Totem poles, proof of work and bitcoin with @stillBTC

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

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

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 say that it's the deepest, darkest depth of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. It's taken me a disgusting amount of time to get round to editing and getting this show out.

I really enjoyed listening to this one and apologies to Kin and Wright and to John for taking so long to do it. I absolutely love seeing all these plebminers with their incredible setups and the love seeing this crossover with plebminer group and the Mechtdel group.

It's really cool to see people getting their local communities involved and to see them growing produce as well as mining. I think this is the final episode from the plebminer month. I know it dragged on for three months, but we just had so much content, so many people with incredible stories.

And yeah, I just couldn't get round to editing it all. It was just articles and pods and everything else. And John and Mr. Crown and Sarah and everyone involved in the plebminer month worked so hard to make it happen.

So a big thank you to all of them. I also want to thank all the sponsors who sponsored that month and for the people giving the prize giveaways. We still have one giveaway that we haven't actually decided on a winner yet.

We will be deciding that John and I before the end of the month and that's for a foundation devices passport. So a big thank you to foundation devices for sponsoring that month and also this show.

If you haven't already checked out foundation devices, go to foundation devices.com. You can check out all the info on the website and you can also listen back to the episodes I've done with Bitcoin Q&A and ZAC.

Once you've checked out the websites and the episodes, you've seen the incredible design. You've seen that they're fully open source. You've seen the team behind it. You're gonna want one.

So you can still enter this competition. If you haven't already done that, make sure to go and do it. You can check it out on Twitter and if you can't find it, you can just DM me or John and we will point you in the right direction.

If you enter and you do not win, well, you can still buy one. You can go to foundation devices.com and you can use the code bit by bit to get an additional $10 off. I also wanna say a big thank you to Urban Hacker.

Urban Hacker came on the show a couple of episodes ago and after recording, he very kindly donated to the show. He has an incredible project, which we talk about at length in the episode and I'm also gonna have him back on the show in the new year after seeing a full demo and we're gonna go a little bit deeper

and talk about where the project is today. So thank you again Urban Hacker for supporting the show. It really does go a long way. It helps me continue the show and it is massively appreciated.

Also to everyone who's been using Fountain, Breeze or any of the other podcasting 2.0 apps to support the show and send in messages, it's fucking awesome. I'm really seeing an uptick with this and if you haven't already checked out Fountain or Breeze, if you wanna find out how to use it and you're not sure you can always ask me,

every sat that comes this way, it goes back into investing into the show, making it better and spreading the message. So thank you, it really is appreciated. And finally, before we jump into the show, I wanna say a thank you to FastBitcoins.

FastBitcoins support this show despite me shitting on their business day in and day out. As anyone who listens to this show will know, I suggest you earn or mine your SATs. But if you do decide to use a KYC exchange, then do it at your risk.

Try to limit that risk. Try to use at least a company that doesn't jump through hoops they don't need to. Try to use a company that wants you to hold your keys. They do not want to custody your SATs and choose one with a team that is respected.

Check them out at fastBitcoins.com and enjoy the show. - Aaron, did you get all the animals in? - I just, they're locked in the room here with me and they're sleeping right now, so. - For now, till they start snoring.

- Yeah, till they start hearing me talk about Bitcoin and they're gonna freak out. - Yeah, it's the story about being late. The, I started to get everything set up for to record with you and I look outside the window and I see chickens in the yard and there shouldn't be chickens.

And I thought, well, my 10-year-old daughter is supposed to be watching the three-year-old daughter and I don't exactly want them outside. Jason, chicken the round, we're gonna record a podcast.

So I figured I better get out there and secure that. - That's okay. - It's just, I think. - Right now, it definitely feels like things are quite chaotic. I don't know what it's been like for you.

- Doing things on time recently, it's just chaos right now, so. - Do you usually feel that? Do you usually get that sense that there's chaos in the world? - There's times where I feel like it's heightened and then there's times where I feel like it's just absolute peace and bliss.

But the last little while it does feel like it hasn't been quite heightened, even just not paying attention to what's happening around the world, just day-to-day life type stuff. - Yeah, it's almost like you can get that sense without reading the news or listening to whatever you're being fed by the mainstream media

or any media, really, for that matter. Even if you were to check out on Twitter, check out from listening to everybody else, you just get that sense. There's like that spiritual sense that something is not right.

- Mm-hmm, yeah. I do not really ever watch, actually I don't have cable or anything, so I never watch TV anymore. But Twitter, I mean, it can be a bit of a, a bit of a time suck, you know, and yeah, if you're not careful, you can really get sucked into that stuff and just mess up your mojo and, you know,

but it just takes discipline, I guess. That's a great thing about Twitter is that it's, or sorry about Bitcoin is that it's always there for you when you want something to do or need something to do.

- It's true and you don't have to interact with Bitcoin through Twitter. It's just like that's the way we have chosen to interact with each other. But it's nice when you get off of there and you just kind of think about the principles of Bitcoin and, you know, for you and I mining or agriculture

or things that we want to do with waste heat. When we can focus on those kind of scientific things or even those spiritual pursuits when it concerns the Bitcoin, I definitely feel a lot better.

So that's kind of why you and I are speaking is what we're doing with plebminer month and our common interests in mining and harnessing waste heat and using the most of what we have as far as mining goes and attempting to kind of bust some of the FUD out there, environmental FUD about mining.

- Oh yeah, I love doing that. - Yeah, and you kind of tell everybody what you're doing with Bitcoin greenhouse and how you harness waste heat and all the things you're doing with growing.

- For sure. First, I just want to say thanks for having me on. I have been following along with the plebminer month and I think it's absolutely brilliant. I really love the enthusiasm and giving the plebs their spotlight long live the plebs.

- Yeah. - But yeah, so actually just as I was about to jump on this call, Bitcoin Kate from Brain's shared the video of my greenhouse here and my friend just messaged me like literally right before I hopped on.

If I could show my greenhouse to his parents. So that's kind of weird sequence of events that just all kicked off in the last-- - The people want to know. - Yeah. But yeah, I have a mining that I'm doing with an S9 in a greenhouse that I have at my house here and I've been kind of looking into and experimenting with the concept

of mining in greenhouses for the last, say four or five years now. I did a project locally here on Haida Gwai that was actually part of an art exhibit that displayed kind of a scale mining setup and that talk to all about capturing waste heat and then the things you could do with the waste heat.

And I'm currently working on a full scale version of that which is at the website, bitcoingreenhouse.org and that is to be an open source greenhouse. So all the lessons that we're going to learn and that we are learning will be available for people to kind of critique and it's gonna be built to provide food to our community where I live.

There's a whole kind of litany of reasons for that but bitcoin actually is solving like quite a few problems all at once and it's not just providing heat but it's also providing income, jobs and like a stability that's kind of necessary to have a good foundation for any economy.

And thinking long term, the time preference thing I think is really crucial aspect of what's happening now. We're kind of running into all these problems that have come up because of the time scale of the thought process that goes into making decisions and stuff so that's what I'm really fascinated about now

and I'm finding more and more people are also on board. I'm, you know, people locally are asking me about it and they want to know. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot I can unpack here. I guess it depends what you want to ask.

- Yeah, let's go deep into the setup of the greenhouse. What are some of the elements that you feel are necessary to have kind of a regenerative agriculture, a permaculture greenhouse and how do you kind of weave that in with Bitcoin mining and heat capture?

- Okay, well, the first thing I would say, I think this is really, really crucial is in terms of electrical safety because, you know, Bitcoin miners are using a decent amount of power and they're running constant load which produces heat.

So I just would say to anybody listening that, you know, if you're thinking about putting miners into a greenhouse or even into your home, really make sure that you are either extremely competent with electrical or just getting electrician to come and view what you're doing and either get them to do it or sign off on what you're doing

because the last thing you want to do is have like some electrical fire where you burn your greenhouse down or worse, you know? And when I was just kind of getting into, you know, mining in greenhouses, like, you know, I don't really have that much electrical knowledge.

So, you know, I did some pretty amateur stuff and I melted a couple of plugs and, you know, I guess I was lucky that nothing worse happened, but if you can get past that, then, yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things that are pretty crucial in a greenhouse unrelated to mining.

So those are things that you want to check off, you know, like you need to have good soil, you need to be thinking about ventilation, humidity, temperature, control, and once you've kind of like sussed all that stuff out, then you can think about, you know, how you can use the heat for mining.

So, for the greenhouse I have in my house, you know, I just started with like the most basic iteration, which was just plugging it in and venting the heat around and it worked pretty good, but it was loud and, you know, I was trying to get insects into my miner, which is not good.

So, yeah, you run in there and you see there's all kinds of moths, yeah, a lot of fan guards. Yeah, so, you know, that was kind of the first step that I took after was, okay, I think about air filtration, make sure that the bugs are not getting into my miner.

And then I got to think about noise. So that led me to brains. I started running brains on my S9 because of the ability to kind of tweak the settings. And then it also, you know, removes the kind of stock setting for the fans, which if they're just left at stock is very loud.

Like it's way too loud for you, probably. And it's too loud for your plants. I mean, plants are affected by sound. There's a really fascinating study that was done by a guy in Japan about how plants react to emotions and talking to them and those kinds of things.

So, those are things that, you know, people may not think about, but it's important. And then the other thing that I had to think about here is my power because where we are is isolated. It's not attached to any mainland.

So it's got a tiny grid and the grid that I'm on is a hundred percent diesel. So yeah, and it's not just that it's a hundred percent diesel. It's a hundred percent diesel that's sent 45 kilometers through power lines.

So the power that I'm getting here, it's pretty inefficient. And that means that it's expensive. - Yeah, you're way downstream. - I'm way down, so I'm like right at the end of the line. So, you know, power costs here was between 11 cents a kilowatt hour for the first 1500 hours and then it bumps up to 30 cents a kilowatt hour.

So it's extremely, extremely expensive. So the way that I had to basically justify it was that if I was gonna be mining, I would be using the heat because if you're not, you know, then you're either just, you know, kind of buying Bitcoin by paying your hydro bill, which is totally cool.

And that's a good way to acquire Bitcoin. - Yeah, it's a good way to DCA. - Yeah, but on a kind of community level, you know, telling people that you're mining and burning diesel to do it is not really cool.

I mean, here the connection between the community and the environment is very strong. It's still a majority First Nations population here. So those are the things that you have. - Can we take a little detour just so as you're describing all this stuff, people can get a better understanding of what Haida Gwai is.

- Yeah, sure. - Who are the people that live there, where it's located 'cause it's really an integral part of your story. - Yeah, totally. So Haida Gwai is an archipelago. It's in northwest British Columbia, which is on the west coast of Canada.

This is still a Haida land. So this land was never seeded. It was never, there was no treaties done. And currently there is a case in the, I believe it's the Supreme Court in Canada or in British Columbia over title of the land.

So it's Haida land. It always, you know, has been for as long as, you know, stories have been told about this place. So there's a really special relationship between the people in this place.

And because of that, you have to, you know, kind of tread carefully. You have to be respectful. You have to respect nature. You know, for Haida people, you know, it's not, it's taking only what you need and nothing less so that it can be, you know, in a perpetual state of pristine.

So that is kind of the backdrop to where I live. You know, Haida culture and Haida history is fascinating and I'd really encourage everybody to learn about it and to be respectful, to Haida people and hear what they have to say.

But where I am now, you know, heat is a big, it's not, I'm gonna say it's a big problem, but a big majority of energy usage. Probably 80% of all the energy used here is for heating. - Yeah, it makes sense given where it's located.

- Yeah, so that, you know, what that turns into is, well, you gotta think about what are you doing for heating? So the options are basically firewood and there's a lot of scrap wood, which so it's not really that damaging to the environment.

But if you don't have a wood fireplace or you're not able to get firewood or whatever, then you're looking at either heat pumps, which are pretty efficient. However, you know, if they're not installed properly or if they're not super high quality, then you usually are using some supplemental heat.

So that's the case for a lot of people here, is that they have a heat pump, but they also use supplemental heat. And that supplemental heat is either fossil fuels, some kind of oil that's burned, or it's electric resistant heat.

So I actually got ahold of a report that was done on the, basically the electrical situation on the island and that was done in 2011. Population has actually declined since then, but at that time there was between three and 600 space heaters running on island.

- No reason for that. So not given what it was that we're working on. - Yeah, so, you know, I heard somebody say recently that nowadays a space heater is an inefficient heater because it's not mining Bitcoin.

And I mean, that's true. You're using similar or less power. You're getting heat, but you're not getting the best money of all time. - This is the point where hashing the heating would come in with one of his memes, with the duration of a resistance heater.

No, yes, yes, that's it. That's it. So, you know, kind of all within that picture, mining Bitcoin here, you know, has a place. And that place is replacing that electric resistance heat. So, for me, you know, mining Bitcoin in my greenhouse in order to grow food and cannabis, which I had growing in there, is, you know,

much more justified because not only am I using a little bit less power because, you know, I'm running my miner around a thousand watts, but I'm also producing food for myself, which has kind of like a knock on savings effect where, you know, that food is not being imported from afar.

You know, there's all kinds of savings there. But also, it means that I can provide food to my neighborhood and to people around me. And I can also provide a warm space to grow food over the winter.

And that is kind of what has led into building the big greenhouse is that from a food security standpoint, there is a lot of available food here. However, when it comes to things like produce, you know, around 80% of it is imported from around the world.

So, that means that it's either expensive or it's not fresh when it gets here or both. You're paying a lot and it's not good quality. So, wherever you are in the world today, where inflation is a real thing now, you know, like a lot of Bitcoiners have been saying for a long time.

- You don't say, I don't know. You know, one of the things that really starts to happen pretty fast is that people, you know, what you guys see called disposable income or what they're spending their money on in terms of food, you know, it starts to slip pretty quickly.

So, you know, that means that people are not able to afford, you know, nutritious food, fresh food. And if the food is being imported and it's already expensive and it's not fresh, you know, pretty quickly you can start to see where it can go bad.

And, you know, the high-down nation is really amazing at delivering food to the community. You know, things like fish, you know, there was a big, like, quarter of potatoes that came from across Canada because the government in East Coast was literally just gonna throw these potatoes out.

So, there is a lot of really good community effort locally to feed each other, provide food. - The inhabitants of the island, I think you guys always say first nations, right? That's the terminology up there.

What was their normal staples, you know, say three, four hundred years ago, just mainly fishing? - It's a lot of, I mean, it's a lot of things. And not all of that knowledge is not necessarily public.

You know, a lot of things are still kind of kept private and you just had to respect that, so. - Yeah. - But otherwise, I mean, there's a, you know, seafood is bountiful here. Salmon is a pretty integral part of life.

You know, everything from spiritually to nutrition. And, you know, there's all kinds of other good foods here. Like, there's a lot of berries. You know, there's a lot of other kinds of really, really good seafood around.

And, you know, now there's a lot of deer as well. Now, deer was introduced, you know, but I think about a hundred years ago, as if kind of like a sustenance. They're now like kind of taken off because there's no natural predators for deer here.

But, you know, there's generally a pretty good amount of protein available. If you are, you know, handy, you can pretty much live off the land. But for everything else, you know, that you would get in a grocery store like, you know, fruits and the end vegetables, that kind of stuff is pretty much all imported.

So, you know, what we wanna do is provide a space. Now, it's a pretty large space talking about 8,000 square feet. - Well, okay. - So it's just a pretty big space where we can grow all the things that would be imported here.

And I mean things like, you know, bananas, oranges, avocados, all these kinds of things that require. - Not something you typically associate with the Pacific Northwest. - Yeah, all these things that people enjoy, that for most parts of the year, they, you know, you can't get here.

The growing season here is very short. At this time of year, there's a lot of food available. And there's lots and lots of pros you can get. You know, that's comes locally, you know, things like tomatoes and all that kind of stuff.

But basically now, starting now, that all starts to kind of go away. So the kind of economics of heating a space here, growing food here through the winter is very prohibitive without something like Bitcoin.

And the heating aspect of that is like, it's hard to understate how crucial that part is because although it does not get like freezing cold here, it's actually the warmest place in VC over the winter because it's surrounded by ocean.

But even still, you know, you're still kind of like, in a place where you need some supplemental heat. So we wanna be able to basically build a growing environment where you would be able to grow anything that you want.

And part of that will be, you know, space where we just grow things based on what people say they need, you know, based on what's being sold in grocery stores and at farmer's markets and that kind of thing.

And then the other part of it is basically providing a space where people who are really super knowledgeable about growing food can come and just grow food in the space. So there's kind of an aspect of the greenhouse that uses Bitcoin on the backend for providing, basically what is a bounty.

There's a hacker space in Vancouver called Decentral and that space actually is one of the first communities I ever found for Bitcoin, but that's based the way that they operated was on almost like a co-op model, but using this Bitcoin backend where, you know, there would be kind of like membership dues where you pay like $20 a month

and then you could use a space and host events. The meetups and that kind of stuff. And that Bitcoin would go into a treasury and then from that treasury there would be bounties that you could do.

So if you, you know, you could go down there and like take the garbage out, you could go sweep the floor, you know, do something that needed to be done. And then by doing that you would claim a bounty and it helped the space kind of sustain itself.

And we want to employ that same thing in the greenhouse. So that, you know, the greenhouse itself will be mining and part of that mining income will go into a treasury that is there to pay bounties to do the work in the greenhouse because a greenhouse takes a lot of work.

It's not just like a set for get type thing. You know, you need to be able to kind of be doing things almost daily. There's a lot of stuff that you can automate away which will save you a lot of time and effort, but even still it still requires kind of human input.

So we want to provide this kind of back-end that is giving people, you know, income. And that income can be in Bitcoin, which is what we would prefer. It can also be in food, you know, or we can even convert it to fiat for people who just want, you know, fiat, that's okay.

But it's kind of like, you know, Bitcoin is providing the kind of heart for the whole thing. It's providing the heat. It's providing an income and it's providing, you know, like a back-end to basically like fulfill what would otherwise be kind of like, I don't want to say bureaucracy, but, you know, a lot of the kind of fiat.

- But you know, you have a First Nations population there that would prefer probably not to be tethered to the Canadian government. - Yes. And here is a source of sovereignty for them. I mean, they're already existing too far downstream when hundreds of years ago, they were right there at the source of everything that they needed.

And to, you know, what these, what oligarchs do and what powerful governments do is they want everybody as far downstream as possible and there to be only one source of food, one source of currency, one source of subsistence, and that is through them.

- Yeah, no, totally. - I'm kind of glad that we went over the cultural environment there on Haida Gwai because I think a lot of these, a lot of these things, these commune-type scenarios, they often fail.

- Oh, yeah. - You know, you can kind of like go back to the, yeah, you can go back to the '60s. Oh, hell, you know, as far as American history, you can go back to Plymouth Rock. The first attempt there, that winter, they tried the whole commune lifestyle and it almost crashed the whole operation.

And then the next year, they were like, okay, well, we need to give people a little bit more autonomy. You can have some sort of private property. So it doesn't work in all situations, but I do think that it is applicable to native populations where you have that deep, deep cultural heritage

where you have, you know, those common goals together. So I do think this is kind of a neat model. - Yeah, well, there's, I mean, it's like if you think about, you know, like let's just say environmentalism, okay?

Like taking care of the environment. Now, regardless of arguments like for or against the use of fossil fuels, you know, you guys think about the incentives to actually getting from like point A to point B.

And, you know, the exhibit that I did, like the actual whole concept around that exhibit was to inspire people to kind of like, you know, get going on, you know, here the goal is to transition away from diesel generation generated power.

And it's, you know, it's dirty and it's expensive. But honestly, the incentives are just not strong enough without Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin provides really, really, really strong incentives.

And here- - It keeps people honest. - Yeah, so I think, you know, from all the things I've heard about communes, people I know who've been in them and all these things and how they fail, et cetera.

You know, I think that the incentives that Bitcoin offers, you know, not only is it kind of helping you achieve something by measuring it, you know, but it also helps you kind of adjust your behavior.

You know, the human behavior, I think, which is so crucial to any kind of like success for anything. And I think Bitcoin is really, really good at kind of fixing, you know, whatever deficiencies exist where a cooperative environment cannot succeed or does not succeed and fails.

- You have to have a medium exchange amongst people in sort of a co-op commune. I think, you know, I'm sure, I don't know if you know if you want to use the word commune for what you're doing, but I think it's a general term that people can associate with is you still have personal interest involved.

- Yeah, so it's my thought would be like, as far as your model here goes, what stake do people have personally within the model? Or are they gonna sell the goods that they grow in there? Are they able to put in their own miners in there and create heat?

- Okay, so we are hoping to crowd fund this greenhouse. And we've been working, you know, there's staff, five developers who are working on this project on building functionality using liquid network so that in the crowdfunding, you know, say you or I wants to put one dollar

into the greenhouse, you're then given one liquid coin or one coin on the liquid network. And by holding that in a wallet, like a Bitcoin wallet or a liquid enabled wallet, as we're mining, you will be entitled to that income from the miners.

So every day or every week, you haven't decided on the interval yet, some portion of the Bitcoin that's mined in the greenhouse is coming back into that wallet. So for people who are helping to support this internationally, that is kind of the like stake that they would have in the greenhouses

that they would be receiving Bitcoin as it's earned. And for people locally, same thing. So, you know, I understand that people here, you know, in some situations do not have a lot of disposal income and, you know, maybe don't have the capacity to invest in things.

And that's okay. So when we set this up, you know, a certain allotment will be, I don't want to say airdrop because I don't like that concept, but provided to everybody on an opt-in basis.

It's got a bad connotation with shitcoinery. Just the term airdrop, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So what it would look like is, you know, we'll present the project, we're probably going to be presenting to the community in the next couple of weeks, and it will look something like, you know, if you are unable to afford, you know, this,

then we still want you to have some stake in it. So, you know, you will be given the option to opt-in to receiving like, we don't have to turn the amount yet, but like, let's just say it's five, you know, greenhouse coins.

By holding those coins, you will, again, be entitled to income that's coming from the Bitcoin, but also because of the actual power situation here, you know, we're going to be able to sell a lot of power back to the grid, and that income as well will be, you know, converted into Bitcoin and then paid out to everybody

who's, you know, basically holding any of the coins in the greenhouse. So our whole model right now is not even factoring in food sales, but solely just basing this on what we can earn as the bare bones from mining.

And then, you know, by doing that, the hope is that everybody will have a stake in the greenhouse, and, you know, if they want to come and do work, that's great. There'll be jobs available for everybody, varying skill, you know, and they can earn Bitcoin additionally to what they are already getting,

but in the scenario where we're able to sell food, you know, locally, then if there is income from that as well, you know, everything at the end of the day is going to be going back into Bitcoin.

This is, you know, purely a Bitcoin venture. You know, we want to move away from the Canadian dollar at all costs. And the revenue streams, you know, it's basically those three. It's income from the mining, income from selling power to the grid, and the grid costs cost them $1.30 to produce a kilowatt hour.

So, you know, they're losing a lot of money here. So, you know, there's a standing offer from the hydro companies to buy power around $0.99 a kilowatt hour. So, you know, we'll have a sweet spot where we have the amount of power we're going to use for mining and heat, and then the amount of power

that we can go back into the grid, et cetera. And then, yeah, what we're, you know, I would really hope that because of the income from the Bitcoin, you know, we'll be able to subsidize the cost of the food down so that people who would like it, you know, who maybe couldn't afford it before, now going to have access to fresh food,

highly nutritious, like locally, you know, organic, locally produced. So, there'll be, you know, aspects of this that are community-based, you know, where people are coming in and growing food, but also people are coming and working.

And, you know, we want it to be a place where people can come and learn about all these things as well. You know, learn about greenhouses, learn about, you know, energy, you know, renewables, all these things, and Bitcoin, you know, like, there's a really cool greenhouse in a place called the Nook Book,

which is like right on the north of the continent. And it's a community greenhouse and it's thriving. It's absolutely thriving. I will link it to you after if you want. You can put it in the notes or whatever, but-- - Yeah, please do.

They're growing all kinds of food in there, but they're also doing all kinds of other stuff. Like, they have yoga classes inside there. They do workshops on, you know, canning and jarring and preserving and all these kinds of things.

And it's kind of like a hub for the community. So, that is what we want to achieve, you know, is providing this space where, you know, there's a physical appeal to it. It looks really cool.

It's collecting a lot of energy. It's mining Bitcoin and providing income to the community, as well as the option to come and work. But it's ultimately kind of like a hub for people to come, you know, to learn, to socialize, to chat about all these things which are really crucial now.

I think we're really seeing now how important things like growing your own food, you know, collecting your own energy, which is like, you know, the way that I would really describe Bitcoin mining.

And then also just learning about these things so that you can go and do it on your own. You know, Bitcoin is a really great system because it doesn't require permission and it doesn't require some fancy degree, you know, to participate.

And there's a huge community of people like you, you know, like, frankly, all the people that are on the plug minor months who are just willing to help. You know, it's like a standing offer to help if you need, if you want to help just, you know, message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

And that is really, really awesome. So, you know, we kind of want to bring all that stuff into the greenhouse. You know, we realized it's a pretty big kind of concept to achieve, but we made a ton of progress so far.

And it's going to look really, really, really cool, man. It looks like, if I promise you, yeah. - That is definitely one of my favorite parts of interacting with people in the Bitcoin community.

And especially interacting with all the plebs that we've gathered together for a pleb minor month, you know, just in the span of a few weeks, Chet has gone from installing an S9 to runoff solar and in at Carl's farm to where Carl can use it to warm up his composting toilet.

And he goes from Michigan to Guatemala to that Bitcoin lake project to put used cooking oil in a centrifuge and run off a diesel generator and run some machines down there. It's just incredible.

The lengths that people will go to and spend money out of their own pocket because it's something that they truly believe in. And I think that's an environment that you have up there. You're clearly excited about the Bitcoin greenhouse and you have so much of this planned out and so much of it thought out from the design

to how you're going to interact with the locals there and get them onboarded. A lot of Bitcoin onboarding just kind of happens on its own once you present the material, once you present the code to people, they get it.

It puts a lot of things together. So I kind of want to go back to the design of the greenhouse. We talked about the size of the greenhouse, really was it 80,000 square feet or 800,000 square feet?

- 80,000. - 80,000 square feet. - Yeah. - So you need heat, you need ventilation. Have you decided on how many machines that you're going to need to warm that place up and what are you using for power so you're not so far downstream from the power generation?

- Okay, so the entire roof, it's not going to look like a traditional greenhouse which is like a poly structure, a wireframe poly structure. It's going to look like a long house and a long house is a height of building.

It's a home for the whole family, not just like, you know, father, mother and kids, but like, you know, it's like a family home and it's a rectangular building with kind of like a center fold in the roof.

- So you have these two very large rectangular surface areas on either side of the peak. So that will be completely, you know, like 90% solarized the space. - Okay, I'm looking at some shots of height of long houses and they're very beautifully adorned.

I love that artwork, the Pacific Northwest native artwork. - Totally beautiful, the totem poles, wow. - Yeah, it's just incredible. - Yeah, it's a total, the totem pole is a really good analogy for proof of work in my mind.

- Oh yeah, let's get into that, that's neat. - It's a tree, which in itself is proof of work, but a totem pole is very sacred and it's, you know, something that takes a long time and a lot of work and a lot of hands.

It's not only that, it's also what goes into it. So, you know, the designs that are on there, you know, those are, you know, kind of like crests or kind of like spiritual beings and a lot of them are representing of animals, but those things are kind of like sacred to certain clans and families.

So, you know, one family will have kind of songs and stories that belong to them and only belong to them and those are passed down through the lineage and those are the kinds of things that end up on the totem poles.

So, you know, certain houses and certain families will have different totem poles with different crests and those crests are specific to that family. - Are totem poles to be read bottom up or top down?

- You know what, actually, I don't know the answers to that question. - Oh, sorry. - I don't know. - I don't know. - I'm just thinking, you know, it was the bottom like the Genesis block and there's your time chain as it goes up the pole.

- There's definitely an element of like organization for the crests and things that are put onto the pole. I actually couldn't tell you whether it's up or down and I don't wanna pretend like I know it 'cause I don't.

But once the pole is built, you know, carved and painted, then it's raised and it's not just raised, you know, by like a couple people. It's raised by like the whole community. I just actually went to a pole raising here not even a month ago and, you know, it's a big community event.

There's like hundreds and hundreds of people there and you have, you know, a couple hundred people pulling on ropes to literally hoist this pole off the ground into its place at the front of the house.

And then once it's up and standing, you know, that is kind of like you're, now you've found the block. You know, you've made the block and now it's there for everybody to see as like that visual proof of work.

So, you know, the analogy with Bitcoin there is pretty strong. I'm actually finding now that the kind of world of Bitcoin and the world of First Nations people, you know, one of the things that really I think correlates strongly is the kind of like supernatural aspect of it.

You know, like we call Bitcoin magic internet money. And really, truly, I think there is some supernatural aspect to Bitcoin. And First Nations people, you know, supernatural beings are extremely important to them.

And they're, you know, to be respected and to be taken care of. So I think what we will probably see, you know, in the not too distant future is kind of this merging of, you know, First Nations people and Bitcoin because of there is this kind of mutual aspect of like supernatural, you know, stuff.

So that is something that I've, the more that I'm learning about Bitcoin, the more that I'm seeing it and the more time I spent here, the more that I feel it. So that is what the greenhouse will look like is basically a very large longhouse.

And with a solarized roof. So yeah, so it's kind of like maximizing your footprint for energy collection and also food creation. - Yeah, it's a very broad, it's a very broad roof. There's plenty of landscape up there to put up those older panels.

Have you looked into any other sources of electricity generation like gasifiers? - Yeah, we have the simplest one that's really readily available here is wind. There's a ton of wind power here.

- Okay, I can see that being an island right there, do you already have kind of a little infrastructure for windmills? Is that already a popular option? - No, so like, I think, you know, with wind, you know, that when people talk about wind energy, it's, you know, big honking wind towers.

You know, they're expensive, they're huge, you know, they're hard to recycle. All these kind of, you know, all these not so great things that come around with them. But, you know, one of the things that really, I think, is unlocked with Bitcoin is that you're able to collect energy at different scales.

And, you know, there was proposal here to do a big wind farm because there's a lot of wind, but it just didn't happen. You know, and it's kind of like, it's like, it's put it left a bad taste in people's mouth when it comes to wind.

So, that kind of operation is probably not really gonna happen, but there is a lot of really cool options for-- - I can just see from looking at these buildings and totem poles that aesthetics are important.

- Yes. - And the natural lay of the land, I'm sure, is important to everyone there as well. So, a bunch of big ugly windmills probably wouldn't cut it for them. - Yeah, no, it's not gonna happen and I don't think anybody's really pushing for that anymore.

But there is good, you know, small scale wind collection now. And there's one company I really think is cool called Icewind and they build remote wind collection for like Arctic research stations.

But that's something that we've looked into is, you know, because we wanna think about what is the maximum amount of energy that we can collect with this space. And, you know, solar is like a pretty simple, easy one because of the surface area.

But, you know, it does have its drawbacks and you have to be realistic about that. So, you know, the other ways that we can collect power are wind, that's pretty straightforward. There is also tidal energy, quite nearby.

But in terms of, you know, going from the theoretical energy collection to the actual implementation, you know, as you get away from solar, it starts to kind of bloat with permitting, feasibility, bureaucracy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It's often prohibitive. So, we're just focusing right now on doing everything we can with solar. And, you know, once we have that achieved and we will look into other things because there's a lot of other, I mean, there's tons of other ways to get power.

There's really good geothermal here. But it's, again, it's a cost prohibitive based on the size of the population. You know, there is all kinds of other technologies, I guess, you know, you could look at like hydrogen and, you know, those kinds of things.

I would say that, you know, fossil fuels are just kind of like taboo here. - Okay. - It's not really feasible to make presentations where you're talking about increasing the use of fossil fuels.

And I would like to, you know, just put it in the caveat that I do understand the importance of fossil fuels and what role they play wherever you are today. And that, you know, certain uses of fossil fuels like natural gas, it's pretty clean.

I mean, it's not like, you're burning pumpkin fuels. - My best friend runs a natural gas electricity generation plant in Georgia. And he will lose his mind if somebody says that they're, you know, CO2 emissions are high.

And he's like, my plant's 95%, you know, efficient. And even after that point, we pump it back in and use it again and he'll go off. - Oh yeah, no, there's a lot of new ones there. - There is a lot of new ones.

- It's important to-- - I'd like to get you hooked up with a guy in the plug minor group, the Bitcoin base load. And in this view kind of thing, like reach out to him. From what I understand, and we're gonna talk to him a little bit more and hopefully he can break things down to a level that I can understand it.

And then I think if I can understand it, then everyone else can. You know, that solar is great and wind is great and all these other things are great, but you still need that core base load.

And how do you get that core base load to a remote island like that when you guys are so far downstream? And that the base load coming to you is diesel. And I don't think a lot of people would agree that that's the best way to generate electricity and deliver it to a remote island like that.

So I think there'll be a cool fusion between you guys' minds to figure out that base load problem that you're gonna have there on the island. - Yeah, I would be the first person to say that the more that I'm learning, the more that I'm realizing how little that I know - Yeah, I have the same problem.

- And it's just like, it's endless, but you know, it's like pushing the rock up the hill, you know, it's with that meme. It's like, are you wingsun? It's like, yes, if it wasn't for my misery, like I wouldn't be able to enjoy the good things, you know?

- So it wasn't for this city and project that I have of pushing this rock up the hill. - Yeah, yeah. So what we're looking at doing, because like, you know, he's totally correct. I mean, solar is not a base load and wind is not a base load.

So you're going to be doing net metering. We're not gonna have as little batteries as possible and we're just gonna tie into the grid. - I agree with you on that one. - So that worries me.

- Yeah, so that in the summer, because in the summer here, because we're far north, you know, the days are very long, like, you know, really long. So there's gonna be, you know, a lot of solar energy produced here in the summer that we're not gonna really use, but the town where the greenhouse is located,

you know, it's only like five minutes from the town, not even where the greenhouse is gonna be located. So the idea is that in the summer, you know, we are producing such amount of power during the day that we will feed back into the grid and on an annualized basis, you know, we will be able to provide like a net reduction

in diesel burning and then in the winter, you know, when there's not very much sun at all, then we would just be pulling power from the grid. And we've had one, like, kind of like survey done on the solar yield here.

We're getting another one done this week just to get, just to get a second opinion. But it does look like we can run like a few hundred, S-19s if you, if you wanted to. I don't think we're gonna need that many in the greenhouse.

- I would say not. - But, you know, we want to, at the end of the day, we want to be at the very least reducing the amount of diesel burn on the island. - Yeah. - And, you know, there was at one point drilling here for oil about, I think, a hundred years ago, and I just didn't really pan out.

So, you know, when we're talking about using fossil fuels for base load, like, yes, in theory, that is a good concept and it can't work. The problem, however, is that the shipment of those fossil fuels to this island is crossing, like, literally one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world.

- Yeah. - So, if something goes wrong, and likelihood is that eventually something will go wrong, then you're talking about an ecological disaster that is, A, gonna be directly responsible for, and B, it's just causing a lot of harm to something that's so crucially important to the people that live here, that, you know, honestly, we just,

we have to find another way. - Have you spoken to Moses at all, Ernie Gusham? He's in the Toronto area. - I don't think so. - Okay, he's, my pod with him will be coming out soon, but I'd really like you guys to have a conversation.

- Okay. - He's the first nation's guy. He wants to empower, you know, the people there with growing something called azzola, which is like an algae that kind of grows on this fern, and it just grows and grows, and you can grow it pretty much anything.

You just need some water and you need some chicken poop or something like that, you know, and it will grow. And then you can take it and break it down and put it to a gasifier and burn it as a fuel, and then you're making biochar and you put it right back in.

So I think you and Moses would have a really great conversation and bounce things off of each other. - Yeah, we follow each other on Twitter. - Ernie Gusham. - Yeah, yeah, we're following each other.

So yeah, I would, I mean, I would love, I would love to. - It's like I said, it's like, you know, I've learned so much and that's like one small piece of the vast infinite knowledge that exists.

And, you know, because we're going to be open sourcing this, you know, that means that we're gonna be welcoming, you know, feedback, and with feedback comes like, hey, that's stupid, don't do that.

And you just have to be willing to like take it on the chin and be like, yeah, okay, I think about that. - I thought this was way for two years, but I guess it's your right. You know, like it's, I think one thing I've, personally I've really learned with Bitcoin is just that it's such a like humbling experience,

almost on a daily basis, that you kind of just have to get over the fact that like you don't know everything and you're gonna be wrong. And you have to be like, yeah, okay, I was wrong. Fuck, all right, you know.

- Now we said like, in my normal day to day, I didn't consider myself a pretty smart guy. The people around me do. And then when I get into conversations with Bitcoin, they're like, oh shit, I'm gonna outmatch here.

Actually, I'm just gonna sit here and listen and go, mm-hmm, makes a lot of sense to me. - Yeah, oh, I know, it's like, it's amazing. I mean, it's, Bitcoin is amazing because of that. - But you'll have these amazing people and all you have to do is ask, like what we had talked about before.

Hey, Moses, can you help me out with this? Yep, I'll spend hours if not days and whatever I have to do to help you achieve the things that you wanna achieve. Because I think all of our goals are pretty pure.

A lot of us got into Bitcoin originally because we thought we were gonna get rich. It's like, you know, enter the space for the money and then stay for the kind of the moral obligation of it all.

- The other day, I was kind of thinking about this. It's like the way that I was thinking, but I was like, imagine you're in a dark room and you know that there's a place that is, you know, bright and happy and you know that you wanna get there.

But it's everything's dark and you can't see where you're going and you don't know what to do. And then all of a sudden, this kind of like tunnel opens up and you can see at the end of the tunnel like, okay, that's where I need to get to.

That's the place where the light is. And Bitcoin is like that tunnel. It's like, you're still gonna have to make the journey. You're still gonna have to put in the blood and sweat into yours to get there.

But at least now you have a path and you know, it's on you to kind of like, keep going until you get to that place. And what I found is that with Bitcoiners, like the kind of goal for everybody is somewhat similar and everybody's kind of working towards that.

And that's why I think it works so well that you know, people can just help each other. Like, you know, what other system do you have where you have like people like you and like everybody else in Bitcoin who's literally just relentlessly every day getting up.

- Sometimes I forget that I have a normie job. I'm at work and I'm just on autopilot and I haven't really thought about my job at all. I've been thinking about Bitcoin and mining and different projects and additionally with that, it's kind of interesting that everybody will bring up the spiritual aspect of this.

You know, me, I'm a Christian and I often in conversations find people saying that, you know what? I grew up Catholic or I grew up Protestant or Orthodox or whatever and I kind of left my religion.

I left my connection with God or I left my connection with the spiritual. And once I got into Bitcoin, Bitcoin was one of the things that brought me back to spirituality because I started making all of these connections and realized that there's something supernatural going on here.

You know, whether you wanna believe it's the hand of God that's kind of guiding all of this or, you know, from the First Nations viewpoint, the spiritual nature of all of this, it's pretty wild how we're all coming to the same point.

- Yeah, no, it's like, it's amazing. I mean, it's hard to really describe it, I guess, but Bitcoin Twitter and Bitcoin in general is like, you think about how many different ways people describe Bitcoin?

It's almost like every day where it's like, Bitcoin is actually this. No, Bitcoin is actually this. You know, it's like every time, every day, there's like some new kind of iteration of like, what is Bitcoin?

And that's like the hardest question to answer too, is some sense is, well, what is Bitcoin? It's like, well, you know, I usually now just go like, yeah, it's magic internet money and if you want to know more, let me let me know.

- If you want to know more, you know, research it and then talk to me in six months. - Yeah, yeah. - Then we can begin to have a conversation. - Yeah, and I will say my first kind of like coming to Bitcoin, the first thing that I was really fascinated about was Bitcoin mining and I just didn't get it.

And if I could go back today, I would just say to myself, like, hey, stick with that interest in Bitcoin mining because I think from Bitcoin mining, the knowledge that you gain it like is so vast, it's so many different fields, you know, and it gives you such a good foundation for things

like taking care of yourself, taking care of your family, taking care of your neighborhood and providing for yourself. And I think one of the big areas of providing for yourself is with energy.

I mean, it's quite clear that the more energy we use, the better our lives become, the more availability of energy. - Yeah. And like the concept around the finite nature of energies is something that I think a lot of people miss is that energy just, it just is, it's just a constant, it's always there.

And it's about, you know, what are we doing to collect it efficiently, you know, and we're kind of just striving towards that goal and Bitcoin is such a good tool for helping us get to that place where we're able to really efficiently collect a lot of energy all the time and not have to worry about, you know,

energy scarcity and those kinds of things. - And nothing puts into perspective better the importance of energy and the smart use of energy than mining because energy has a cost to it, whether it's a 10 cents a kilowatt hour, five cents, 20 cents, or whatever the hell they have in Germany now, you know,

40, 50 cents, it gives you an understanding of the cost of electricity and it puts more value that you can kind of understand and feel and touch. - Yeah, totally. - In perspective, you never would have had before if you didn't get into mining.

And I'm glad that you're into mining and I'm glad that you're into caring about the environment and I'm glad that you're into caring about people and wanting to take care of the population of where you live.

And I think that's kind of a good place for us to end our conversation here today. - Cool, man. - As you build up your project, how can people follow along with you and what can people do to help if they believe in what you're doing, help crown fund this thing?

- Okay, so you can do a couple of really simple things right now. You can go to the website, which is bitcoingreenhouse.org. You can sign up for kind of like email updates. So we're not sending people emails every week.

Like we haven't had any emails yet. We'll just be sending an email when it's like, okay, we are ready to launch the crowd fund. It will start on this date. And then the month or two leading up to that date, we'll send like a couple emails, just be like, here's some things, here's some interviews, some context.

You can follow us on Twitter. It's @btcgreenhouse. Again, we have not really posted on there and we're not really gonna be posting on there probably until we're a little more kind of past the community.

- That's understandable, yeah. - And then, otherwise people can just reach out to me on Twitter @stillbtc. And I'm totally open to feedback. I'm totally open to accepting that I'm probably, got a lot of blind spots when it comes to stuff.

My background is really just in bitcoin mining and I'm just getting into the growing of food aspect. We have one of the people on the team is, that's his expertise, he's an electrician, and he builds heat systems in greenhouses and automation in greenhouses.

- Good thing he's on your team, yeah. - Yes, so we've talked a lot about the design of the heating system and what that's gonna look like. But yeah, those are the ways that you can get in touch with us right now.

We have a GitHub that's currently private, but it will be open sourced. We have a tool that we've built alongside the project. It's like a Git ledger, so, you know, to provide kind of like a transparency into what's going on with funding, acquisitions, hiring, all that kind of stuff.

Anchor to the bitcoin chain and that tool will be open sourced as well. So everybody can use that. And I'm on Telegram too at the Real NINSA, so you can message me there. But yeah, I'm happy to take feedback.

You know, I'm happy to take critical feedback. I'm happy to take trolling, you know, whatever. - Yeah, I'm happy to take trolling. You're the first person to ever say that. - And I'm also happy to help other people too, who are interested in these things.

We're not the only ones who have exclusive rights on the idea of heating a greenhouse with bitcoin mining. And I'm definitely not the first person who's ever done it. And, you know, I've learned a lot and I've done a lot of things with it and I continue to do it.

So I'm happy to share that knowledge because at the end of the day, we're just trying to grow bitcoin and, you know, the more the merrier, really. - Yeah, sure. I think that's a large tenant of plebminer month is the guys that are participating in it are fully aware that they don't know everything

and it's a learning experience for all of us. And I'm hoping after this podcast that Moses will reach out to you and that Bert DeGroote will reach out to you and let you know all the things that worked for them.

You know, growing the tulip bulbs and stuff like that over in the Netherlands and all the permaculture people will come out of the woodwork and tell you what crops are going to grow best in that kind of environment and bitcoin base load is going to get involved and let you know how you can secure your electricity grid there.

And it's just amazing. The kind of when you, when you put out a call to action, everybody takes that call and comes running. And when I put out the call for action for plebminer month, you were kind of at the top of my list and I reached out to you and I say you want to get involved and immediately you said yes.

And I'm glad that you did because it was really great talking to you today. - Thanks, man. Well, it's awesome. Good for you for doing this. This is the proof of work that is so crucial to Bitcoin and yeah, thank you very much.

- Thank you. - For having me on. It's a pleasure. - No doubt. - Thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed that. If you want to get in touch with anyone, do check the show notes and we'd be happy to hear from you.

I'd also like to say thank you very much to Mr. Crown for helping with the website and if you haven't checked that out already, go to ungovernablemisfits.com for all the pods, articles and everything else.