input and you have to have the right connections.

But it sounds somewhat practical if you had all of your ducks in a row. We recently did an interview with Bassload and Troy Cross and Troy Cross just put out an article recently that miners are eventually going to drive the market, the energy market because they are going to search no matter what for the cheapest forms of energy.

So your initial Bitcoin mining build may be built around something like this. - Yeah. - Not in an afterthought sort of way. Like hey, this is where Cisco does a lot of their pre-cooking for their fried shrimp or potatoes or their other restaurant supply stuff and it's in an industrial park and maybe we can use kind of a dual fuel thing.

When it's the weather's right outside, it's not bitterly cold. We might switch over to vegetable oil or black diesel generators. And then when it's practical or we are in some kind of curtailment or demand response program, then we'll switch over to the electric supply stuff.

I do think it is practical even though there seems to be a lot of inputs as far as time and energy and skilled labor as well. That's not simple stuff. - What was your maintenance on these machines?

How often did you have to replace a part, a filter, a fuel pump? - They did good. I mean, yeah, I went through a learning curve trying to burn chicken fat basically and unfiltered fuel, right?

And so what I was finding with that is it would just plug the fuel filter basically and starve the engine on the first build. But once I got that dialed in, it happened a few times where I forgot to switch over and then went to start the car and it wouldn't start.

The way that I started it was I took a heat gun and just aimed it at the injectors for about 10 minutes and just tried to warm it up. - So normal glow plugs won't do it? - No, because the glow plugs heat up the cylinder but they don't really heat up the injectors, right?

- Okay. - Right, so if your injectors is plugged, then it's no fuel flows, right? But here's, all right, I'm gonna, I'll tell you what my next crazy thought is with all this. - Bring it on.

- Yeah, my, you know, I'm in Wisconsin, there's a lot of anaerobic digesters going up and getting built here. And there are, when we talk about all these flare gas getting repurposed for mining, all these farms and anaerobic digesters are gonna have flares.

Some of them are actually installing the scrubbing equipment to make it pipeline grade natural gas basically and then injecting it right into the local infrastructure that way. These farms are often far away from that infrastructure, right?

So there are flares going up here everywhere and I want to buy, you know, a Craigslist special natural gas generator for, you know, a few thousand bucks and just try to run it on this bio gas from an anaerobic digester.

In fact, my neighbor has got a fairly large farm. I think he's had it like 700 heads, something like that and he's putting one in. And so I want to, I want to buddy up with him and be like, I'll buy some of that gas.

If you're just going to flare it, I'll figure something out. What I want, ideally, the best case scenario would be like, hey, how about I give you some of the Bitcoin in mind with it, right?

You know, maybe I can get them going that way a little bit but the problem with bio gas is that it has hydrogen sulfide in it and that is not friendly to an internal combustion engine. It will make the oil acidic and create a problem.

- Now, my thought is you can mitigate that from what I understand in a couple of ways. I mean, you can scrub the gas first but that's big infrastructure and high costs to do that. You can change the oil in the engine a little more frequently and maybe you can treat the oil.

You know, if it makes the oil acidic, maybe there's a way you can neutralize, add some kind of neutralizer to the oil so it doesn't burn up the engine that way. - Okay. - But I want to try, I want to try it and just see like if I buy a beater generator and just see how long it'll last and maybe I can just up the oil change frequency

and the thing will just run. And so that's kind of my next thought. I just have to find the farmer. I don't know if I can convince my neighbor thinks I'm a little crazy already, you know, as you can imagine.

- Yeah, yeah. - You know, so I'm just, you know, the, I think many Bitcoiners are like this. We're just like, you know, that obnoxious neighbor that's, you know, that guy's just a little off, right?

So, but so I have a good rapport with them. But, you know, they, I think will be pretty skeptical to allow me to hook up some equipment, you know, to their new operation. - Somebody was doing this with a pig farm, a guy named Ricardo Carmona had digesters down in Mexico or further south.

I haven't heard from him in a long time. So I don't know if the coin price being so low has made this not as practical. But it's funny, I just mentioned Troy Cross. His dad, Troy Cross's dad is up in Wisconsin.

And I think he's a, he's like University of Wisconsin professor. And one of the things that he studies is bio digesters on dairy farms. - Really? - Dairy cattle are the right kind of cows to do this with.

Obviously, you know, feedlot cattle might not be as easy to collect the waste, but in dairy farm, they produce a lot of poop and they come in to be milked. And, you know, the floors are set up in a way where they do the manure collection and get rid of it because you can't have all that shit around these sterile equipment.

So maybe see if we can get you in contact with Troy Cross and see if we can get you in contact with Troy Cross's dad and see if you can't get piped in and study some of that or maybe take a visit up there to the University of Wisconsin to see what they're doing.

- Man, I love that, I love that. I think, I mean, I just need to find somebody who will let me park a generator and, you know, put up a little shack to try it, basically, you know? There's not much else you need.

So I think if you start with a used generator, just shopping around, I mean, less than 5,000 bucks, you can probably find something that's pretty good size, you know? - I wonder if you get, you sometimes, you have these military auctions.

Those generators are pretty well maintained. - Don't they have like a weird power supply, though? Or it's like a different voltage? - Hmm, I don't remember, that was 20-- - What, 600 volts or something?

- 25 years ago. - Yeah. - I'll have to look that up. - Yeah, there's some other, maybe some other wiring to do with something like that, but I'm not positive. But I would like to play around with that.

- I think that would be a lot of fun. - I know, I watched a video the other day where a guy was building a wood gasifier, and he was running the exhaust from the wood fuel part into water, and then collecting, you know, was bubbling in the water in the bottom.

So I wonder if the water's a decent filtration system for that exhaust? - Yeah, I wonder if that water then would be water that you don't want to just dump on the ground and dump on the ground-- - Yeah, right.

- Is treatment, you know? - They didn't have the EPA getting involved. - Yeah. - Is it just dumping that water back into the creek? No, no, I'm not. - Well, the other thing is with this, the other aspect of this is that from the EPA side and emission side, they want to put those flares out.

They don't want the flares because they're, just for the same reason they don't want flares at oil wells. - Yeah. - They're dumping methane into the atmosphere, right? 25% of the methane doesn't get burned and the wind blows, and then it's just dumping emissions, right?

So, you know, the other angle to this is if you could make it work properly, there might even be some enthusiasm from the environmental side and regulatory side. - Yeah, we just had a conversation the other day about stronghold here in Pennsylvania and their waste coal remediation program.

They're also doing a waste tire remediation program and getting paid by the state of Pennsylvania to do both. - Yeah, it's awesome. - You were talking earlier about showing up to people, you know, being the crazy next door neighbor, and I think a lot of pleb miners and a lot of the Bitcoin mining community,

we're all, I mean, Sarah said as me before, like we're all kind of the same guy, you know? We all have the same goofy interests. You and I had a conversation the other day about punk music.

You used a minor threat song in one of your videos in the pleb miner telegram group. We're often talking about skateboarding because of base load and he's got my old ass back in the skateboarding and you posted a couple pictures from your childhood and all in off, you know, five steps or doing some pretty decent action there.

Who were you as a kid? And like, you know, in the 90s, I'm assuming the music you were into skating. What were your thoughts back then? What were your political leanings as a kid? Mine was anarchy.

That's what I wanted, you know, as a young man, certainly before I joined the Marine Corps, you know, my political leanings were anarchist punk. Then I joined the Marine Corps and I became like ultra right wing conservative, you know?

And I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh back in the 90s, really hard. And then you start to see the effects of the neocons and the war mongering and the war hawks and, you know, all of the problems with the right wing.

So then you start looking into Austrian economics or you start following people like Thomas Sol and you become more of a libertarian. And then from libertarianism, I've become more classically liberal.

And then it's like you're on the complete other end of the spectrum. So what was your political evolution from, you know, a young kid skating and listening to punk music to where you are now?

- It's funny. You're right because we are like the same person. It seemed very similar path, right? So in college, punk rock, skateboarding, and I would say that I was a left liberal but an anti-war liberal, right?

And what's so crazy today is that the, somehow the left has become the war party. - It's crazy, you know? - You know, like so bizarre. It's so bizarre, like, you know, how has this come full circle?

And so very similar, you know, skateboarding punk rock was, let's say, left. And then, you know, you become disillusioned with that over time once you realize that, like, just doesn't work.

And so when I got out of college here, this was like formative years of my life, you know? I got out of college and I thought, okay, well, you know, I went to college, I did everything I'm supposed to do.

Where's my job, you know? Like kind of waiting for the handout, like, where's my, you know, I should just be able to like, just walk into like a $60,000 your job, you know? Well, that didn't happen.

And I was, I actually, I studied political science in college, you know? So like, talk about a bullshit, you know, social science degree, but, you know, so I didn't want to be a lawyer and I didn't want to go to law school.

- Be a lobbyist. - Yeah, right. And so like, I think I was interested in that stuff because I was interested in history and I was interested in Cold War and stuff like that. So that's kind of why I gravitated that way.

But I got out of school and like, I was delivering pizzas and I was wondering like, what is going on? Like, why, why is this isn't supposed to be how it's, how it is? Like, why is it like this?

Why is it so hard for me to make ends meet? And then I worked a lot of shitty jobs. You know, I was like, I worked for a rental car place and I worked for a health insurance company. - And they give you the tools to be your own boss.

- The rental car place? - The rental car place. - Yeah, that's right. (laughs) And then, you know, I just bounced around these really crappy jobs and just got punished, you know? And I just, I was falling a little further in debt every week, month, year, and just didn't get it.

And then finally, a couple of my friends who were in the construction trades said, hey, we think, you know, you like working on cars. We think it'd be pretty good at this. And, you know, finally I had, you know, an outlet to succeed and direct my energy.

And I think getting punished the way I did for a couple of years after college really motivated me, you know? - 'Cause you're a hard edge. - Yeah, I mean, I was a kid that could only learn the hard way, right?

So like, your parents tell you, you should do this, you should do that. And you're like, yeah, I can't stand, you know? You think you know everything, right? But I was pummeled into, you know, figuring it out myself.

- What were they telling you as a young man that you should do? 'Cause obviously you're engineering chops, your mechanical aptitude chops are very high. You had to know this. You know cars so well, did you grow up building cars with your dad and tinkering in the garage?

- Well, I had a drunken stepdad. And the one thing that I got from that guy was he showed me how to work on cars, you know? So I have to give him some credit. Where it's due, he was not good for much else for our family and all that kind of stuff.

But he taught me how to work on cars and he let me use his tools. And so in high school, I, you know, I did all my own work on my cars and helped my friends and stuff and did break jobs and things like that, you know?

- Did you come out of high school? I mean, so you have this experience of working on cars and doing break jobs for extra money and be like, but I don't want to end up like my stepdad. So I'm gonna do something completely different and be a political science major.

- Well, my dad, dad, you know, I'm from Wisconsin. We're, you know, my grandfather's a farmer. There's a lot of paper mills around here. They're closing fast, but my parents, you know, worked in paper mills and my grandfather and my other grandfather did and uncles and aunts and all that kind of stuff.

But my dad was like, he was very critical of me going to college to study political science. He thought that was a terrible idea, you know? So I think he would have, you know, he was a millwright and he didn't communicate it the right way, but you know, he basically said, like you're doing the wrong thing, this is a waste of time,

you know, and it, I don't think it was a total waste of time. I think there was things I gained from that experience and it was a good time in my life, but it was not as productive of, you know, think about your 18 to 22 year old self and like how productive you could be at that time if you really were motivated, right?

- You didn't need to sleep at that time. - Yeah. So I could have probably been more efficient with those years than I was. - No, I'd have to say most people probably say the same thing. You know, you'd mentioned your dad being a millwright, well, that's a good union job.

And what I've noticed, you know, Wisconsin is an interesting place and I think it's like Pennsylvania and a lot of the Rust Belt is all kind of the same. It's like the people that vote Democrat in this area, they're all blue dog Democrats, they're all union types.

Like you're up in Wisconsin, you've got your ultra left Madison Wisconsin types, but I think most of the blue up there is good union job, you know, type of things. And you and I have had the union conversation.

It is Labor Day today on the day of this recording. - Right. - I'm in a union, your union adjacent within your industry. What do you think the difference between that union mindset 20, 30 years ago and the union mindset today?

I feel that there's a huge rift between union leadership and the union associates and the rift is getting larger. - And what are your thoughts on that? - Yeah, I agree with that. And there's, you know, and what we talked about earlier is the difference between unions.

I think there's a spectrum, right? Some are terrible and some are less terrible, right? At least with ours, it's skills based, right? So if you don't have the skills, you're gonna ride the bench and probably get starved out and go do something else, which is good.

Though the unions that I think are not good are the ones that are seniority based because the young guys are not gonna try harder because they can't, they gotta pay their dues, right? They gotta put in their time and the old guys aren't gonna try any harder to do any better because they already paid their dues.

- Oh yeah, did my time, son. - Right, and so then you have, you have like this stagnation of inefficiency, you know, there's no, the incentives are wrong, right? We talk about incentives in Bitcoin a lot.

The incentives are wrong there, but I agree with you entirely that, you know, we're gonna see some kind of political upheaval because you're right, the leadership is not in alignment with the membership.

And you know, what do we get for all these donations? We don't get anything from them, they just take our money and you know, spew the, whatever line is that, that they think we wanna hear, you know, so I think like a lot of Bitcoiners, I'm just, you know, I'm apolitical now and I don't really care and pay that much attention to it.

You know, it's like, you know, like, I wanna say to my dad, like, oh, you still believe the news, you know, like the TV news? - I think I just said that yesterday to my dad. - Yeah, right, you know, like, I just, you know, it's pointless to even watch.

- They're still so dependent on it. It feeds their net, they're already existing narrative whether your boomer parent is from the left or from the right. They're just going to have their ego stroked.

They want to be assured that their boomer grift is going to continue, that their 401(k) is going to continue or stocks are gonna continue to accrue in value. Their social security will always be there, their Medicare will be there.

They don't care about unfunded liabilities. That doesn't matter to them. Their house is always going to go up. It's number go up world for them and whatever they have to do to reconfirm that to themselves they're going to do and they don't want to listen to any of us.

And it is interesting, you know, you went to college and you came maybe from a left point of view and I went into the military and I came from a right point of view and I see this a lot in Bitcoiners.

It's like, I bet you 20 years ago, a lot of Bitcoiners would have had arguments with each other, political arguments with each other. And now we've all kind of merged around this one view, this one freedom tech view.

It makes me feel good for the future, for sure. - Yeah. - We may agree, disagree on certain political viewpoints, but we're in the same ecosystem. We're the biggest disagreement that we may have is cast iron versus, you know, stainless steel pans.

- Yeah. - Speaking of cast iron, you had a build a while ago. I think it was like, it was like an S9 or something inside an old cast iron heater. - Oh yeah, yeah, sure. You don't have a funny story about that thing.

It just turned on by itself. So it's, I brought that thing out with me to my out-of-state job that I'm on right now. And it was plugged in, not hashing. It was just plugged in turned off, right?

And yesterday, just checking my dashboard here, it turned on. What the heck? How the heck did this thing just turn on by itself? And the only thing I can think of is maybe the power went on or bumped off and then back on.

And now it's just sitting there hashing at my apartment from my out-of-town job here. But that was a lot of fun. I think somebody on Twitter had posted a picture of something similar to that and talked about putting an S9 in there.

I don't think that person ever ended up doing it, but then we were looking for, it was a couple of years ago, a year ago, two years ago, we went to cut a Christmas tree and then they have like their little gift shop at the tree farm and they got all kinds of knickknacks and antiques and stuff.

- That's where they really make their money. - Yeah, oh yeah, for sure. And that thing was in there. And I thought, yeah, I think you can fit an S9 in there. And so I bought it and then I mounted the power supply on the very bottom and then ran extended the power cables so that they could reach in.

And then it's like an old fuel oil space heater, basically. And it's not a perfect enclosure for it. - Yeah. - I have to underclock it so that it doesn't, like right now, since it turned on, it's running around. - It tracks too much in there.

- Yeah, and it's running at like seven tera hash right now. I don't wanna say it's at like 600 watts, something like that. But yeah, she's just hashing away. The wife actually put a little plant on top of it.

And just a little plant because we weren't running it. And I asked her today, I said, "You didn't leave that plant on that thing. "It's gonna be dry to the crisp." - Yeah. (laughing) - When we get back next week.

But so yeah, that was kind of a fun thing. You know, I'm glad that people appreciate stuff like that. You know, and it's quiet. I have some Noctua fans on that one. - Yeah. Well, I have to say that Rick's little space eater thing, 3D printed one, he basically just copied off you with your cast iron one.

Just went with plastic. - Does it? Okay, so like it stands the-- - It stands it up. Yeah. - Vertical one. - Okay, gotcha. - So you like the, you have a few extra APW three plus power supplies and a few extra parts.

And Zach bombs does low keyboard, has enabled you to build something pretty unique. Can you describe to us your newest build? - Sure. So Zach's low keyboard allows new gen hashboards or amp minor hashboards to run on alternative power supplies.

And I don't understand the technical aspects of that, but basically if you try to put a foreign power supply on a amp minor S19 hashboard, it won't hash unless it's paired with the correct model power supply.

So this low keyboard that Zach built jail breaks it basically or makes it so that you can use any power supply. And Zach already built one of these and he had, I guess, a proof of concept where he took a S19, took it down to just one hashboard, took two of the hashboards out, and then using his low keyboard and an APW three plus plus

power supply, which can run on 110 volt power, run a single board amp minor off of 120 volt power supply. And the reason that this is unique and special is that you can run it on 120 volts.

So most of our pleb minor friends don't have the ambition or the money to get an electrician to come in and put in 220 outlets in your home. And everybody's got 120 volt outlets throughout their house and this would be a way to mine off 120 volts.

But also only running one board, the amount of power that you need is, let's say, 1,000 watts or so in that neighborhood that can be supported by 120 volt outlet. So he built one and it was the stock housing, the stock amp minor case and he put in some standard foam to fill the voids of the other two boards.

I wanted to do it a little differently. Working in the construction trades, we use things like Unistrut. And I wanted to build something that you could see the-- you could see the actual heat sinks and you could see everything I wanted to make it visible.

And so what I did is I took some Unistrut and made a stand so that the hashboard would stand vertically and use plexiglass to sandwich that hashboard so you could see inside of it. Then mounted the control board on the outside of the plexiglass and then the power supply on the backside.

So it's like this vertical space heater, basically. And I started-- the first iteration was just using the stock amp minor fans, which are too noisy. And I eventually went to an AC infinity inline fan similar to the-- You love UNAC infinity inline fan.

Man, I do love them. I do love them. But they're a little bulky. So there's another iteration that I want to try. Who is it on Twitter? Sat stacking pleb. I don't know if you've seen his little build.

Yeah, he's in the group. Yeah, right on. So I like what he did there. He used like an electronics cabinet with a clear cover. Yeah, it's a really clean build. It's a nice build. I like that better because everything is contained inside of that cabinet.

So like if you had kids or something like that, they're not like sticking their fingers on the power lugs or anything like that. If you're a pleb minor, your kids get it at this point. I mean, all they got to do is talk to Barnminer.

And he'll show you pictures of his son's fingers. And they'll say, well, don't stick your fucking fingers in the fans. That's right. So I'm going to keep playing with that. And then the other justification that I had for buying my latest used AMP minor, JPro, is that like, well, if when the halving comes around and these things aren't

profitable, I'll just recycle them into space heaters. And they'll potentially have some life if they don't have any life anymore, right? So I'm always coming up with justifications, right, for buying more machines.

For rationalization, yeah. That's right. There's a lot of exciting things coming up with old machines. Zach has been instrumental in bringing new life to old machines and new ideas to pleb minors.

Scott with BitX, same thing. Sure. Avril, multi-year tech, and Decentral up in Canada are providing single hashboards and builds for the BitXs and reselling Scott's stuff. Rick CryptoClokes is a reselling Zach's boards.

It's a little pleb minor ecosystem within a pleb minor ecosystem. Yeah, and I have to give Zach credit for all of the-- I mean, this is what kind of busted things open for more tinkering like this.

Without those parts without the Njord board and the Loki board, there's opportunity here that wasn't there before. Let's do to him. All credit to you. Z-Bombs. Z-Bombs to Z. If anybody wants to take a look at Travis's sandwich board build, you got a name for that thing?

No, I don't have a name for it. All right, I'm going to call it sandwich board build. He's written an article for us, and we're going to post it up on Uncoverable Misfits, how he built it, and some data on it, too, because you can get some pretty good efficiency out of these builds.

Yeah, I was quite impressed. The donor machine was a 92 tera hash, JPro, Antminer. And that single board machine is doing no problem, 36, 37 tera hash, by itself, on 120 volts. And with reasonable efficiency, with about stock efficiency, let's say 29, 29 and 1/2 watts per tera hash, that's running that 92 machine at 110, somewhere

in that neighborhood, or 115 tera hash. So that's not bad. And if you wanted to tune it for more efficiency, you could do that. The one thing that I will mention, though, is to get that APW3++ power supply to do what I had to do, you need to make a slight modification to that power supply and add a resistor in place of a potentiometer.

And Zach actually walked me through that. Zach has a nice write-up on explaining on how to do that. I think I have a link to that or on that write-up for you, too. OK. If not, we'll get it posted up before it goes up on "Governable Miss Fits."

I like the nature of what you and sat-stacking pleb are doing with these visible internals. It reminds me of the old Macs. When Mac came out with that, you could see the inside of it. I loved it.

I used to have an old Texas Instruments calculator that you could see the insides. I thought that was super cool. It helps, you know, especially having kids. They see what the parts are. You can describe it to them.

It makes it more accessible for people than this big silver thing with these screaming fans. Yeah. You brought up earlier talking about Zach and appreciating him for what he's brought. And I can do the same thing.

There's so many people on Bitcoin Twitter that inspired me to do different things with home mining and do different things with mining. There's so many in the community that have inspired people to mine at home.

Last year, we started pleb minor month talking about diverter and his mining for the streets article. Econo Alchemist has been very inspirational to a lot of people. You shared in one of your videos that you made and something that we talked about recently, your appreciation for Mr. Rogers and what a practical sweet soul he is.

And you have a video of him. And I think he's getting an Emmy. Or he's getting, he's at some awards ceremony. The lifetime achievement, I think, is what it was. OK. Well, that's certainly well deserved.

And in his acceptance speech, he says, all of us have special ones that have loved us into being. Would you just take along with me 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life?

So who have been inspirations to you in Bitcoin mining? Wow. I wasn't prepared for that question, but that's excellent. Come on, then. We go deep here. Yeah. Well, Zach, for sure, you know, Zach's helped make it happen.

I mean, I want to say, you know, I mean, that little video clip I had called out Zach. Kaboom racks supplied most of my machines. So thanks to them. And then also, you know, the brains team has helped me out.

Alvaro from Brains. Oh, yeah. He's good, dude. We love Alvaro. Yeah. Yeah, no, he just helped me, actually, since I've been home, get all my amlogic control boards running brains. And so now that kind of opens up some more opportunity.

Yeah, that's nice. To, you know, underclock, overclock, what have you, right? And so it's allowed me to-- for whatever reason, some of the-- there's the low power mode on the stock. Ant miners, I could not get the firmware to upgrade to the low power mode.

So like, they were just kind of stuck in normal or sleep, right? So no, I'm-- That's been out since Christmas. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't-- probably a user error or what have you. But I'm getting away from your question.

You know, who else-- you know, some of these telegram groups and the folks barn miner, you know, right? Never heard of them. Yeah, I've got to give him a shout out, you know? And boy, you know, the community, you know?

I'm going to think of like 10 people after we hang up here, you know? But I'll just say, just in general, thanks to the community that has shared ideas, has engaged. And everybody starts somewhere, right?

You start asking questions, my first S9, I had like an old power supply cable from, you know, like a computer or something. It was like a gauge wire. And I was running that thing out of-- Oh, man, I was running that thing at like 1,700 watts with a 220 plug on it and melted the plugs on that stuff

because that power supply was thin, right? You know, you learn the hard way, you ask questions. And, you know, so I appreciate everybody who answered questions for me, you know, over the last few years that I had.

And I'd encourage the folks be patient that if you see some new boat there and they're asking some kind of obvious, you know, question to take the time to help them and hold their hand and because somebody helped me.

So help each other and we'll make it happen. You've been so active on home mining wizards. I don't say much in that group, but I check in a lot. And you do that. So I'm sure there are people out there that would like to thank you for all of the work that you put in documenting what you do, taking pictures, putting it on Telegram

and the home mining wizards group, putting it on Twitter. You've pushed me. You know, I've seen some of your builds and they're so clean and that's something that I pride myself on, given my vocation is clean wiring.

And I go, ooh, his looks better than mine or all. That makes sense. So I think that little competition that a lot of the pleb miners have is good and it drives us. And I've seen you in home mining wizards and you are kind and patient and understanding to noobs who ask a question like, how do I point my miner to a pool?

You know, how do I plug this thing in? And it's really important because we have to foster new pleb miners and bring them into the fold because you never know who's on the other side of that Telegram chat.

It could be some genius engineer who's gonna come up with the next innovation like Zac Balnster has. - That's right, yeah. - They just need a little kick in the ass to get started and to know that this is a community that accepts people of all skill levels and we're all in this together.

- Amen. - So Travis, thank you so much for being our pleb miner in the wild. I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm glad that we got to go into a lot of the rabbit holes that we've been chatting with each other about.

- Yeah, I appreciate that very much. I enjoyed it as well. - All right, thanks, man. - Take care.