Hey Stacker.news 👋 I'm Michael aka Schnitzel — ask me anything about heating with Bitcoin.
I'm a Swiss engineer living in the US who's been down the rabbit hole since 2011, and I'm convinced a miner isn't a space heater with a bad attitude — it's a space heater that pays you back. I heat my home, hot water, and hot tub with immersion-cooled ASICs, and I've spent years turning that into open, repeatable builds anyone can copy.
Lately I've been shipping a lot in the open:
- Mujina firmware — just ran the world's first open-source mixed-hashboard miner (S19j + S19k) on it, plus a "balance mode" that finally lets you chase your solar surplus instead of fighting locked stock firmware.
- Libre Board — I'm lead engineer on the 256 Foundation's fully open-source mining control board, part of a complete open stack (Ember One, Mujina, Hydra Pool) we unveiled at the Nashville Energy Mining Summit.
- RY3T NOVA — I'm on the advisory board and now building the software for the NOVA 3 test rig, which turns idle solar surplus into monetized hashrate.
So bring your questions: heat reuse, home mining, immersion cooling, Libre Board, Mujina forks, DIY water heaters and hot tubs, solar monetization, or where the future of Bitcoin mining is headed. No question too nerdy. Fire away. 🔥⚡
Do you have a favorite bitcoin meme?
not particularly, I'm a connoisseur of all memes.
If you want a specific one:
Probably not right now in the current bear market, but I know it will be hard again if we rip above $125k. I also stopped actually to convince people to buy, I learned if they are interested they will come and ask
I see no one dare ask the tough questions, so I'll step up with one.
How come a Helvetian wears the name Schnitzel? As far as my school of schnitzology is concerned, the Swiss could only credibly claim stake in the Cordon Bleu...
I am baffled. And hungry.
Do you have any tips for someone who wants to start experimenting with home mining and heat reuse?
Start with a bitaxe, check out the Bitaxe vendor list: https://www.bitaxe.org/buy
It's the simplest and easiest to start with and gets you in contact with all things mining (flashing, pools, frequencies, firmware updates, heat usage, etc).
For heat reuse specifically there are multiple projects to learn. If you want to DIY check out:
If you want something that is already built but still lets you take it apart and learn:
If you want something super slick:
why are the bitaxes so ugly?
I guess it depends on taste, there are some ideas to make them prettier: https://ixtech.xyz/products/bitaxe-nerdaxe-gamma-whitepaper-edition?variant=46944522207490
But it's completely open source! you can 3D Print your own case and make them exactly as you want :)
What's the most surprising thing you've learned doing bitcoin mining things?
How nobody in the bitcoin community really knows how mining works and how much centralized bitcoin mining is:
We're talking in Bitcoin always about open source, but mining is super far away from this. And especially the mega miners don't see a problem in that at all.
I'm pretty sure though if their shareholders actually would know that a megaminer is basically completely dependent on a single vendor that makes closed source software&hardware and with that creates a massive risk, they would demand change.
That is exactly what we are trying to solve at the 256Foundation: making a complete open source hardware and software mining stack, so that we can decentralize mining again.
HI!
Why do you live in the US?
Multiple Reason:
Do you think heating miners are worth pursuing in countries or climates that don't really get that cold.
I had this idea (when shipping was cheaper) about renting heat miners during the Nth hemisphere summer. Sending it to Australia for 3-4 months during our winter.
yea, I thought about this as well. I've hard though that its just such a pain to ship the miners around that no many people do it.
I do wonder though if thats because the current miner hardware isn't really made for it, and now that we have open source hardware we could build miners that are much more rigid and made to be shipped around the world multiple times a year.
yes, especially for heating water. Even in hot climates you need hot water: Shower, Dishes, Clothes, etc.
Obviously it will not that much heat than if you try to heat a house in a cold climate, but thats where open source is so important: being able to build a system that is made for the specific usecase.
Also in hotter climates you usually have a lot more sun and therefore also solar panels and with that free energy, which can be used again to heat water or just heat the air which will usually give you more money back than selling the energy back to the grid
we don't like being Europooreans...?
If there was one mining pool operator I could get on Stacker News for an AMA, who would you like to see?
I think Antpool would be extremely interesting to hear their position on the pool situation, like why they are hiding that they actually have more hashrate than they claim.
Or Foundry, to see their point of view, but also to ask how hard it is to create a mining pool in the US with all the regulation and compliance. As I think we need multiple "regulated" mining pools, but nobody really wants to do it.
What do you think bitcoin mining will be like in 5 years? 10 years? 100 years?
similar to this: #1530845
Basically the mega miners will slowly fade away and bitcoin mining will be more and more embedded where the heat (and cold) produced can be reused for a secondary purpose.
I believe in 20 years every house/building will have a bitcoin miner in it to generate heat.
Wrote at length about the TFTC x Exergy home mining handbook this week. #1530104
It's an incredible tool. What do you think about it?
I haven't read it myself, but I work with Tyler, Dylan and Mike together almost every day and they are some of the best educated and based heatpunks.
And I'm sure a lot of the ideas in there are shaped by discussions that I have with them or are happening on a broader scale at the Heatpunk Summit and other places.
It's a great tool and extremely important in our journey to convince home owners, trades people and investors that heat reuse, solar excess and off peak bitcoin mining is a massive opportunity.
What worries you most about Bitcoin these days?
Good question, not much. If you ask my wife and friends they will tell you that I'm a hopeless optimist :)
In the short term I am a bit worried about how the BIP110 discussion is ripping the Bitcoin community apart. We should fight together against Fiat and other forces that want bitcoin to go away. Instead of doing this we infight and actually help these other forces.
However in the long term bitcoin will survive this and actually come out stronger.
What is a DIY heat reuse project no one has done yet but that you think would be totally awesome?
Oh, I got thousand of ideas :) But the one that I would love to work on but just don't have enough time right now:
Creating Cold through Absorption Chilling. Basically converting Heat back into Cold, which would allow a bitcoin miner not only to heat a house, but also cool it.
The technology is used already by Data Centers (massive scale) and RV-fridges running on Propane (small scale). However the heat that is generated by current Bitcoin miners is not hot enough for the existing absorption chillers.
So we either need to:
A) Figure out how to make the water that comes of from bitcoin miners hotter
B) Engineer an absorption chiller that can work with 80C water coming from the miners.
Probably in the end we will need to do both. But if we do, then we can basically replace any heat and cold source for houses and building by bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin miner AC sounds sooooo cool!
How should the community use LibreBoard, and wen widely available? Thanks!
two main reasons:
Do you have an opinion about BIP110?
I did a video with Staci where I share my opinion a little bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CLQMWyTAL8
However I try to stay away from having too many opinions about stuff, for me it's more important that everyone decides for themselves what they want Bitcoin to become, if everyone does that Bitcoin will be the best system for humans.
Unfortunately a lot about the current BIP110 discussion is just focusing on generating a lot of fear, and usually with fear people can't make rational decisions (I was in the military and seen people taking stupid decisions when under fear). So I'm trying to explain people what BIP110 exactly is, how it works, what would happen if it activates today, etc. And then let the people decide themselves what they think is best for bitcoin.
If you want my raw opinion:
Wait, how can one illegally use the internet?
sorry, this should have said "criminals" not illegals
makes sense! thx
I really loved your adventures with making a Bitcoin-powered water heater. Do you expect to see a big increase in consumer uses of Bitcoin miner heat reuse?
If not, what do you think are some of the challenges to more widespread adoption?
Thank you!
I do expect that eventually all houses will use bitcoin miners as their heat source, especially for electrical water heaters it just make so much sense to also use the generated heat for something else (generate sats).
However I'm also very aware that the current existing solutions are extremely steam-punky and will need a lot of work to be actually installed by people. Especially plumbers and HVAC tradespeole will need a lot of convincing.
As soon as the first products that are easy to use and easy to install exist on the market I could see a massive explosion of devices, who doesn't want a water heater that makes you money?
So I think there are a lot of hurdles to overcome, but we're working on them really hard with RY3T and 256Foundation. OpenSource is going to be the base for everything, and we are now so close to have a complete open source hardware and software mining rig.
This is exactly how I feel! Do you have any suggestions as to where non technical folks could put energy into helping make this a reality?
If you have some sats (or dollars) to spare, donate to https://www.256foundation.org/ which is also an 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization so you can tax deduct your donation.
Otherwise just help spread the word, on X, reddit, stackernews, etc. The more people know about open source mining, heat reuse, etc. the better.
And as soon as we have the first actual miners ready to install: Become a beta tester and give us feedback!
Do you think that home miners will always be a relatively small portion of hash rate?
for the coming years yes, however if I look at the longer term I think the mega miners will slowly fade away and the hashrate be replaced by heat reuse projects (which includes home miners, but also schools, hospitals, district heating, etc.).
The reason for the megaminers to fade:
How should someone who is not deep in open source or mining and not a dev evaluate where to buy a miner (either a home hobby thing like a Bitaxe or an old S19)?
I'd like to play around with a miner but sourcing the hardware feels daunting.
Start with a bitaxe, check out the Bitaxe vendor list: https://www.bitaxe.org/buy
It's the simplest and easiest to start with and gets you in contact with all things mining (flashing, pools, frequencies, firmware updates, heat usage, etc).
Then when you fell you have reached a ceiling and want to do more find an S19J Pro somewhere, there are multiple vendors selling them in MOQ 1 (minimum order quantity. of 1). You should find them for around $150-$200
I'm getting mine from https://megaminer.market/ but there are also other sellers out there.
What's different about Hydra Pool?
How do you manage excess heat in the summer when home heating demands drop but you still want to mine?
Simple: Declare your house as a Sauna and enjoy the sweat ;)
Otherwise:
LOLOLOL, lovely.
hashtag go team Sauna
I know some people in the Netherlands were heating greenhouses with miners some years ago. Do you know about any projects like that in the US?
there are some, yes: