Mining bitcoin with unreliable power.

To begin with, what is Bitcoin? When bit 47? A lot of people are familiar with lightning and liquid is effectively layer two. That one, two, nine. What is taproot? For in taproot, that's the first new protocol upgrade since Zagwet.

Difficulty adjustments. How do mnemonic seed words work? UTXO management.

Hello, ungovernable misfits. Ten-side bunker here, bringing you another bite-sized Bitcoin. Today, I'm going to be talking a little bit about mining here in South Africa with unreliable power.

South Africa has had a low-chidding crisis for almost a decade now, maybe a little bit more, and it's a problem that's been getting worse over time as the state gradually decays. This means that for multiple hours or time slots during the day, we have our power cut for up to eight hours a day where our power cuts lost

between two to four hours at a time. This has made things somewhat complicated when it comes to mining. When I've not been paying attention, the constant power interruptions have been somewhat destructive to my computing components, lost multiple graphic cards, motherboard, power supply units, even a washing machine.

So when I first got my miners, I decided to be a little bit more cautious with what I was doing around the home. Not only are these machines quite expensive, our input duties are extremely high, not to mention the difficulty of acquiring replacement parts locally.

So I felt specific attention needed to be put in place to ensure that you get the most out of these machines for as long as possible. And so one of the first things I do when I get a miner and I've connected it here is the plugs get replaced with surge protection plugs.

I also ensure that none of my miners are sharing circuits with other electronics or appliances. I've had multiple issues here in my office area where when the power turns back on, circuits end up tripping because of the high current draw as certain things turn on concurrently.

Now many people would look at this difficulty that I'm experiencing doing this, all these challenges, the high electricity costs, the intermittent power, and they would want to know why I want to mine in these conditions.

And I'll say I'm a bit of a zealot when it comes to Bitcoin. I like having KYC sets that I've earned by exchanging electricity for sets. Also like mining, even at a loss, it can have certain tax advantages.

And not to mention that this entire winter Bitcoin is what kept me warm. There are also many other issues I see in South Africa where as more and more people are going off the grid because of our intermittent power supply, our only state owned power provider is losing many of its highest power consuming customers.

This means that they make less money, which in turn means that they either make up the short fall by borrowing more, increasing electricity rates or failing in other areas. So selfishly, I see myself as helping them limp along for as long as possible until it can no longer go on by exchanging fiat for KYC free sets.

So fortunately, this has been going on for long enough that the power cuts adhere somewhat loosely to a schedule. These schedules are designed in a way that different suburb groups are targeted at different times every day ensuring that not the same group of suburbs have the power turned off when it's time to make dinner.

So everybody gets their turn at cooking in the dark. This is further complicated by the stage of load shading, which increases the amount of times you get load shaded in a day. So stage one load shading, you'll get shaded for only one hour a day and sometimes it might jump

up to stage three or four when your power gets cut three or four times a day. So I find myself spending a bit of time looking at the schedules and fortunately, some industrious other Africans have made an app called Eskom Sapush, which sends you alerts

when your suburb is going to be load shaded as well as letting you know if there are any changes to the load shading schedule. So since I work from home, this allows me to know when I should stop mining or turn off my ASICs and stopping my ASICs allows the ASIC fans to cool the ashboards down instead of letting them

get cooled by passive ambient radiation, which is the case when the power is suddenly turned off. And you know, this is even worse if your miner is in an enclosed space, which many plebs do to make the ASIC more bearable for a home situation.

So recently, I have found myself leaving the home quite frequently for a few hours at a time, and this means that if I'm scheduled to go down, say in six hours from now, I would miss out on six hours of possible luck if I were to preemptively power down before I leave, and this is not something that I enjoy doing.

So to mitigate the situation, I wrote some software, which allows me to use the Watts miner API to remotely connect to my Watts miner and turn off the mining remotely as I have VPN access to my home network.

Hopefully, when I have some more time in the future, I'll be able to connect this thing up to Telegram bot, which will allow me some finer control and not necessarily rely on my VPN, as well as linking up into the Escoms to push API so that all of this stuff can happen without any of my direct input.

So what would I do if I didn't have a schedule? Well, I most probably wouldn't be running any of the newer generation miners at all, because even when these ASICs are throttled, they still use quite a bit of power and the boards heat up quite a bit, and it's an undesirable situation for me.

If they heat up quite a bit and they get their power cut repeatedly, S9s are way more suited for this purpose. Not only are the machines robust as hell, when brains with two eyes firmware is loaded, you can throttle the machines all the way down to 100 watts,

and I would probably be running multiple S9s concurrently to make up for the short fall in overall hash. This would allow me to set the temperature of the ASIC to a level that I would be happy with should an immediate disconnect of power occur.

Failing that, the only other way one could mitigate a situation like that is to have a battery backup that you're linked to, that you can then use to trigger the shutdown conditions once the battery gets reduced below a certain threshold.

Well, that's all for now, and if you need me, you can find me on Twitter @tensibankai and drop me a DM.