Episode 167

Bitcoin Weekly Close – May 5th 2024

BTC – $64,032

Bitcoin Block at Time of Recording

842,286

 

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I can be reached by email at mcintosh@satoshis-plebs.com and on Twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @mcintosh@podcastindex.social. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Website

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Music Credits

Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

[00:00:00] McIntosh:

Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is May 6th, and this is episode 167 of Satoshi’s Plebs. I’m your host, Macintosh. And today’s episode is an interview with Rob Warren. Alright. Earlier this week, I had a great interview with Rob Warren. We’ll be getting into that in just a few minutes. Before we do that, I do wanna go through our regular market update, then we’ll jump into the interview with Rob. We’ll talk about our supporters, some news, and, and that’ll get us on out of here. So we’ll start with our market update, May 5th, just a few hours ago as I record this little bit. We had our weekly closing, 64,000 and $32, 64,000.

So we, well, since we’ve last talked, we’ve gone down and then back up. We actually broke out of the box that I talked about that I’ve been talking about, and I’m not gonna stop talking about it because I still think it’s important, 60 to 70 1,000. And if you go back and kinda look at the daily chart here, on April 30th, on Tuesday, April 30th, we fell below 60,000 briefly. And then on May 1st, we actually did the same thing and actually stayed, on Tuesday, May 2nd. We started climbing. We had a great day on Wednesday and went all the way up to, like, 64,000 where, basically, we have sat since. We’ve been kind of consolidating at that level.

So what does that mean? Well, it means that, it means we’re still back in the game. It means we have a very strong floor. Although, I’m I, honestly, I’m surprised. We went as low as 56,005,584, even if it was only for a very brief period of time. There was a lot of negative cell pressure, obviously. And, well, in this case, the, the Bulls won, so to speak, and we’ve come back up. We’ve reestablished. And, again, until we break out either down or up of this box and we do it definitively, which, of course, we did not do in this case, and we’re just gonna keep bouncing sideways. I have speculated. We are now into May, early May granted, but we’re now into May. We’re still going sideways, and I have speculated this basically could be it for a few months. I mean, I could see going between $6070 ish $1,000 for the next few months. So I hope I’m wrong. I hope it goes up as a miner, certainly, because the miners are hurting after the halving.

Anyways, that’s where we’re at. In addition to that, at time of recording of this part of the episode, we’ve got a block height of 842,286. It does look like we’re going to get a desperately needed downward difficulty adjustment on May 8th, just a few days from now. 2.84%, almost 3 percent. Hopefully, it will push on down to 3% by then. Our fees and mempool, we’ve got over a gigabyte of unprocessed transactions. I did see earlier today, actually, in one of the blocks that came up and I don’t know exactly which one, but it essentially contained the 1,000,000,000 transaction, which is pretty cool.

So so since early 29th, 2009, we’ve processed a 1000000000 transactions on the network. That’s pretty awesome. And, our fees right now sit at about 15¢ per vbyte for a low priority. So not too bad. Not too bad for the transactions. Alright. So we’re gonna jump into this interview. I’m not gonna give too much background. I will say this. It was a great interview. One that I’d, reached out to him, and asked if he could come on the show. He graciously did. Rob does work at Riot Mining. We talk about that a little bit, although we cannot go into, you know, a whole lot of detail about that. But I will say this, Riot is one of the largest miners here in the United States. They’re primarily facilitated in Texas. They may be exclusively in Texas.

They do take advantage of the ERCOT program, for energy balancing or whatever they call it. What that means is, say, during the summer, as we’re approaching these summer months, and it’s super hot out in Texas, maybe it’s a 100 degrees or so, and everybody’s running their air conditioner to help you cool, Energy demand is up, and ERCOT says, hey, Riot. I need you to turn off 60,000 miners. And within a few minutes, they could do that, and that frees up that energy to be used elsewhere. It keeps them from having brownouts or blackouts, and, Riot does get compensated for that.

So, anyways, I we have some great questions. I I thought some thoughtful conversation. I hope you enjoy this. Alright. So here we are. And by the way, I apologize. I should ask you this before I started. Is it do you go by Rob or Robert? You go it’s Rob. Robert. Hey, dude. Doesn’t matter. Whatever suits you. Great. Welcome, to Stoshi’s Plebs. I I really appreciate you coming on. I’m looking forward to this conversation. So, we’re gonna talk about some mining stuff. We’re gonna talk about a book that you, have written and is coming out soon from what I understand.

And, we’re gonna talk about a few other things as well. So, let’s just go ahead and jump right on in there. First of all, Rob, what I do like to do with all my guests is kind of get a little bit of background. Let the listeners hear kind of your story, how you found Bitcoin, how you got involved in your case with mining. I wanna hear about that as well. We can go ahead and talk about that now. So, just kinda take us down the rabbit hole or whatever it is, the Alice in Wonderland.

[00:06:50] Rob Warren:

Happy to take you in. Yeah. So I I initially heard about Bitcoin 2015, 2016 through a podcast that I was a a pretty avid listener of at the time called EconTalk. Okay. And they there was a speaker, an individual by the name of Wences Casares who I think a lot of new folks maybe don’t know about, but, those who were involved in the space, predominantly earlier days would know him quite well. Started a company called Zappo that was a a custody company, and he was so just insanely optimistic about this Bitcoin thing that I had only heard about it previously through, through utilization in darknet markets, and this was my first time on, what was a reputable podcast that I really enjoyed listening to where I heard somebody really touting the benefits of this thing, this Bitcoin thing. Right. And at the time, I was living in New Orleans running a start up, and I didn’t really go down the rabbit hole at that time, so to speak. I have kinda developed the idea that there’s only really two reasons why people, at least in in the last few years, get into Bitcoin, and it’s either because they are greedy or because they have to. So it’s either number go up or I need to protect my wealth. And I was very much in the first, the first category. You know, I I was running this other company. I thought, oh, look. It’s a it’s a high return asset. I could I could allocate allocate some capital to it. And, you know, in a few short years, I’ll be Warren Buffett. I’ll just be filthy rich. It’s a a high risk thing that I could do, but, hey. It’s high risk. You know? Do it. Right. So I did that and bought a bunch of Bitcoin.

Didn’t really become, the sort of standard DCA or was difficult to learn at the time. Andreas Antonopoulos was really kind of the key man to really learn about Bitcoin at that time, so credit a lot of my early, early navigations through the Bitcoin space to him. You know, you had Bitcoin talk forums, but me not being technical, I wasn’t somebody who, at the time really got involved in those. It was really just Reddit and and YouTube videos of Andreas that got me into it, and then kind of forgot about it, frankly, for a couple years, but still held, knew knew enough to know that I should purchase in self custody. So I was always very keen on that.

And then around early 2019, I kind of rediscovered it. Right? The company had changed. I was exiting at the time. I was in a position where you’re kind of, you know, sorting sorting your affairs, so to speak. And this was right then leading into COVID. And that’s when I started to really understand Bitcoin not predominantly as an asset, but understood it more so as a network, as this kind of living, breathing thing that was run on computers and these various these various operators. It was the nodes. It was the miners. It was the the folks who are participating, signing, and and submitting transactions to the network. And that’s when it really kind of hit me just the power of what this thing was, not as an asset, but really as a living entity, or at least as a computer entity, as a, as a network an organization oriented network. That’s right. Mhmm. And that’s when I went down the rabbit hole and started getting involved. And the most the most kind of natural extension for me at the time was to, you know, start to obviously get on Twitter as all as all good, Bitcoiners inevitably do, and navigate the space that way, which is when this mining thing sort of popped up in my, in my face. And it was something I really didn’t know, much or anything about, but I found myself in I’m sorry. What year? I I apologize. But what year was this? This would be 2020, 2021. Okay. Okay.

So as this is as COVID is kind of unfolding and I’m I’m rediscovering Bitcoin, as this living thing, I’m going down this mining rabbit hole because it it seems so alien to me. And, through some good fortune, was able to get my hands on a couple of s nines and learn quite a bit more about, you know, the the the basics of mining, so to speak. Mhmm. Built an early version of, Steve Barber had published, what was called a brown box, which is essentially a home version of his now commercially available black box that you could make out of a single 4 by 8 sheet of, of plywood.

And, as I mentioned, I’d had a couple of s nines. Well, that was, that was great to learn with, but it was very difficult to convince my, my then fiance, but now wife, that running a couple of these in the 2nd bathroom of a 5th story apartment building was a good idea. That’s really where it all kind of started, and I started producing a lot more content particularly oriented around mining. So Mhmm. Early days around home mining, really figuring out what the heck was going on. There was a lot of impetus around folks in the space starting to solve these really interesting problems. Right? Starting to solve the problems of, you know, not just site location and how to set the machines up and how to get the racking and how to get the the proper ventilation depending on what kind of cooling you’re running, also how to network these machines. And then once you network them, well, I gotta go to a pool. Well, now there’s all these other pools that are starting up, and which one do I choose? And how do I decide which one to choose? Are they really better than one or the other? And what the heck is this firmware thing? And okay. Well, I guess I also have to figure out a business model because if I’m gonna be investing, you know, a substantial amount of capital into this thing, I really wanna understand, am I gonna be profitable or not? Right. You need a return on investment.

That’s right. And so that’s that’s on the journey where, to me, things started to get really interesting in the mining space because, it it became readily apparent to me that this whole mining thing was not the same in the in the sense that I didn’t understand it in the same way that I understood Bitcoin. Mhmm. Because Bitcoin is kind of this purely purely intellectual exercise to a large extent. Right? You you have to understand the players. You have to understand how the system works. And that’s what you kind of get through the white paper and through through learning about it through other folks where you you understand this really beautiful game that’s been assembled. And once that kind of clicks on you, you go, oh my goodness. This this has all these amazing properties to it, and it kind of sits in you. And it’s it’s, a lot of folks become very ideological about it. But what I found in mining was that you couldn’t really apply that same kind of logic. You know, surely, you were a participant in the network in the sense that you were, you were providing hash rate. You know, you were, you were working to, you know, fulfill the difficulty and be able to submit a block and be rewarded for it, and to make sure transactions were continuing to be processed.

But you had a whole different set of operators that you were trying to figure out as a Bitcoin miner that really didn’t fit within this kind of purely ideological schema that I’ve become so familiar with strictly in the kind of broad Bitcoin space. And that’s when that’s when the years really perked up, and I’ve been going down the the mining rabbit hole, so to speak, ever since.

[00:14:02] McIntosh:

Very, very interesting. I I have a slightly different history in that I found I found Bitcoin, it sounds sounds like, a little bit before you did and wandered around for a while, got involved in various other things. And then to be honest, I came back to Bitcoin, very, very strongly a few years ago, roughly man. Well, 20 about 2020 or so. Great. Maybe maybe 2019. But as I’ve gotten back involved in in, really, in Bitcoin only, one of the things that has been of of a good deal of interest to me is the mining aspect of it because I I have a computer background. I’ve, I actually build systems for in the cloud for companies. Right? This kind of thing. And so, I understand a lot of that stuff that’s going on there, and it’s it’s always I wished I would have gotten involved in mining earlier, to be honest, because to make this story shorter, because I never would have left Bitcoin. I mean, if I would have gotten involved in mining back in, say, 2015 or so Mhmm.

Man, I don’t know. I don’t know where I’d be, but it would not be the same place. I’ll say that. And, so I’m enjoying it. It’s it’s well, anyways, getting off off track. So I’m gonna stop myself, but that’s really cool. Now for those who don’t know, you do work with Riot Mining, and we’re not gonna talk specifically about Riot. But Riot is a very large mining company here. You may be the largest one in the United States. I’m going out on a limb saying that, but you’re a large company. I was looking at some of the the, publicity things that came out and, like, over the last year or so during kind of the bottom of the market, y’all were buying large amounts of miners. And by large, I mean, one of them, I think, was 60,000, like Yeah. 60,000.

What’s miners, if I’m not mistaken? But, anyways, large amounts of minors. Obviously, this is a very large company. From that perspective, I wanna ask you a question. It but I need to preface that for just a second. I have not talked yet on this show because we didn’t have an episode, last week, but samurai the founders of samurai who do a wallet that has some Whirlpool in is it whirl no. It’s CoinJoin integration into it, were arrested by the Department of Justice, essentially. And that’s a different subject, but it does bring about governmental interaction in the Bitcoin space. Now we’ve seen this kind of coming, at least I have.

Maybe I’ve not been vocal enough about it, but I have seen that this was going to happen. We’ve seen a lot of regulation over the last year or so. We’ve seen some good things come out of that. We’ve seen some things that aren’t so good. And what’s going on with samurai, regardless of those people involved, is not a good situation. So as a miner and with you involved in this public company here in the United States who has 1,000,000 of dollars in capital tied up in mining equipment and all this kind of stuff, what are your concerns about governmental regulation?

Do you see that being a problem for these and they’re you’re not the only large mining company here Yeah. In the states. What are your concerns about that?

[00:17:36] Rob Warren:

You know, I can tell I can tell you personally my my sense, and it’s this has evolved quite a bit since getting into Bitcoin, and over the past years. But, I really think that, you know, monarchism, this idea that the the smallest government governs best is a a goal that we should aspire towards. You know, I don’t I don’t really have a schema in my mind for what, what the governmental structure is for how you handle 100 of millions of peoples in various states throughout the United States in a state and a federal, setup with our current kind of, Frankenstein as we have it.

But I can tell you that I I I, like many, many, many others, kind of know what the game is, and the game is very much one of extreme governmental oversight in all aspects of personal and private life. Right. And so it seems like there is this kind of just generally, this feeling sort of in the in the pool that, you know, the tone is maybe changed and that there’s this slow creep into your money or into the the car that you drive or the food that you consume. Mhmm. And it’s happening through a lot of the administrative state. So the regulatory agents, the regulatory bodies.

And that’s something that just personally I can tell you I find very, very, very disturbing, and it’s it’s something that is not policed by our sort of tripartite governmental structure. And it’s something that has just been leveraged and leveraged and leveraged over the last however many years, you know, whether it’s it’s not just presidential cycles. It’s something that’s been creeping since the, sixties, seventies, eighties. And it was something that people used to call the deep state, and you would immediately be called a conspiracy theorist for saying this was a thing that exist.

But then when you phrased it in a little bit of a different way, when you phrased it as, hey. There’s a group of people who work for purely governmental entities that are not governed by the same sort of regulatory structure as the macro level level government who do not change every 4 years. They do not change every 6 years or or however many years per election cycle. That in and of itself is a kind of capture, and that’s something that you should be extremely wary of and you should be hacking away at. You should be reducing. As far as that pertains to what we’re doing in the mining industry, it’s a very, very real threat. It’s a very real threat, and we saw that with this this recent interaction with the EIA seeking this sort of survey of minors in the space.

Right. I can tell you that it’s something based on what we’ve done just organizationally at Riot, not something that I took any sort of personal credit or took any personal part in, but it was something we took extremely seriously, and it’s something that we acted on extremely seriously. And as you can see, it very quickly, disappeared. We challenged it. Mhmm. And this is a really interesting this is a really interesting topic in the space because as much as as much as everybody likes to say that, you know, Bitcoin is, is extremely decentralized and Mhmm. In some sense, there’s a sort of derogatory remarks towards public miners. Oh, these public miners, they’re so so big. There’s risks involved. Of course, there’s risks involved in any large scale company.

And that’s not to diminish any sort of critique that people give, but the the counterpoint that I think people need to be very, very cognizant of is that it wasn’t a bunch of plebs. It wasn’t a bunch of private miners who had 1 to 5 megawatts Right. Who were able to rapidly organize and rapidly deploy a response to something that was a drastic and entirely inappropriate governmental overstep. It was it was riot in conjunction with another, a group of additional parties who essentially said, no. This is this is not appropriate. This is something that, flies in the say flies in the face of the way that the United States government is supposed to work. It’s a blatant affront to the way that, private business or or in our sense, public business, can be monitored and governed. And so we’re going to address it immediately, and we’re gonna take it very seriously.

And you can see, you know, very you can see the sort of proof is in the pudding that they, the EIA was forced to essentially back down off of everything that they were claiming because there was no merit to it. It was strictly a a governmental overstep. It was strictly this kind of attempted abusing the powers of government to gain information about a private industry.

[00:22:05] McIntosh:

Right. Right. First of all, that was probably one of the most eloquent explanations, kind of the way that the United States works that I’ve heard in a while. Thank you. I would say, the judicial branch of the government Here in the United States, we have 3 branches of government, the judicial, the administrative, and I can never remember what the Congress and senator critters are called. But the 3rd branch

[00:22:34] Rob Warren:

The executive and the legislative.

[00:22:36] McIntosh:

Legislative. Thank you. So the judicial branch has failed. These administrative people are they’re grabbing everything that they can, and I would lump the Department of Justice, and I don’t wanna turn this into a political podcast. I try very hard not to. I can’t help it sometimes. But the DOJ is absolutely doing that in this case that we were I was just talking about samurai. They are overreaching. They are grabbing and seeing what they can grab because once they gain that ground, it becomes very, very difficult to to have it removed from them. That’s right. And so it’s the judicial branch. It’s that ends in our supreme court.

That’s their responsibility to keep that from happening. And so, anyways, I just as a little tangent there, I kinda feel like, in essence, they’re failing us. I hope that that does not continue, but we will see. But you made a great point that if it weren’t for the public minors, then, you know, this bit of overreach that you were just talking about very likely would have pressed on. And it was only because of y’all that it that it was able to stop, and I don’t think it will come back. So congratulations. Good job on that.

[00:23:55] Rob Warren:

And and we can have people All credit to our to our brilliant executive team, to to Brian Morgenstern who is really, really a very sharp guy, who has worked in administration for a while and helped to very much lead a lot of this charge in the strategy. Pierre Richard went and advocated. There was also, there were also a number of participants from various organizing entities, sort of industry groups, the Texas Blockchain Council, folks who came in and took this very seriously, and I think they all deserve a ton of credit. Yes. They do.

[00:24:31] McIntosh:

They do. They all do. Absolutely. So we got through that one. We’ll see what happens with samurai, and we’ll see what the next thing is because there’s always going to be a next thing. That’s just the nature of it. So we have to prepare for this. And I there’s something I’ve wrestled with for a long time. And to be honest, I don’t know the I don’t feel like I know the exact right answer, but we’re doing what we can. I wanna talk you you, you wrote an article, a blog post, or whatever for brains, which is they are a mining pool. They also do firmware, which you mentioned earlier, for miners. They’re actually the mining pool that I use, and I don’t get paid any money to say that. But it’s true.

I do like brains. But you posted a nice, article about the happening. And I don’t we’re not really going to talk about the happening a whole lot. I’ve talked about it on the show a number of times. But you gave more lessons to thrive through the happening. I it was a great article. I would have and I will have a link to it in the show notes. You should all go, take a look at it. I do wanna ask a question, though. Please. And I’m I’m not trying to trap you. I’m really not. But I I would note in your story, you started basically as a plebminer. You bought s nines, you said.

For example, there’s literally kaboom racks. I just noticed they’re selling used ones now for $95. They I’m sure they were not that cheap when you bought yours. But, you said, in one of your points, if you’re new here, and which may be a a great qualification for this. Hosting minors isn’t passive income, and you probably shouldn’t do it. It’s not passive income. I agree with that, certainly. But I would encourage I personally and this is just my my stance. You shouldn’t just go out and buy 10 or 20 miners. That’s a lot of money and a lot of responsibility.

But if you if you think you have some interest in mining, I flat believe somebody should go out and buy 1 or 2 miners if they’re able to and put them online. Understand now there’s some basic understandings that they need to have. I mean, electricity costs money. Right? And miners use different amounts of that depending on their power requirements and how efficient they are and that kind of thing. You do have to have some basic understanding. I would not recommend you probably start with that $95 s nine because right now and probably for the rest of history, to be honest, unless you have access to zero cost electricity, it’s not going to make money, if that makes sense.

But you gotta start somewhere. I started with a s j 19 teen pro, I think, which was, at the time, pretty doggone expensive. And right now, I just noticed it’s actually operating at a loss, which I’m willing to do temporarily. I feel like Yeah. The the having will for after after things settle out here in a month or 2, I think we’ll be heading onward, because we just can’t keep doing this forever the way it is, but this has also been the same way for the last few happening. So, anyways, I do wanna ask you about that. I I I see a lot of people in the mining space. Here’s how I wanna phrase the question. I I see a lot of people in the mining space who kinda have this pushback. They’re like, well, this is really hard.

It’s not easy, but it is do-able. If if somebody has some level of computer knowledge, specifically with Linux, really, or or Unix in general. Mhmm. I feel like people can mine, like, if they want to. And I would encourage anyone to do so because it’s such an important part of our ecosystem. Yeah. Does that make sense?

[00:28:29] Rob Warren:

Yeah. I would so I wanna add some some character to that because I understand the point that you’re making. I wanna create a distinction between learning versus trying to gain financially. Mhmm. And I wanna create a distinction between ideological mining versus commercial mining. So the the the sort of cautionary reference that you mentioned in that article is really targeted around this idea of counterparty risk. So when you when you buy Bitcoin and you hold it in an exchange, you’re incurring a lot of counterparty risk, and we’ve seen this happen. We saw it happen at Mt. Gox. We saw it happen with FTX. If you’re not holding it, it’s not yours. And that’s really the magic of Bitcoin is that you have a way where you can essentially eliminate your counterparty risk by simply holding the asset yourself, holding holding Bitcoin yourself.

The risk with hosting in particular is that if you don’t know enough, if you don’t know the questions to ask. Right. If you don’t understand the operation of really the difficulty of of setting up and running a Bitcoin miner, you don’t understand the operands in the business, you don’t really understand the levers or what lives on the, the balance sheet of these Bitcoin companies, you can put yourself in a position where you’re taking on a huge amount of counterparty risk. Right. And that might look like you sending 10, 50, a $100,000 worth of machines to some warehouse in the middle of god knows where. Right. And then, essentially, when you’re expecting some kind of return, you know, expecting to monetize those assets by running them, you could very quickly find yourself in a situation where through no bad action of your own, you’re upside down. And it could be because the person doesn’t know how to run the miners. They have a facility that’s not set up properly. They have negotiated something inappropriately or incorrectly, and so they wind up you know, their power bill isn’t what they think it was. There could be curtailments or other sorts of things that are happening on their side that through no fault of your own or really through through a lack of inquiry, through through a lack of knowing what questions to ask, your own run your own sort of naive perspective, you can wind up putting a lot of money at risk.

And what what I typically recommend, which is actually a little bit different than I think what what you suggest is that I I like the idea of somebody understanding hands on Mhmm. What that initial jump into mining looks like. So if somebody says, oh, I wanna get into mining. And if they haven’t ever run a miner before, I’ll often say, well, Kaye, listen. You can make a very small upfront investment, and it’s an investment in your learning. You know, you’re probably gonna spend a couple $100 on books or podcasts or classes over the course of the year. Buy a miner and go online and figure out how to use an s nine. Don’t expect to make money.

Right. But simply learn. Learn how the pieces fit together and understand it. And there are a lot of people who do that who then go, you know, actually, this this may not be for me. I actually just wanna hold Bitcoin or I wanna do something financially. I wanna sell puts or buy calls. You know, I wanna try to generate yield. Right. I don’t want folks to think about Bitcoin mining as a yield generation strategy. I really want them to think about it as a business.

[00:31:50] McIntosh:

Mhmm. Now

[00:31:52] Rob Warren:

this is all kind of negated by the second distinction that I made, which is ideological versus commercial mining. This is if you’re doing commercial mining. You you have to make sure that your profits exceed your revenues. Otherwise, you don’t stay in business very long. However, there are entirely legitimate reasons why people would want to mine at breakeven or at a loss. Mhmm. And there are loads of folks, you know, a lot of folks in the, in the pleb mining community or messing around with these bit axes, these sort of single chip setups. They’re doing this ideological mining because to them, it’s important to do something to decentralize hash rate, and it doesn’t have to be a ton of hash rate. It’s not a bunch of, costs that they’re incurring. They’re not doing it strictly to make money. They’re doing it because they wanna support the network, and there’s even a group of people who are totally comfortable, totally willing to set up a number of machines, at their home.

5 5 would be a ton of machines, 5 to 10 machines. You know, you’re looking at, 1 20 amp breaker per machine. So looking at sort of like the s19, m 30, m50 series, that’ll fill up a 200 amp panel. There are people who entirely, legitimately, will continue to mine regardless of cost because to them, it’s extremely important to acquire non KYC sets. Right. Right. And so that’s a totally legitimate way to mine. Totally legitimate. There’s there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But a lot of folks don’t necessarily understand that distinction coming into mining, and I wanna kinda disabuse them of the notion that this is purely a yield strategy or, oh, I’m just gonna go make the asset. Now I can generate revenue. I want them to have a little bit more of a subtle take. Right. No. That those are very, very fair points, and I skipped

[00:33:41] McIntosh:

Kind of the lower end. I I never bought an s-9 or anything like that simply because I’ve got enough experience with computers, frankly, to know. So, you know, a reasonable idea of what I was getting to. And my cost for power where I live is more than double essentially, what it would cost for me to have it to a hosting facility. Now I Yeah. I think I frankly had a bit of good luck. Although, I did do a good amount of research beforehand, including going to, basically, like, pleb, minor telegram groups and this kind of thing, which are great sources for information. But I use Kaboomrax. And, I mean, they don’t pay me to say that, but they they are my host.

And I have had zero issues with them outside of their accounting system, which I complain about constantly. I love hearing that. The Kaboomericks guys are great. Yeah. They are. They’re great people, and they provide a great service. They’ve been very reliable. I’ve had very little issues. Yeah. The accounting thing needs an upgrade, but other than that, I can manage. So that’s how and I did. I only bought literally one server and had it online for a couple of months, and then I bought 2 more. And then I don’t discuss what I’ve done since then. But Great. You know, I did put my toes in there first and make sure that every I literally work this out in Excel. I guess I’m a I don’t know. Whatever. But I I worked all the cost out, how long it would take to recoup the the minor cost and what I might be able to sell it for and all this kind of stuff.

And it seemed to make sense, so I tested it out and I tried it. But when I did that, I had to sign a document saying I’m doing a 1 year commitment That’s right. With Kaboomrax. And that’s that. It’s a you know, they they have a right to that if I’m committing to that. But in my case, because of my power being as expensive as it was, there was just it did not make sense to do it at my house. So That’s right. Everybody needs to evaluate their own situation. Those are some excellent points. So and things like BitX and the s 9 Miners and I I shouldn’t dismiss them. I I apologize. I kinda wanna walk that back because I do I know I sounded well, I do. I dismissed them because they they don’t generate very much terra hash and but you’re right. There’s a lot of other reasons to to be doing that as well. Look. I I do wanna step into, you have written a book.

I believe at this point, it is a 100% complete. Is that true? You’re basically waiting to publish. I you I want you to talk about it. You can kinda do the big reveal, walk through what it’s about. I think people would have figured out a little bit at this point, maybe. What it’s about it’s about Ethereum. No. I’m just kidding. You know, and let and let’s chat because I’m looking I’m personally looking forward to this book. I’ll just be honest.

[00:36:38] Rob Warren:

Oh, I love that. Thank you. So the the book is called the Bitcoin Miner’s Almanac, and it’s coming out the middle of June, so June 15th this year. Everything submitted, got manuscripts. We’ve run through. We’ve done our line edits. We’re going through our formatting, our pagination right now. Illustrations have been completed and submitted. So, now it’s very much kind of a hurry up and wait, and then it’s also a hurry up and, oh, man. I wish I could have added all this other stuff. So I think that’s the case, but, you know, if anything, it’s good news because it, it gives you the opportunity for a a second edition already. Right. So the the book is essentially in 2 parts, and the intention that I had here was to, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of great books kind of explaining Bitcoin from an ideological stance and giving people an understanding of the players and understanding how they regulate internally.

And so much great thinking has been done about this, but there wasn’t a resource that did this for Bitcoin mining. And in Bitcoin mining, the the operators, the players, the things that affect your operation are fundamentally different from the rather, I shouldn’t say different, but they’re fundamentally an extension of what the Bitcoin protocol is doing. So in some sense, you know, we are playing by the rules of the Bitcoin protocol. But instead of being this internally self regulated code driven system, we exist in the world, and we exist in the world through the technology that we develop, the the Bitcoin miners, the cooling systems, the various ways that we source, acquire, and convert energy into electricity for consumption, the way that we think about that.

There’s there’s a whole bunch of differences there, and we’re also constrained by the the the businesses that we’re able to set up and and run-in the space. Because if you’re gonna operate commercially, as I mentioned, you have to have your business model in mind. You really have to be concerned with your profit and loss, which is something that if understanding Bitcoin was hard enough to now have to go get a masters and understand business, It’s just whole other game. So it’s a it’s a book in 2 parts. And the first part is, reducing Bitcoin mining to the the fundamental entity in my mind. It’s reducing Bitcoin mining to the miner itself.

So if we can make mining as simple as possible, and start with the machine, then you can work out from the machine, and you can start to illuminate for people why certain Bitcoin mining actors who seem very different from each other all think that what they’re doing is a very good idea. Why does somebody like a riot who’s doing extremely large scale mega mining sites, why do they think that they have a great thesis when somebody like Bob Burnett is out here acquiring and running substantially smaller sites. He what he refers to as the horses in the space. Why does why does Bob Burnett think that’s a good idea? And then why does why does Scott and the rest of the crew with the BIT ax or or Zach Baumstra with his his modifications of single units for home heating, how do they think it’s a good idea as well? It it doesn’t make sense on its face, but a way to add some coherence to this is if you reduce everything to the machine itself.

And so every machine fundamentally consists of 4 parts of a machine. Right? You’ve got your power supply, your control board, your hash boards, and your cooling mechanism. Mhmm. And once you have those, you have a miner. And then once you have your miner, there’s really only three things that physically connect to it. You have a source of electricity. You have your Ethernet or your connection to the Internet, and then you have your cooling. And how do we explore what the sort of current space looks like? How do we survey that and understand based on that survey why all of these different businesses think it’s a good idea to mine Bitcoin in the way that they’re mining Bitcoin. And so starting from the machine, we we go and explore the world of hashing. What the heck is the machine doing?

Why are we concerned with with pools? Why are we concerned with the way that we use or treat or hash? Going through the electrical cable, we say, okay. Well, where does electricity come from? We start concerning ourselves with, okay. Well, you you’ve got these large markets. You’ve got, things like the grid, the electrical grid, which we’ve all heard about. But how do miners think about the grid, and how do they see an opportunity to to run a business based on where they think some angle is in the grid. And then we’ve got this whole other alien landscape, which are people who aren’t even on the grid, people who are, you know, collocating directly with large sources of electrical generation, like the folks that are going to these remote dams Mhmm. Or folks that are going to excess power capacity and sources of production.

And then you have folks that are just showing up on oil wells and inexplicably running generators that consume, hydrocarbons Right. And turn that into electricity for people to turn into Bitcoin. Why the heck do all these people think it’s a good idea? And then the final piece, of course, is is that cooling connection, which is okay. Well, you’ve got this you’ve got this really pissed off piece of industrial equipment, this really angry hot machine. How do we keep it from getting too mad and shutting itself down? What is the state of the art? Can we explain the way that people are starting to think about or categorize whether they’re doing a mega mining setup and building a whole custom building, whether they are using a containerized solution, some custom solution in their house for home heating, if they’re doing hydro cooling or immersion cooling or air cooling. How can I think about that? And you can reduce it really quickly to a lot of really good existing knowledge about heat transfer coefficients and electrics, and system cooling. There’s a lot of great technology that’s out there, but it all lives in these other domains. It lives in the domains of electricity and plumbing and and, and engineering folks who are having to model do CFD analyses for these, these various cooling types. And so that’s the first section is to just give a sense of, hey. If we start with the machine, can we start to explain what the world of Bitcoin mining looks like and why people think these are all good ideas?

And then let’s go one step further. Let’s make it real. So the second half of the book is all interviews with actual operators, folks who are doing a variety of different types, styles, and sizes of mining. It’s everyone from the folks at SAS Mining who are doing hosting, you know, green oriented hosting, really looking at the Atapu Dam in Paraguay where they have a huge huge cache of Mhmm. Excess hydropower and hearing through their voices. Okay. Well, why do they think that’s a good idea? Or hearing through the privacy advocate, Econo Alchemist, Why does he think it’s a good idea to ideological mind ideologically mine Bitcoin regardless of the price, and set up his own small systems, strictly to fulfill his goals of of maintaining privacy and and reducing KYC exposure.

And how does this compare to somebody, somebody like Jason Less, the CEO of Riot Platforms, who has a strategy to make these ultra large sites that live on an unregulated grid, which is ERCOT. Mhmm. How does that fit into that strategy on ERCOT where you’re fundamentally doing something a little bit different. You know? Bob Burnett is not shutting off to curtail to sell his power back to the grid. But Jason has a strategy for Riot that involves us being a large flexible load on ERCOT that gives us a really interesting edge in the market. And hearing it through the voices of the operators, I really want the reader to say, oh, you know, I get it. It’s not like it’s not like everything is gonna reduce to this one kind of mining.

It’s not like everything is gonna reduce to this one size of mining. It’s really that where we are right now as an industry, we are starting to explore the outer edges of what this industry can look like. And that to me is a really exciting idea because it it all lives in the real world. It’s not it’s not the same thing as going online and, you know, arguing whether we should, we should allow op cat to live in the protocol. It’s not like that at all. You know? It’s something where Right. If you’re willing to put the skin in the game and you’re willing to test your strategy against reality and you believe you have the skills to operate, you can go and discover these new ways where you can apply Bitcoin mining in these very disparate industries, and that to me is really, really exciting.

[00:45:32] McIntosh:

We we are also, and I’m I’m quite sure you wouldn’t be able to get an interview with them, but we’re also starting to see, you know, sovereign countries that are mining. Bhutan in particular, I just saw years ago, they started mining. I think they said it was $5,000 of Bitcoin when they started, but it came out last year or the year before because of some leg lawsuit that they had been mining. And they said, yep. We’ve been mining. Well, they just recently announced they’re gonna actually, like, 5 x their operation, which would make them certainly the largest sovereign country mining. It’d be larger than El Salvador or anybody like that. I don’t know who else would be mining. I’m pretty sure Russia is, but that’s just a conspiracy theory. So and probably China. Right?

So anyways, I I love seeing countries like Bhutan and El Salvador invest in mining as a way to better themselves in the future. I mean, that is long term thinking, and that should be applauded because we don’t see that a lot in political systems. Mhmm. So, anyways, that sounds really terrific. I I am very much looking forward to reading that. Are you gonna go to, the Bitcoin conference in July up there in Nashville?

[00:46:54] Rob Warren:

I will. I’ll be out there. I’ll I’ll hopefully be I have put in a suggestion that I would love to I’d love for us to facilitate a panel with a number of the folks that are interviewed in the book. Mhmm. So that they can kinda share these perspectives in person with, with all the attendees.

[00:47:10] McIntosh:

Is there any chance that you interviewed Eric Hersman

[00:47:16] Rob Warren:

from Africa? Did actually. Yeah. From Gridley’s Compute. So he’s he’s in the book as well. Great. Because he’s I love him. He I’ve interviewed him before. He’s, like, honestly, one of my favorite peep don’t tell him that. I don’t he’ll get Wonderful guy. Well, I mean, he’s a wonderful guy. You know? Anytime you move him, he’s just fantastic.

[00:47:33] McIntosh:

So, yeah, that’ll be awesome. I’m gonna be up there. I’m planning on being up there unless this market keeps going sideways. But I am planning on being up there, and I’d love to pick up a copy and have you sign it maybe. I’m not a fanboy kind of person, but it’d be awesome if you could do that. That’d be wonderful. It’d be my pleasure. Cool. Alright. I’ve got well, I wanted to mention, if people wanna follow you on Twitter, you’re at bikesandbitcoin. That’s right. I do wanna wrap up. I’ve got one question I ask all, all the people I interview. I ask them, and you cannot use your own book. I’m sorry. But what is your favorite book? And it it can be fiction. It can be nonfiction.

That’s completely up to you. And if you really can’t decide, you can throw me a couple. I’ve had people do that as well.

[00:48:19] Rob Warren:

Oh, man. Just just book life book in general?

[00:48:22] McIntosh:

Mhmm.

[00:48:23] Rob Warren:

You know, so I I when I was in, when I was an undergraduate, I started studying psychology, and was involved in some psych research. Didn’t didn’t find it kind of as demanding as I wanted it to be, so jumped in and picked up a philosophy degree as as well. And at that time, I was a total Nietzsche fanboy and really, really loved, his his I don’t know if you call it his magnum opus, but a book called that I absolutely loved of his. And I I have a copy that I’ve been through, you know, 3, 4 times, and can turn to and just absolutely love this kind of pithy, very, very intellectual, very rich writing style.

But he kinda sends you down a rabbit hole if you start to look into his origins, into some of the presocratics and sort of early stoics. So the Heraclitus, the Epictatuses, the guys that were kind of informing a lot of early Marcus Aurelius. And I discovered kinda late into my college career and then early thereafter, Epictetus, who was this wonderful stoic philosopher, has, a work called the Enchiridion, which is, translates to the handbook. Right? It’s essentially sort of a handbook for life, and it’s detailing this stoic philosophy. And it’s something that I’ve just absolutely loved going through as this very, very rich, very, very tight logical reference point, because the the the stoics really don’t hold back.

And it it’s a really, really I think at least for kind of the modern age where lots of stuff is coming at you and especially in the digital world, there’s always stuff that’s trying to get your attention or provoke a response. It provides this really healthy counterpoint, this really enjoyable kind of settling sentiment where if you can go into these stoics, this kind of cleanliness of writing, it’s it’s a really, really great counterpoint to kind of the modern, you know, hyperstimulated era to remember this kind of basic dictum, which is, you know, know what’s in your control and know what’s not within your control, and concern yourself only with the things that are in your control.

And that’s really one of these beautiful kind of universal truths that comes out of, Epictetus’ and that, I just return to all the time. I love it so much as a bit of a kind of guiding guiding structure, guiding ethos to to live and work by.

[00:50:47] McIntosh:

So first of all, that’s probably the most profound. I don’t think I’ve ever had Harry Potter? No. No. I’d absolutely not. I’ve had I’ve never had well, I didn’t expect the philosophy degree, first of all, that was out of left field. How did you get involved in computers after that, if you don’t mind me asking? But, yeah, I to be honest, for Christmas, I read a lot. I do. I read a lot of nonfiction stuff mostly.

[00:51:19] Rob Warren:

Yeah. The only If you need a if you need a fantastic energy book that will just absolutely rattle your brain, The best book in my mind was recommended to me by Harry Sudhak, and it’s called, energy in civilization by Vaclav Smil. Mhmm. That above all is hands down the one of the most stimulated stimulating nonfiction books that you can read to truly understand how civilization has progressed as a function of Of energy consumption, energy production, energy consumption, mastering energy.

[00:51:59] McIntosh:

I have heard discussions about this book. I need to put it on my list. It may already be on my list. I will make sure because I wanna read it.

[00:52:07] Rob Warren:

Oh, it’s so good. I it’s 100%

[00:52:09] McIntosh:

believe in the basic core tenet of of that. I mean, it’s it’s real obvious. Let’s just go somewhere and look at a tribal group in South America or Africa, and there still are some who they don’t have access to any type of energy other than, flowing water, which they don’t really utilize, and fire. And that’s the level that they’re at. And I anyways, that I do need to read that book. But, it’s funny because for Christmas, one of the books I got is actually a philosophy book, and I I just started reading it. I’m a little behind this year. But, it’s Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, and I only got about 10 or 15% of it. It does seem to be a very good book. I’ve never, in all my years, read this book even though I’ve heard of it for a long, long time, and I finally put it on my list. That’s about as deep into philosophy as I’ll go.

[00:53:11] Rob Warren:

That’s a classic, though. You know? He’s, he’s legendary for both what he lived through and then his work as a I think it was a hospital in France that he was the head of a suicide ward. I may be forgetting, but there’s there’s really incredible stories about how really deploying this knowledge, this framework

[00:53:32] McIntosh:

Mhmm.

[00:53:33] Rob Warren:

Had some really profound results in that hospital.

[00:53:37] McIntosh:

So I love to read. I encourage people to read, and I just kind of always wanna pick people’s brain for for one thing for new ideas, but just it also helps me to understand where people are coming from. So I always throw that in at the end. That’s it. It’s been a terrific interview. I really appreciate your time. We’ve got a lot of stuff to think about. I would encourage my listeners to go out and pick up, Rob’s book when it becomes available. You said in June. Right?

[00:54:02] Rob Warren:

That’s right. June 15th. But available now Bitcoin Magazine publishing. I gotta schillo

[00:54:07] McIntosh:

gotta show the pre right? I was gonna say, yeah, I do know that it’s gonna be available on the mag Bitcoin Magazine website, when it comes out. So you can take a look at it there. I’m sure there will be other places that I won’t mention conference in July, I know some of you will be, You can catch up with Rob and shake his hand. Oh, I’d love that. Yeah. It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. I wanna go ahead and get this stopped. Alright. Hope you enjoyed that interview. We’re going to move on now to talking about our supporters. We’ve had some great support, since we last talked, and then we’ll jump into our news.

Alright. We will begin with episode, 166. Welcome to the 5th epoch. It was our post havaning, episode that we had. And our first boost came in from Gulag Bound, our friend Gulag Bound. Said this, just got back from the honeymoon catching up cheers and sent a 1,000 sats. I do appreciate that. Awesome. Congratulations, to your marriage, and, hope you’re enjoying yourself. And then, we also got a nice, episode 156. Somebody was, sir Michael. A knight of the no agenda round table, I assume, was going a little bit back in the catalog and, boosted a nice I I think this is 8,000 sets. It’s probably a number though that’s not quite that. 7928 is what came through. I apologize but I can’t do that math in my head.

Anyways, he said, always appreciate your insight. Thanks for your courage. And thank you, sir. I appreciate that. Yeah. I I do appreciate that. So thank you very much. And that is it. So in total, we did get some streaming as well. And in total, we’ve got 10,374 sats in the last 2 weeks, which is awesome. So I appreciate that greatly. And, we will be putting that to good use. Alright. Let’s jump into the news. I am gonna go back a little bit. I’m not gonna cover everything for the last 2 weeks, but, there have been some very important things, and we need to talk about that. On the 23rd, there was a thing saying that the Paraguayan deputy, and I don’t know who that is, but they presented a bill to legalize and recognize Bitcoin as legal tender. Paraguay has been flip flopping back and forth. This all goes back to the dam that they have that they send power out to Brazil and I think Argentina as well, because they have so much excess power.

And, basically, Bitcoiners are willing to pay more than the rate that that they’re selling it for, and so things are kind of in turmoil. There’s people who have been pushing back on that, but I think maybe cooler heads have prevailed. And those miners are going to get to, have some kind of security essentially, for their business. And it looks like Paraguay might even wake up and realize that Bitcoin might be very, very helpful for their economy. Alright. Here’s kinda where the core I wanna talk about with this week’s news. The samurai wallet founders were arrested. They were charged with money laundering. They were also charged with, something else.

I have talked about samurai on here. I have actually never used their product. I have looked at it. I’ve investigated it. They, in addition to the wallet, offer a coin joint service, or I should say they did, which essentially is a privacy method for Bitcoin. I’ve talked about that in the past. And I’m not gonna go into this in great deal of detail. For one thing, it was almost 2 weeks ago. There’s a lot of other podcasts out there talking about this. Regardless of your feelings about the way that the samurai people present themselves, to the public.

I think that this is a really bad thing for this. I think that this is violating code as speech, which would violate, I think, it’s the first amendment. If it’s not, it’s the 4th amendment. I continually get them confused of our constitution. We went through this really with PGP, back in the nineties for anybody who is old enough to remember that. That was very early in my well, it really wasn’t even it was before I started in my computer career. I think I was in college. I’d have to look it up, but I’m thinking 93 or so, and I was still in college. But I do remember, Phil Zimmerman and the trial for PGP and the fact that essentially, even though Department of Justice, I think it was in this case as it oftentimes is and it is in this case as well, the Semerai case.

They were trying to prosecute Zimmerman saying that, he could not have encryption like that. And, anyways, there’s case history there. Code of speech. You we have a right to free speech here in the United States. Now were these people money launders? I don’t think so personally. That’s just my opinion. And, I think this is a shakedown. I think this is the Department of Justice trying to set the boundaries at a very, very high level, and it is not a good thing for the United States. It is not a good thing for Bitcoin in the United States, for development of Bitcoin in the United States, and so on. So I don’t know. We will have to see where that goes.

Oh, and by the way, samurai, even though they were providing this coin, CoinJoin service, they were strictly passing messages around. Essentially, they were coordinating it. The Bitcoin that I might add to that CoinJoin service was never actually in a samurai’s possession. And, so anybody who was involved in that essentially sent that money back and forth to each other. So how does that work? I don’t know. Strike did launch their service in Europe. Yay. I did wanna point out, I just the BBC posted this whole article. Tanzania shut down 5 hydroelectric stations in a bid to reduce excess electricity in the national grid.

This is the first time Tanzania, which suffers chronic power shortages, has closed hydroelectric dams due to excess production. Hey, Tanzania. I got a solution for that. I’m just saying, mining Bitcoin would solve that problem. I believe I posted this Willy Woo who’s like a analyst Bitcoin analyst. Seems to be a pretty smart guy. I’ve listened to him for a long time. And this is what he had to say about privacy on Bitcoin. And I’ve had this kind of very same conversation on here from time to time. Not as clearly maybe as he did on this tweet, and I wanted to read it.

Well, he said, I remember a long conversation in Bali with Adam Fisker circa 2017 about privacy on Bitcoin, and it was a lot better than nothing but still very hard to completely work. I walked away thinking the only way to be sure was to buy USD cash or talk to my HSBC bank manager. Yeah. The problem with privacy on Bitcoin is it is very difficult, and it is stuff that’s add ons like these coin joints. And to be honest, it needs to be integral, and default to the Bitcoin protocol, in my opinion. Phoenix then announced on April 26th that the Phoenix wallet will be removed from the US app stores, And that was because of what happened to Samurai.

So they have chosen to just move out of this market, and I think that will happen with more than one company. I don’t think they will be the last. Kingdom of Bhutan, I’ve talked about them quite a bit and I only bring this up because I don’t hear about it in very many other places, certainly on podcast. 1 year ago today, the nation of Bhutan revealed it’s been mining Bitcoin since $5,000 price, I should say. Today, April 29, 2024, it’s increasing its investment 6 fold to become the largest sovereign Bitcoin miner in the world, and I say congratulations, Bhutan.

Keep at it. And federal prosecutors are examining financial transactions at Block, the owner of Cash App, and Square. So they are definitely cracking down. I I don’t know. It’s going to get all resolved in court. It will probably take years, and I just hope it goes the right way. And wasabi Wallet, Z Snacks, who basically was behind wasabi, and you can kind of think of wasabi as a samurai. Well, certainly a competitor. It’s Bitcoin Wallet. They provide a coin joint service, etcetera. They are shutting down their coin joint service effective June 1, 2024. Again, to try and keep out of legal trouble.

Alright. That’s it. That’s the news. That’s what’s important. So I will say this in in I I wanna get Seth for privacy back on here. I think he did a great job when he was on here before. He has been out talking about, samurai wallet and these other situations, and I’d love to kinda get his perspective. For my listeners, I don’t know if that’ll be possible or not, but I’m going to try. If you clip an episode, here’s what I mean. Go to Fountain, one of the podcast 2.0 apps. You clip 1, 2, 3 minute, episode, part of an episode. And if it’s current episode, the last couple episodes, I’ll boost 500 sats back to you when you do that, when you post it. If it’s an older episode, 300 sats back. It’s a way for you to make some treasure. It’s a way for you to make some sats from me, and you’re welcome to it because it promotes the show. And I’ve had very little uptake of this, and I do not know why.

I don’t know. But there it is. I’m perfectly willing to pay for that. And, of course, Satoshis supports podcasting 2.0. We’re a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I don’t have ads. I don’t have sponsorships. I don’t have anything like that. I depend on my listeners to support the podcast. People like Sir Michael, people like, Gulag Plev. They are, you know, going getting a podcasting 2 point o app, putting their lightning wallet, attaching to it, and streaming sets and boosting in. It’s a great way to provide feedback. You can say, hey, Macintosh. Talk about this. Hey, Macintosh, great job. Hey, Macintosh, whatever.

Right? In addition, you’re providing a great form of feedback for me. Okay? You know, it doesn’t have to be a huge amount. I if you sit if you boost a 100 sets, that’s terrific. If you boost a 1,000 sets, that’s terrific. If you boost a 100,000 sets, that’s really terrific. I’ll be honest. But, yeah, the amount actually doesn’t really matter. I just love getting the feedback as well. Alright. You though should actually go out, grab a podcasting 2 point o app. There’s a lot of them. You can go to podcastapps.com and there’s a whole list there.

Okay? Fountain, Cast O Matic, Podcast Guru. I’d say right now I mean, honestly, Podcast Guru is my favorite. I really need to hook up my wallet to it because I can’t boost from it. I also use Fountain quite a bit. I was actually just listening to the podcasting 2.0 episode, podcast tonight on my way back from some business. So on fountain. Alright. Very cool. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and I would love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I’m on mastodon@macintosh@podcastindex.social, and I can be reached by email at macintosh@satoshisdashplebs.com.

Alright. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I’ll talk to you all soon.