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Was 60 and sunny last year in Denver, and 30 and snowy up in the mountains! We do a ski trip the day before the summit with a bunch of bitcoiners.
If you want to test, contribute, join our bi-weekly Mujina dev calls! Follow the calendar on https://forum.256foundation.org
Otherwise, spreading the word, or supporting the 256 Foundation directly is much appreciated!
Turns out that getting those certifications are seemingly like dealing with the mob. Pay to play. Costs money to get the approval. Part of the approval requires submitting extensive documentation on how the product is built, how it's controlled. Failsafes, safety procedures, etc... All of this is effectively impossible if your product is a retrofitted, closed-source, Chinese miner. AKA 99% of machines.
So I'm a big believer that an open mining stack, and systems designed from the ground up at the ASIC chip level to be building infrastructure will be much easier to certify.
Supporting the 256 Foundation (https://256foundation.org) is where I think attention is best put right now.
It can be done with the retrofitting route. But it's a headache. Plus who wants to spend time building a product around S19 hashboards - and then have the S21 hashboard change form factor on you. Frustrating!
Another thing we need to bridge the gap on is the building codes. Which are per county, city, state and national. Big rule book. Really depends on the location on how strict things are.
If we want plumbers / HVAC guys to offer these products to normal people, need to pass all the codes.
Turns out, there's no such things as a building code for an immersion fluid heating system with bitcoin computers inside lol. Things like that!
If anyone would like to join us for our third annual Heatpunk Summit, we'll get together last weekend of February in Denver, Colorado to deep dive all things Hashrate Heating!
This special event brings together pleb miners, developers and experts from the heating and building industries to keep pushing the needle forward and help bring miners back to homes and businesses.
Waitlist open! Would love for you to join us.
Sizing.
All heating systems are designed for the coldest day of the year + some margin. It's a liability thing. You want to make sure your heater can keep you comfortable even when it's -20 outside for 2 hours at night that one day in January.
If you size a home or business hashrate heating system with those rules, then you end up buying 10x amount of miners - but only use those 10 on that one cold day. 90+% of the year, you have ASICs that are never running. Big mistake when the miners themselves are more expensive than regular heating systems.
So we size with a different rule at Exergy - "base load sizing". Effectively, we pick the number of miners you need to cover the "majority" of your heating needs - resulting in the miner running as close to full power as much as possible. This stacks you the most sats from that machine and gets you the best bang for buck / ROI.
On the extra cold days, the traditional heating system kicks on to help the miner out.
Think of it like a hybrid car. The Hashrate heater is the electric motor/battery in the car. were sizing it optimally to get you best gas mileage. Not turn a gas car into an electric car.
Not familiar with the protein folding argument. But our thesis is effectively:
- Miner's convert electric energy into heat and money in attempts to settle transactions and issue new coins.
- People that need heat and can benefit form the money to offset what they would pay for that heat will do it for that reason - making the settlement of transactions and issuance of new coins and underlying thing that happens - not something they seek out to do primarily.
If the bitcoin rebate, heat supplied, solar excess monetized, etc... meaningfully helps their building energy system - then they will continue to mine, when the need it, and are much less sensitive to hashprice, difficulty swings, J/TH ASIC efficiency, etc.
The best mining operation is one that's not seeking profit.
Honestly, making the products solve a problem for people - without them knowing the underlying technology is bitcoin - is the way IMO.
Block has done this masterfully with the Square terminals. Go to a coffee shop and tell them you can pay without 3% card service fees. Their mind is blown.
Same thing here in the Heatpunk space. Doesn't lower everyone's heating bills, but for folks like you and that exact scenario in Seattle, it's a no brainer. A device that offsets their heating bills. Simple as that.
Love what my friend Softwarm LLC is doing up in Idaho. He's got a semi-truck wash (hot water used to get off road grime).
I think those kinds of applications where hot air or water is used as part of the daily operations, not just when it's cold - are the obvious low hanging fruit.
Sunny where you live? It's 97F today in Denver, and our office solar system at The Space is controlling when miners turn online and dump heat outside. Free sats!
Yea I think we're in the early stages of what these software + hardware products and services look like. It'll keep getting better and better to the point that it feels like magic IMO.
Not a big fan of FPPS. I like PPLNS, and Tides from Ocean gets you that. Plus can link a bolt 12 address for lightning payouts.
It's tough because home miners / heating systems don't mine full time. They follow your heat load, so you want a pool that can reward you for this kind of setup. But also want to balance sovereignty and transparency.
Big fan of the e-hash project from vnprc (e-hash tokens).
I studied mechanical / thermal engineering and briefly worked on the heat transfer team at United Launch Alliance for their rocket program.