Happy birthday Lincoin pool - Bitcoin mining and Paynyms

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 to "Pleb Mine a Month." Today, we speak to Medi Nasari about Linko in pool. It was on our radar as soon as they put Paynim support for payouts on the pool. And John has been testing it out.

It was really good speaking to Medi and learning more about Boti Mcbot face and some of the other features on Linko in pool. Today is Linko in pool's birthday. So go ahead and follow them and give them a happy birthday message.

Thank you to the team for pushing forward. Paynims, I really do appreciate that. And thank you for taking the time to jump on the pod. I also want to say thank you to everyone who's been involved in "Pleb Mine a Month."

That means everyone who's been contributing, sending in articles, jumping on pods, doing bite-sized bitcoins, and also everyone who's been sending in messages, asking questions, retweeting.

It really is amazing to see how this thing is growing. I recorded with John yesterday. We did a bit of a roundup of the month so far and also did the prize draws. So for everyone who's been entering the competitions for the S9, the hoodies, the no-grunners gear, and the seat signer, make sure to check that one out.

Before we start, I also want to say thank you to Foundation Devices, not only for sponsoring my show but also for sponsoring "Pleb Mine a Month." Make sure to check daily on Twitter and ungovernablemissfits.com to make sure you catch one of those.

If you haven't already seen one of these incredible devices, go to foundationdevices.com. If you'd like to buy one, you can use the code "bit by bit" to get $10 off. And if you have any questions about the passport, you can get those questions in and you can ask Bitcoin Q&A and Lily who will be coming on the show.

Also, a big thank you to FastBitcoins. They are an exchange based in the Isle of Man. They have an incredible UX. And for those of you who don't want to listen, don't want to go know KYC and decide you want to give your information over, then you might as well make sure that it is with a company that can be trusted to do the right thing.

They will do everything they can to keep you safe. And they're also here, despite me continuing to shit on and slag off every KYC service out there. So thank you so much to them for supporting the show.

It means a lot and it just goes to show that they are here for the right reasons. Check them out at fastBitcoins.com. And if you have any questions about the trade-offs, please do ask me.

I'll be happy to talk this through. Enjoy the show. - It is amazing when it works. I've just ninja launched you, by the way. - You did, you always do. - I always do. It's great to have you on the pod.

As I said, I'm sorry for being late. It's just been a bit of a crazy day of driving. - You were late and I was an hour and 15 minutes early. (laughing) - I was the only on time going, huh?

(laughing) - Yeah, well, yeah, thanks for joining and we've got this mining month obviously kicking off. I'm sure John has given you a little bit of info on it. I came across a tweet that had gone out and saw that you guys were supporting Paynims.

And honestly, that was the only thing I'd ever heard from this pool. And I was like, fuck, can we get these guys on? This is awesome. Since then, I've been looking in a little bit more and pretty impressed with what you guys are doing.

So I'm really looking forward to getting into it and learning a bit more about why you set the thing up. - Sure thing, yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me first of all. And yeah, we have been doing a lot and we have a lot to be done on our roadmap.

So I would be happy to discuss those over this podcast and introduce this product and the technologies that we're building around it to more plebs. - Before we sort of jump into Medi, can we talk a bit about why you're here and why you're doing something as fucking cool as getting Paynims involved?

There's not many Bitcoiners that are doing this kind of stuff. Like, how did you get into this? - Okay, so we got to go back to many years ago. It was 2015. I was one, like, nerd guy. I was, at the time I was at graduate school.

And the first Bitcoin ATM in the world was installed in Vancouver. I said, "Hey, what's this thing? How cool is it?" I started buying Bitcoin from that ATM. And well, it was just a hobby for me.

Until the day that I went on a backpacking trip in Latin America. I remember I was in Nicaragua on an island, a volcanic island named Ometeppe. And we were staying at a hostel, like a farm hostel.

And I saw that there was a sign there saying that Bitcoin is accepted here. Wow, how come? Like, we are in the middle of nowhere, literally in the middle of nowhere. How are these guys doing that?

I started talking to the receptionist, "Hey, do you actually accept Bitcoin?" Said, "Well, we have the sign. We haven't done it yet. But sure, we do." And said, "Let's give it a try." And I paid for my hostel.

It was at the price today. It cost me around $10,000 or whatever. But I made a payment. At the time, there was no QR codes or stuff. I mean, I know the technology was there, but they only had the address.

I had to type that in. And I made a payment. And at that moment, I thought something changed in me, right? So I said, "Hey, I just transacted with these guys "without requiring to trust them, "without having any intermediary involved."

And I just had that moment. I thought, "This is going to be the future." And I got to do something about it. And I was one of those nerdy guys that invent something new every morning, right?

So I said, "Okay, let's invent something about Bitcoin. "Let's do something about Bitcoin." Well, at that, I mean, I started learning more. I came back from that trip. My heart stayed in Ometepan in Nicaragua.

But I started learning, a body of mine who is now helping me with this company. He's our city almost, nappa. We started learning different topics about Bitcoin, how the infrastructure works, what is mining, what is blockchain, all this stuff.

And we started building around it. It was 2020 that we officially started this company in order to build a product for Bitcoin miners. And we still had a lot to learn and a lot to build. But over the course of one year, we built our first product.

It was around like November, December 2020 that we launched the alpha version of the product. And March 2021, we launched the beta version. You can't imagine how bad it was, right? All the bugs, all the issues.

But eventually it was September last year, September 7th, on Bitcoin day that Venezuela, I mean, El Salvador announced that they are adopting Bitcoin. They're starting like having Bitcoin as legal tender.

On that same day, we launched our product publicly. We had some small miners, but he said, okay, here's a product. Now we should bring miners in. And started doing the marketing, talking to people, telling them about our vision, our mission.

And some people took the risk to actually come on board. We are really grateful to them, right? A new product, you have no idea who are these guys. But they trusted us and they joined the platform.

And from that moment, we started to grow. It is worth mentioning that we as miners, we didn't have any miners. We only had one T9, one S9, we still have them. And those are being used for our testing purposes.

But we didn't have any large operations ourselves. We were like pure plebs, if you want to call it that way. So we started from there, we started growing. And people started joining the platform.

And we received really, really great feedback from them. That, hey, this is something, well, the product was crappy, I would say, at that time. Minimal features, but they said, hey, we'd like the UX.

And you guys got to build on top of that and make this a great product. And that was a great motivation for us. We started building and building and building. It was around April, April this year, that we got to the point that we could claim that Lincoln is now the leading product in the market.

We know that we have already included every feature and we have the best features in the market. And we kept growing and growing and growing and we are where we are now. We have around like, well, that's not much, but it's honest work, around like 200 to 250 peta hash, all from plebs, we're mining through Lincoln.

- Very nice. And John, I know you've been playing around with some of the features and you were telling me about a telegram bot and some other different bits as well. - Yeah, so far, I've been testing out Lincoln Pool for about two weeks and I really like the interface.

I really like like the customer support. You know, Medi and his team are on that telegram group all the time. Any question you have, they're available to you. He's kind of building like a family atmosphere over there.

It's pretty light on the telegram group, a joke around. I'm really enjoying it. The interface, the UX is really clean. So far, monitoring on the miners has been good. I'm very pleased. You certainly are building quite a team over there and a great product.

- Thank you. Thank you. I'm happy to hear that. Something that you mentioned, and I just want to just some elaborate, some more on that. Since we started this, we thought that, okay, we don't have money, at least let's be nice.

So that's basically what we decided to do. Let's build a community around this product. Let's have the right culture in our community for people to enjoy being there and be supportive of each other.

And as soon as you go on our telegram group, and you'll feel that, you'll see that. Most of these people who you are referring to, that they have been supporting you, they are not affiliated with us.

They're just our users. And they are there to support everybody else to succeed. And that's how we are growing, the power of community, the power of the culture, the right culture in the community.

And that's what we love. I mean, that's a great motivation. Every morning that we wake up, we have something. We have a reason to actually keep building. - I love that. Well, that really is what this pleb mining month is about.

It's getting the plebs together, getting them to learn from each other, help each other, and they've all got different skills and different abilities. It's really nice to see that. Like it's a grassroots thing.

And we want to see more plebs getting involved in the mining. And if you have helpful support teams, it makes all the difference. - Absolutely. - John, what else have you found from playing around with it?

Any features and things that are of interest? As you know, I've not played around with it. I haven't got any home miners yet, but I will be forced to at the end of the month. So what's this telegram bot you were talking to me about?

- Well, that has a pretty nice story behind it. So one of the features that we had on the pool from day one was a telegram bot that people could use to interact with the pool. Well, we had it for a while, but at some point that we started adding more intelligence into it, we thought that, hey, this guy needs a name.

And we went to the community and said, hey, this is the bot you've been using for a while, but now let's come up with a name for it. And ask people to suggest names for it. Well, at the time we said, okay, let's come up with a name like a rocket star or superhero or something like that.

But we started getting like some funny names. And at the beginning, we were like, wow, are we gonna really name this bot, any of these suggestions? I mean, are we gonna use any of those? And well, out of all the names, the name Botty Mac Botface was selected by the community.

And it was actually based on a story about a bot being named by a city, yeah, named Botty Mac Botface. But they said, let's use the same framework to name this bot, Botty Mac Botface was born.

- Do you know the difference? - And what's the difference? - The difference is that you actually stuck to it and allowed the community to actually name the boat. I know about this because it happened in the UK and they put it out to the general public saying, what do you wanna name the boat?

I'm not sure if it was military or what it was for, but it was British public, we're gonna vote on it. And the British public being the British public came up with something fucking stupid and that was Botty Mac Botface.

But they didn't name it that. They went with something else, but you guys did. So that's that quality. - Yeah, and we actually at that moment, we totally felt that something changed, the intimacy that people had with the product was boosted from that day.

At people thought, hey, we are actually contributing in building this community building, this product in building, all the things around it. And we are really happy that we received those suggestions and we followed what is asked for our community.

And we are now seeing the result. People are loving it. - Yeah, something unique about Botty Mac Botface. Well, it is basically a boat that helps you maintain your hash rate, tells you if anything goes wrong, you can ask it about whether like the faulty machines or what is my average hash rate, things like that.

It is also really good in telling dad jokes. And whenever you feel like tired or whatever, you can ask for a joke until through you, the worst joke you have ever heard. Like not funny at all.

So that's the feature. - Are you on the chat now? - With chat on the other one. - Yeah, let me-- - Can we have a dad joke? - I wanna get a Botty Mac Botface joke. - Yeah, I wanna experience this.

- These are world class, tell a joke. How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh? - I don't. - Come on Max. - I don't know. - 10 tickles. (both laughing) - That's very good. - That's a real value added.

- It is you. What did one wall say to the other? I'll meet you at the corner. (both laughing) - As you'd say Max, good quality. - That is good quality. - I like that. (both laughing) - I'm just writing those down to use later.

- Well, start mining on Link Coin Pool and you can have access to it too. - Yeah, you do. - It's not just a value add for mining, what a value add for your life. - Exactly. It's a lifestyle thing.

- Yeah. (both laughing) - That's good. So you said you've obviously been growing quite quickly. Do you think that's just something from within the community? People are sort of dipping their toes in to start and then bringing more and more hash online or like how are you bringing people in?

Is there any sort of advertising or like it's a kind of new world to me. So I don't know how these things kind of happen. - Yeah. So we are a pretty small team. In the startup world, they call it a pre-seed team.

So we haven't raised any funding or whatever. It's all bootstrapped and it's all like being developed with the revenue that we're generating through offering services to our miners. So we don't have much budget for marketing and we don't do much marketing.

It's all the network effect which is bringing people in. And there is another driver for our growth which is innovation. Well, we believe mining pool industry has stayed in 2015. No innovation is happening.

Well, people are trying, but we think that there is a lot of room for improvement and for advancement. And we are actually doing that. We are building new features, new tools every day. We are building at a greater speed and that's kind of the main driver or one of the main drivers for our growth.

I mean, product innovation and the network effect from the community is how this product is growing. Yeah, well, like I said, the one that really jumped out to me being someone who's heavily interested in privacy to see that paintings were being included incorporated into this was really, really exciting

because it's something I've asked people for a long time. Like, isn't it a pain in the arse to just have to go in and keep changing manually the addresses? And, you know, some people do that and they manually change every time other people I know just say, "Oh, I'll just keep it as the same."

I just reuse the address. And I'm like, "Well, that's pretty basic 101 stuff not to do." I kind of felt like something should be built in to stop people from doing that. And bit 47 and Paynims is something that not many bits of software are using it.

Obviously, Samurai have got it and Sparrow, but outside of that, like I've not really seen anyone jump on board and start using this. So it was really exciting personally for me to see that and it made me think this is actually innovation.

This is actually something moving forward that people need. So yeah, I mean, this thing, bit 47 has been out there for many years, but well, no, I mean, and it has been adopted by wallets, as you said, Samurai and Sparrow wallet, but no platform had actually adopted it.

So no one was offering that solution for people to actually use their Samurai wallet with it. And we thought, let's do something about it. And the problem, the biggest problem for this was that there was no source code for it out there.

Like in many projects, the software developer is trained to go find the right code, copy and paste and build around it. But specifically for a bit 47, there was not many resources out there.

And we had to build from scratch, just imagine how much testing should have been done for a new code like that was built from scratch. And we did it. And we were pretty happy with the outcome.

And it was really well received by the community. And well, I mean, just as an example, you heard about us through payment, right? So we are pretty happy that we implemented that and we think that we are contributing to the advancement of this industry, especially for a small and medium scale miners who care a lot about their privacy.

This was a key feature and a new advancement for us. - Yeah, that's something we appreciate here. As we're celebrating PLEB minor month, giving the resources, small scale and home miners that they need.

It's really appreciated like from our vantage point that we can use a pay name. I initially saw that tweet. I think Dverder had sent it out first saying that you guys were the first one to use pay names and then Max saw it and I saw it.

And that really was the impetus for us contacting you and me getting on Linkoin Pool was the pay name. And then it's like come for the pay name and stay for the other advantages that the pool has.

So if somebody starts mining with Linkoin Pool and they want to pay on the pay name, how do they set that up on the pool itself? - So something about pay names is that you have to create a payment channel between the payer and the pay.

So in order to establish that channel, you gotta send a transaction on the network on chain in order to make that decentralized. So if anybody wants to start using pay name, they have to start mining, accumulate some Bitcoin, like they'll need 20,000 Sats.

And with that 20,000 Sats, they can initiate the channel. And once the channel is established, we will start paying them through that painting every time that we are sending them out a payout.

And the payouts on Linkoin Pool, they're two different methods. One is the instant or quick withdrawal. The other one is automated withdrawal. For the quick withdrawal, you can request the payout any moment during the day 24/7.

And that's gonna be sent to your pay name as we talked about. The other one, the automated withdrawal, you can set time triggers and thresholds to be paid on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

And again, that payout is also gonna go to your painting or BIP-47 payment code. So that's how it works. We have tried to make it as simple as possible in terms of UX. And people have been quite happy with it.

What was your experience, John, how was it for you? - I found it to be pretty painless. I had more of an issue with my Electrum server setting up the pay name than I did anything else. It took me a second to realize the 20,000 sat fee, I guess, to establish the channel.

But once I kind of understood that, it was pretty simple. Is there a threshold for the instantaneous payout? And do you have a threshold for the scheduled payout? - The threshold, well, it's 100,000 sats.

So that's the threshold. I'm used to just the threshold that we ask people to use for their payout. - That's a pretty low threshold. And that's helpful to a lot of small-scale miners to have such a low threshold.

- Exactly, exactly. - John, did you use Samurai for that or Sparrow? - They're used to Sparrow for that. - It's very interesting. It's like we were saying, this is for the pleb miners. And I think like a lot of the pleb miners, especially the ones in Europe, this is something that is done.

A lot of people are doing this for privacy because the energy rates are so high here. It makes it very, very difficult to be competitive. So the people who are mining, they're having to have all these extra steps they've got to think about.

And to have this integrated is just, yeah, it's really, really clean, I really like it. And I've been pretty surprised to see that no one else has integrated it outside of Craig. And it seems like I've asked a few people and they always just say, it's very difficult.

Like we do wanna do it, but it's too hard to do for X, Y, Z reason. Are they bullshitting? Or did you have to work really hard on this? - Well, it wasn't easy, I would say. We got it done in a quite short time.

We took us about like one month to implement. But that wasn't an easy process. You, we had to be creative around like the protocol. We had to be innovative on the code and the infrastructure.

So I don't expect this to grow very fast, but based on the feedback that we have got from our community, we think that it is gonna be adopted by more and more platforms as we move forward.

- Yeah, something that we like about it is that as you said, people don't actually have to do their like updated address every time. And we are implementing the same mindset everywhere throughout our product.

So basically we have an Instagram saying that we are here to make Bitcoin mining boring. Like people are trying to make it exciting, but we are trying to make it boring. You just set it and forget it, right?

You make it a passive income, you just set it, well, and everything else is gonna be done by the platform. And that's how we are trying to actually implement the same mindset in like device monitoring, payouts, management, things like that.

- So Mediud said that there was no source code out there to implement the pay name structure and that you guys built it from scratch. Would you be willing to share like how open source is that with other pools or other organizations that want to set up that kind of pay name pay out structure?

Or are you keeping that all proprietary? - Absolutely, shorting, that's something that the leaf should be shared. But for a new product and new code, there are some risks to do so. So just imagine if there is a bug in the code that we have and we just put it out there and it's gonna be used

by some bad guy to actually take advantage from it, that's not something that we want to happen. So before releasing the code, we just wanna make sure that it's tested for a while and it's actually a reliable to be out there.

So for sure, that's something that is gonna happen. - Did you guys coordinate all with Craig Raw or the Sparrow team or the Samurai team on building that particular functionality of Linkoinpool?

- No, we didn't have any communication channel between us, but their GitHub and their open source code was pretty helpful to understand the procedures and how they have implemented it. So we used their code, which was mostly in Java or I'm not sure what was the other one,

but we learned a lot from their code. - It kind of really displays the importance of keeping everything free and open source and the power that that actually has. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's all about this crypto, I mean, this Bitcoin community, right?

From day one, everything has been open source. All the procedures that we have for releasing beeps and people just see, comment, help you promote and develop that code and then it is adopted.

And that's the same thing in the entire community. - So at the moment, your code for this is close source or you're not sharing that while you're working out bugs, but is that something that you will share with certain developers to get some more eyes on it and then release or do you have like a plan for that?

- So just to clarify something, the code and how it works, it has already been implemented by Samurai and Sparrow, both of them are open source. So if anybody needs those, the code is already there.

So first of all, that's right. About what we have done, yeah, we have written our own code in our preferred language and we are sharing that with other devs like internally without like public, I mean, not publicly, and once we're sure about how it works and about like all the features, the security of code, that's something

that is gonna be published as an open source code. - Okay, that's huge, kudos to you guys. - That's very cool. Yeah, no, I just wondered in the meantime, like whether you would have a step between having the internal, they're like people who are interviewing the code and making sure they're comfortable with it before releasing.

I wondered if there might be a second step before the full release, which would be to speak to Samurai or speak to Craig and say, do you wanna cast your eye over this and just can you give me some thoughts and feedback, like kind of, I guess trusted plebs, trusted members of the community who you're not worried

about them fucking you over have kind of experience with this. - Sure thing, yeah, I mean, well, as I said, we didn't know them, basically in real life, I mean. But the moment that we announced this, we got pretty good support from them and from their community.

And we think that's something that should happen, this collaboration should happen in order to serve the users better. So that's for sure something that is gonna happen. - Awesome, I'm gonna have to set up a pod and get the three of you together.

- Sure thing, yeah. (laughing) - That would be a good listen. I know that these guys will just be, there'd be a huge amount of excitement from them because I know Samurai have been like banging their head for so long, like, come on, someone adopt this, come on, like all the communities like fucking hell.

And then Craig obviously jumped on board and there was a massive amount of support there and you know, with what you guys are doing, it's gonna be the same. So I'm sure they would help in any way possible.

- Yeah, I mean, I mean, that would be a big part of the Bitcoin standard which is which we believe is gonna happen in the coming years. So just imagine how many people are gonna set up these payment channels.

Like every employer who's paying their employees, every payer who's paying their pays, they'll need something similar if they wanna transact on layer one of Bitcoin. - Or those that are seeking donations for causes.

- Exactly, yeah, I mean-- - The whole Hong Kong model thing really could have been avoided with a payment. - Yeah, exactly. People are uncomfortable sending Bitcoin to a public address, right?

Because you kind of can be traced and tracked. For many different reasons, you don't wanna be that public, right? - Yeah, absolutely. Like you say, a lot of that could have been avoided. The privacy guys have been shouting this from the rooftops for years and years and a lot of people just don't wanna pay attention.

And then you have a real world situation, a situation where Bitcoin is actually needed by people on the ground and the ball is fumbled because people are too lax and they don't take care about these sort of things.

And this is, I guess, that pleb culture and especially in the mining community and what we're trying to do here is really to think deeply about how you do these setups, making sure that people are running VPNs when they're mining at home, making sure that they're thinking about paynims and thinking about ways to keep their data secure,

stop themselves from becoming a target. And that's something that's not really possible for a lot of people outside of mining. A lot of people struggle to buy in cash. A lot of people are going to exchanges.

And I guess within Bitcoin, I kind of see, Bitcoin mining is almost a counterculture within Bitcoin where you have the sort of think boys and you have the number go up crowd and it's something that's growing and it's cool to see there's a platform that's trying to embrace that.

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely. - That's one of the features, I think, for a lot of the pleb miners, a lot of the home miners is this is their avenue to get KYC resistant. I wouldn't know, KYC free is kind of a really abroad term, but at least mining is, it's a little easier to obfuscate

what you're doing and the paynim payout is really important for those small miners. What other kind of tools do you have that are more tuned towards a small miner? Do you think they would make linkcoin pool attractive to a small scale or home miner?

- So we identified one big issue in Bitcoin mining when we were building this product. Well, we thought that people are missing out because of their down times. Every 15 minutes of downtime means that you're losing 1% of your revenue.

And well, there was not enough tools and there is not enough tools out there to let you know that, hey, you're not hashing, I mean, for other thing purposes. So we built the entire infrastructure in a way that we wanted to make sure that we let miners know that if there is any issues, we'll let them know in less than five minutes.

So if there is a problem with the machine, is it a disconnection or is it a hash rate drop for every single miner separately, we let them know in less than five minutes and that's where body mac what face comes into play.

I mean, we also send others through email or through the mobile app, but that's something that we had in mind from day one to send out alerts for connections, for disconnections, for hash rate drops.

And we think this is a game changer for miners, especially for home miners who can't afford losing a lot. - You can't now just tell you a little story from yesterday, we had a big lightning storm and I decided it's time to disconnect my machines from power and I went down there and it was almost instantaneous.

That body mac bot face had informed me that my machines were off, which machines were off because they're not all on the same circuit. So I would turn about two off at the same time, wait a couple of seconds, take two more off, wait a few minutes because I have to go somewhere else in the home and then turn off the other two.

And it was almost instantaneous for each one on body mac bot face and the link coin pool app. And I also got emails as well. - That's awesome too, you got them all. (laughing) Thank you for the load on our servers.

So you had-- - You're quite welcome. I'm glad I signed up for all of those services. You know, for notifications and banner notifications and I don't know how you are with your phone, but I don't see any of them.

I don't notice them, they're mostly all silenced, but I am on Telegram often and I think a lot of other Bitcoiners and miners are on Telegram. So body mac bot face was super convenient for that.

And the details too, which miners are, you know, how many miners came offline and that's at least enough for a monitor for you to go into the app itself and get a little bit more details.

What kind of details are in the app as far as like a worker management? - So for the worker management, let me open it up because we have been adding a lot of features recently, I'm not sure.

- Yeah, yeah, I've noticed that. I think like a release came in for iPhone and you were like, oh, I didn't know that that was gonna come out yet. (laughing) - Yeah, that's the thing. We have a lot of new features in the funnel that hasn't been released yet, but what we have live right now, so for every single machine,

you can see the 10 minute average hash rate, one average hash rate and 24 hour hash rate. You can see the reject rate. You can see the estimated daily revenue for that specific miner. You can see the estimated daily electricity consumption for that miner.

So you can set the model and the panel will tell you how much does it cost to actually keep this machine going. So at some point you might decide that, hey, it's not worth it to keep it on.

- And you're just going on the average use from that particular model of machine. - Exactly, that's the Joule per terra hash or what per terra hash. That's how we calculate that. And we are adding more features around that, but-- - With, you know, each machine is, of course, different.

A lot of people will take measurements at the wall and look at their hash rate. Is there a custom entry for that, for your electricity consumption? Or are you just picking from generic models and their estimates on the factory?

- That's actually a good suggestion. So we hadn't talked about it. - Thank you. - Yeah, we'll add it for you. (laughs) - Hey, thanks again. - Oh, no, right? - Appreciate it. (laughs) - Yeah, so right now we only have a list of, well, pretty much all the machines out there.

But as you said, the energy consumption for all of them is not the same because, I mean, the cheap quality is different. So right now we don't support that, but that's something that we think should be added to the platform.

So yeah, you soon you will be able to add your own Joule Bertera hash for each minor and see what's going on. - Soon, TM, that's kind of the interesting part of the organization that you are, is you're lean enough to make those kind of changes almost in real time.

- Yeah, we actually hate this soon, TM thing, right? Everybody does, right? - I think a lot of people do, yeah. - Yeah, we rather talk about now, TM, because we think that we already have some great features.

And as you said, we are fast enough to build features in a very, very short time. I mean, if a feature request comes our way, we usually have that feature implemented in a week or so. - Let's get a timestamp on this.

We're almost, we're 39 minutes in the bit by bit pod for plebminum month with metting the Siri. And you have already trademarked a new trademark now, TM. - Right here, right now. - Yeah. - Yeah, it's official.

- So for, yeah, I mean, other people have been using, using that, so we're not infringing any trademarks here, just saying that-- - No, we're crediting you. - I know, but again, I mean, we hate keeping people waiting for something.

So we rather actually release that and then announce it. So as you said, one of our updates leaked last week that people learned that we are adding some new features about like the hashboard temperatures and the fan speed, stuff like that.

We were actually kind of surprised and kind of sad that, hey, people are knowing about this, now they are waiting for it, but it's not ready for release yet. So that's kind of a bad feeling for us.

- Not really, I mean, people get that sense of, you know, they gotta have it now. - Yeah, but anyway, that's not gonna take too long. We sent out all the new apps and stuff to our beta testers today, to test those new features.

And hopefully on our birthday, which is gonna be next week, we are gonna release a bunch of new updates for our web miners. - Hmm, I've kind of made up the schedule for the first two weeks of releases, but maybe we could do something with this pod if Max can edit it in time to release the same time that you're worth.

- Yeah, what was that date for your birthday, Maddy? - September 7th. - September 7th, I'm writing that down, Max. - Okay, that done. - Maddy, can you tell me how and you don't have to go, you can go as deep as you want to or not, how your app or Linko and Pool can monitor the hashboard temps and the fan speeds of the machines.

- So what we will need, we'll need users to actually run an agent locally, which runs in the background on a like a Windows PC, on a Mac, on a Raspberry Pi, or any sort of platform. And that agent will be kind of the guy who overlooks everything, reads all that, how I gather them, send them server to enable miners to actually monitor

their entire operation through Linko and Pool platform. And we are also adding some cool features to it. For example, it happens very often that one of your machines stops hashing for whatever reason.

So this new update will automatically move forward, take action, reboot the miner when there is no hashboard coming toward the pool. So we kind of trying to automate those. And as I said, we are trying to make Bitcoin mining boring.

So you guys could only like see back, enjoy your movies, just from time to time, check your app and see, yeah, everything is a small tent. It is happening as it should. - If you have anxiety and OCD, that's impossible.

- Yeah, we try to solve that too. Maybe a new feature for Buddy Mac, but face would be some sort of like therapy face. - Yes, true. - Yeah, the other way we were discussing like adding food recipes or relationship advice as features to Buddy Mac, but face- - All relationship advice to Bitcoiners, that's a really good idea.

We'll get love as Bitcoin involved, they can help out. Is that that agent that you run locally, the software that will run on those machines? Is that proprietary to you? And is that a paid service?

- That's for pre-entry. So we have built that from scratch. And that's kind of included with the pool. So anybody can have it installed and start using that right away while using Bitcoin pool.

- Wow, I was really expecting you to say, no, that's kind of on a more of a paid side. - Well, it's too early for that. I mean, we don't like to become too greedy too fast, right? So we wanna have it open for people to test it, to try it out and help us grow.

So that's the main reason. One really cool feature that we are including into this update is that we know that everybody have like any desk or team viewer to do remote desktop to their like computers to check on their machines.

We are actually adding a proxy tunnel to our platform that people can actually login into the dashboard of their miners through the mining pool platform. So you'll see your aunt miner dashboard or what's mine or dashboard right on the pool platform without being like at home or at your facility.

- That's really convenient. - Yeah, that's a very convenient feature. - Yeah, I mean, let's see. I mean, it's still like seven days left until we publicly release that or let's say publicly better release that.

But so far so good. I mean, we have received great feedback from the community about this new addition in this new feature. And we're excited about it. - I kind of want to pivot too. And I think a lot of people don't understand this.

Would you be able to describe to the audience an FPPS payout system and a PBLNS payout system? - Sure thing. So PPLS basically means pay per last N number of shares. That basically means whenever the mining pool successfully mines a block, they will distribute the rewards

among the people who contributed in mining that block. So basically the miners won't get paid until the mining pool has successfully found a block. And well, that school that has been out there for a very long time.

But all the risk is shared between the pool and the miners. Or basically it's all on the miners kind of because they are the ones who are bringing in the proof of work. But what FPPS means, it means that the pool takes all the risk and pays miners to the maximum of their potential, to the maximum of their potential of winning a block

with every submission that they make to the pool. So in that case, all the risk is on the mining pool side and the miners, they will see one a steady payout. Practically, if you look out the rewards in a big window, they should be equal because that's all about the probability of winning and all the chance stuff.

So they should be pretty similar and well, quite close. But practically, when you are running an operation, you can't forecast or predict when your machines are gonna go off, right? For any reason, because of like internet disconnection or anything goes wrong with electricity.

So that makes it a bit unpopular from financial point of view that like PPLNS could actually kind of damage your revenue. But at the same time, people like it. People like it because they say that, hey, this is exciting.

We see what's going on. It is exciting watching pool luck and when you hit a double block. And just to let everybody know, like for instance, slush pool soon to be brains pool is a PPLNS payout structure.

And lancorn pool is an FPPS payout structure. But yeah, you do have that sense of excitement in when you're mining on slush pool. When they hit a double block and you see that the pool luck is up really high.

So there's a certain amount of excitement for that. But I can understand that as more you scale up that you don't want so much excitement that you want more stability in your payout structure.

- That's true. I mean, it's not about which one is better. Everybody might have their preferences. But in the meantime, in a big window, you're gonna get paid the same through any of these two payment methods.

- Yeah, it all averages out. Now typically, I used to understand it that the FPPS payout fees were a little bit higher. And then that was the trade-off between the PPLNS and the FPPS was, well, you're gonna have a steady payout on a pool like lancorn pool.

But the fees are gonna be higher. Are your fees typically higher? - Well, you're right. So typically people are charging more, for example, some pools are charging like 4% to 1/2% for FPPS.

While PPLNS fees are around 2%. But I think that's not the case anymore. It used to be like that, but recently we see that they're becoming closer. Or I've been seeing this conversation going on home miners group on Telegram.

But people say it's not FPPS, which is expensive. It's actually the PPLNS, which is expensive because there is no risk involved. So it should be much cheaper compared to FPPS. But right now, the fees are pretty similar these days.

But we might see PPLNS fees go down sometime in the near future. - How do you guys determine what fees you're gonna charge? Just a profit and loss kind of calculation? - That's actually hard to answer.

So in running any business, probably the main goal of any business is to maximize their revenue. So when you wanna actually maximize your revenue, you have to evaluate the willingness to pay from your customers.

- Sure. - And that pricing, that's all about somehow similar to supply and demand or what is the willingness to pay from the users. That's what decides the fees to be. So that's technically how we say that.

But well, in the real world, the mining pool industry, there is a lot of competition out there. It's a bloody red ocean, right? So you could go out, start shopping around, find your best fee and stick to the pool that charges you less.

But at the same time, you won't get all the features and stuff that you'll get from any pool. - Yeah, UX is a very important part of it. - Exactly, so the pool itself, I can say pretty much all the pools are as good as each other in terms of their pool side of business.

But in terms of the tools, features, and UX that they are providing, that's where the fee differences come into play. - Can you kind of describe for us? So if I'm mining on brains pool and it hits a block and they sign that block, and then based on your hash rate contribution, say you were still mining while it was discovered,

you get paid out from a percentage of that. But with your pools a little bit different, you guys aren't signing blocks, right? - Not yet. - Okay, so how exactly does one discover a block on your pool?

- So technically we are part of a bigger consortium of pools that we share the non-search area. So technically people who are mining with us are contributing in finding a block, but the block that is being mined because we are probably like a small player in that consortium is not signed by our name.

But soon that's gonna be solved and we're gonna be signing our own blocks pretty, pretty soon as we expect to keep growing. - Can I just jump in with it? Sorry, Medi. Can I just jump in with a bit of a retard question?

Is it not better not to sign a block? Is it not better to be in some way anonymous or is it no matter what you do, it's still trackable? - Anyway, you can be traced because when you are mining a block, there is a block reward and TX fees that are gonna end up in a valid address.

And that valid address is associated with the pool or with a miner or whatever. So technically, what do you mean by valid address? - So in every block that is mined, there is a Coinbase transaction that creates that 6.25 Bitcoin out of tin air, right?

And that 6.25 Bitcoin should end up somewhere. And that somewhere is the valid address of the mining pool or the miner who found that block. - But why does that need to be linked to an identity?

- It shouldn't, but people actually find that or keep reusing that address, that valid address in order to increase the transparency of a pool operation. - Aha, this is really what I'm getting at is.

- Understand now, yeah. - Yeah, what is the benefit of doing that? Especially as we move into most probably an adversarial environment where I imagine a thumb is gonna come down on mining pools at some point and they're gonna start putting pressure.

If there's no strategic advantage to doing it, why does everyone do it? - Yeah, I mean, that is quite important. So if you are mining FPPS, you don't care much, you just get paid to the maximum of your potential.

But if you are mining PPLS, you actually have to kind of audit your pool or keep them accountable on the blocks that they mined, right? Because you get paid on that event. So mostly, I mean, it is a lot more important for PPLS pool to actually have one unique static address that every block is mined into that address.

I mean, the coinless transaction of that block. So it will help them to show transparency to their users and show authenticity that, hey, this is what we earned and this is how we are going to distribute that.

- Okay, all right. So it's a transparency thing to the users. Do you see that that could change in the future if this thumb does come down and that people will start to adjust the way that they work?

Because something that I've wondered for a while is well, if this pressure comes down on the pools, then do people have to start considering solo mining? But then obviously that's a huge risk in terms of, you could mine for a very, very long time, especially if you're a small operation without actually ever earning any stats.

So do you think that that trend to be as transparent as people are being is something that will continue? And is someone like me just being paranoid thinking that there's going to be this pressure?

Like what's your view on the way that it's going? Do you not sort of think that this pressure is going to be coming down? - I think sooner or later that's going to happen. So we have these regulators in every country who will find out at some point that they can actually regulate that block creation process, right?

There are some solutions for it. For example, a Stratum V2 that enables miners to build their own blocks. But again, that block template should be approved by the pool. So again, there is some sort of risk involved here that could cause censorship, or let's say traceability or whatever.

There might be other ideas out there. For example, putting mining pools on dows or dows of dows. I mean, decentralized autonomous organizations who are not run by people, but we are too early on that side.

So soon we might see similar solutions pop up, such as like smart contracts, over lightning who actually manage a mining pool. That's a possibility. - Okay, so to say for your organization, you spun up a pool pretty quickly.

I mean, sure you have a great team and you're well-educated and hard-working and you spun up that pool, but you're part of a bigger consortium of pools. Wouldn't the bigger consortium be the focus of attack rather than the small pools?

Like you could just leave that consortium and spend something, or you can just kind of get rid of Link Point pool, spend something else up and join that consortium again. But if that consortium is the one that's compromised, how do we deal with that?

And what do you mean by compromise? - I guess it's compromised by the state. Like I said, the regulators will be coming down on pool operators and attempting to audit them for more information.

- So many scenarios could happen around mining pools in terms of regulation. As I said, soon or later, we might see that happen by regulators. For example, we are a Canadian company, the Canadian regulatory might set rules at some point on our operation.

And we have to comply. I mean, there is no way around it, but unless we have a dowel or a dowel of dowels who actually run the mining pools, that's a big possibility in maybe five to 10 years.

But something else that I predict to happen is that we will see pools affiliated with different countries. For example, we will see one eastern mining pool, one western mining pool who comply with their own regulations.

For example, the US might set sanctions on Russia or like eastern countries, China, whatever. And they will do the same back. And they will kind of ask their mining pools to block transactions of the other side.

And we can see a hash rate war happening over there. With people or the governments could potentially say that, "Hey, we need more hash rate in order to mine more blocks "and kind of process our desired transactions in those blocks."

So these are things that could happen. But again, that scenario of getting the power of mining out of people and companies and giving that to smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations, that could be an exciting scenario.

One thing I kind of said in like the what is a plebminer thing that launched out plebminer month was that a small scale miners and homeowners are the stalwarts of the Bitcoin network. At any time, we could go to solo mining, though there'd be an extremely low chance of us finding a block.

So perhaps us together under these smart contracts, which that's not something I know very much about. Just thinking of ideas and how we can kind of band together the plebminers to defend the network, to defend this kind of city-state type of mining pools.

So I think plebminers play a very important role in the network. I think these large publicly traded miners with like hundreds of megawatts of power, they are unhealthy for the network. They can cause a lot of issues.

And we think decentralization is critical and it is now time to actually act on making the network more decentralized. And plebs are the people who are actually doing, or playing a big role in decentralization.

Yeah, I agree. It just seems fairly obvious that these companies are getting bigger and bigger and they're the first places that governments are going to go and knock on their door and they're the people who will comply.

And that's what I love about the plebs is they won't comply. It's what makes me feel confident with Bitcoin is that there are these people who are here, not just for the money, but for real change and they're not going to back down.

I wondered like seeing everything that you're doing here and the amount of innovation you guys have. Why are you doing what you're doing and what is it that Bitcoin means to you? Well, everybody have had their journey in Bitcoin, right?

So you start with some ignorance, then you have some doubts, then you start believing in the protocol and in the future. So we have had the same journey. So, well, again, as I told you, I got to know Bitcoin 2015 and every day that it passes, I see more and more values coming out of this technology.

And the way that proof of work is actually helping us, making it more democratic and more decentralized is unique and critical. And well, that's the same thing for us. I mean, as you said, as you asked, what does it mean to us?

It means that we see ourselves on a mission to build the infrastructure for the future of the world, for the Web5 world, as they call it, where the money, identity, and any sort of asset is being transacted over layer one of Bitcoin.

There are many layers. Many layers are going to be built on top of it. But we are on a mission to build and maintain layer one for the future of the world. And potentially for an interplanetary, like money exchange, right, or exchange of value or medium of exchange.

How much have you dug into that? It's something I've heard spoken about a little bit. And some people have said about potential latency and issues and whether it's possible. What are your thoughts on the interplanetary stuff if we do?

And up on Mars, or-- Well, we have a limiting factor here, which is the speed of light, right? So we can't move faster than light. And I'm not sure about the number, but it probably takes more than 10 minutes to send something from Earth to Mars.

Or it might be close to that similar number. So layer two and layer three will play a huge role in that new organization or that new setup that we will have as an interplanetary species. Lighting would be probably the main method of exchanging assets.

And we will have a lot of settlement transactions on layer one, which is the slower layer, in order to process and settle those transactions. So it might take more than 10 minutes for people on other planets to actually see their transaction has settled.

Well, that's OK. We were used to that for a long time here. Oh, yeah. You can see why it's so important for a lot of Bitcoiners to be flat earthers. Because there is actually quite a large number.

There are a lot of each number of flat earthers in the Bitcoin community. So yeah. All right. My mind was going to go in a lot of different directions there. Hey, Maddy, when we first started talking, when Max screwed up the first launch of the pod, as usual, you were talking about how you've kind of design link

pool to be like a North American mining pool. But you come to find out that there's so many people all over the world mining on that pool. Can you kind of talk about that journey? Sure thing.

Yeah. When we started building the product, our vision and our goal was to serve North American Bitcoin miners, I mean, US, Canada, or potentially Mexico. So we build a product. And you see, it's the only language that we support is English right now.

But the moment that we launched a platform, we saw that, hey, people are actually joining from all around the world. And at the time, we only had two servers, one in Toronto, one in San Francisco.

And one user was asking us, hey, I'm connecting to your pool from New Zealand. Do you guys have a server for me? And said, oh my god, that's something that we had never planned for. And we started adding more and more servers, one in Europe, one in South America, one in Australia.

And we saw the community grow. We saw miners joining us from all over the world, from Paraguay, from Venezuela, from Mexico, from New Zealand, Australia, US and Canada, for sure, even from Europe with all the issues that they have for sourcing energy these days.

But we also see European miners are actually joining Lincoln Pool. So we think that this is an international product. We are building something for the entire world. And that makes our responsibility kind of more.

So we feel the weight on our shoulders that, hey, we are playing your role. A lot of people are relying on us. And we have to build a better product and more reliable infrastructure. Isn't that kind of always the way it happens in Bitcoin?

Before I kind of got into this space, I didn't have any international friends. And now I do. It's just so easy to meet people throughout the Bitcoin space, whether they're miners or whether they're privacy guys or kind of devs.

It's almost like you should have just expected it that it was going to be a global movement in that way. But glad you guys are lean enough to where you can make those adjustments and get some EU servers or get some servers in New Zealand.

And is that kind of how you distinguish yourself from a lot of the other pools? Like, sure, the technology is a little bit different. The payouts are a little bit different. Body McBodface is neat.

You guys got some worker management tools. But as with any successful business, it's the people that do it. Would you like to talk about your team or talk about the guys that surround you, guys and gals that surround you, that kind of make link coin pool special?

Sure thing. Yeah, I mean, we believe the culture is super important in any team. The way that you deal with situations, problems happen in any team, on any team. It's all about how you actually deal with them, whether it's an internal issue or that's an issue with your users, with your product.

So, we were lucky enough to have the right culture on our team. And Mosapha and I, we have been friends since 2010. We have survived for many years. I mean, our friendship have survived. And that's something that has helped us a lot.

So, we know how to solve problems together. And as you said, we are lean enough and we are committed enough to build and keep building 24/7 while working together in harmony. So, this is important.

I mean, no one is saying that, hey, my quota is full. I'm not gonna work anymore. This is what it is. We are literally working 24/7 to build the best product in the industry. And it shows, you've obviously built a culture and a team there, like you said, of harmony.

And everybody's willing to put forth their 100% effort 24/7. And it shows, and we really appreciate you coming to stop by a pleb minor month and describe Lincoln Pool to all the plebs. It's important that we have paid in payouts.

And you guys are kind of leading the way there. But I hope during this conversation that everybody gets to see the value out there for Lincoln Pool and for pleb minors or small scale minors.

And it shows to me. So, Medi, I really appreciate what you've built. I appreciate the hard work that you put into your product. And thanks for stopping by a pleb minor month. Talk to Max and I.

- Thank you, thank you guys. Thanks, John. Thanks, Max. And thanks to everybody who are listening to this. And we are very excited about the future and how we could contribute to this industry and to this movement.

- Yeah, thanks, Medi. And let's keep the conversation going. I'd love to see what you guys are doing and keeping contact. So, thanks for taking the time. And I look forward to speaking to you soon.

- Sure thing, anytime. - Thanks for listening. Make sure to go to ungovernablemisfits.com to check out the whole month of pleb minor month. We have all the content, all the articles and everything else on there.

Make sure to check out the prizes. We have some incredible prizes coming up, including minors, merch, seed signers, foundation devices, passports, and much, much more.