Remember the message.
The future is not set.
Okay, you good now?
You just had to walk away, John.
Okay, that's good.
All right, all right.
John, tell us what we're doing here.
All right, welcome everybody, Bitcoin Mining World.
We're here at the Bitcoin Village and we're talking about Bitcoin and things that are interesting to Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin people.
I'd like to introduce our team that we have today.
We have Scott Offert.
He is the 256 OG.
He's been selling Bitcoin miners since the mid-2010s.
Almost 10 years.
He's one of the first people in the space to help people get Bitcoin miners safely and purchase them without getting scammed or hustled.
And he created some fantastic technology that has really revolutionized the industry.
Scott, thank you for joining us today.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me here.
We're going to be talking Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining, so hold on to your hats.
One thing I want to point out about Scott Offert is that he doesn't just sell miners.
He also builds communities.
It's one thing that he's famous for is bringing people together who are like-minded, who want to learn about different niche topics within the Bitcoin mining industry.
He builds those communities.
There's a lot of different communities on Telegram, on X, and that's one of your specialties, Scott.
Absolutely, yeah.
We have more communities than you can ever want.
Absolutely.
More communities than you can shake a stick at.
Speaking of community, we're glad to be a part of the CypherCon.
Community and being here today with all of you where we can talk about cryptography, talk about hacking, talk about all those good things.
Can we say hacking?
Yeah, you can say hacking.
Okay , that's great.
I think you can say whatever you want.
It's probably one of those kinds of conferences.
Not a lot of professionalism around here.
Oh, my.
Lockpicking.
Team it down.
Lockpicking.
See, that's what I love about this is the lockpicking and safecracking.
It's like we're trying to steal things.
We're trying to get into stuff.
We're trying to figure out how can we break into different things.
Breaking stuff.
Yeah, break stuff.
All right.
Speaking of Limp Bizkit, we're going to do a little bit of Q&A and we're going to talk a little bit about what we do.
First, John, you introduced Scott.
You didn't introduce yourself and you didn't introduce me.
So let's not get too excited about the community thing.
It threw off my rhythm.
It is very exciting.
So Trevor Bellow is a podcast host, a heat reuse aficionado.
We call ourselves heat punks, John.
A heat punk.
He's not just a heat aficionado.
He's a punk.
And he helps with plebs, people who want to get started in the Bitcoin community to find new ways to use the heat.
And Trevor, tell us a little bit about what you do out in Oregon for Bitcoin mining world.
Yeah, absolutely.
So you mentioned that I do the podcast.
What I like to say is that, you know, Bitcoin mining is highly industrialized.
It's very confusing for the average person.
And I like to make that highly confusing process easy to understand.
And so through my podcast, through some of the endeavors that we do here at Bitcoin mining world, like you said, I teach the average individual, the normie, how Bitcoin mining works and how that process can be beneficial to the average person's life.
So through things like heat reuse, where we take a Bitcoin miner and install that into a heating system, we can use Bitcoin mining to subsidize the heat cost in our lives.
I love what you do.
And if you haven't seen it yet at Bitcoin mining world dot com, there's a brand new video of you in Denver.
It was made by you and our our director of photography, Jordan Ketter.
Yeah, it's a fantastic work.
It's an incredible video.
And actually, later today, I'll be playing it on the TV, too.
It's about seven minutes.
You can look up Denver heat punks on YouTube.
You can find it.
It's a great video.
It takes about seven minutes and it's very exciting.
Even if you don't know what Bitcoin mining is, I highly encourage everyone to go and watch that video.
Yeah, it's great stuff.
And once again, my name is John Taylor.
I am part of Bitcoin mining world and I help people build their Bitcoin mine, get started in the Bitcoin mining business by creating simple solutions.
Whether you're just an investor looking to get into the Bitcoin mining business or you are part of an industry like electric or oil and gas and you'd like to diversify your portfolio.
That's where I can come in and help you with your business.
And we'll be talking a little bit about how to convert natural gas into Bitcoin and the exciting process that that is.
We'll be doing that a little bit later.
But for this segment, we're going to talk about bringing up the next generation of Bitcoin miners.
And I think that's what we do with the community, with selling things, selling the equipment.
Scott, tell us a little bit about what that means to you.
What does it mean to bringing up that next generation of Bitcoin miners?
Yeah, that's a good question, John.
So for me, you know, one of the reasons why as a company, Bitcoin mining world, we decided to pursue that as one of our goals.
You know, our vision, like you said, is to raise up the next generation of Bitcoin miners.
When I first got into the industry, maybe seven or eight years ago, there was nothing for us.
It was just a bunch of random people on a forum online, like bitcointalk.org.
And, you know, people were chatting back and forth a little bit here and there, but there was not a real good community or a way to learn how to do this, especially on an industrial scale.
You know, people were sharing maybe like little blueprints here and there, ideas about how to make sure you get the heat away from your miners and run a commercial operation.
But from that, I really just recognised that there was a need for more education.
And my biggest goal was, hey, I want to help people to avoid the same mistakes that I made when I first got into the industry, because there was nothing there for me.
You know, we watched YouTube videos, little clips here and there, but there wasn't anything really very cohesive from start to finish, A to B, all the way through A to Z, to help you be successful running Bitcoin mining as a business.
So that's one of our goals as a company now, is to make sure that other people can do that a lot faster and a lot easier than I was able to seven or eight years ago.
Yeah, I think as we've seen, if you look at the history of Bitcoin mining from 2010 on to today, a lot has changed in the industry.
We went from CPUs to GPUs, now FPGAs to ASICs, and it's become highly industrialised and it's very difficult.
And we've seen a lot of Bitcoin mining companies rise and fall over that time.
And I think that's due to the structure of the business and how they continue to work through certain problems.
And so what we're trying to do, like Scott said, we're trying to help educate those people so that they can build a more profitable, more sustainable Bitcoin mining operation.
Yeah, and I think a lot of the building community comes in because it's the mindset.
To build a Bitcoin mine, it's not that hard.
And to run it, once it's running, it's not that difficult.
But most of it is mindset because it is such a complicated, new technology that there's not a lot of documentation on.
If you go out and try to do this on your own and go it alone, it's a little too daunting.
You need to have a lot of personal fortitude.
So by joining the community, being a part of the community, you can be with other people who are building their Bitcoin mine.
They're having successes.
They're sharing their successes.
And I think that's the most important part of Bitcoin is that Bitcoin mining is not a competitive business.
We can all share our best practices in our Bitcoin mine and share how we are more profitable and share ways that we can improve our business.
And it will help everybody involved.
We're not competing against each other.
We're all competing for that block reward.
I don't know, John.
I think I'm competing against you and trying to get a block first.
Okay.
I'm just kidding.
I'm just messing around.
Well , you have like 18 BitAxes running.
I do.
I do.
18 BitAxes, some heaters going.
I mine for heat, man.
Yeah, you're just downright dirty with it.
And that's perfect.
I love it because you have a hothouse and miners everywhere.
I do like a hothouse.
With miners.
Yeah.
Okay.
He sleeps in the nude too because he has so many miners running.
It's a fun environment at my place.
Got to do that.
So let's talk a little bit about what we do.
We're going to talk a little bit about how the West was won.
And then we're going to talk about what we do.
How's that?
Because we just looked at the slide deck and we know where we're going with this.
So how the West was won.
You're talking like, what, we're pioneers here?
Yeah.
We're gold diggers?
What?
That's it.
It says it right there.
Pioneers.
So no, we're not going to sing that song.
Okay.
So anyways.
Keep it PG, John.
There we go.
Keep it PG.
The pioneers came out.
We like to tell the story about how the West was won.
And the pioneers came out 150 years ago.
And they made the tools to mine the gold.
And they went out and they discovered ways.
They had to invent a lot of the things.
And they were the first people to really step out and do this.
They laid the groundwork.
And this is similar to a lot of the Bitcoin miners that came around in 2010 to 2015.
Those pioneers had to make the tools.
They had to invent things to make the GPUs work at that high heat.
They endured the fires and they solved the problems.
The next group that came out was the businessmen.
And they brought out people.
They brought out more people.
And they started to make a business out of Bitcoin mining.
And then that third group was the industry came out.
And those were scientists where they looked and they found the gold and they had industrialized mining practices.
And that's where we are now in Bitcoin mining.
We're at that industrial mining in Bitcoin practices.
But what's unique about Bitcoin mining is that even though the industry is... the big guys are getting bigger, there's still a lot of space for the little guy to get into it.
There's a lot of areas where people can get into a half a megawatt or like a heat reuse.
But Scott, let's talk a little bit about that 1 to 10 megawatt.
How can people get into it?
What does it look like?
And what does it take to do that?
Right.
So to get into your first 1 to 10 megawatt site, that is considered industrial on a commercial scale.
A little bit smaller than that, obviously, would be maybe using the existing power that you already have at a warehouse or an office location, maybe.
So let's say like you're in a building that has a transformer.
You're not using the full capacity of that transformer.
You can add some miners to that.
Right.
So that's like one step before that.
The next step is you're going to start to be thinking about the actual location where you're mining.
It's not maybe as convenient.
You might have to go out and look for it.
It might be in the next city.
It might be in the next state over.
But you're going to have to start actually planning it out.
So site selection is a thing.
You're going to be wanting to look at your power rates, the environment as well, the amount of humidity, the amount of heat.
You don't want to be doing this right next to the ocean.
You're going to get a lot of corrosive activity there in the ASICs.
Not very good for maintaining the ASICs.
So yeah, there's just definitely a lot more of considerations.
When you're doing it at home, there's a little bit of issues you have to deal with heat.
You got to get that heat out of your house.
Otherwise, your spouse is going to get really mad.
Right, Trevor?
Yeah, absolutely.
What do they say?
What's that saying?
I call it the wife approval rating.
The wife approval factor?
Yes, the WAF.
Scott, I'm curious.
Speaking of the 1 megawatt to 10 megawatts, you talk a little bit about power, you talk about site selection.
What are the biggest hurdles for somebody who has never run a Bitcoin mining operation?
How are they going to get into this industry if it's something that they're excited about?
Yeah, so how do you get into the industry?
Well, you got to learn about it first, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, you can go just head first and dive in, kind of like I did many years ago.
But yeah, you know, I don't know.
There's a lot of different ways to learn, right?
There's conferences.
We actually just got back from one in Florida called Mining Disrupt.
There's online chat groups, right, on Telegram that we have.
And you can definitely come talk to us and we'll put a link in the video if you're watching after.
But yeah, I don't know.
What are some other ideas for you?
So, I mean, obviously, I'm in the heat reuse side of things.
And my biggest thing is that if anybody's interested in how Bitcoin mining works, you have to get off zero.
The first thing you need to do is you need to get a Bitcoin miner and you need to learn how to set up the wallet configuration.
You need to learn how to set up the IP address.
You need to learn how to clean, maintenance and maintain your Bitcoin miner.
Because if you can't do it with one to five miners, you definitely can't do it with 300 to 1,000 miners.
And the whole idea is building a one megawatt mine, you're trying to industrialise this.
So you want multiple of these machines in a warehouse, in a building, running them all at the same time.
And so you're going to have a lot more breakages, a lot more failures, a lot more things going wrong.
And so you need to understand the basic principles of how this process works before you just dive headfirst into building a full-size industrial operation.
Yeah, and that's a good point.
Getting off to zero, that's definitely where it starts.
Plugging in a miner.
That's how I learned very quickly.
I tried running five of these miners in my basement.
I was blowing circuits left and right.
My wife was mad with all the heat, with all the noise.
So that very quickly led me to take it to the next step like, hey, I got to get these things out of here.
So what do you do?
Well, maybe if you're not quite ready to build your own Bitcoin mine, you can get them hosted somewhere, right?
So that's another starting point as well.
So if you're not quite ready to build that first 1 megawatt, 5, 10 megawatts, you can always consider hosting.
Using somebody else's infrastructure, maybe you're co-locating or using their managed services to get up and running faster.
And I think we got a little bit ahead of ourselves.
When we talk about Bitcoin mining, a lot of people don't even know what Bitcoin is.
I was just on the plane with a guy and he says, yeah, I've seen it in the news, but why should I buy a Bitcoin for my grand grandkid?
You know, what is it?
And I could go into the whole, you know, the big, you know, the Bitcoin solution.
You know, digital energy, right?
Yeah, I could just go into a big long thing.
But really, he just wants to know, is it a good investment?
Is it a good asset for him to buy and hold for his kids?
And I think that's a big hurdle.
I want to talk about that a little bit later tomorrow about how we could rebrand Bitcoin.
How can we make it simple?
Simple as an iPad.
It's a blue button or a red button.
You know, it's a blue pill or a red pill.
And when we talk about Bitcoin mining, it's a complicated thing.
But let's talk about Bitcoin first.
What is Bitcoin in the most simplest terms, Trevor?
I mean, at the end of the day, Bitcoin is freedom money.
Bitcoin, you know, if you look at the financial system over the last 250 years, our dollar has been debased over and over and over again.
And the reason why our country isn't failing versus other countries are, is because we are the world's reserve currency.
So if you look at this trajectory of where we're going, the money is being inflated, our values being stolen from us, our time, our energy.
So what Bitcoin does is it changes that status quo and says, hey, here is a monetary system, a network that cannot be debased by governments, by corporate entities, by someone who wants to take control of, quote unquote, the money printer.
So at the end of the day, Bitcoin is this technology, this 21st century money that is kind of like gold in a sense.
It's digital gold.
And it allows for people who spend their energy and their time producing goods and services.
It allows them to save that time and energy in a digital form that can't be stolen from them.
Scott, what do you think Bitcoin is in the most simplest terms?
In the most simplest terms?
Yeah.
The thing that comes to my mind first is no middleman, right?
You might have seen a chart that has a man on one side and then a bunch of things in the middle and then another man on the other side.
With the regular banking system, you have so many people in the middle taking their percentages, credit card processors, banks, right?
And you have to ask for permission to use your own money when you're dealing with banks.
With Bitcoin, the simplest form for me is it's just peer-to-peer.
You're removing the middleman.
You're removing the risk and you're not asking permission to use your money, the value that you've created for yourself.
It's basically you're pushing your money out to somebody else instead of pulling it out of somebody's wallet.
So yeah, to me it means just freedom to transact, no middleman and the next generation of money.
So when we talk about Bitcoin, Bitcoin in its current state is a value asset.
It's an asset that can be bought and sold like gold or like a bond, like a Vanguard or maybe a stock.
It doesn't do a whole lot other than that, other than just hold value.
Provides heat.
And when you talked about debasing, I guess a way to describe what debasing is, is in 2020-21 when we were attacked with COVID by the Chinese, what happened is we had a recession on the horizon.
And so to combat that, the Fed bought down, they call it quantitative economics, they bought down the overnight securities and debt at a higher rate than normal so that they could keep the bank's money flowing.
So they bought that with money that they didn't have.
And when they got to the end of the quantitative economics period, they had to print more money.
And that's where they came up with that $1 trillion coin that they were going to print and then put it in Fort Knox, right?
So when people say, gosh, you know, what is debasing?
What is the value of money?
I don't understand it.
That's a perfect example of it.
We didn't have money and we needed to combat a recession or a depression or whatever it was going to be.
So we printed money and then we just made up.
We just magically pulled that $1 trillion coin out and put it into Fort Knox.
So I want to kind of paint a picture based on exactly what you said.
So from 2020 to 2024, the United States government printed, I want to say, what was it, like $6 trillion.
And if you amount that to time, you know, the average human being, the average person in America works 40 hours a week.
They work until the age of 65 and they make, let's say, $20 an hour.
If you were to add that up, the government printed 8 million American lives.
That's the amount of money that they printed from 2020 to 2024.
They stole that.
They stole that from us.
8 million American lives completely up in smoke because they have access to that money printer.
Maybe, but what they were doing is they were combating a recession or depression.
So unless you have a better solution for heading into a recession due to COVID, it was something that they did.
It was a choice that the world's best economists chose to do at that time.
I'm not the world's best economist, so I can't say if it's a good idea or a bad idea.
That's what they chose to do.
But I think as it relates to Bitcoin is really important because people walk around today, take eggs out of the equation, right?
Milk is twice as much.
Houses are twice as much.
Cars are twice as much.
I want to talk about eggs.
They're not really twice as much.
It's just that there's twice as many dollars.
The dollar is worth half as much.
And when people don't really get that, they say, oh, it's inflation or it's this or it's that president or this president.
It's no.
We had a situation.
We chose a solution.
We printed a bunch of money.
Good idea or bad, it is what it is.
And now if you want to buy a house, it's $100,000 more because your dollar is not worth as much.
Now, Bitcoin is still exchanged to the dollar, so it's still determined by that.
But at the same time, it is independent of it because no one can print any more Bitcoin.
Correct?
One Bitcoin is one Bitcoin.
That's that's what they say.
Absolutely.
Yeah .
I mean, honestly, for me, being in the Bitcoin industry for so long now, I start seeing it as it's not the price of Bitcoin that's going up and down.
It's the U.S.
dollar that's going up and down.
Because if you see it as one Bitcoin is one Bitcoin, if the price of Bitcoin goes from $20,000 to $40,000 to $60,000 now to $80,000 that it is right now, we're thinking of it in terms of U.S.
dollars, but eventually you start flipping it and you see, actually, it's the price of the U.S.
dollar that's going down.
It's not the price of Bitcoin that's going up.
So a perfect thing to your point about houses costing more in the dollar terms, cars costing more in the dollar terms.
If you look at what a house cost in 2012, I'm going to throw out random numbers here, $250,000 for the median home value.
And that was at the time, 2012, what was it?
$400,000, $4,000 Bitcoin.
Well, as we progress through time, the cost in dollar terms is going up, but the cost in Bitcoin terms for that same house is going down.
And that is because Bitcoin is holding its value in relation to the dollar being printed.
Definitely, definitely.
So one, I guess the point of that is that Bitcoin, we can't make any more of it.
You know, it is, there's a finite amount of them.
So at some point it will be a standard which other wealth is determined.
Right.
And the whole point behind that is it's scarce, right?
Maybe one of the most scarce assets out there.
I would argue that it is the most scarce asset out there other than an individual's time.
One that's based on technology?
Yeah.
Good point.
So Bitcoin is a great store of wealth.
So why should somebody get into Bitcoin?
We don't want to dive down the maxi hole, you know, but we're talking to grandpa.
He's on the plane next year.
He's going to visit his kids in Boca.
Why should he invest into Bitcoin?
Yeah , I've got this.
So why invest into Bitcoin?
Actually, in the last few years, it's really become known as a completely separate asset class now.
When I first got into this a few years ago, it was just magic internet money.
You know, there were people that were preaching.
They knew like in their mind, they were absolutely convinced that maybe this would be the world reserve currency one day.
But back then, it was just a way to opt out.
It was just a way to transact anonymously, you know, to do something that's more like bartering, right?
Instead of having to use the US dollar.
But yeah, like, you know, back to your point, it has become a completely separate asset class that has a completely different risk profile to it now.
So it has progressed over time.
And I'm really excited to see where it's going.
So what I would say is, why would someone invest in gold?
You know, you work for dollars, and you use dollars to buy your groceries, you'd use dollars to pay your electricity bill, which is all fine and great.
You'd use gold to pay your electric rate.
But you buy gold, because you know that the value of gold is going to go up over time.
And it's going to hold that energy, the time that you spend to go and make the money, you put that in gold, and it's going to hold that over time.
Well, there's a couple of things that make gold not so great.
And that's the divisibility of it.
That's the transferability of it.
That's the fact that, you know, 2% of it's being dug out of the ground every year.
Bitcoin kind of flips that on its head and says, well, it's infinitely divisible, it's easily transferable, and there is a supply cap, like you had mentioned earlier.
So the reason why I would want to invest in Bitcoin is because I want to save my wealth and my time in a currency that I can transact with anybody, anywhere in the world.
And Bitcoin, I don't know if it's... some people may say, I know you, Bitcoin or death, everything's in Bitcoin.
But Bitcoin can be used as one part of your portfolio, it can be used as an asset.
You know, you can have a Vanguard, you can have gold, you can have houses, you can have collectibles like baseball cards or Trump coins, whatever it is.
You can have all these different fun things that you can do to create wealth and hold them as assets.
But no matter which one you do, you should learn all about it.
You know, find out as much information as you can so that you are making a decision based on your knowledge base and based on the research that you do.
Because, you know, the worst investment you can make is the one that that guy on the plane tells you to do.
Absolutely.
There's, you know, when I first started my journey, I read a book called The Warren Buffett Way.
And obviously, Warren Buffett is not a Bitcoiner, and that's perfectly fine.
But his piece of advice was never invest in something that you don't understand.
And obviously, Warren Buffett doesn't understand Bitcoin, so why would he invest in it?
But it does not matter whether you're investing in gold, Bitcoin, real estate, commodities, doesn't matter.
As long as you understand what your investment is.
And that's why we at Bitcoin Mining World want to educate people on how Bitcoin works.
Because we want you to have a good foundation to stand upon when you start making your 1%, 2%, 10%, or like me, 100% allocation to Bitcoin.
Right.
And how much has Bitcoin gone up?
Well, that's an amazingly good question.
Over the last trailing five years, it's averaged 59.4% growth.
It had some up years and some down years, but we'll show some charts on those later.
I got cool graphs.
Yeah, that's a lot better than my bank account.
I remember years ago, I was making like 4% on this one mutual fund or something.
Now it's gotten down to like 0.01%.
And inflation, you know, we talked about when they print more money.
If you have a dollar today and you put it in a drawer, next year, that dollar is worth less than 90 cents.
Because they print more money, there's inflation, there's all these things that are happening.
Like the microphone's ringing a little bit, but all those things happen and then it's worth less.
Whereas Bitcoin is going in the proper trajectory.
If you put anything into an investment, you need to make at least 10% more or you're losing money.
So let's talk about Bitcoin mining.
Because we talked about what is Bitcoin, why should people invest in it, but there's this mining thing.
Michael Saylor talked about 95% of the world does not know what Bitcoin is.
And if you talk about Bitcoin mining, it's even less.
So really nobody knows about it.
So let's talk a little bit about what is Bitcoin mining and why is it a good business to get into.
And what are some of the challenges that you're going to face and what are some of the rewards?
Yeah, I can start a little bit here.
So what is Bitcoin mining?
One way to look at it is when you are buying and selling Bitcoin, that's the demand side of it, right?
When you are talking about mining Bitcoin, that's the supply side of it.
So Bitcoin mining really is the very tangible side of Bitcoin.
The part that you can actually touch and feel, it's the infrastructure.
It's the computers, the ASICs, the miners that you have to plug in and consume the energy.
So that's maybe one of the first ways to look at it.
If you don't know anything about Bitcoin and how it's powered, it's powered through the supply side using these miners' computers in data centres and in people's homes.
Yeah, and what a lot of people don't understand is when you make a transaction in Bitcoin, someone has to facilitate that transaction.
There has to be someone on both ends that is buying and selling the Bitcoin, but there's that middle component that allows for the transaction to happen.
And that's what Bitcoin miners are doing at the end of the day.
We're generating new Bitcoins up until that 21 million supply cap, but we're also facilitating the transactions so that if I want to buy a cheeseburger or a house from Scott, there's something in the middle making sure that transaction happens.
Cheeseburgers.
Mining is a business.
That's the way that I look at it.
I think that there's a lot of different ways that you can get into it.
You're really into the DIY, let's be crafty, let's come up with new things.
I think that's a foundation of what Bitcoin is, is to have enthusiasts who want to make Bitcoin a hobby.
And it's profitable.
There's also people who just want to get into the Bitcoin business and they're deep into it.
They know all of the things and all the pools and all that kind of stuff.
And then there's people who just want to invest.
They want to have it as a passive income source.
And really, Bitcoin mining is a great passive income source because you can set up a mine and have people maintain it and just collect the money, basically.
You can pay the electric bill and then write that electric bill off.
Now, if you are, let's say, a dentist or something, and dentists make too much money.
This is actually a real problem.
So, if you're a dentist, what you could do is you could have a Bitcoin mining business.
You could pay the electric bill to reduce your profits.
Store all that Bitcoin and not have to pay taxes on it.
This is not financial advice, by the way.
But you could put it into different type of retirement funds where you don't pay taxes on it until you're 59 and a half.
And then you can have that complete write-off.
And it's a passive income source.
So, it's not like... this isn't like Alaska Gold Rush where if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, it's required that you go move up north and live with a bunch of hillbillies and get a tractor.
You can actually do this at home and live the life that you live.
Well, the greatest thing about being digital money is the fact that it is digital.
So, yes, you need that infrastructure somewhere in the world.
And Bitcoin miners are sourcing cheap power from different regions, most of the time rural places.
But, you know, if you're that dentist, you can, like you said, pay someone to set it up for you.
And then you just collect that Bitcoin at the end of the day.
Make sure that your power rate is paid for and slowly build up that Bitcoin stack.
Yeah.
So, you know, talking about Bitcoin mining as a business, there's other things that go into it, right?
We talked about the scenario where somebody might be doing it passively.
They just invested in it and they have somebody else doing it for them.
Well, that other person that's doing it for them is the person that's running it as a business as well.
And they're taking care of things like accounting, right?
They're taking care of inventory.
They have people that are actually on staff working for them, plugging these things in, unplugging them, maintaining them.
So, yeah, it can definitely be a business and it can definitely be a passive way to invest as well.
Yeah.
And when you get into the Bitcoin mining business, there's a couple of different ways.
You can get a BitX, you know, that's basics.
Not much of a business, but it's getting into it.
Next, you can go into hosting where you could go to a hosting facility.
You could buy one, 10, 20 miners.
You can have them installed and just pay the electric bill and collect the Bitcoin rewards.
It's very hands off, but it's a way to get into the business.
The third step would be to have a done for you solution where you own a piece of property or you lease it and you put the Bitcoin miners in there.
You get them up and running, you operate the mine, and then you can go full on if you really want to.
You can buy the property, you can pour the cement, you can unbox the miners, put them on the shelves, do everything.
And that takes a little bit more skill, but it's not rocket science to do this.
You just need some guidance from Scott and from Trevor to plug the machines in and make sure that things work.
John does a lot for us.
He's a very humble guy over here.
Never been called that.
But anyways, let's talk about Bitcoin mining.
What were we going to talk about?
As a business?
Nope.
What's the next slide?
Let's take a look at the slides.
Oh, let's talk about community.
That's what we're going to talk about.
That's why we have a slide deck.
The Bitcoin mining community.
It's an interesting thing.
As you said earlier, we are cooperating together, right?
We are competitors in a sense, but we're also working together as one giant network to support the Bitcoin network.
The community in the Bitcoin mining space is awesome.
It's great.
It exists in person, like at conferences like CypherCon, where we're at right now.
Or it exists online, in forums, in chat groups, on Telegram, as well as mastermind clubs that we run.
Let's jump into mastermind because I think that's really important.
Mastermind, we're all on there every Friday morning at 10 a.m.
And Trevor, you host almost all of them.
But there are deep dives into the different aspects of Bitcoin mining because it's a complicated landscape.
There's different things from insurance to taxes that we had on the other day.
Or just basic education, as well as fans and the machinery that you use to mine Bitcoin.
HVAC, power, site development.
I think at the end of the day, you don't know what you don't know.
And if you're very interested in learning a new system, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's gold mining, whether it's investing in stocks or bonds, the best thing is to, like we kind of alluded to earlier, learn from people who have already done it.
So what we do in the mastermind is we seek out those individuals who have built mining operations, who have built a business around the tax side of the investing part of Bitcoin.
And we go through an hour of asking them in-depth questions so that they can help people understand those processes.
Because if you can learn a little bit from somebody who's already done it, you can learn the mistakes that they've made and not make those mistakes yourself.
And at the end of the day, our job as educators is to help you not make mistakes.
Yeah, move forward faster.
That's what education is all about.
We do that in the community by connection and by the collaboration.
I think one of the biggest things that I see at all of the Bitcoin conferences is the networking is the most important part.
The people just being able to talk about their day-to-day problems, the things that they are faced with, the challenges that hold them back, and being able to find five, six, ten solutions from the community is so important.
And should have brought a clicker, but we didn't.
So we're going to talk about education because education is so important.
We have the Build-A-Mine Bootcamp.
We have the Blockchain Academy projects that we're working on.
Yeah, so there are a lot of these different avenues to learn Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining coming up now.
There's even colleges and universities that are starting to implement these things into their courses that we're starting to see.
But yeah, it's one of these unmet needs that we've seen, and that's why we've gotten into education.
So yeah, you mentioned our Build-A-Mine Bootcamp that we've done.
So we actually bring in people who are interested in doing Bitcoin mining as a business and bring them in in an intensive three-day or five-day in-person scenario where you can really learn the very tangible things that you need to know about getting your first megawatt of Bitcoin miners up and running.
And then you also mentioned the Blockchain Academy.
They have an online course and even a certification program that you can take part in too.
If you want to take their exam, you can be a certified Bitcoin mining technician.
Okay, so you have electricians, you have HVAC technicians, you have plumbers.
When you want to be a plumber, when you want to be an electrician, you go to school for three to five years to become a master electrician or a master plumber.
I don't know the different levels of it, but you've got your plumber one, plumber two, and plumber three.
Exactly.
And Bitcoin doesn't have that.
And that's what Bitcoin needs.
In order for us to scale Bitcoin, in order for us to help people get into the industry, not just on in, you know, I want to run a Bitcoin mine, but also finding those technicians who can service the miners, who can set up the electrical infrastructure,
who can run the HVAC.
We need education and we need certifications so that people can go to the Web3 certification board.
They can get this mining certification and they can go to a company like Mara or CleanSpark and say, Hey, I've run through this program.
I am certified in mining level one, two or three, and I am ready to work for you and help you build your Bitcoin mine.
And that's what we're doing with the Blockchain Academy and the Web3 certification board is we're creating an ISO certified Bitcoin mining technician that's industry recognized and ISO recognized so that there is a baseline of knowledge in the community.
And there's a good way for people to get involved into the business.
You talked a little bit about learning gold mining and there's a thing in gold mining called artisanal gold mining, where they're just small miners, they find small pieces of gold, they craft things out of them.
I think what you're doing in the heat reuse, you're kind of the artisanal Bitcoin miner, where you're finding these stranded uses of energy, turning them into other things and creating education and wealth from them.
So I really appreciate what you do for the Bitcoin community, Trevor.
Well, thank you for that, John.
Heat reuse is something that really excites me because when you look at the world, and I'm going to show this in a presentation later today, when you look at the world, there is a lot of energy infrastructure.
And half of that energy infrastructure goes to heating.
And a quarter of that energy infrastructure goes to comfort heating.
So all around the world, people are turning on their HVAC, they're turning on their water heaters, they're enjoying the comforts that heat provides.
And they're paying for that.
At the end of the day, they're paying for that heat.
So wouldn't it be awesome if I told you that you could get paid to heat or you could at least reduce the electricity or the cost for that heating?
And I feel like everybody at the end of the day would say, yeah, that is a good benefit for me.
And so what I do in heat reuse is I am trying to help educate people on how we can use Bitcoin mining infrastructure to provide that heat and at the end of the day, subsidize the cost of electricity.
And speaking of heat, if you want to really heat up your house, get yourself a brand new S21.
We have the S21 234 terahash on sale today and today only.
So be sure to talk to anybody that's over at Bitcoin Mining World.
Our booth is number 234 right over there.
That may or may not be true, but we do have the S21s.
We sell equipment.
That's the business that we're in.
We sell Bitcoin miners, we sell transformers, we sell containers, and we sell Bitcoin mining sites.
And I think that's the most exciting thing that we do.
We have Bitcoin mining sites that are half a megawatt that you can plug and play in Illinois and Missouri, right by St.
Louis.
They avoided the whole tornado, so you're in a safe space.
We also have some really fantastic mines in Oklahoma.
3.8 cent power in Oklahoma.
That's ridiculous.
It's crazy.
So we have a lot of different sites available.
There's about 25 of them.
If you'd like to learn more about it, be sure to stop by booth number 256, Bitcoin Mining World, right there on the end.
That's us, okay.
Is it 256?
Yes, it is.
Nice plug, John.
Nice plug.
So now that we've sold all of our equipment...
Oh, that's where it's just going to end.
Yep, that's the end of it.
That's a good journey.
I mean, after that, it's all about optimization, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we've got two gentlemen in the crowd here.
Do you guys have any questions for us?
I would love to hear your questions.
Okay, let me repeat that question.
He's asking, how up-to-date is the ledger?
So if you're paying somebody, how up-to-date it is for security and that type of thing?
Yeah, so that ledger updates every 10 minutes.
Every single time a block is found, it's added to the ledger.
And that ledger goes back all the way to the Genesis block, which is back in 2009.
And you can run a node, which is a piece of hardware that allows you to audit that ledger.
So let me follow up on that real quick on that.
So if you want to verify a transaction, they say that you should wait for 8 transactions to happen, about 90 minutes.
So that is a really good question.
I don't know the actual dimensions of the solar arrays that you will need, but you have to answer a couple of questions.
The first question is, are you wanting to mine 24-7?
Because if you want to mine 24-7, you're not only going to need the solar arrays, but you're also going to need battery infrastructure.
And then you have to multiply those arrays by a certain number so that during the day, while you're mining Bitcoin, you can also charge those batteries so that during the night, when you don't have the sun shining, you can power the miners through the batteries.
Yeah, and that part gets really expensive with the batteries.
But there actually are people who are mining on older Bitcoin equipment that has already ROI'd in the past.
So if you're going to be mining on solar and not doing the expensive part of buying the batteries, you want to do it with older generation equipment because you're not running it 24-7.
Oh yeah.
So you're talking about the profitability of installing solar.
One thing that people are doing is they're installing solar panels and doing this as a business, maybe even selling the power back to the grid.
And when they're doing that, they're not making very much money.
But adding Bitcoin mining to a solar project like that is a way to start ROI-ing faster.
Typically, I've heard you can pay back your initial investment on the solar setup within a couple or a few years.
Yeah, I would say 3-5.
Whereas if you're doing that without Bitcoin mining, you're going to be doing that like 5-10 years or even longer.
And to your point about the power supplies, that's a very valuable point.
Now, there's the difference between DC power and AC power.
Solar power is DC power, whereas the Bitcoin miner is also DC power, but from the wall, you have AC power.
So you use that power supply to transfer the AC current power to DC.
When you're mining off of solar, you don't need a power supply.
You can actually direct convert the power coming from the solar arrays straight to the Bitcoin miner.
Now, it takes some education, it takes some knowledge and know-how.
And a great person...
It's 100% doable.
They're taking it because the Bitcoin miners like to run off of around 12 to 15 volts.
So yeah, they're putting little actuators or whatever they're called, you know, modular thingies.
I don't even know what the terminology is.
To protect it and to make sure that the sun is always giving that voltage that the control board and the hash boards like.
Yeah.
Right.
Instead of up and down.
Yeah.
I believe it.
All right, John.
Yeah, we got to wrap this up.
We got another panel coming up.
We can answer some more questions.
We're going to be talking about the business of Bitcoin mining business.
Is that what we're doing next?
You tell me, John.
You came up with the agenda.
I sure did.
And I know what it is.
Kind of.
Awesome.
So it's up there.
Whatever that means.
Bitcoin basics at 3 p.m.
It's me and Trevor.
Bitcoin basics.
Didn't we just cover this?
We did.
So I think we're going to take a short break and then we're going to go into the business of being in business.
All right.
Yes.