#HashTheTorch

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 another day of plebminer month. Today, I am a grumpy fuck. I have just deleted about 10 hours' worth of editing. My laptop is on its last legs, and it decided to crash on me today.

So very fucking annoyed about that, but also very, very excited for what John has just released. He has released #TheTorch. This is an incredible idea to get more plebs involved in mining and for people to pass on their knowledge and older hardware.

I'll let John explain here, but I just wanted to say to everyone who has been participating in this so far, and everyone who has given hardware away, thank you so much. It really is amazing, and I think we have 10 S9s to give away this month, which is absolutely mind-blowing.

As always, I am astounded by the generosity of the plebs, and I also want to say thank you to everyone who's been giving any of the prizes, not just the machines, everything else. Everyone who's been streaming sats to help go towards the postage of all of these incredible prizes, and to everyone who's been giving their time

to put out incredible content for people to learn from. Enjoy. My first foray into mining was sometime in late 2011-2012. At that time, Bitcoin Core had mining functionality, and mining on a PC was relatively simple.

I didn't take the time to truly understand Bitcoin then. Me being an intensely paranoid individual was distrusting of the software using my computer's GPU to solve an algorithm. Didn't read the white paper and didn't join any chat rooms or social networks to connect with others involved in Bitcoin.

I've regrettably uninstalled the software, not to return to Bitcoin until 2017, and not to mine again until 2019. Couldn't even tell you if I'm responsible for some orphan Bitcoin. In those eight years, we had three kids, but let something like 450,000 blocks slip past me.

That's okay. I don't cry myself to sleep every night because of regret anymore. I have a nice mining set up now, and I don't consider it healthy to live a life of regret. I can reflect though.

Perhaps I should have joined one of those Bitcoin nerd channels. I never had social media before Twitter. Maybe I should have, or at the very least done my research. So what's my point here?

As the poet John Don wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself. "Every man is a piece of the continent, "a part of the main." And although I don't live my life regretting past decisions, I can learn from them.

It wasn't until I left that island or at least connected it to the main that I learned the true nature of Bitcoin and its unique properties. It wasn't until I began to research and read articles written by so many hard-working plebs who were willing to pass the torch of knowledge to others

that I finally understood this technology we revere. And it wasn't until further study that I realized my place within it was mining. By then, the S9 was a couple of years old and it wasn't difficult to find one.

I learned a lot over the next couple of years about mining. I quite enjoyed the experience. And by 2021, I had six S9s running in my garage. Like many at that time, I saw the China Exodus as a good time to upgrade my setup.

I acquired five S19s and I'm now up to six. Now, what to do with those S9s I had laying around? I suppose I could have sold them, but I was busy tinkering with my home heating projects and working, and of course, numbing my mind by bullshitting with all of you on Twitter.

I decided I'm gonna give some machines away. I gave two S9s to my partner at work. I've been orange-pilling him for years and he thought it would be fun to dip his toes into mining. The heat-reuse case was a big draw for him.

The joy I felt when he showed me his mining setup was exciting. It was the perfect situation for him. A mechanic and a farmer, mining suited his skillset. I later sent a machine to a friend in Texas that was at risk of losing his job over Vax mandate.

And I thought maybe the machine could help him out. That's about the time I became more vocal on Twitter and the telegram groups. And began answering simple home mining questions. I prefer to just communicate on DMs regarding mining rather than wading through the string of backlog telegram messages.

In discussions with plebs, I always felt myself saying, well, I'll send you an S9 and you can mess around with it and find out if you like home mining or have interest in it. Then, once you learn, you can send it back.

Or because shipping is so much, just hand it off to someone else. I'm not unique in this. I've seen the generosity in the mining community, truly some of the best people are in mining, especially plebminers.

I had the idea to call it hash the torch. Seemed like a fun name for what everyone was doing. I gave another S9 away to a buddy of mine who was a machinist and it was helping me out with my immersion project.

This hashing the torch is fun. I saw Barnminer making strides in the same direction as well with his S9 lending program at local meetups, which certainly solves the shipping dilemma. It kind of all hit me at that point.

The no man is an island concept, the connected decentralized network, the plebs helping plebs idea. Don't let someone just up and quit on Bitcoin without understanding it as I did over a decade ago.

Hash the torch of knowledge. Hash the torch that are these machines that don't mean much to us beyond being able to offload them for a few bucks or holding on to them for whatever reason.

When Max and I came up with the idea of plebminer month, it was just supposed to be a few pods with cool plebminers, a few bite-sized bitcoins and fud busters, and a couple of articles to give plebs into the resource to get into mining.

It quickly morphed into what it is today is developing a life of its own. One of the biggest surprises, though I shouldn't be surprised given the quality of plebs in the mining community, was the outpouring of support from other miners who too wanted to pass the torch.

We're early in the first iteration of plebminer month and we already have 10 machines to give away. So many miners are offering not only to hash the torch of unused and underused machines, but offering much of their time to produce content, write articles or do interviews.

So many in this space, whatever they call it, hash the torch or S9 lending program, is willing to dedicate part of themselves to this overall movement. To ensure that plebs don't feel like they're on an island, that those blocks are just as much at play for a small time pleb as they offer a large institutional miner.

That whatever regret they had in their mining journey doesn't have to be a regret for someone new to it. They know if they hash the torch that they might be giving a machine to the next schnitzel, tech engineer or coin heeded.

They could be kicking off the mining innovation journey of the next econoalchemist, diverter or hodl tarantula. And who knows what innovations and rabbit holes those new miners will discover.

So I'm putting out the bat signal plebminers. Go to a meetup with your old machines. Orange pill, that mechanic or machinist buddy of yours. Unload that knowledge you have in your dome and teach your kids and grandkids the value of decentralizing the network through pleb mining.

Hash the torch plebs. And to all of the plebminer month winners of the donated old gen miners, learn on that machine. Experiment with different settings, firmwares and pools. Find uses for the waste heat or perhaps find alternative sources of energy to run your machine.

And then do with the plebminer that gifted you that ASIC and hash the torch. Thanks for listening and for anyone who has been inspired by listening to that and wants to get involved. Please reach out to either me or John.

We'd love to hear from you. And thanks again to everyone who's already donated a machine. We'll catch you on the next one.