
Tyler Stevens of XRG reveals how Bitcoin miners can double as heaters, slashing energy costs while decentralizing hash rate back into homes and small businesses.
Tyler Stevens (XRG) reframes Bitcoin miners as smart electric heaters that turn every watt into heat while earning a “Bitcoin rebate,” making them viable replacements or supplements for propane/oil and even some electric systems, especially in cold, high-cost markets. Real-world pilots (e.g., hydro-cooled miners driving radiant floors) show strong economics, and the addressable “comfort heat” load is so large that even 1% adoption could add significant zettahash to the network while distributing hash rate back to homes and small businesses. The go-to-market path runs through HVAC/plumbing trades, with incentives like hash-rate splits for installers and simpler firmware to throttle miners to heat demand. As hardware matures (modular hashboards, single-phase hydro units) and software improves (fleet tools, fast tuning, room-sensor control), “heat punk” shifts from DIY novelty to a practical, cost-cutting energy upgrade that also strengthens Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin mining is smart resistive heating. It’s the same as an electric heater, but with a protocol attached that pays you.”
“Every watt of electricity that turns into heat is also going towards the mining network. Why wouldn’t you monetize that?”
“Fifty percent of the world’s energy is used for heat, and half of that is comfort heat. Even 1% adoption adds multiple zettahash to the network.”
“300 homes in Alaska could save $15 million a year on heating, and that subsidy is paid out by the Bitcoin network, not the U.S. government.”
“This is not a mining operation that sells heat, it’s a heating operation that earns Bitcoin as a rebate.”
“The HVAC industry hasn’t innovated in a century. Incentivizing installers with hash rate splits could flip the whole market.”
“Bitcoin’s proof of work is literally a way to make computers sweat. Why not use that sweat to warm your home?”
“People ask, ‘Why not just buy Bitcoin?’ But heating is a sunk cost, you’re going to pay it anyway. Why not earn sats at the same time?”
“We’re niche of niche of niche, Bitcoin mining heating, but it feels like the perfect Trojan horse for decentralization.”
“Imagine a future where blue-collar plumbers manage fleets of Bitcoin-heating systems across towns. That’s passive income and network resilience in one.”
Viewing miners as heaters first, and miners second, turns an unavoidable expense into a yielding utility that reduces bills, decentralizes hash ownership, and nudges pool diversity, all while improving comfort and efficiency. If products, firmware, and installer incentives align, HVAC pros can deploy fleets of Bitcoin-heated systems across homes and businesses, quietly embedding network security into everyday infrastructure. The result is a win-win: lower heating costs and a more resilient Bitcoin, with blue-collar trades at the center of the next wave of decentralization.
0:00 - Intro
0:30 - Tyler's backgorund
7:01 - ASIC race and return to consumer application
11:28 - Making computers sweat
16:10 - Bitkey & Unchainedc
17:52 - Target markets for hashrate heating
20:10 - Total addressable market
22:37 - Demo of heat system at The Space
29:48 - Bitcoin rebate mechanics
34:23 - Obscura * Opportunity Cost
35:48 - Pool distribution and market timing
50:48 - Smart heaters
56:20 - Exergy’s vision
1:05:01 - How to get started
(00:00) We're talking about tens of millions of dollars of savings. The government subsidizes everyone's heating bills. They pay the utility directly. And 300 homes would save like $15 million. That's paid out by the Bitcoin network, not the US government. Running a small mediumsiz HVAC business, like great way to build a Bitcoin treasury.
(00:18) You had to see people like yourself out there actually doing the hard work to solve that really hard long-term problem, which is how do we keep this sufficiently distributed? Are we going to distribute hash rate, Tyler? Way more than you think. Way more than you think. I was refreshing my stats for you, Marty, before I jumped on. Oh, good. Cuz the stats are what I want to talk about.
(00:43) You got fresh stats just for you. I feel like every time I see you while we were in Georgia together. Yeah. A couple weeks ago. You always making progress. is always more excited than the previous time I saw you and getting me more bullish on mining waste heat as a consumer application. The heat's a product, not waste. But yeah. Yes. Yes.
(01:08) Yeah. Yeah. It was fun to catch up in Georgia. Um we're tinkering. We're getting hash rate heating online. Well, let's um let's give the audience a little intro to yourself for those who may be unaware of what Tyler is up to. You have CEO of the space, but you're also um started a company using Bitcoin mining heat as a byproduct to do uh the heating uh in homes in home applications. Uh that company is called Xurgy.
(01:43) So, why don't we get a little background on yourself, how you came to Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining specifically, and even further into your niche with a focus on using mining heat. Yeah, the Bitcoin story. Thanks for asking. I um moved out to Colorado after grad school. I was studying mechanical engineering and it was happen stance. I'm one of the lucky few I was listening to.
(02:08) I think it was Jordan Peterson and Safeodine for my 20-hour drive from the Midwest. That was like one of my first intros to Bitcoin. And then I proceeded to listen to 19 more hours of Bitcoin podcast on my drive and immediately found the Bit Devs community out here. So, I was fresh blood, but I avoided all the shitcoinery.
(02:27) I was lucky in that case. Um, my first Bitcoin I ever bought was at the all-time high of 2021, so it was all down. But I was surrounded by good people. I got brought out here to do aerospace engineering. So, I worked for a company owned by Loheed and Boeing called United Launch Alliance.
(02:45) They're kind of the uh the government version of SpaceX, let's say. Um, SpaceX launches 100 plus rockets a year, though. ULA launches too. Um, and in that time, I I would spend more time with the Bitcoiners, obviously. was working on thermal stuff, temperature predictions, heat rates, had that kind of eye for things.
(03:09) And it was at a bit devs once where a friend of mine, Travis, brought like an S19 um kit that was converted with a Loki board from Zack Bombstead to run off 110 volts. And that was where I really saw the light for Bitcoin heating. And so I came in viewing these things as waste heat out the get-go. That was my entry point to mining. Um, ultimately ended up leaving that role at the aerospace company after two years in January 24. It was funny.
(03:29) I actually was up till 1:00 a.m. in the launch control room watching the rocket I worked on for 2 years launch. Went to bed for 6 hours. Came back 9:00 a.m. Quit. Went straight to Denver International Airport. Flew to NEMS. First time I saw you, I think, there at Bitcoin Park. Met Rod and the guy. Saw Schnitle with his hashtub.
(03:50) And I was just I had I didn't really have a plan, but I knew like this is what I wanted to do. So what came out of that was that community from Bit Devs. We kept working to build our our Denver Bitcoin community into a physical location that started the space. Got 82 members now here. Most of them are in Colorado. So we do a lot of events and that's where my office is now.
(04:12) And then in that time, I I kept researching this Bitcoin heating thing and kept having calls with people, learning, tinkering, and ultimately just decided to tell the guys at Brains, I was like, "Hey, I have a lot of notes on this. Like, why don't we just put it into a book?" And they were um helpful and a great partner in that sense. And so I put together a book, Bitcoin Mining Heat Reuse.
(04:30) I got a copy of it here. And then the subsequent NEMS 2025, that was where we met and I got you a copy, Marty. I I launched that book this past January and then really after that come April time frame started to ideulate on how could this could get turned into a company and so started XRG in April with uh my friend Mike Clear and Dylan Sy and we our goal is really to decentralize hash rate bring mining back home where it started started in the homes with the laptops and the GPUs and transition to these industrial
(05:03) products which makes sense like it's a story that you can follow all the steps difficulty went up. Got to have more power to compete. The devices literally like morphed into I see them as heaters because the reason they're shoe boxes and like the power constraint, the hash rate constraint, the efficiency constraint, they literally can't pump more power into them or they'll overheat. They're all like thermally bottleneck.
(05:24) So, they're little heating boxes and we're trying to now use those for the main product they make, which is heat. Only sometimes do they get Bitcoin and bring it back home. I love it. That's an incredible story and I didn't know that background that you uh found Bitcoin via Jordan Peterson and say fell down the rabbit hole. I'm sure many people were listening to JP during the co time.
(05:47) Yeah. And then it takes balls to quit your job right after you watch your baby launched into space 6 hours later. That's uh it's funny working for the defense contractor. My dad's a longtime Air Force vet. I always had that mindset in my family. It's funny. My dad is very much like the straight arrow government guy.
(06:11) I joke with him cuz he went right in after college. So, he's never made a free market dollar in his life. Like every dollar he's made is printed or stolen. Um, love you, Dad. But, and my mom is very much like the opposite. Always, you know, what kind of conspiracy theory? I don't trust this. I don't trust that. So, there was some push back, but I'm glad I pulled trigger. That's a good yin-yang to have in the household%.
(06:30) Obviously, your parents did a good job to uh to foster and intellectual curiosity in yourself and more importantly the confidence to go follow that which I think is uh common among Bitcoiners particularly those who are starting businesses you got to make the leap and I think that's number one admirable um and two it's almost insane because it's like why won't you just mine the fiat buy the bitcoin it's like no I I feel compelled totally to help push the ball forward and in terms of what you're doing at XRG this something that has fascinated me. Mining just generally, I've been in the mining
(07:08) industry now for 7 years, which is hard to believe. um started offrid flare gas mitigation. Learned a lot of hard lessons uh with great American mining, good lessons, had a lot of fun times and learn more about energy over the course of 4 years than I did in the first uh 20 of my life, which is uh which was a fascinating experience. I'm still 7 years into the mining journey.
(07:39) I I feel just as ignorant as I was the day I started really researching it because it is a vast rabbit hole. And I think one of the factors that makes it such is just the ways in which people can apply mining in their everyday lives or not in their everyday lives but the ways in which mining can be applied.
(08:03) Like you were mentioning we have these now it's industrial it's very tangible. Yeah. Um, and for the longest time in Bitcoin, the there's been this meme of ASIC commodification like the AS6 are bottleneck obviously and particularly between 2019 and in 2022 I would say was like just a race to acquire AS6 the top of the line AS6 whatever price plug them in um because the advancements that Bitmain and MicroBT were making at the silicon level or such where if you weren't staying with the top of line hardware, you're falling behind. But it seems like we're
(08:40) getting to a point where the physical limits on the silicon is beginning to we're approaching this the limits of where you can really make step function improvements and efficiency. Yeah. And I've always thought that we were going to get to this point in time, but then when we get here, I think that's what really unleashes the cool stuff.
(09:08) Like you sort of had this journey with Bitcoin mining where it started at home, people running their laptops or computers, GPUs, AS6 come, then it sort of goes industrial, but I think with commodification, it'll go back to the home eventually. I think it has to to a certain extent. not only from an economic viability perspective but from a health of the network and particularly hash rate ownership distribution being sufficiently distributed. I agree.
(09:39) I mean, I think it makes sense during that ASIC race and we're starting to see I mean, people have been talking about Morris loss for years, but I think we are starting to see that plateau and year-over-year efficiency gains and in that time when each new generation of industrial ASIC was leaps and bounds ahead of the other one.
(09:59) I mean, it it makes sense to me again to just think like if if that was the your bottom line for profitability, there was no time to focus on anything else. and and that's kind of led to a lot of the bad acting I guess you could say from the Bitmans and the microbts and just the inattention to customers. You and I saw it when we were at the proto launch, right? Like in one in one way it's like oh wow that's amazing. Look at what can happen.
(10:19) This was must have been a ton of hard work. But in the other way like you look at it and this was part of my reaction there. It's like their competition wasn't very that hard to beat. Like you're you're telling me like a company as successful as Block, my competition is Bitmain and all I have to do is ask the customers what they want. They've been screaming with pitchforks for 10 years.
(10:38) So, it's cool to see that now that like efficiency year-over-year improvements are kind of plateauing, some attention is paid to other areas for improvements and optimization. And I think that will also transition, I agree, too, more unique applications for hash rate outside of the data center. Yeah.
(10:55) And it seems like the proto team has that in mind with the modular nature with which they designed the rig, which is a great name. And it'll be really cool to see how people um for use that modularity to to create specific and unique setups for their particular circumstances, which is um again desperately needed.
(11:21) But and let's let's focus in on the particular part of the market that you're Mhm. looking to take over with XRG. And I'm trying to think of where to start. Like maybe we should start with the physics of the machines and the thermal dynamics of the machines and why these mining machines uh produce heat and why not wasting that heat is a good thing. Yeah. Um, my friend Rob Warren said it well.
(11:53) Like the Bitcoin protocol mining, Satoshi invented a way to make a computer sweat. Like that's what proof of work is. So all they're doing is taking electricity and performing these hash operations as fast as possible, as many as possible. It's power. Um, and the thing about electric heating and energy is you can't create or destroy energy. It it all has to be conserved.
(12:16) So 100% of that energy you push through your your desktop or your laptop. And in the case of a Bitcoin miner, it doesn't have a screen. It doesn't really there's a small amount for the fans, but all that electricity used to mine is converted into heat. It has to turn into something. There's nowhere for it to go. Um, and so they've gotten so power dense because they are computers that do just this one thing and they sweat. They convert electricity into heat.
(12:42) Why would you not like monetize that heat? Um, and so that's really the blunt of it. From a a physics standpoint, it's no different than a typical resistive, you know, heater that just has copper traces or some nickel chromium alloy. And you're just sending electrons current through a very specific path instead of and so the the resistor is this ASIC in this sense, right? And so all you're doing is the same thing as electric heating, but you're passing the electrons and the current through this special path.
(13:08) And then you're telling a network of other computers doing the same thing that you're doing it and that network happens to pay you for passing the current through that path if you're successful in mining a block. So that's basically the blunt of the the the physics of it. I mean it's it's smart resistive heating. It's resistive heating with protocol attached to it.
(13:26) Yeah. And I I think the protocol that will pay for these computations is the real unlock for using the waste heat economically. Yeah. And one thing I thought of recently, which is why this is cool and makes sense now, because like monetized heating, you could have your 1200 watt gaming desktop or you could monetize the heat from a Gro AI cluster of GPUs of Nvidia A100s or whatever, but because of the Bitcoin protocol, it's the first time you can like distribute it and decentralize it into chunks. Like you
(14:01) can break up the data center. You can't break up an OpenAI data center and make part of it your water heater. It has to be on full time. They need the uptime. Um, doesn't make sense. But because of the protocol, the rewards are proportional to the electricity put in.
(14:18) They don't do anything but mine this algorithm. So all you have to do is turn them on and they immediately start doing it. And that way you can actually control it like a heater. When you call for heat, it's on. And every watt of electricity that's turning into heat is also going towards u the mining network. So, it's pretty cool to think of it that way. No, it really is.
(14:38) And I think this sets us up for the next question is why should these mining machines replace uh incumbent heating machines that already exist throughout the economy? Does it make economic sense? Yeah, I was uh stareyed and bullish on this from the guys that have taken S9 space heaters and, you know, made them quiet and put them in their living room and said, "Look, honey, it's cool. This is mining.
(15:10) " Um, but but how does that scale? And where I was pleasantly surprised is uh local to Colorado where I am, I looked up in the mountains. People are on propane heat in these high altitude towns that don't have natural gas lines drilled through the granite. Natural gas is cheap here in the US. We didn't blow up any pipelines for ourselves yet.
(15:29) But, uh, we the stored fuel sources, propane, heating oil, uh, in New England, the old country, right, which is essentially just diesel. They're expensive. And I found that the electric price like on a dollar per kilowatt equivalent, like natural gas is like 2 cents a kilowatt hour. Um, but propane and heating oil are like 11, 12, 13 on average.
(15:49) And if your electric rate's 15 cents a kilowatt hour, but you also get the Bitcoin mind, depends on the efficiency of the machine, um, you can like energy arbitrage it, and where I am in that high altitude climate, you can find opportunities to save 80% plus, 100% plus on heating bills if you're counting that Bitcoin rebate um, to offset these those utility costs. Sup, freaks.
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(17:57) Do you think this market is constrained to areas that have high electricity cost with propane and oil? Yeah, there's um there's a few candidate there's a few variables that make you a good candidate. Um obviously you have to have heat demand because a minor at the end of the day is like an expensive high performance device. Um it's complicated in a sense. There's a lot of work that went into developing those ASIC chips.
(18:25) It's a whole another conversation. Talk about like retirement homes for old hashboards that have depreciated. But if you use heat a lot, that's essentially your uptime cuz we're talking about mining not 100% uptime. And then you use the heat when it's convenient.
(18:43) This is hash rate heating as I'm coining it is just matching your hash rate to your heat demand. And so if you use heat more, then you're going to pay that machine off faster. You're going to reap those rewards faster. They're kind of ticking time bombs in a sense because the rest of the network difficulty does go up. So they're like heaters that pay but their rewards are less and less each year. And so like tangent to Proto's modular hashboard.
(19:02) That's a sweet way to like up upgrade your heating element of your furnace or boiler. But another variable that makes you a good candidate is the cost of that utility. Um solar plays a huge part in that too. I mean, I found here in the space where I'm at, we are on natural gas. So, the heat is like 2 cents a kilowatt hour, but we have 20 kows of solar right out my window here.
(19:21) And so, we're we're trying to, you know, prototype demo site this whole smart energy stack up where we're we're generating our own power. We're going to store it in a battery power wall. We're going to use the heat from Bitcoin miners as the priority in the summer when we have generation. We are going to dump the heat outside.
(19:39) So, we're monetizing all of the uh solar on the roof instead of getting like 1 cent per kilowatt hour credits back from the local utility and then we still have the natural gas heating system in place like worst comes to shove. So, it's a backup in that sense.
(19:58) I think that's probably a way it will scale is um really upgrading the whole smart energy stackup from a sovereignty perspective. Utilities aren't going to like it in that sense because every home can serve as its own generation, its own revenue generator. Um but it does increase efficiency and it decentralizes the network. Yeah. And you've run the numbers on the total addressable market in terms of Yeah.
(20:21) the arbitrage that exists between where the market for home heating is now um to where it could be if Bitcoin mining as a heat source were implemented. Um, so that's the one thing that stuck out to me at your talk during NEMS uh at the beginning of this year was what the opportunity looks like from an additional hash rate perspective. It's wild on Bitcoin.
(20:48) So 1% Well, I'll back up. Um, like 50% of the world's energy is used for heat. A lot of that is industrial processes like melting steel and um manufacturing things. But another 50% of that is what we call comfort heat. That's your space heating, keeping your building warm, your water heating, pool heating, things, luxury heating, things like that.
(21:16) And the comfort heat differentiator is important because that's the temperature range that a Bitcoin miner can deliver. Um, they're computers. They don't have flames inside of them. They have electricity. It's friction heat at the end of the day. And 1% of comfort heat would add two zeta to the network if that was powered by hash rate. And I I updated my stats for you today to get a little more specific.
(21:35) This is wild. I was looking at the target markets more. Got my notes over here. Um USA only furnaces and boilers. So just air heating buildings warm in the USA. That's five zeta if you got all of it on hash rate. The US water heating water heaters in the US 2.3 zahash. US propane and heating oil.
(21:58) So if we just were going after the target markets where we can offer these people a big savings on their utility bill, another 1.5 set of massive, hundreds of times bigger than the energy used for Bitcoin mining, which is funny for all the FUDsters to say, you know, Bitcoin mining is wasteful. The energy consumption is wasteful. And the amount of energy being used to make heat for people is like 250 times larger. So we should just start calling them electric heaters, I guess.
(22:23) We really should. I mean, in Europe, that's what they love. That's what they all use is electric heaters. Yep. They don't like air conditioners, but they like electric heaters. Yeah. Um, and with that being said, I'm going to share my screen. Okay. You guys, you've been building out one of these systems at the space. It's like a proof of concept.
(22:49) And why don't you just describe? I think this is like the perfect tweet to bring up because you have the sure the heat map visualization and then you have yourself. We won't turn the audio on the video, but you're you did the video, so I'm sure you can describe it anyway. But what what are we looking at here? This is a good video to walk through because it also highlights some of the challenges with doing this.
(23:09) Um, that right there is the only Bitcoin miner that is hydrocooled, which means it heats water. Hydrocooled, water heating. It's kind of inverse. the Bitcoiner, the miners out there are like it's water cooled and us heaters say it's water heating. Um, but it's the only one that's singlephase power, which is what you have in residential applications or a small business like the space here uh in the USA and North America. So, the European guys, they benefited from having three-phase power in their homes.
(23:33) They can use like a dozen different hydro miners from Bitmain and whatnot, but this M64 is the only one. It's really unlocked the ability to do exactly this in the US. That is a heat core rack around it. It's called an H series. And um he cores partnered with MicroBT. They make larger racks for industrial use cases and data center style mining operations.
(23:58) But this tiny little unit just has one a pump, a heat exchanger, and a little fan attached to it. And it's sweet. Like it's pretty simple to set up. Plug-andplay. All it does is dump out 80° C water. It was ramping up in that video. And then we had um a plumber come and install radiant flooring in our building. We have the floor joist exposed. So that's just PEX tubing through all the floor.
(24:17) The thermal images do a good job and it was ramping up in temperature, but this is going to be our heat source in the winter. We'll have radiant heated floors uh showed off at the heat punk summit. Uh that's one minor and uh it's enough BTU per square foot or uh for the miners listening like enough kilowatt power uh to service our building which is first floor is around um 3,000 square ft. That's pretty crazy.
(24:43) Yeah, they're super power dense. Like people don't realize one bit that one Bitcoin miner is like five or six horsepower. Like I would have I would have thought you need at least five five miners to to heat a building of that size. 3,000 square feet is not small. They're so power dense. And and that's ultimately like what I'm trying to help do with XRG2. I I think of it as handholding right now.
(25:08) But in the heating industry, like what Heit's doing is awesome. What Canon's doing with their mini space heaters and there's a couple other ones like 21 Energy in Europe and whatnot. But when it's not a gadget like a space heater that you plug in yourself, you don't pick your own boiler. You call the heating guy.
(25:24) Uh you call the plumber and they tell you what you need and they install it for water heaters, furnaces, boilers. So we we were working in tandem with that plumber. We learned some things along the way. Sizing is a big part of it for the Bitcoiners out there. You don't need as much as you think. So we help people figure out what they need.
(25:41) But it was fun working with that plumber. Like I asked him, there's a quirk about that system. I asked him for a mixing valve which lets you mix hot and cold water. It's like what your uh shower has, right? So it mixes the two knobs so you don't burn yourself. And he installed it into the boiler like it was mixing the water going into the minor.
(26:00) And I was like, why'd you do this? And and then I realized from reading like these old hydronic heating books that you do that because natural gas boilers, if you put too cold of water into them, they like condense and start sweating and rust themselves to death. But I needed the the mixing valve the other way cuz the Bitcoin miner water is actually too hot and it would warp the wooden floors.
(26:18) It's like 80° C will melt the uh the adhesive between the laminate and the subfloor. And so we have to dial that back to like 120F. So we're learning, we're figuring out we had to get a demo site online. And I mean that this is coming back to the reoccurring conversation we've been having over the course of this year is like how does this market develop? Does it take somebody like Xergy to build an HVAC system themselves or is a partnering with plumbers, HVAC providers and really teaching them how to begin to
(26:53) incorporate this into their service offering? Yeah, I think it'll be a big challenge and transition period. So right now we're very much involved in the loop with you can't call a heating company and ask them to size a hash rate heater for you.
(27:12) But you can call us and you tell us your home size and where you live and how cold it is. You give us some bills that helps or you show us how big your other boiler is or your furnace and we translate we're translators. We translate that into which systems work for you. Like I know that that hydro miner is the only one that's singlephase power. The average person might not know that. um and and what it fits into to make it a good boiler.
(27:32) Um and then when it comes to installation, the products are getting kind of better. Like that one just had hot and cold hookups, power in lit. Plumber could figure that out. He's not going to figure out plugging in the Ethernet. Well, he'll figure out plugging in the Ethernet, but he's not going to like IP scan the boiler, log in with root route, set up the mining pool payouts. And so that's where we're still handholding that part as well.
(27:56) think ultimately if the products are good enough another call back to the protolunch like I was super bullish to see the fleet announcement where they were like oh it's a built-in software fleet management that has an IP scanner and you just press start and it finds the minor logs in automatically logs into the credentials gets it online gives all your notifications I I my heating brain was like oh my gosh that's gonna be awesome if I can just have tradesmen plug in systems and press boot on and they you know authenticate themselves and and get themselves online. And I guess one other thing I'd
(28:26) say on that and how do we incent because incentives drive everything would be you know giving some hash rate splits to the installers which is one of the coolest things about hash rate heating and uh aside from the whole like economic angle to save and offset your heating bill with Bitcoin rebate.
(28:47) You can like imagine a future where a network of thousands of installers across the US were incentivized to recommend hash rate heated furnaces over the other because they got 1% 2% of the hash rate out of every system online and then if they were in a town of a thousand people and they managed a fleet of them. They're smart computers at the end of the day. You can check their hash rate.
(29:07) You can get notifications on temperature sensors. These computers have notifications. They have sensors. They have firmware. They have smart software, all this stuff. Essentially, you could have like water heaters or heating appliances that notify your your plumber to come fix them before you even know there's a problem with it.
(29:25) And maybe it's like some passive income split for them to come help you manage that. And it flips the structure where it's like, I'm going to wait for your thing to break. I'll come to your house. I'll charge you 500 bucks to fix it to I'm managing this fleet of systems that's passive income for me. I want to make sure they're all tip-top healthy all the time.
(29:44) That's an incredible flipping of incentives that Yeah. makes a lot of sense. And so you've said it multiple times now like really to dig in and explain it like I'm five Bitcoin rebate. So Mhm. on the economic side of thing like you plug that in, you guys are heating the floor at the space.
(30:07) How does it like obviously you're still getting electricity bill the miners pulling electricity it's very power dense. Mhm. You're pointing that hash rate at a pool. What are the mechanics of actually realizing this rebate? So for us, we want the Bitcoin. We have our own DATM gateway at the space. Um XRG has one. Space has one. It's uh giving us daily payouts on CLN to our lightning node.
(30:32) But I realize that, you know, to scale beyond the average Bitcoin or even the technical Bitcoiner, those are more technical things. Not I don't think most Bitcoiners run a CLN node or DATM. Um, you know, there's ways to get the rebate the and I call it a rebate because I'm trying to flip the notion that it's like Bitcoin mining heat reuse.
(30:52) I view that as the the mega minor sites that sell some heat to a greenhouse next door or the Finland district heating project because it's a full-time Bitcoin mining operation. They sell the heat when it's convenient. No, this is a full-time heating operation. Heat is my, you know, one commandment and the Bitcoin is just like a rebate. it it's it's an extra positive.
(31:08) Um I think you know even with tools like Strike and whatnot, it's becoming more possible to give the customer like the dollar the dollar rebate if that's ultimately what they cared about. There's a lot of complexities with it though because you know I have a fear if it was a a non- Bitcoin aare customer. Not a fear but it's going to be something worth solving is oh maybe your propane bill was hundred bucks a month and now your electric heating bill is $200 a month but you're going to get back $150 worth of Bitcoin. So you're actually like saving 50 bucks. But it depends on the timing. what if I give them their rebate
(31:43) like two weeks after they paid a $200 electric bill? They're going to just say, "What the hell, man? My heating bill just went up." Um, and so there's a lot of nuance involved there. It should be possible. Um, but that's what I mean by rebate. I'm just trying to, you know, flip the notion of like mining operation versus heating operation.
(32:02) Yeah. wear something um like u I always forget the acronym of the name VP RNC the hash pools the e hash pools oh yeah yeah I uh I remember with Evan who was working on eash and Gary at temps um I think that would be super that's another good thing worth diving into I need to study this more because heating systems are um they're on and off um and their power depends on your heat demand.
(32:37) And so what does that mean for your payout structures and um like how much you're contributing? Like does it does it mean you have to like use FPS to get the most bang for your buck and get the best rewards because your share window and you're constantly cycling your duty cycle on and off or adjusting your power settings? It's not steady state like a mining operation. So I'm really excited about the e-ash stuff. I need to deep dive more into that.
(33:02) Yeah, you can point hash whenever get eash share tokens in return and sell those for bitcoin. Yeah, automatically if you want to similar to fppps but with a different sort of mechanism. It's crazy how creative you can get with all these things. And and I think it highlights the fact that we're just banging around all these ideas.
(33:25) It seems like there's obviously some disconnection in the market um to make it a a well-rounded like fully immersive experience where it's intuitive and you don't even have to think about it. But yeah, I think it also highlights how different the mining industry could be years on from now. And we'll look back and look at the uh the Bitmain world and the Antpool world and the mega miners that you know were just running their mining operations for profit without some utility. Like I'm a big believer that you have to have some utility to stay afloat. That utility could be monetizing stranded energy. So
(33:59) off-grid that utility could be uh curtailment, demand response or even national security. I mean that's an argument. Um for the Bitax guys, the utility is supporting the network. That's what's useful to them and that's why they'll do it for a sunk cost. But um I think hash rate heating is the perfect Trojan horse to just hide it in a heating utility, a sunk cost that everyone pays and they're not they're not going to stop paying it. Suffix was brought to you by our good friends at Obscura. Obscura is the first
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(35:46) That's opportunitycost.app. Well, then and then you get into the dynamics of like how this could potentially not only distribute hash rate ownership significantly, but the pool the pool layer as well, which is yeah, arguably way more centralized than hash rate ownership, inarguably more centralized than hash rate ownership.
(36:11) And you can think of scenarios and ways in which these system operators operate where you have like an HVAC company that has their own little pool. Um, thousands of HVAC companies have their Exactly. their own little pools. It's way more opportunities to select your pool structure, your block templates. For sure. Yeah.
(36:35) What's one thing what what excites you the most about this? Is it the heat side? Is it hash rate distribution? Is it I think the narrative of the market of H. Well, that is funny because the heating industry like hasn't been innovated on in a hundred years. Um, so smart monetized heat is a fun angle. There's a bunch of fun angles.
(37:00) I think what gets me most excited is just clearly the demand is there to bring mining back home. Um the open source miners united, the Bitax guys, the little nerd axes, everybody wants these little products. It's cool to see companies like Kanan make the nanos and the minis. And uh people want to get hash rate into their house. They want to support the network in a complete manner.
(37:20) And I think this is a really cool way to to do that from cipher punk back to heat punk. um started in the home, bring it back home at scale. Yeah. And how do you see this market developing? Are we very early on in a trend that will be obvious 5 years from now, 10 years from now, or is the timing right to implement this widely? I think the timing is right to start paying attention to it and building this.
(37:56) Um the if you would have asked me this 18 months ago, I would have said the hardware sucks, the firmware sucks. Like this sucks, but it can be done. Everyone that's doing it was strapping S19s in their duct work. And at the end of the day, they were all just already Bitcoiners and already DIY guys that wanted to tinker, but everyone on planet Earth, even in warm climates, uses hot water. They need heat.
(38:21) Um the timing what gets me excited is the fact that we now have commitments from companies like Orodine and Proto to give chips. You know that's like a missing piece. I can't go I mean I could maybe but it take a long time and a life's worth work of dedication to go spin up like an ASIC chip development in a fab. Um so that that's something that a heating company's never going to do.
(38:44) Um I think that the 256 foundation efforts to open source the full mining stack firmware um even the pool hydropool setup the control board hashboard is really outlining like mapping out um all the stepping stones to build hashboards and miners and completely new form factors and different use cases.
(39:05) Um, and I think in at the same time it makes sense for me to be doing what I'm doing with XRG, which is trying to get the education out there and start the conversations with the tradesmen and the installers, the trade organizations, because I think that the space heaters have shown that this is another cool way to mine.
(39:26) they've had great success, but it there's just this big bottleneck to go from space heaters to integrated heating infrastructure because people don't install it themselves. And so you you transition from like an engineering problem to a people problem and a distribution problem.
(39:44) Um, and so for me with Exergy, like when I view my competitors in my head when I'm mapping out my business, it's like RE and Carrier and Bosch and General Electric and then all the tens of thousands of distributors that sell their products and go to their conferences um around the country. Yeah, I think I don't know if No, the two of us weren't talking about it, but I was talking with somebody at the proto event who's in the sort of off-grid natural gas mining space, and they were saying that it's been much higher ROI for them to go to the oil and gas conferences compared to the Bitcoin conferences. And I imagine for a company like XRG, it could
(40:18) be similar where Bitcoiner see what you're doing, they're like, "Yeah, this is awesome. Like, we want more of this." Um, but it's not really like a mo a needle mover in terms of like finding an an end client. Whereas, if you go to these trade shows and conferences dedicated to HVAC systems and the heating industry, um, if that even exists as a as a name.
(40:48) It's a huge industry and we have to, right? Because, you know, here's an example. We were working on a proposal for a commercial project which you're excited about. You're like, "Oh, it's a business. Let's do it. You get asked a question like, "Are these miners UL certified?" And it's like, "Shit, I never thought about that. The mega miners don't care." Oh, turns out some of them are not.
(41:05) Oh, um, hey, can you insured as an electric heating system or a Bitcoin mining operation? Because the premium's eight times more if you if you call it a bit, but it's we already talked about the physics. It's the same thing. Um, and then you know, rebates, subsidies, where people have signs in their front yard in Denver here where I'm at like this house has been converted to 100% electric.
(41:30) That's the whole green angle, which I haven't even gotten into, and it's it's obviously not what like gets me up in the morning. But that's a whole other argument to make as well. So, we got to start having those conversations, doing that ground work. Well, what's the green argument? The green argument is these are um emissionsfree heaters. They're trying to get natural gas out of the homes.
(41:49) The the new proposition in Denver that passed is that new builds can't have natural gas. Um, you know, stove tops, heaters. Um, I think there was even one that didn't pass that you're like lawn care equipment if you bought in Denver County couldn't like it had to be electric lawnmowers and everything. So, they'll stop at nothing.
(42:07) Um it's just convenient in the sense that like if there if their efforts to um die in the the climate cultism hill also um integrate Bitcoin mining into people's homes. Yeah. You got to make lemonade with lemons. It is insane that they're doing that. In fact, if anybody tried to take away my natural gas stove and oven, uh I'd be pretty pissed.
(42:32) Yeah, 100%. Yeah. the uh I love talking to you and others like you because in an era of Bitcoin as somebody who's been around the block for 12 years now uh where a lot of the dominant conversation of the day is focused on Bitcoin treasury companies and nation state adoption and what the Trump administration thinks which I will say is all interesting to a certain extent and definitely important to a certain extent but at the end of the day the network is a distributed protocol that needs to remain sufficiently distributed for any
(43:11) of the other stuff I just mentioned actually makes sense in the first place. Like it feels good to see people like yourself out there actually doing the hard work to solve that really hard long-term problem which is how do we keep this sufficiently distributed? And it's even more fun speaking to someone like you because it seems like you're having a ton of fun doing it. It is a blast.
(43:35) I appreciate you saying that. Um it feels like we're on the cutting edge. You know, Bitcoin's niche, mining is more niche, and then Bitcoin mining heating is niche of niche of niche, which is a fun place to be for sure. Yeah. And to any of the heat industry individuals who may be listening to this, like what pitch would you give to them to begin exploring this? Like how are you approaching Yeah.
(44:07) the sales to this? What's been really helpful is showing off the demo site? Um, we had a real estate developer come see it and that led to now their mechanical engineering and plumbing firm is coming. So when a new project is built, they you hire the architect, they hire the MEP team and all the subs to actually design everything. And so those that led to a conversation with the MEP team, which is really helpful in a sense that these guys are pros at sizing heating systems.
(44:29) That's their freaking job. And then I just have to translate that into Bitcoin mining systems that work for the job. Um, so that's really helpful to see it in the flesh. Um, and that's why I built the the Heat Punk community forum, too. So heat punks.org You can act, you know, if you're one of those people, you can go see some other systems.
(44:49) People post their projects, their tinkering, their products. People I saw a post this week. Some guy was like, "This is awesome. I'm a bluecollar tradesman. I can travel around. I'm happy to work on these." So, that's really cool. Um, the other way I try to open with the tradesmen and those experts is really a way to level up and out compete.
(45:10) I mean, we've mentioned a couple times there's thousands of these HVAC plumbing companies that all offer the same stuff, you know, and they try to get you on their $200 a year plan so that they'll remind you with a phone call to come change your $15 air filter, um, there's not a lot of innovation happening in that space.
(45:31) And so the handful of conversations I've had with those folks, being caught up next to one on an airplane ride home, this guy like installs heated driveways in Aspen and I told him about what we were doing and he was like, "Dude, this is awesome." Um, so I think it's a really cool way to offer a unique new innovative heating solution. And we just need to try out this incentive restructuring with the hash rate splits because it's very doable right now. It's not glamorous.
(45:54) It's not like, you know, a a plumbing heating iPhone app that money shows up in yet, but we'll get there. No, I think yet is the most important word there because as we've been touching on throughout this whole conversation, like incentives drive everything. And it would be cool if an application like this like force pools to come to market that have the payment splits very intuitively designed and it's just very easy to get set up and start getting paid. Not that it's hard with pools that I've connected to as an
(46:31) individual miner, but once you start thinking about um bringing multiple parties into a mining operation, that's where things get hairy. And yeah, being able to do auto splits and just set it and forget it would be perfect. That would be it it'd be cool to also have a future where the majority of Bitcoin transactions processed on the blockchain are, you know, it's just passively happening in people's heating systems managed by blue collar plumbers and HVAC techs across the globe. And they don't care about hash price. They
(47:05) don't have a marketing team to pay. They never have to talk to investor relations. These are just sunk cost heating systems that offer them some rebate. You get some modularity, some slick integrations like you just said for payouts. Your heater lasts 30 years.
(47:21) Maybe every 5 years you upgrade to the newest hashboard and kind of reset the the starting clock for um your rebate and rinse and repeat. Yeah. and as a a tradesman or somebody running running a small mediumsiz HVAC business like great way to build a Bitcoin treasury if you're willing to take those passive incomes and yeah it's almost the opposite of the pubos that are one of them said I I forget which one I probably shouldn't say even if I did remember um I was reading one of their public press releases and it was like publicly traded Bitcoin mining is not a capital accreative way to increase sats
(47:59) per share. It's capital destructive. This is that I mean if if you can build a heating company that is essentially a mining company with passive hash rate splits with the aligned incentives that doesn't pay the energy bill that's just sat accreative for all parties. Yeah.
(48:22) And that's I mean that's again going back to this sort of weird era of Bitcoin where the focus seems to be on the the financial the Bitcoinization of finance and public markets specifically. Like I wonder if we're all going to learn a hard lesson um in terms of not all of us. I'm not participating in any publicly traded Bitcoin treasury companies.
(48:43) A lot of us out there I'll put myself in the camp. I'll put the flag up there. Like I am skeptical that a lot of these treasury companies are going to be successful. It just seems like the left side of the bell curve caveman to me is like uh it's too good to be true.
(48:59) Um like you need to do the hard work, the proof of work to actually have a successful business. And what you're describing, what yeah, you're working on um just intuitively, viscerally feels like higher signal to me in terms of building a viable business in the long term. I'm confident we can do it. It's going to be awesome and people are going to be pumped about it.
(49:21) You find a way for them to participate if that's their in. Find a way for them to save on heating bills if that's their in. Find a way for them to reduce their carbon emissions if that's their in. Screw it. I'll play ball. Bitcoin's ESG. It's the most ESG. Uh yeah, it's the most ESG friendly play you can make.
(49:42) It was funny when I was talking about hash rate heating in Alaska. I went up to Juno. Um, and I really was pumped to go because that whole town, the capital city of Alaska, the whole town is surrounded by glaciers, so there's no roads in a route. So, and they don't have the natural gas pipeline from mainland Alaska. So, the whole town is heated by essentially diesel and kerosene heating oil. It's $5 a gallon.
(50:04) And the whole town is powered by hydroelectric power with zero emissions. So, all the emissions in that town come from heating systems. And there was um some protesters outside because the congressman was there um as a keynote speaker and we offered them some tickets. Some of them came in and some of those protesters that were very adamant against Bitcoin mining.
(50:26) I was successful in convincing one of them that like it's actually just electric heating and we had a nice conversation after which was cool. Hey, you got to win them over. You get get the crazy environmentalists on our side. I may not like them, but they're they're effective at uh fear-mongering people.
(50:43) We should fearmonger people into using Bitcoin. Exactly. To eat their houses. Trojan horse, baby. Yeah, we touch you touched on earlier particularly in the context of proto launching fleet, but on the firmware side, what doesn't exist today that you would like to see to make these operations smoother? So a couple things um in the sake for uh in the case of microbt the tuning is too long.
(51:17) So traditional heating systems are controlled by turning them on or off. And that largely has to do with the fact that you can't get like 30% flame. You're either burning gas or you're not. And so the way you deliver the amount of heat you need is you just turn it on and off. And if it's on 10 minutes out of the hour instead of 5 minutes out of the hour, you get a different amount of heat to the room.
(51:37) But Bitcoin miners are digital computers. Like Bitcoin aside, they actually offer a lot of performance benefits. Um, you could say run at 70% throttle. Oh, it's one degree too hot in here. Dial back to 65% throttle. Oh, I overshot. Dial it up 2%. And so you have this resolution, this granularity that is an option now because they're computers, but not all the firmwares allow for that.
(52:02) So, um, Orodine miners have kind of mastered this. Um, I I haven't played with it myself, but I've seen it in some of the heat punk telegram chats and and on the forum. Um, and I'm hoping to test one soon. But they have quick response within 30 seconds and they quickly respond to the power because that's your your actual heating target. The hash rate, remember, is secondary.
(52:20) I want the hash rate to tune, you know, pretty quick so that I'm I'm monetizing most of my energy consumption as best I can. I don't want it to take 30 minutes, but it doesn't have to be 1 second. So, that's one of them. Um, there's some other things just with control like responding to temperature.
(52:38) So, the aftermarket firmware manufacturers like Luxer and Brains, for example, they have a really cool feature called Brains DPS and dynamic performance scaling. And Luxer has ATM, automatic thermal management. And it's essentially you can set a temperature um on the chip temp which is a sensor on the hashboard and the the minor will ramp up and down in wattage according to the temperature of that sensor. So you can think of it like a target temperature which is cool.
(53:04) The the feature was built so the machines don't kill themselves, right? So if it gets really hot outside all of a sudden the machines are overheating, they'll just like walk themselves down in power. But when I want to heat a room, um, how you make that work right now to like heat your living room is you have to interpolate like the difference, the delta.
(53:23) And imagine instead of the thermostat in the wall in your house that says, I want it 70° in this room, you're commanding your heater to try and keep it 70° in the room by how close the furnace is to blowing itself up. That's essentially what that does. The temperature sensor is in the machine, but I want to measure the temperature in the room.
(53:42) And so a firmware feature to like talk to that just open APIs. Um, and you know, smart thermostats are growing in popularity there in a lot of homes. I know that Schnitzel at the 256 Foundation is even working on analog input conversion to digital. So you could have an old Mercury thermostat that just talks straight to the control board. Bang bang on, off.
(53:58) There's a lot of cool stuff to do. That would be crazy. Yeah. And is there a scenario like in the future where you could have these miners always on? You just underclock them to tilt to save with that ramp up period that you were describing earlier. Or does that not make sense? I think so. Um I'm not an electrical engineer at embedded systems guy. My understanding is there's like a lower limit.
(54:27) There's a floor just because there's a minimum voltage required to keep these things like happy. Mhm. Um, and you can work around that by batching the miners and turning specific chips up, uh, excuse me, on or off to kind of have really high resolution. There's hundreds of chips on these things. If you could walk back which ones are on. Um, that is an interesting idea though.
(54:46) And what you're alluding to is, you know, really just higher performance in your heating demand and and in your heating application, which is really cool. Like I think you're going to have way less temperature swings in the house. Like in that sense, it's just a better performing heater. You're gonna feel more comfortable in your house with a hash rate heater if we can solve these tuning and firmware problems.
(55:05) Because right now if you your thermostat, like I said, it turns on and off. It turns the flame on and off and it'll overshoot. So if you're commanding 70, when it gets to 69, it won't do anything. When it gets to 68, there's like a 2° swing. It'll say, "Oh [ __ ] I got to turn on." And then it'll turn on. And then it doesn't turn off at 70. It turns off at like 72. And you're just bouncing between these two temperatures.
(55:22) Bing bong bing bong. It's called bang bang heating. And um a Bitcoin miner with a smart thermostat in the room should be able to really fine-tune that and adjust it, dial it in. That's an efficiency right there. I imagine the cost of turning that neck gas flame on and off. Yes, that adds up. Yeah. And they're even less efficient when they're starting and stopping.
(55:46) It leads to more wear and tear on the hardware. Yeah, this is fascinating. I know. It's cool to think about. I'm really pumped about the open source firmware. Um, just because uh we're solving for a different problem. Um, it's fun to see what the mega miners struggle with because it's led to open source firmware like proto coming out with all these software tools like Fleet.
(56:16) But it's going to be a whole another can of worms when we say actually this is the intended use case for these machines. Now let's optimize for that. Yeah. And that's a business line in and of itself potentially for XRG where it's like, hey, we'll design, consult, build the physical hardware, but then on top of that, we've got we got the firmware solution. Yeah.
(56:42) I mean, my vision really big picture is it's what the term exergy means. It's um exergy, the the thermodynamic term for me to geek out for a second is like the maximum amount of utility, usefulness or work you can get out of a quantity of energy as it settles with the environment. So as you come to equilibrium, what's the most work you can do? If you gave me a,000 lb steel ball, like what's the most useful thing I could do with that as it came to balance with 70° air? Um, that's what ex.
(57:13) And in that sense, what's the most useful thing I can do with the sun pounding down on my rooftop? It's capture it, heat my house, uh, store it in batteries, power all my electronics, live my life, monetize it when I'm heating, monetize it when I have excess. Yeah. And then and for each individual doing that, it's a rebate. Definitely paying less.
(57:42) But when you aggregate, if you think of this thing, this system being deployed at scale, we're talking about tens of billions, dollars of savings. Yeah. The United States alone potentially. Oh, yeah. I had that up. I um I was looking back at my notes from the Alaska thing and I was like, "What if 300 homes did this in Alaska?" That's what I was pitching it. I think the congressman was in the room. I had my pitch hat on.
(58:06) And um if 300 homes did it, they had this thing the the heating oil is so freaking expensive in Alaska, the diesel heating oil, and they're so remote that they have this heating assistance program. The government subsidizes everyone's heating bills. They pay the utility directly. And 300 homes would save like $15 million.
(58:24) That's paid out by the Bitcoin network, not the US government. So a year, I mean, it's crazy. That's 15 million. What's that? 5,000 a house. Is that Does that sound right? Probably. Maybe it's 1.5 million. I'd have to pull the number up, but it was 1.5. It's cool, man. I mean, I have a friend who's heating a United States post office with hash rate heat. The government doesn't even know they're mining Bitcoin.
(58:54) [Music] This reminds me of my uncle. He was uh he was running Bitcoin miners at a at a school he worked at years ago. Did he get caught? No. Um, yeah. Nobody come looking for my uncle. Yeah. And it is what like what's the biggest push back you get? Cuz it to us it makes a ton of sense.
(59:23) And like you mentioned many times like it's pretty vanilla industry now at this point with little innovation over the last century or maybe 30 years if we're being generous. And you'd think that if you had somebody was ambitious and wanted to really make their mark in the industry.
(59:43) I don't know if anybody has that intention or goal at the end of the day, but I'd like to think that no matter what business you're operating in or what industry you're in, you'd like to leave your mark. Like there's a massive opportunity here. Yeah. I think the biggest push back we've received are twofold. For the energy-minded folks, they say, "Why wouldn't I just get a heat pump for people that are kind of familiar how these systems work?" And a heat pump is kind of like an air conditioner that works in reverse. So, doesn't actually make heat. It just moves heat, just like an air conditioner moves heat out of
(1:00:12) your building. Um, a heat pump moves heat into your building. And even when it's cold outside, there's some energy in the air. helps if it's a humid location or it's mild, not too cold, not too high altitude because the air is denser at lower altitude and it moves heat inside with a big refrigerant condenser. Looks like a big coil fan.
(1:00:32) But my argument against that is they don't really work in high altitude climates where the air is um not dense, it's really cold. Often they have resistive electric heater backups inside of them. That could be a Bitcoin miner. Maybe that's a product in itself.
(1:00:52) And ultimately, like a guy like me, maybe it's other people, I'd prefer an option to also make heat. I don't want to just be able to move heat inside. I would like the option in my house to also make it if I need it cuz it's really freaking cold outside. Um, but they are super efficient. They have like 300% efficiency.
(1:01:09) So, for every watt of power you use to like spin the pump and move the refrigerant around, you get three watts of heat from outside brought into your house. Um, so you can take your electric bill and like divide it by three, but it only works if it's not too cold out. It's like cold but not freezing cold. Um, the other push back we get is why wouldn't I just buy Bitcoin instead, which I get it. Like mining hardware is expensive.
(1:01:28) Um, you can get last generation hardware. I think there's a big argument for that. I'm a big believer in that, especially for the heating systems because I'm not sensitive to I'm not trying to run an operation that is profitable. like I'm literally just offsetting a sunk cost.
(1:01:46) So, sure, I'm going to try to get a pretty efficient machine because that gives me bigger rebate, but it doesn't have to be bleeding edge by any means. I can take to the depreciated hashboards. Side note, that's why I'm excited about the modular hashboards um for upgradability of heating systems. But the other response I have to people that say, "Why don't I just buy Bitcoin instead?" I mean, there's a handful of responses. There's the nonKYC angle.
(1:02:03) Your your electric utility is your exchange. It's kind of a gamified way to stack SATs. Um, and ultimately it's a sunk cost anyways. You're going to continue paying for heat. You're not going to stop paying for it. I wager that if you went through the whole process, saw what you could save, got a heat audit, figured it out, saw that the systems were getting really snazzy, your plumber talked to you about it, and then you didn't do it, and you were stacking stats another way, eventually you'd come around, you say, "Damn, I really wish I had that thing." Yeah. Why not both? Exactly.
(1:02:34) Why not both? You can support the network. Well, I think it's important too like to highlight like it seems pretty clear to me it's not like some altruistic endeavor to help the network even though it certainly does. I think like we were saying earlier incentives are important.
(1:03:00) You can't have people just plugging this in altruistically to support the network even though many of us are doing that in different ways. So, I like to run Bitaxes and um I want to help the network, but I also want to manifest a solo block mind where I get the full reward. Totally. Um but I think there's an economic case to be made here. You know, there certainly is. And big time. We had a uh we have a hotring up in the mountains that we met.
(1:03:26) One of the one of the part owners is a Bitcoiner. So, that's how we got introduced. It's a naturally heated pool, 40,000 gallons. Kind of like a resort with tiny homes and airirstream campers. You can take your family there. And it's naturally geothermally heated, but they want all the pools, all 40,000 gallons, like 100° hot tub temperature, so you can use it.
(1:03:44) So, they supplement it with propane. They spend 22 grand a year on propane. They have 13 cent power. We ran the numbers for them. Their bill would go from 22 grand on propane to 24 grand a year on electricity. And then with those Ordodine miners, those hydros, the A3880s, they'd need four of them and they would mine $27,000 worth of Bitcoin a year, not full-time. That's mapped to their heat load.
(1:04:08) So I actually looked at when their heat was on and that's like me only saying the miners on when they're buying heat. Still make 27 grand a year. So I mean that thing's going to pay itself off in 30 months. It seems like they'll make three grand a year from that. Yeah. profit from paying 22 grand a year, they'll be making three grand profit. Yeah. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.
(1:04:32) We've seen this with the bath house in New York. That's right. And it's funny to see I feel like it was Time magazine wrote an article and there's a bunch of other local New York publications sort of deriding them for uh using Bitcoin mining to to heat their their pools. And it's like, how do you guys not get this? It's literally lowering cost and being more efficient with your electricity.
(1:04:57) Yes, they'll come around. They will. What um what can anybody who is listening to this who may have just had their interest peak do to help what you're doing to get in touch with you to potentially implement what you're working on into their business or their home? Totally. I appreciate the question. We need the data.
(1:05:29) Um, I think I've done a good amount of research on these target markets, but just last week we had a guy come to us and tell us his dad's house is heated with old oak logs in upstate New York. And I was like, "Dang, I didn't even know people still did that." And he wanted to know how much he could save. And we figured it out for him. So, if you want to support us, check out what we're doing. Our website's xheat.com.
(1:05:48) We offer they're basically handholding services right now because the the hardware is not there, the software is not there. It can be done. You saw um the system in our building that Marty showed. Um but we we got to handhold you to if if you need the help, we can help you out, figure out what you need.
(1:06:07) It's probably much less than you think and actually help with the installation as well cuz we kind of know the lingo and how it translates into tradesman talk. Um so that's what we're doing. Our heat audit services. It's not free right now. It's a service fee. We hope to make that free. I mean, ultimately, if the products are good enough, we shouldn't have to do any handholding, right? Like, the tradesmen will just recommend this stuff because it's a win for them and they'll love installing them because it's so easy and it's no different except it needs an internet connection, right? And I think we'll get there. But right now, we're we're kind of transitioning out of this proof of concept phase. We've done the research. We have a couple demo sites
(1:06:37) coming online. We are trying to solve commercial right now from a a tax and a liability perspective. And now we just want to date the data. And we want to kind of scale up this handholding process. So if that's something that interests you, check out our website.
(1:06:55) Maybe we can do a heat audit for you and get some hash rate in your house. We'll link to all that in the show notes. Tyler, thank you for joining me. This will be the first of many conversations as you build out XRG and this becomes more common place and more obvious to people around the United States, around the world that we should be using the heat produced by Bitcoin miners to bring down not bring down our electricity bills, but uh in a way you're going to pay for the electricity, but you're also going to get Bitcoin.
(1:07:23) You're going to stack s whether you like it or not. It's a beautiful thing. Thanks, man. Great to be with you. Thank you. have fun at the beginning of the night and we will. We will. Let me know if you need some heat. I will. I will. I'm gonna I'm gonna talk to you off air in 3 seconds. Peace and love.
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