Bitcoin mining at home with Lili

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! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! 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 world. Join me as I speak to some of the most dangerous people in the world. I'm going to talk about Bitcoin and the space and say that to the deepest, darkest, depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is all about home mining. I've had a lot of people reach out asking questions. It's something I'm particularly interested in. And it definitely seems that if you can get the right setup at the right time, it is the perfect way to stack no KYC sets.

So many people reach out after our last conversation and she makes some incredible material to help people be more private and to do home mining. I did wait and I've sat on this interview for some time now because I didn't really want to put it out while she was still working with compass mining.

There were lots of problems caused for many, many people. Huge amount of sat have been lost. And yeah, it was really, really disappointing to see how that company treated fellow plebs. I don't need to go into it too much.

The fact that she's leaving, I think, probably speaks for itself and onwards and upwards. I loved this conversation. I really hope that people enjoy it and find it useful. Lily has kindly written some really good show notes for me because as you all know, I'm fucking useless at it.

And I wanted to make sure that you can actually get all the links and everything that we talk about in this episode so that everyone can mine at home. So have a read through those and if anyone has any questions, you can reach out to me or to Lily and we'd love to get you sorted, love to get you mining.

Before we start, I do want to say firstly, thank you to everyone who's been on Fountain or any of the other podcasting 2.0 apps, streaming sets to this show is incredible. I love the personal messages and I have been told that it's not too long until I'll be able to respond to you on that platform.

So I'm really looking forward to that and thank you once again. It really, really is appreciated. Given the issues that we've seen with a few of the companies in this space, I think very, very carefully about the people that I have as sponsors on this show.

The three companies that I have sponsoring this show are ones that I have chased and chased because they are the ones that I truly believe are going to look after listeners. I think it's important that everyone listening can have access to Bitcoin, they can buy it, they can secure it and that they have the best hardware.

That said, if any of the companies that are supporting this show start acting a little bit company, please let me know. You guys mean more to me than a few sats and we cannot accept this sort of fuckery in the Bitcoin space.

So let's go through the sponsors. First up, fast bitcoins. I've chosen these guys because they make it so easy for people to stack sat. Yes, they are KYC. I make that very clear, but not everyone is going to go straight to no KYC.

And if you're not, I want to make sure that you use a company with people that I respect and who I know are going to do their very best within the framework that they have available to them to keep you secure, to keep you safe.

They were the first exchange to start using lightning and they really push people to take their sat off exchange as soon as possible. For more info, go to fastbitcoins.com. Once you have these sat off exchange, you are responsible for them, you need to keep them safe.

In my opinion, the best way to do this is with the use of a good hardware wallet or signing device. Foundation devices make my favorite. It's fully open source. You can use it with Spectre or Sparrow on the desktop.

You can use it with blue wallet and you can also use it with CASA. It is so simple to use. The interface is lovely. If you go to foundation devices.com today and use the code bit by bit, you will get $10 off your purchase.

And finally, CASA. They make it so simple to use multi-six security. Multi-six security is the best method for somebody who is protecting themselves against attack or loss. If you were to lose one of your keys, they're always there to hold your hand and back you up.

I've been using them for over a year now. I find the app to be very, very simple and the whole process so slick. Their team is incredible and they've been here for a very long time for a reason.

If you use the code bit by bit 10 at keys.casA, you will get 10% off your purchase and you can get multi-six security from under $10 a month. It really is incredible and if anyone has any questions, you can reach out to me. I'll be happy to answer.

Enjoy the show. Hey Max, good. How are you? Yeah, good. Am I coming through disgustingly loud or is it all right? No, you sound good. Excellent. All right. Well, nice to have you back on the show. Long time no speak.

I know, it's good to be back. So a lot of people, since our last conversation have reached out to me, especially with the Meastadale and people wanting to do some home mining and dip their toes in.

They ask me loads of technical questions and things that I've got no fucking idea about and I keep going to you for answers. So it's definitely the right thing to get you on here and help everyone out a little bit.

Yeah, it's awesome. I mean, a lot of people are starting to mine at home now and they're starting to see that it is feasible for them. So try to answer the questions. We'll see. Have you seen a lot of people reaching out to you the same as it started to spy a little bit the last few months?

Oh, yeah, for sure. A lot of people are asking about, you know, costs of mining, asking like where to buy machines, like how to keep their privacy while mining, because I've been talking a lot about this.

I've been trying to, you know, educate people on, you know, the costs of it and kind of painting it as it is DCA. It's not something that's supposed to be wildly profitable and make you rich, but it's an alternative for you to stack and people have started paying attention to that.

Yeah, well, I have to say now that I've got a couple of miners going, although I'm not home mining, because of the reasons we'll get into a little bit later. But I have to say, it's pretty addictive. It's so much more fun than stacking.

It's so good. Like every time that I see, it's like every couple of days, I'll get some sats deposited into my account. I'm like, oh, this is really fucking cool. And you start to watch and go like, I've got this much hash ray. If I was to increase it by this, then I'd be stacking this amount every day.

And I don't know. It just, it feels a lot more fun. It's almost like a sad little hobby for me. No, it's so addicting and it's so much more satisfying because you know that you're getting it from a good source and you don't have to worry about KYC.

And I mean, you can spend hours on the brains insights calculator seeing like, oh, if I add this much hash ray, how much will I make? It's amazing. And this is something that's caught you very much so as well. This is like your passion, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I didn't expect to like it too much. And I guess I kind of went down this rabbit hole because I wanted more KYC sats and the first time I started buying K, non KYC, I didn't really do it because I wanted to.

I did it because I felt like it was necessary. And, you know, I thought, why not just mine my own Bitcoin? And that's kind of how it started with an S9 and now a couple more and, you know, it's, it's a good, pretty big learning curve.

But once you get started, it's pretty easy. OK, so what's the pitch? Obviously we discussed a lot of it before. So anyone who hasn't listened to our previous conversation, go back and have a listen.

It's like 10 episodes or 12 episodes ago, I think it is. But if you're going to say to someone, look, don't just DCA, don't go to a KYC service, have this as an option. What's the shill? Well, I mean, look, most people, they get into Bitcoin from the beginning because they want that economic benefit.

Like they want their money to appreciate. But like any asset, you want to purchase it at a good price, right? So mining Bitcoin, depending on your electricity costs, of course. Mining Bitcoin costs below 20K.

Spot Bitcoin is trading at 40K. And, you know, you don't have to take my word for it. You can calculate your cost in mine using the brain's insights calculator. And on top of that, you're mining non KYC Bitcoin at a discount.

That's a good shill. I don't think we even need to do any more than that. You're getting something at a better rate. And it's no KYC, which I think most of us will agree is worth at least 10% more now today

and could be worth infinitely more in the future because of all the shit that will come when you're tracked down with all the stuff that's going on in the moment. So just so anyone who's listening thinks, oh, that sounds too good to be true.

When you are doing that calculation, what are you plugging in there in brains? Are you putting a certain kilowatt hour price for the electricity? Well, your price is going to depend on, you know, your residential rate.

So mine is around 7 cents per kilowatt hour. It's pretty cheap. But if you're new to this and you don't have a miner, I recommend plugging in the median electricity price for your country.

So in the US, it's 12 cents per kilowatt hour. You want to put your difficulty adjustment at like 50% to be conservative. And then you want to put like your length of time that you're mining between three to five years because mining is a long-term endeavor.

It's not something that, you know, you're going to start making a lot of money within a year or two. Like you're going to have to ROI and your machines. So that's going to take time. It's a long-term investment.

I would consider that for sure. And then of course, you know, the network hashrate growth, that's going to continue going up. And that's going to eat into some of your profits as a whole miner.

I don't think that's a bad thing. Like you can look at it on the other side by saying, okay, well, network hashrate is going up. That just means bitcoins here to stay. That means that the market is resilient.

And that, you know, your investment on your ASIC, it's not going to go away. You're not mining a shitcoin like Litecoin or Siacoin or something that, you know, the hashrate might be for high today, but might go away tomorrow.

Yeah, it's a good point. When you're saying half the cost to miner Bitcoin, are you doing that at the average US energy cost? Yes. Okay. All right. Fine. So for anyone in the Europe, it's going to be obviously quite different to that.

But it's still worth having a look and seeing if people can find cheap power, find a workaround. But we're just, yeah, we're getting raped at the moment. Yeah. I mean, Europe's an interesting market.

Like now there's a lot of proposals and different parliaments in Europe. They're raising, you know, concerns about electricity costing. Okay. Can we give people tax tax breaks for using a certain amount of energy?

Can we give people tax breaks for using more energy? So maybe there's some like power purchase agreement or like green energy credit that you guys can take advantage of. I just haven't looked into that too much personally.

It's something we're going to have to all work out because that's the sort of one thing that's sticking. But most of the listeners are actually US based. So for them, we're talking, do you say 12 cents a kilowatt hour is sort of average?

And that means that they can mine at half the cost. And when you say 50% increase in hash rate, are you talking about that year on year or over the term? 50% in difficulty. Yeah. But over the term or over a year?

Over the term of your operation. So like the three to five years. Yeah. I wonder what we're going to see with everything going on at the moment. It does seem like things are sort of ramping up in the background and some big players are coming in.

But what's your thoughts on that? Do you think that we're going to stick around that 50% increase? Or do you think we could see things explode? I mean, it's kind of tough because now you see states like they're creating these incentives for Bitcoin mining companies to come in and use their electricity.

And they have different laws like data exemption laws that let them write off machines like tax free. So I think we could see that explode. I mean, I'm sure the price of Bitcoin is stagnant, but the hash rate hasn't slowed down and we're entering a bear market right now.

It certainly looks frosty out there. That's for sure. It could catch us off guard. I'm going to get some hate for that. But I really do think the bull market's done for now. It feels like it because there's all the infighting that's going on. It definitely feels frosty.

And it's no bad thing. I mean, in my eyes anyway, because I'm just happy just stacking away and also shake out some of the bullshit that's going on, hopefully. But yeah, it does feel that way. Maybe that's a good time for people to be getting in and spending some time thinking about these sort of things.

Because when the price is running, everyone is sort of jumping around on Twitter, congratulating themselves and high-fiving each other. And maybe don't have time to be considering they're stacking over the next three to five years.

And I think that's a good way to look at it. It's like, okay, you've been in for X amount of months or years, and you've been doing either buying on an exchange or you've been buying no KYC, ideally.

But maybe it's time to rethink how you're stacking. And it's such a nice option to do something with mining. Like you said, yeah, okay, maybe the hash rate does go mental, but that only means that we're going to be more secure.

We have more chance of being around. And with that, you can only assume that the price follows. We don't know when, but it should. So then it doesn't really matter because you're doing that calculation in dollar terms in your head.

Or most people will be, but actually you're still going to be stacking those stats. And if they're going 10X in the next five years, then does it really matter? Not really, no. Right. No, that's so true. And we also don't know what kind of laws are going to come out in the next three to five years.

We don't know if unrealized capital gains laws are going to come back, surface on the floor of Congress. I mean, that's a mess for the KYC stacker, you know? Yeah, it's only going to get worse. I mean, there's no future that I see where they're going to make things easy for Bitcoiners, because I can't see this not being blamed.

Like if there's an issue in the current financial system, they're not going to hold their hands up and be like, we've been dirty, stupid, greedy bastards and we fucked it all up.

And there's this thing called Bitcoin, which, you know, could help people. They're going to say, well, it's because of Bitcoin and these greedy Bitcoiners who were just lucky, they've made a load of money.

We need to tax the rich and the rich are the Bitcoiners. So let's go after them. And then they're just going to look up everyone's name and address and go, ah, there they are. Right. Let's go knock on their door.

And then everyone will say, oh, yeah, well, I had a boating accident. And they'll say, that's fine. We're going to seize your boat. We're going to seize your house. We're going to imprison you until you fucking give us your sats and everyone will fold. No matter how hard they think they are on Twitter, everyone will fold.

And I would as well, because freedom means more to me than the sats. Right. And that's what I tell people too. I'm like, there's an infinite many amount of risks that we have in the current environment, not just economically, but with what the governments have been doing to people and trying to limit their rights and freedoms.

But if you have a risk that you can anticipate, like a seizure of KYC sats and mitigate by mining or stacking through BISC, why wouldn't you do it? Yeah, it's, um, I think for a lot of people, they still think that because it's easier when you get it a little bit cheaper.

It's worth it, but they're not looking at the tail risk.

I think that's just a journey that most people will go on over time. I think the other thing that seems to be muddying the waters is going a bit off topic now, but something that I've noticed on the KYC versus no KYC aspect is a lot of people are saying, well, when we can lend against our Bitcoin

or we can loan out our Bitcoin or we can have a mortgage against our Bitcoin, it's going to need to be KYC because you're going to be doing these deals with banks and businesses and they're still going to be in the fiat world.

And although that makes sense that it probably will be that way, it's not really worth the trade off and long term.

We're hoping that these institutions can fuck off entirely and that this can be done and appear to be away somehow or rent or do whatever. So it's a lot of people are saying that to me recently and I understand why they're saying it and they're not wrong.

But I just don't personally see that that trade off is, I don't think it's worth it long term. Yeah, no, I agree with you and I agree with them too, our economy is still highly dollarized and KYC Bitcoin is just an asset in the dollarized economy.

I don't think it's bad from an investment standpoint to onboard via KYC if you plan on using trade finance services. But if you're in the camp of this is freedom money, I want to be part of a circular economy, you have to stack outside the system.

Yeah, and you can be in both, right? You don't have to be, it's not black and white. You could say, well, all right, I want to have X amount of SATs on the side, which in the future I'm going to loan out or I'm going to have for a mortgage.

And that's okay. But then you can say, well, actually, I'd like some no KYC SATs and how am I going to do that? Well, you know, I can go with this. That's fine. But generally you're going to be sending your bank details to someone else who you don't know.

So there's risk there. All you're going to do it with cash and there's risk there, you know, because again, you don't know who you're meeting. You don't know if you're going to get jacked. You don't know what's going to happen.

So it seems to me done right. Everyone should have a no KYC stack. I don't think that can be argued. And I think anyone who thinks that not having any no KYC SATs should be on the table is basically just dumb.

Like there is no fucking excuse for thinking that with that in mind, like if someone's listening to this now and they're like, okay, well, all I've got is KYC SATs at the moment.

What would be then their options if they're thinking, yeah, I do want to stack some of these and mining does sound like a good option because I don't have those other risks or I have less of them.

Like what's going on in the Bitcoin mining market at the moment? What can you tell us? Yeah, so I mean the market itself, if we're looking at the hardware markets, it's becoming a lot more dense and sparse spread out.

So like if you want to buy an ASIC, you can't buy it at a Walmart or Home Depot or whatever, like you're going to have to find a reputable seller.

And if you want to stay private, you can't be buying your ASICs from Bitmain directly. For example, you're going to have to go through a marketplace that, you know, unless you put in a PO box, doesn't take your ID, that kind of thing.

And I've noticed too is a lot of people who have, like I get these DMs, like they're trying to find ASICs, they're sending me ads of stuff that they've seen on Telegram or Reddit. They're like, "Is this legit? Like it doesn't seem right. Is it safe to send someone payment like this?"

I just think like we should clear that up for people because there isn't like a go-through or a go-to process where they can just find an ASIC, add to cart and buy it. Like there's so many considerations and even like the reputable businesses, you know, like let's say mine farm buy, for example, they can be impersonated by scammers.

Like there's a lot of ads that imitate real businesses, a lot of like scammers that leak into hardware markets on Telegram, which are very popular with miners.

So I think it's important to spot scams and recognize when red flags are there so you don't send Bitcoin to like a bad party and get discouraged and say, "Okay, mining is it for me because I can't even find an ASIC, you know?"

What are the red flags? Like are there any obvious ones that you're coming across that people should watch out for? Yeah, so a couple things. So if they promise free money or heavy discounts, they're likely like scamming you, also crazy specs.

So if they're offering say a what's miner M30S and they're saying it's 150 tera hash, like you know that's a scam. They don't come like that. If the seller is sending you like unexpected correspondence, so if they're sending you invoices or requests for payments and other billing info,

before you finished like negotiations, that's a red flag, imitating real businesses is another thing. Like they take a logo from a known business and they slap it on to their ad, that's a red flag.

And if they can't identify themselves, so usually real employees from legitimate mining companies, they're usually available to verify their identities to customers. So it doesn't mean not saying IDs, but via video calls, voice chats, and other means of communication.

And then if they request immediate payments, that's another red flag. Like they should be there to answer all your questions. All the terms should be laid out. They should send you an invoice before saying, "Oh, okay, the total is a million sats.

Like just pay this." Yeah, I think that scares a lot of people. The worst thing in the world would be thinking, "Okay, I'm going to buy myself a miner or send it off and you pay your money and then just you never get anything arrived.

It would be sickening." And obviously, you want to be doing this with Bitcoin, so you're fucked. There's no money back, you've just lost that. And so then would you say just to go on these telegram groups and maybe reach out to a few people who are in the know just to verify, "Can I just check with you?"

I've got a few people I would maybe reach out to personally, but would you think that's probably a good idea just to sort of belt on braces, check and double check? I'd definitely say so. I mean, you want to reach out to somebody who's known in the industry. They have a reputation.

So if you have a reputation, you're not going to be dishonest because that would be a bad look for you, so you need to ask them. If they come across an ad on telegram, they want to buy it. They need to ask, is that legit?

I mean, I can recommend some places to buy miners. Can I do that on here? Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so I recently bought some more miners from LC HODL. He works with Kaboom Racks. They're a very good seller. They have a good reputation in the community.

You could also go to the hardware market telegram. So for that telegram group, each seller has to be verified before listing on there. There's a blockware solutions telegram group. Sometimes you can find good ads on there, but I can say that a lot of what blockware posts themselves are actually not in great condition.

So that's kind of a last resort kind of thing. You know, you can buy hardware from Mind Farm Buy or even the Compass Mining, but they are, of course, higher prices over there. I'll just throw my all in there. And I would say to my listeners, I cannot suggest that they do that, but that's down to them. The risk is theirs.

Yeah, I mean, look, I don't blame you at all. That's something that is, you know, I just want to put the options out there. Obviously, my top option would be Kaboom Racks. I hear a lot of good things about Kaboom Racks, and I've been sort of lurking in the telegram rooms.

Not that I'm actually buying anything. I just like looking at it and seeing what comes up. There's always something on there, like every day. So just looking now, there's like 5,600 subscribers, and there seems to always be stuff. So it seems like that's a fairly legitimate one if someone's going to go for one.

Yeah, I mean, I've had people buy miners from there for me, myself. They've been great. I just bought some more. So I will personally vouch for them. Awesome. What did you go for? So my first buy was the M30Ss, and then I got S9s, and then I just got some more S9s because I'm experimenting on expanding my immersion cooling setup.

And I don't want to break anything valuable. So I got them. That's cool. So is that going to be something you're going to be doing at home, the immersion? Yeah, at home. I did it with one. It looks working fine, but I feel like I could clean it up and make it more efficient, and I guess less messy.

So I'm just going to do it in my basement. I have so much room. I'm experimenting there. I don't know. I like it because you don't have to maintain it as much. You don't have to clean out the machine every month, and the noise level is so low, and the heat's controlled.

Once you get it set up, everything is handled by the dielectric coolant. It's kind of cool. This is such a new thing to me. I've just been so used to the air-cooled setups. I just wanted to try this, and I've kind of been using that mosaic theory, like getting different resources and testing things out, seeing how it works.

And have you had any issues so far, or has it been relatively stress-free? No, it's been good. Nothing bad. It's just 1S9 for that right now, so I didn't try to make anything crazy. Cool. All right, let's take a step back because I'm sort of running away, because this is something I want to do myself, so I keep going off on tangents.

Well, that sounds interesting. I'm digging there a little bit, but I'm trying to do this for people who are listening and persuade them to do some home mining.

You've talked about where to acquire the A6 now. What's the next thing? They're obviously making sure they're not going to get scammed, ideally, but now they want to make sure, obviously, that they're paying in Bitcoin, but where are they going to get tripped up here?

They want to make sure that these are properly KYC-free SATs, and they're not going to be tracked. So what are the tips there if they find someone reputable and they say, "Here's the amount of SATs I want. We'll send you out to the miner. What do they need to watch out for here?"

Yeah, so the first thing before thinking about sending anything in Bitcoin, when they communicate with the seller, I would make sure that every communication is using an encrypted tool.

So no business and social media DMs, they're unencrypted, and they're stored on big tech servers. So even if you're taking all the precautions, you found a good A6.

If you're using social media DMs, especially if you're not using a VPN, while you're using those DMs, that communication could be easily traced back to you using your IP address.

So I'd say make sure you use messengers like Signal or Telegram Secret Chats or Trima to communicate, and if you're using email, don't use Gmail, Yahoo, Apple or Outlook.

So these all collect user data can compromise their personal data, so only use like ProtonMail, Tutanota, or see Templar to communicate. It's just like that way to protect yourself.

You don't want to have somebody read these at a third party, and authorities can request your personal data at any time, so you want to make sure that data is encrypted and out of their reach.

Yeah, so when it comes to sending Bitcoin, even if you're getting, if you bought Bitcoin from, say, Coinbase or Swan or whatever, it's KYC Bitcoin, you're going to want to send it through Whirlpool, and coin join it, break the links from its past at minimum.

Ideally, you'd be paying with a non-KYC Bitcoin and also whirlpooling that, but in this case, it just makes your coins, and I think that's going to be enough.

Yeah, because it's one of those things that's like in the future, you never know, someone might think, "Oh, well, I'm such a small fish now. It doesn't really matter. I'm buying one miner. I'm just fucking around. Who's really going to track me across my messages or who's really going to track my payments?"

But it's like, well, you don't know how valuable what your mind could be in 10 years, and these things are going to sit on these servers, and they're only going to track you more when it becomes more valuable. So you've got to think about what's it worth in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and you just don't want that knock on your door.

Right, and here's the thing that people don't get. A lot of people think Bitcoin is anonymous by default. It's actually pseudonymous. If you're buying on a KYC exchange and you're sending that Bitcoin from the exchange, that Bitcoin can be tracked.

It's like taking a Sharpie and writing your name and address and handing it to the person at the grocery store. You're not going to do that with your dollars. Why would you do that with your Bitcoin? So if you're using a KYC set, you have to coin join it, or you're just going to put yourself at risk to be tracked.

Agreed. And for any tech illiterate fuckwits who are listening, then I would suggest maybe do something like reach out to someone that you know who might want to sell you some for cash, who already has well pulled, who's a bit better with this sort of stuff.

Or maybe if even you don't have that, then you could go to a cash point and do it. You might have to do it over a few trips because they've lowered the amounts you can do. But that's what I used to do early days.

And it was like eight or 10% more or something like that. But I could do a fair amount every time. And you can just go to as many of these things as you want every day and do it over the course of a few weeks or whatever.

If you really don't want to be messing around and you don't feel confident using Whirlpool or any mixing service, then all is not lost. There are other ways around it. Yeah, no for sure. And also you can't just use any mixer. There's a lot of bad ones out there that honestly are not any better than just sending the KYC Bitcoin over.

So yeah, if you're going to do it, use Whirlpool and either have that with Samurai or Sparrow. If anyone's listening and they're not sure and they want some help, you can always reach out to me and I can point you in the right direction.

Yeah, I mean, even if you decide to pay in fiat for your miners, you could do it in a private way. You could pay through an LLC account that you established with a registered agent. That keeps your name off the books. That gives you some possible deniability and being tracked.

But it's still not as good as paying in Bitcoin. Yeah, that's definitely an option. What does it take for that to be unwound? Yeah, I mean, the thing is, if they really want to figure out that it's you, eventually it could get back to you. But I'm not really sure how many steps that would take.

You're going to go to that registered agent. That registered agent has the docs that say, "Okay, I registered XYZ Corporation and this address, they live here." The registered agent, really, that's just the name that you put on the record.

But eventually, if you're the person that created the LLC, your name is somewhere. It's just not as easy to track. Yeah, it's obscuring things a little bit, but really, the best thing is to pay in Bitcoin and make sure that, yeah, you're not going to be tracked with that. That would be the ideal.

Yeah. Yeah. And like I say, I think most people who listen to this show are fairly technical-ish, or at least to my sort of special needs level. And so, if anyone's not, and then you, then they can just reach out and we can point them in the right direction. It's really not that hard.

Yeah, no, it's not. It's so accessible now. You don't have to not code anything to use these tools. Yeah, the new Tanto and the Google Pixel, that's all you really need. I had ZELCO on the other day, and he was just looking at that thing, and I was like, "Fuck, I want one of those things on my desk so badly."

So, if someone really doesn't want to mess around, they can order one of those, and it's piss-easy. Yeah, no, they made it so easy. They made it simple, like, unroll, but with better security.

And so, we've done those bits. Someone's managed to find one. It's on its way to them. Is there any sort of prep that they need to be thinking about if it's like, "Oh, okay, you're going to have it in a month or a couple of weeks, however long it takes?

What do they then need to be thinking about so that they can have some happy hashing rather than problems?" Yeah, so one thing is, usually these miners do ship with the PSU, the power supply units, and the ethernet cable.

If they don't, then they're going to have to purchase that separately. Usually, they can buy it from the same place that they got the miners from. And then another thing is to make sure that your home's electrical circuit can handle that extra power that's going to come from the miner.

And you can look at that by, you know, going to, like, ASIC miner, value.com, putting in your mining machine that you ordered, and then it will tell you how much power draw it takes and how much it's going to need from your electrical circuit.

That information, compare that to how much of your electrical circuit that you're currently using, and then it's like max capacity that you're going to get from your electricity provider, they should tell you what your max capacity is and how much you're using per month.

The miner should definitely not exceed 80% of that capacity, so if they're using 70%, and this miner is going to put them at 85%, they should get that circuit expanded, you know, for their safety, so they don't fry their home.

And then they're going to need a 220-volt power unit installed in their home. They just call a licensed electrician, and they'll install that for them. They don't have to do anything. So they're literally just plugging the wall, and that's pretty much it for that prep.

Okay, so they have to work out how much power is actually limited, how much can come into the house without having an issue, and make sure they're not above 80% of that with the miner. So obviously for the US, is it 110 you've got for all your sockets there?

Yeah, 110. So that then needs to be adjusted for the miners, but then here in the UK we've got 230 I think is our sockets. So then maybe we don't actually need to be fucking around with anything.

I know when I had S17, I just plugged that straight into the wall. It just had a normal power socket for the UK. Is that still the case for the newer ones? Yeah, I mean you don't have to make adjustments because your power is already like that.

It's a different voltage. I mean here we have 220s, but that's usually for like a washer and dryer dishwasher. I know some people they unplug the washer and dryer and they plug in their miners instead.

They can do it. I mean, that's okay, but if you want to live normally, you probably want to get another one installed in your home for the miner. I love that. And then they can use that as the dryer anyway because it kicks out some heat.

They can just hang their clothes over the top of it and make sure it doesn't get wet and they're good to go. Oh yeah, but you know that's more important about it is if you do that, like let's say you unplug your washer and dryer and you put in the miner.

Your home's electrical usage is going to stay pretty stagnant. Like the electricity provider, they're not going to notice any spikes. So it's like you're mining off grid while using the grid.

It's kind of cool. Yeah, I love that aspect of it. I love that no one has to know that you're mining there other than the fucking racket it makes and it being so noisy. If you're not going for the immersion, that's the only thing.

Yeah, no, I mean, eventually, right, like, we're going to see more like plug and play solutions for heat and noise mitigation. Steve Barber already came out with one. It's called the black box. It's pretty cool. Like, put your miner and it doesn't, you can't hear anything.

I kind of want one. And it goes outside as well, doesn't it? Yeah, you can put it outside. Hmm. I think we're going to see a lot of competition in that space in the next three to four years.

Yeah, you've got to because you can't, you can't be running one of these things or a few of these things and not having any sort of noise canceling because they're so loud. Like, you can't go and just like live a normal life with that, like in your living room.

It's, you've got to be a special type of person to put up with that. Yeah, but I know some people like they'll just put their machines on these like racks and like let them run. But usually, if that's the case, they'll soundproof the whole room.

Soundproofing the room, though, will cost you like a couple K. It's not really ideal for the home, like your average home miner. Yeah, so they're the things you have to think about is like these are the, I guess, the extra costs that people have to put into their calculations when they're considering this.

So it's like working out, okay, how much is it going to cost for the miner? What's my electric costs? How much is it going to cost me to get an electrician out if I need to get an electrician out?

How much is it going to cost to either do an immersion setup or to do some sound deadening either in a room or in a box or whatever it is? And then what am I going to do with the heat? So they're all different options out there. What do you suggest to the average person or does it mean that does it sort of depend how much you scale up?

Then you would sort of change the way that you do your setup. Yeah, I mean, it's going to depend on like, you know, how big your fleet is, where you live, like you live in a home or do you live an apartment in the city?

Like that's going to make a huge difference. I mean, if you live in a home and you have one miner, let's say like an M30S or an S9 or whatever it is, like you could simply use like a cooler and you can like exhaust that heat out like into the like outside.

That's the easiest way to do it. But then you're wasting, you're wasting that heat, like if you want to like use it to heat your home, you're going to have to like kind of divert it into the heating system that's going to be more complex.

If you live in an apartment, I do think you should get a black box or build something similar to a black box because you're not going to be able to live with that noise. It's a lot. Yeah, it's disgusting. Like for anyone who hasn't heard it, it is, you cannot live with that in an apartment.

My sort of thinking is I'm probably going to do it in the garage and then I'm going to have like a little bit of a home gym in there so then the heat will be nice because it's so cold in England anyway most of the time.

So I'm thinking like if I'm just running one minor and then just pumping the heat into that room anyway, it'll be just like a nice little space heater basically, but the noise will annoy me so I will have to have like some kind of box or something.

Yeah, no for sure. There's so many different like things you can build and put like that like foam in the box and kind of like make it less noisy. Like there's a lot of people who've actually built prototypes of something similar to the black box and they're posting on Twitter and on Reddit.

There's a lot of different blueprints that you can find and easily replicate. Yeah, there's so much good info out there now. It's amazing. It's just like it makes it so much more accessible. I think people, if they can sit down for an afternoon and read through all of this or the info that's out there like everything is there.

And then everyone's really happy to help it seems generally like from the people that I've reached out to and asked about bits and pieces with mining.

They're like, yeah, come on, join the club. Like I'll teach you how to do this. And like you said, here's the plans and here's what you do. And yeah, I don't think anyone should be too scared about doing it.

You know, maybe don't dive in head first and put your whole net worth into minors, but dip your toe in and try for sure. Yeah, I mean, the cost to try it out is so cheap. Like you can buy an S9 experiment with it. For some reason, it doesn't work for you. You can just resell it in the P2P markets on Telegram. Like nothing is lost.

How much are they going for now at S9 roughly? Well, 550 to 600. So they haven't really let up and cost even if the price has dropped. It just kind of shows you the level of demand that there is.

Yeah, it's not so much that people are going to cry over it if there's a major problem rather than them going and dropping, you know, 10, 20,000 on a newer minor. At least they can have a play and get used to it and find out what set up works for them as well.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't think anyone should be discouraged from trying. There's a lot of fun out there that says it's not profitable or they shouldn't do it. And I think they should just ignore it and see for themselves, because, I mean, that's what it is, right? Don't trust verify.

Exactly. And so what sort of issues is someone going to run into? Do you think, like, what have you experienced? Is there anything where you've been like, Oh, fuck, I didn't think of that, or this has really caught me out or parts that go wrong?

Or like, is there anything that people can be warned about so that they're ready when they go wrong? Yeah, like what, like, let's say, you know, the minor goes offline or like how to troubleshoot or spare parts that they should buy. Is that what you mean?

Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, I think, like, newer models, especially, you should get spare PSUs, like power supply units. And then, like, you know, when you're setting it up, you might, you might run into problems that might not be properly connected to the mining pool.

Like, you might have something wrong with the config. So what I like to do is, okay, my minor went down. There's two things that you have to check. There's the GUI check, the graphical user interface, and then there's the actual minor that you have to check.

So basically, in the GUI, you want to log in, connect to the minor, see if the pool's up and running, see if the config is still the same. So sometimes what happens is the factory defaults, or goes back to defaults, and then it, like, changes. So you have to make sure that your changes were saved.

Check if the firmware is updated or not, especially if you're using a third party firmware. You want to verify the hash rate in the main stats page, like on your minor dashboard. You want to check the log files while the minor boots up. And then, of course, on the actual minor, just make sure all your power cables are tightly connected.

If it's an external power supply unit, you can reset the PSUs if you're having trouble there. Make sure ethernet cable is tightly secured, and then obviously, like, make sure nothing is burned.

Sometimes these cables and stuff can fry, and if that's the case, you're going to have to replace them. Same with the boards too, can also fry. Like, on the older models, because they've been so used up and, like, resold, and they might have problems.

Another thing too is... Sorry, we got a bit of a delay, I think. I'm jumping all over it. And I was just going to say, like, you said about having the extra parts, like, the PSU have a spare.

Is the thinking there that, well, every minute that this miner's down is costing you money. So you want to have these parts because, presumably, when it gets difficult to source the miners, it will also be difficult to source the parts.

You might have something fried, and you're like, "Ah, fuck. Now I need to order this thing." And then you can't get a hold of one for a month, and then that's going to cost you a load of money and really piss you off.

Is that kind of the thinking and having some spares? Yeah, definitely. I mean, look, if your miner is offline, it's losing you money. This is the way I see it. You're not just, like, not making money, because if your miner is offline, it's extending that time that it's going to take for you to ROI on that machine.

Yeah. So that's totally a loss, not like a nothing. So you want those parts, and you want to be able to know how to troubleshoot, because the last thing you want to do is send in your machine for repairs, and then having that person that's repairing it say, "Oh, this was just something in the config."

And you just had to reset it. That would be so bad. You need to know basically how things work. Sometimes people even run into trouble when hooking up their miner.

Yeah, raise my hand. Raise my hand. That is exactly what happened to me, and I sat for days, and days, and then ended up just going, "Fuck this," and send it back, and I wish I never did.

But that was kind of before I could reach out to someone like you, or anyone who knew what they were doing, and I was just dealing with Bitmain's shitty customer service, and I was just like, "Ah, fuck this. I got too much going on." So it just went back.

But yeah, you're right. Just checking the obvious things before sending them back is definitely wise.

Yeah, and usually an error will pop up, so if you're booting up the miner, and the log files are loading, if there's a problem, it'll pop up with an error message, or something will light up, and you'll know kind of where the problem's coming from.

You don't have to just default to shitty corporate support and wait for them. That's another thing, too. No matter what, whether you post it at home or with somebody else, the troubleshooting's not good. That's a huge problem for you.

Yeah, so maybe having the list you went through there, having someone just go through that checklist, make sure they've gone through everything before they panic, or send it off anywhere.

And then the other thing, maybe it's useful if people know each other on Twitter or Bitcoin meetups and they're mining and they have the same hardware, you could make a case for there being a bit of a pool of parts or something like that.

So you hold enough parts between you, obviously it's different for bigger miners if they've got, you know, 10, 100 or 1000 machines and they're all running the same hardware, then obviously you're going to have the spare parts ready for when one goes down and restock it.

But if someone's buying one machine, and then, you know, they're like, "Oh, well, I have to get an extra PSU and an extra board and an extra this and extra that," it's like, "Well, then maybe they're going to spend the same amount again on the parts."

And then they might not ever use them and then they think, "Oh, that was a bit of a shame." So, sure people can get a bit innovative with how to have these parts between each other. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, if they don't use the parts, they can always sell it to someone who needs it or find someone who has trouble.

I feel like the best thing for newer miners, they should opt for what's miners versus the ant miners. They just have less maintenance problems, like their stuff doesn't fry as easily. It's just a better build quality. Just try to avoid access maintenance where you can is my thing.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I hear everyone seems to say that with the what's miners. What is it that's going wrong with the ant miners then? Is that the PSUs and the boards that are going wrong on the new ant miners?

I know a lot of people have had trouble with the PSUs specifically, and someone even posted on Twitter the other day, like, buy extra PSUs if your model is made after 2020.

And I don't really know what it is. I don't know if it's... I know that the parts have gotten more specialized with the newer models of ant miners versus the older ones.

The older ones used to be able to replace out parts with generic things, and now you have to get specific parts, and maybe that's profitability reason, more than a utility reason. That's what I think, but I don't know. I didn't make... It kind of sucks, though. I wish it was more generic. It's better for the user.

Yeah, where do you see that going long term? We obviously got these two big players, really, in the mining space, and there's a lot of talk of new people entering. Do you think that's going to happen? Do you think that we're going to have more generic parts in the future and that you're not just going to have two Goliath?

You're going to have a few more people to compete. I think we're going to see more competitors in the ASIC market space, but the biggest problem that not a lot of people are addressing is it's not the ASIC manufacturers themselves.

It's the manufacturers to the ASIC suppliers. The people who make these really small 7mm chips that go into the ASICs, there's only a certain amount of chip boundaries that make these. The biggest one right now is Taiwan semiconductor, and the amount of money that it takes to spin up a foundry is hundreds of billions.

That's where the problem lies. There was actually a recent... I don't want to say scandal, but it was like a big thing in the news where Antminer was hiring a lot of TSMC engineers.

I don't know if it was because they plan on making their own chips in house, but they can't really do that because they don't have the manufacturing capacity that they do in Taiwan.

Even the Chinese miners are dependent right now. One of the parts that goes into these chips, China is actually on a US blacklist for receiving that equipment. They can't produce the equipment. They can't get it, and they don't have the capacity and they're on a blacklist.

It would be interesting if we saw the United States start to do something like this. That would change the game because then you don't have to rely on Antminer and you don't have to rely on the Taiwan semiconductor.

It's Samsung, because these shortages, they're not just in the ASIC markets. They're everywhere. They're in the computer markets. Some of these go in phones. This is, to me, a national security issue. If they don't start to manufacture things at home, it's going to lead to huge disruptions.

I know that TSMC, they've mentioned cryptocurrency on a lot of their corporate calls, and they said, "We're going to watch this market, but it's not like a priority for us." Bitmain does not have long-term contracts with TSMC. Their main supplier for their chips for their ASICs.

There's nothing stable right now in that supply chain. Am I right in thinking, did my eyes deceive me? I saw something about Intel producing chips or talking about producing chips. Is that right?

Yeah, I saw that too. I don't know because these kinds of things have popped up in the news before and they've never went anywhere. It's just speculation. Because Samsung, there was rumors about them doing the same thing in 2017. Nothing came out of it.

It depends. It's only going to solve the problem if these chips are fabbed in-house versus outsourced. That's my thinking. For the US to have this presence in the ASIC markets, they're going to need to start producing these chips at home.

Yeah, I remember listening. I can't remember where I listened to it now, but someone was talking about, "Well, even if we did want to start a foundry in the United States, and even if we did throw the money at it, it's not like an overnight thing."

I was saying this is like years and years to build something that could do this. So even if they started now, we're still many years away. Just because of the tech in there and the purity of the air and all this sort of stuff has to be so perfect that it's not like something you can just knock up.

Yeah, exactly. It's going to take a lot of time. I mean, this is just a proposal for Intel. Maybe they're just starting this division. I think it's great. They should do it. I mean, they're going to get a lot of business. A lot of people, they prefer not to do business with a Chinese as bad as it sounds.

Yeah, well, definitely. Here's a dumb question. I've always got to get one in each show. It's just running through my mind now. You're talking about seven nanometer chips that go into these things. Is it that if it was like a, does it go backwards or forwards? Like it goes smaller as newer? Is that right?

So like seven nanometer is what we're at now. If we went back in time, would it be eight and nine and ten? Or is it the other way? Yeah, so the smaller ones are like, like eight would be smaller, nine would be smaller.

As in less powerful or more powerful? There'd be more powerful. Is it possible to produce less powerful ones at a reduced cost and you wouldn't have to have the same infrastructure to produce it?

And therefore, if you could do that, so you had like a five or a four or three or whatever, then could you not just make a much cheaper machine that is less powerful, but it's cheaper, but it's going to produce less.

Do you know, do you guys hear what I'm getting at? Like, is it possible to make a worse machine for way less money and therefore people could mind with that and you wouldn't have this issue?

I mean, I think you can do it, but it's just kind of like, why would you produce a less efficient chip? Like you're going to take productivity from that factory to produce these less efficient chips to make, I guess, cheaper miners.

That's the bit I'm getting at is like, you can't get the floor space in these factories and you can't just make these factories and they cost have many hundred billion, whatever dollars to make.

Would it be possible to make a less efficient chip in a lesser factory? So you wouldn't have to have that same infrastructure. That's what I'm getting at is like, could you see what I mean? So it's like, you wouldn't have to spend a hundred billion dollars. You could just have it in like surgically clean environment rather than past that.

So you then don't have all those costs, which means you can make it for much, much less. Yeah, I mean, I feel like that could be possible, like you'd be using less efficient technology, you'd be using different tech to build these chips that wouldn't require the infrastructure that TSMC has.

But that's something that's like a total engineering question. Like, I don't know. Is that worth it? And then you have to look from a business standpoint, like, how would that machine do on the market? Like, is that something that people would really want?

Like, they can get a less efficient ASIC, like an older model and use that. Like, why would they be producing? Yeah, no, it's, like I said, it's almost definitely a really stupid idea. It's just something that I had to blur it out.

But someone might listen to it and go, "Oh, maybe that's not so dumb." They probably won't, but just in case, if anyone's listening and thinks that it can make something useful. I don't think it's dumb. I just think it's like, it's not a black and white question, you know?

I feel like there's so many things that we're missing. Like, from an engineering standpoint, like, does it even make sense to go backwards? Probably not. Probably not. I don't know. Yeah. Just go and buy a normal minor, people. Don't even listen to me. That's stupid.

Okay, so what else have we got? We obviously now, someone's gone and bought a minor. They have got their PSUs and all the other parts and all that sort of stuff. They've got their power. What's the other things that they need to be thinking about so that they have less issues and they can be happy?

Yeah, I mean, we can talk about setting up the minor, like, what to do when you're hooking it up, how to connect to a mining pool, that kind of thing. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, so before you plug anything in, like, you got all your supplies in with your power supply unit, you want to make sure to make an account with a mining pool.

That could be, you know, any mining pool, F2 pool, I use slush pool, so I can talk about that. Make an account with them first. It's pretty simple. Go to the website. Make an account. And then you want to plug everything in, so all the cords coming out of the PSU, they just go into the corresponding plugs on top of the minor.

And then you plug in the minor, you plug in the ethernet cable, and then the PSU into the wall. So that's, like, mechanically, the most basic setup, and then you want to connect to that mining pool.

So then you're going to have to use that account that you made before you plugged everything in. So to connect to a mining pool, you're going to have to find the IP address of your minor.

So every device in your network has an IP address, and to find this, you just download a software to, like, scan your network. What's really common tool is the angry IP scanner. So you do that, and then it'll pop up, and it'll say, like, the minor name, and then it'll come up with an IP address.

So you're going to use that IP address to access that graphical user interface that we were talking about that you used to, you know, check if you have to troubleshoot. You put in your IP address in your browser so that you can view that, like, graphical user interface for the minor.

When you do this, you should not have a VPN on, because if you try to scan for your IP with a VPN, it's not going to come up. And then, for, like, at least for Slush Pool, you find that connection link on their website.

So there's, like, a link that you put in the GUI dashboard, and that will help you point your hash to the pool. So you take that link from Slush Pool site, it's on their FAQ page, paste that link into the Brains OS pool group section, and then that's going to link your minor to the mining pool.

And then that GUI that user interface, like, that's what you're going to use to interact with the minor, like, to see everything, to look at the hash rate, to look at your account, to look at your payouts.

And, like, that's really it. Like, you just make an account, plug in your stuff, get the IP address, put in your browser, use that connection link to link your minor to the GUI, and then you're connected to the pool, and you should be getting your rewards.

Beautiful. And when they're getting these rewards, what do they need to be thinking about to maintain as much privacy as possible? They're any tips that you can give there.

Yeah, so the first thing is, you know, they're going to ask you for an address to get paid out of, and we all know that address balances are visible to anyone with a block explorer, reuse addresses are pretty easily linked to, like, real-world identities, and that can result in doxing, address blacklisting, and other risks.

And then also, like, this is important that you don't reuse the same address too many times, because mining pool balances and payouts are some of the most closely watched types of on-chain data, literally by everybody from amateurs to government officials to corporate chain analysis companies.

So you don't want to put, like, a target on your back. Like we said, like, you have maybe one to five minors, you're not a big-time player, but you don't know what that's going to be in the future.

So the best way to mitigate this is just input a new address every time you get a pool payout, or what you can do is you can reduce the frequency of your pool payouts, so that way you'll reuse the address less, but honestly, the best thing to do is just new address every time.

I know it's inconvenient, but it's the best for your privacy. Because you've got to do that manually currently, haven't you? You've got to ask. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's a bit of a pain in the arse, but I think long-term, that's going to be worth it.

Yeah, it's super annoying, but I mean, it's okay. It must be a way round it, surely. They must be able to do that. You can get the next 99 addresses or something like that, and then just whack them in and say, "Can you just churn through these on every payout?"

Now, there must be some clever fucker who's listening to this and just goes, "Yeah, I can code that up or something." I know, right? Like, it needs to be a thing, but right now, it's just not like you have to manually change it.

Okay, well, I'm sure it will come at some point. It has to. I can't see why that's such an issue, but then I also don't know what I'm talking about. But yeah, I mean, it's still worth it. And like you said, you can then just, because I think mine does every couple of days at the moment, or every four days.

But that's another thing too, right? If you're reducing the frequency of your payouts, you're taking a small risk of you're having your funds held by the pool operator. Yeah.

Like, for longer, it's that trade-off, like, "Do you want to inconvenience yourself, or do you want more privacy?" It just depends on the person, you know? Like, there's no good answer for everyone.

Yeah, but I suppose no one or most people aren't going to remember to do it like every day or every two days. That's probably not realistic unless this is like their full-time thing.

Because, you know, I think most people who are going to be listening to this show are like people who haven't done it before, and they just want to dip their toe in, and they're doing other work.

So I'd think that the trade-off may be what would make sense in my head here is like, if you've got one machine, just do it so that your payouts every week or two weeks, and just do one new address every time, rather than the same address for doing it every day.

Because I think the risk of you reusing an address is probably higher than losing the two weeks worth of mining those SATs to me anyway, but I guess that's every individual has to make that choice.

Yeah, no, I'm with you on that. It's definitely a higher risk to have that address reuse. I mean, the blockchains are super transparent, and people seem to forget that. Okay, and then anything that they need to do from there, so they've set it up. They've decided that they're going to not reuse their address.

They haven't docked themselves with their purchase of the equipment because they've made sure that it's no KYC Bitcoin and that it's gone through world pool. They've used the private channels for communication. They've then set it up with the mining pool.

My question then would be, right, they set it up with a mining pool. The mining pool then presumably has their IP address, even if it has nothing else. They know that this IP address is associated with these SATs that have been sent to these 10, 15, 20 addresses, however long you know you're mining with them.

What would you think about coin joining on the way out if you're ever going to use these because now your details are with a mining pool and how can you trust them? Or is there some way that you can see what I'm getting at? It seems like we've got some trust with them.

So you can actually mitigate some of this. So the privacy and security is a bit more complicated when it comes to mining data transfers. Like you're mentioning with docked seeing yourself or you're docked seeing your IP.

There's a couple of things we can talk about here. It's a little technical, so I'm going to try to simplify it as much as I can. This is bare with me. We all know that every minute counts when it comes to finding blocks.

Right. And when you take some precautions, you don't want to increase the latency and latency in layman's terms is really a measure of delay. So in this setting, latency measures the time it takes for some data to get to its destination across the network.

So your data transfers between you, the miner and the mining pool, that's something you don't want high latency because that's going to impact your ability to find.

To contribute and find blocks, so latency of high quality VPN is not significant for general web browsing, but it can impact the profitability of mining by increasing a miner's stale shares.

So that's the share submitted for a block height, which has already been mined. So if they submit stale shares, they're not going to receive payouts for that.

Okay. Like a block. Basically, they're submitting shares, but they have this latency that doesn't register with them that the block has already been mined, so they end up submitting a stale share to the pool.

And that's, that's not like a good, it's not a good thing. So one thing that you could do is a kind of alchemist actually wrote about this in his home mining network privacy guide is he uses multiple VPN channels that automatically route mining traffic to the tunnel with the least latency.

So this basically says, okay, now the users have privacy from the ISP, the internet service provider, they have privacy from the mining pool. And there's no material added latency. Interesting.

So, well, I can send you a link to his guide, you can put it in the show notes, but he tested this, I think for a week, and he found that mining with multiple VPN tunnels actually introduced less latency than mining over a clear net, which is like a standard thing.

Okay, and so, well, obviously we'll read this in the guide, we don't have to go too much into it, but is this automated presumably that it's just constantly checking to find out which route is going to be the fastest which VPN to use, and then it just constantly

goes with that. It's not like he's literally sitting there just like monitoring it and switching between. Okay, so there is a program that does that or some code that does that. Yeah, no, everything is automated and imagine doing that, like trying to manually.

That's what I wasn't mentioning. But there's other ways, like, because here's the thing, like you could do it, you can mine, like I said, without a VPN, but you don't use a VPN, then the miners ISP will have the connection to the pool stratum server, which basically means the pool can see your IP address.

And that's not the only risk, right? The miners hash rate is actually at risk of being stolen by these droppers, if they're sophisticated enough.

And the reason is because these data transfers via the stratum protocol, like so you're transferred from, like you to the mining pool, they're actually unencrypted, and they're unencrypted because they're in this format called the JSON format.

And the JSON format basically means like it's human readable. So in layman's terms, this is like visiting an HTTP website and not HTTPS. So it's like going to a website unencrypted if you're not using a VPN.

Yeah, so the best, I guess the best solution really is upgrade to stratum v2, and you can do that via brains. It's pretty simple upgrade. And then the data transfers and stratum v2, they're encrypted, and they're encrypted because they're not in the human readable JSON format.

They're in the binary format, which is only a computer can read can read binary. So the encryption here basically makes stratum v2 synonymous to the HTTPS to stratum v1's HTTP. So HTTP, unencrypted stratum v1, encrypted HTTPS using stratum v2.

So what does that do for the miner? It keeps all their actual mining activity private and hidden from onlookers, and it prevents them from having their hash rate potentially stolen. Okay, that sounds like that is a step you don't want to miss then. Is that something that is going to be accessible to the average person listening to this?

Like realistically, is that something where, you know, a kind of alchemist can probably do it in his sleeve? And I'm sure so can you, but are people going to run into massive issues doing this?

Or is it relatively simple to upgrade to stratum and to have it running so that you have this automated in the background with a couple of different VPNs? Yeah, so upgrading to stratum v2 is the easiest way to mitigate against spying from the ISP from the miner and from having your hash rate stolen.

Like that's pretty standard and you can get this, you can do this like through brains. Also, like if you have questions, you can reach out to one of them and they can help walk you through it.

Iconos Guide is pretty simple to follow, I think. I mean, it's more involved than just upgrading to stratum v2, so I would say the first thing a noob should try is upgrading to stratum v2.

Okay. It's not hard. I can link you a page to that on the brain site if you want to include it in the show notes. Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be brilliant. And so they've done those sorts of bits. The other thing I was going to ask now that you've just said brains.

What's your thoughts on upgrading the firmware, especially on some of these older miners? Is that something that you think is worth doing? Or are there any trade-offs in your mind with doing something like that if they're going to try and get a bit more juice out of them?

I've always upgraded the firmware and I've never had any issues with it. I haven't heard people having issues with it. They just have to make sure that firmware is compatible with the ASIC machine that they're using.

Because I know sometimes things are not compatible. For example, if you're doing immersion mining, you have to have special firmware and that firmware can only support certain machines. You just have to pay attention to that because if you try to put something that's not supported, it could run into problems.

But yeah, no issues. Just go ahead and upgrade and keep your machines efficient. So if someone was going to do that, if they buy a S9 and they take your advice and they're just sort of trialling that, what's the cost or is there any cost for someone to upgrade this firmware?

And if so, how long does it take to pay itself back? Because from what I've heard, the performance is quite different with this. Yeah, so I mean, it's really not an expensive thing to upgrade. A lot of times, it's kind of like it included. You can upgrade.

I know that some sellers actually, when they're selling their machines, they actually ship them with the most recent firmware, so you don't have to worry about upgrading it. I know Kaboom, I don't know if they're still doing it, but they used to ship with brains automatically.

Oh, nice, okay. In terms of percentage of hash increase, is it substantial? No, not really. I mean, it doesn't do anything crazy for the machine, honestly. It's not like running it with immersion and you're going to get more hash rate out of that machine.

That's not really what's going to work. It's just going to keep it up to date more than anything. So hold on, so you get more hash from immersion, did you just say? Yeah, you can. Because a lot of the power draw comes from the fans, and the immersion, you remove them, and if you remove them,

you have to either put a spoofer on there, a fan spoofer, or you have to download the immersion-specific firmware. And that can save some draw, and you can get those machines running at a higher-tier hash than what they're marked at and marked it.

And someone who did this is coin-heated. He's done that for his machines, to his pool. He's the go-to source for immersion. I'm just still a noob in this. I have to get him on, actually. I've had a scroll through his Twitter feed a few times, and seeing what he's doing is pretty cool.

It seems to me, like, from someone who's never done any of this, that immersion is kind of the obvious way to go, especially if you have enough machines, especially now you said that it can make them more efficient as well.

Well, there's less noise, less mess, they're more efficient. It sounds like they're probably going to last longer if they're in immersion as well. It seems like there's not many drawbacks to me other than the cost of setting it up, and I'm sure it's a bit of a pain in the arse to get it all done in the first place,

but once it's there, am I wrong in thinking that, or is that something that you would say, like, long-term? We're probably going to see more immersion than fans. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, immersion is way more efficient. It's cleaner. I think we're going to see more of that.

Also, I'm not just in the home minor side, but on the corporate side, so Riot, like, just built out an immersion facility. But the only thing is, like, now we have this S19 Hydro that's coming out, and this is not an immersion-cooled machine.

It's a water-cooled machine, but it provides a lot of the benefits of an immersion-cooled machine. And it's something that doesn't require a huge technical know-how to operate, so I'm wondering if this machine is successful, unlike the S9 Hydro that came out many years ago, that might replace immersion-cooling in a lot of situations,

because you don't have to deal with dielectric coolant. Okay, yeah, because I saw this the other day, and I didn't realise, I didn't read the Hydro bit. I just assumed that this is, like, using coolant.

I just glanced across it, because it came up in my feed. Am I right in thinking it was, like, 150 or 200 terra-hash or something like that? Yeah, I believe it was 150. Okay. And so, then, what happens? Do you have, like, the minor, and then the casing has got water in there,

which then calls it down, or is it the water's flowing through somehow, or, like, how's that working? Because it's obviously not just satin water, because it fry immediately. Yeah, like, I think this water is, like, fed through the machine, I think, through, like, channels,

because it can't, I mean, it's not going to touch the equipment directly, it's going to ruin it. Yeah. And it's actually a 198 terra-hash, which is, like, crazy. I don't know, I haven't looked into it too much, but some people are saying that it can mine a Bitcoin for 6,000.

I don't know how accurate that is. Fuck. If that's true, I need to get, like, 10 of you. Me, too. That's incredible. And so, then, there's no noise, as well. So, someone can sit this in their home.

Yes. Or, presumably, there'll be some noise, because they have to have pumps to move the water around, but not like a fan. Yeah. I'm really excited to see this in practice, because, from what I read, the S9 Hydros, they did terrible, and, like, they had a lot of leakage.

Okay. So, we'll see if they fix the problem with this one. Well, it'd be interesting, maybe, just, that's the last thing you want. It could cause some serious issues. High-voltage machine and water, and, presumably, these things are going to be a small fortune, as well.

Yeah. I mean, I'm excited to see how it goes. I think it's going to be interesting. I know that there's a facility being built into buy right now, and they're going to have, like, thousands of these Hydros in there.

So, that's probably going to be one of the first, like, commercial tests. And do you think what's minor will follow suit from what you've said, and from what a lot of people have said, I'd be cautious chucking a load of money in anant minor because of the issues.

Like, do you think this is going to be a trend that continues and what's minor will follow? I think what's minor will have to follow and innovate to keep up. But, I mean, this is just speculation.

I think what's minor is more intentional about what they're building, so they want to create something that is, you know, of high-build quality that doesn't need a lot of maintenance. But it's hard to say, like, it's not something that is easy to predict.

And these machines, we need to see them tested, and we need to see them tested for, you know, a good amount of months before diving in and buying them. Like, it looks cool, but it also looks super gimmicky at the same time.

So, a new minor, they shouldn't, I don't think they should be buying this as their first machine. They should try something that's, you know, tried and tested versus going for this new flashy hydro machine that we just don't know if it's going to be good.

Yeah, right, and it seems to me as well, like, where's the market for this thing? Because it's like, yeah, you don't want to be jumping in as a new minor who's just buying one machine to run this.

But also, I don't understand why you would buy these machines where each individual one has to be almost overly engineered to have the water running through, which presumably will have to be drained at some point and replaced on each individual machine rather than just building a massive immersion setup to have your thousand minors in.

And then you're just looking after less equipment, which will be less money to buy in the first place. I don't understand how that works. The more I think about it, who's buying that machine?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we'll have to see that market develops, and if we truly enter, like, a real bear market, is that going to impact the demand of that machine, at least from the retail side?

I don't think that's their market here. I think they're looking at the commercial side. Yeah, no, it's going to be interesting to see. But, yeah, I think we covered most of the things there.

Hopefully that's going to help the people have been reaching out to me. Hopefully it's going to persuade a few people to dip their toe in, and I've definitely learned a few bits there. I didn't know that the immersion was going to help and make it more efficient, so that's good to know when I'm thinking for myself.

But is there any bits we didn't cover where you think people can trip themselves up or any exciting things that are happening in the mining world that we didn't cover? I mean, I think we covered most things.

I don't know if we talk about the coin joining payouts. Why you should do that? Because I know I get a lot of DMs, and they're asking me, "Why should I coin join this if I'm getting..." What they think they're getting is pure Bitcoin, and that's actually not the case.

So when you join a mining pool, you're not getting directly paid out by the Coinbase. You're getting paid out from the mining pool operator's wallet. So the flow is, you know, coin-based reward goes to the pool operator.

Your reward comes from the pool operator to you. And because of that, you want to whirlpool that Bitcoin. And if you plug in any address to the block explorer, you're going to see that this is not a Coinbase payout, and it can be traced.

So whirlpooling will help prevent parties that you send your rewards to from knowing that you mined Bitcoin. And that's why I think it's important. Yeah, that's a good point. It's a way of doing something clever where you can get the coin-based payment or a percentage of that payment where the mining pool couldn't track it.

There's no, like, built in. No, there isn't. I've just thought that through my head. That's stupid. Okay. No. Yeah, whirlpool. No, I've answered my question. No, there isn't. But there are some pools that are structured in a way that the participants do get paid out directly from the Coinbase, but that requires, you know,

a higher hash rate to the pool and more shares. So one of these pools is actually a Laurentia pool. They do this, but, you know, as a small miner, you're going to have to join a pool to get paid.

So whirlpool it, send it if, like, if you're an iPhone user, send it to Sparrow Wallet and have it mixed directly into cold storage. That's really the simplest way to do it. Agreed. I'm actually going to be setting up Sparrow in the next couple of days.

I finally cleared some time. I've finally got my new Linux laptop and I'm sat here, all shadowy super Koda ready because I was using Spectre before and I was, because I'm changing over from Mac and going over to this thing.

I was like, I'm not going to bother until I've got this thing set up. And I had a few issues with it. But yeah, I'm pretty excited because all I hear is good things all the time. And yeah, it just, it means it's so much more accessible for people now, all the iPhoneas and everyone else.

So there really is no excuse. Yeah, it's so easy. Which Linux laptop did you go for? Or did you, like, load a diesel on it? I've got the Starbook. I don't know if you've seen it. Katan's got one, Q&A's got one.

It's a British company, really, really slick. Like, it basically just looks like a Macbook, but all matte black, similar trackpad and all of that. And I massively overspect it because I don't really know how to use it.

All I've managed to do so far is change a background. But I feel cool. Like, I feel like I'm sort of part of the gang now. So yeah, this evening I'm going to play around and do some more bits.

But I've got, that's the hardware and then I've got PopOS I've put on it. That's awesome. I mean, that's a good start. It needs to change those boring default backgrounds. Yeah, I've got the new Ronan Dojo background, the one that's going to be on the new UI.

And yeah, I feel pretty cool. I do. I feel really cool with it. But I just need to do all the settings and changing bits now and actually start using it because I'm still running the Mac.

Yeah, no, it's a process. And it's good that you got that sorted. Hopefully, too. I don't know if you want to delete your data off Mac. You can do that securely and just get out of your life.

Yeah, I need to do that. Yeah, I need to like slowly clear everything. Like, I had the idea of I was going to move house and then just stage by stage starting from the router, like go through and completely start again with everything.

But I now haven't been able to move and tenants won't fucking leave. And it's just an absolute nightmare. And I thought that I'm never going to start. I'm never going to get time to do this properly and just like from fresh.

So I'm just diving in head first at the moment and then I'll try and just get rid of all my old data. But I guess starting is better than doing nothing. It's never going to be perfect. Yeah.

No, for sure. I mean, it's a process. What are you running? You running Linux? Yeah, I have a lot of laptops and phones for all kinds of things. But I run the Red Core Linux on one of my laptops.

I still have a Windows laptop that I use for work related things. And then I have a third one that I kind of experiment with. I have Ubuntu on that. I don't really use it. It's Red Core the one that's like, um, is it like one's red hat and fedora and you have these different ones?

Is that different to that? It's not like the corporate one. No, it's actually a gentle de-stro. Okay. So it's different from Papo West and Linux Mint. Gen 2 is the one that who's like, whoa, was telling me.

Yeah. That's the only one to do. Like, he absolutely loves it. And I was like, just, yeah, okay, maybe one day. I'll start with pop. I'm only doing pop just because everyone that I speak to on a daily basis is using it.

And I'm like, well, at least they want to have problems. Then I can sort of have some help. Yeah. Gen 2 is like the hardcore nerd de-stroze. Okay. I mean, that endearingly. I think sometimes people like, like, whoa, forget what us humans are like.

He's so fucking good at this sort of stuff. And he's like, oh, yeah, it's just easy. And you're like, no, no, just, I don't think you understand quite how far apart we are in our knowledge.

Like, I don't think you can even begin to understand how difficult I find that. It's just a different world. Yeah. I know. It's a process. Like, I don't even consider myself super technical, but I'm trying.

Well, you're certainly more technical than I am. And I've really appreciated all your help with this show. I think people are going to find it very useful. If you can send all the links and bits and pieces, that would be great.

And I'll try and add them into the show notes. But yeah, a bit further down the line, hopefully when I've got set up, we can do another one and run through and do an update when these new machines come out and everything.

Yeah, I'd love that. Be fun. Awesome. Well, nice to speak to you again, Lily. And we will speak soon. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks for having me, Max.