Some 🔑takeaways from the heatpunk summit. 🧵

1. Heat reuse is the future. The heat market is so vast, and mining is such a small energy consumer, that if we convert even a small percentage of dumb heat to smart heat, it suddenly dominates mining. And it will.
2. The obstacles are legion... and all surmountable. We face social resistance from heat-buyers that don't understand bitcoin/mining, from tradesmen who don't want to deal with complexity and the unknown. Our stuff is expensive, one-off, looks janky, and it scares people.
3. What we need are lots of working installs to show the doubters. We need slick products with a familiar form factor, that are also reliable and simple to operate. We also need to demonstrate competitive economics with either other forms of mining or other forms of heating.
4. A major obstacle is building this stuff from salvage. No other industry else buys a finished product, tears it apart, reverse engineers it, and builds up a new product out of parts with no help from the original manufacturer. That's really cool, but... not sustainable.
5. The monopoly in ASIC manufacturing that forces this odd junkyard process... is about to be broken. My guess is that when the demand for is clear, Bitmain itself will respond by selling chips ala carte.
6. The movement to open source every layer of the mining stack has momentum. This will greatly accelerate the ability to build miners that are suited to particular applications. The plebs are taking mining back. Incredible to see.
7. Mining isn't a universal killer app for heating. Instead, there are products and business models that fit in particular niches, e.g., sat sharing with users who have no piped nat gas for heating + cheap electricity. We must find and exploit the bigger niches.
8. Aggregated demand-response participation will level the playing field with the big boys. And it's already here. Can't tell you what a game changer that is, and good for grids too.
9. We're early. If you miss the days where people thought you were crazy for talking about bitcoin... well, even bitcoiners, will think you're crazy if you tell them distributed mining for heat will dominate mining. Awesome to stand at this precipice and see it.
10. Community is everything. Building new stuff is really hard. Events like this bring together people with a common set of problems, but also, people who've tackled each one of those problems. Quantum leap when we pool solutions.
11. Brief aside... while speaking of quantum and community... If you're concerned about the threat, follow @cryptoquick. Gave me a great tutorial today.
12. The fundamental comparisons. First, getting paid for your heat is better than paying to remove your heat. Second, getting paid sats to heat with electrical resistance is better than not getting paid sats to heat with electrical resistance.
13. In other words, compare smart heating vs. dumb heating and compare heat-reuse mining vs heat-wasting mining. Those both come down strongly in favor of mining for heat. The arguments against? They're messy and piecemeal and temporary.
14. There are lots of little practical problems, like getting chips to behave at temps high enough for water heater duty. But the biggest fundamental argument against mining for heat is that heating is intermittent and capex is expensive and depreciates quickly.
15. I see that depreciation slowing for chips, as we are nearing physical limitations. I see the mining premium over "dumb heating" coming down as the stack is open sourced and we achieve economies of scale in manufacturing.
16. We're going to look back and cringe at the inefficiency of everything we do now in mining / heating. If you have efficiency OCD, which I do, everything I heard these past two days was triggering. That inefficiency won't stand over time.
17. Really this thread should have tagged all of the relevant people along the way and included links to their stuff, but I'm busy! Consider this a teaser. Just follow @SpaceDenver and look up the folks at the summit.