Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Today we are joined by Kyle Schneps, VP of Public Policy at Bitcoin mining pool Foundry, joins us to discuss…well the election! Why did Bitcoin miners go so hard for Trump and will there be repercussions? Why did Foundry sit in between and not endorse either candidate? And what actually matters more in 2024, States or the Federal level? 👉 Get tickets to OP_NEXT by visiting the website! And use discount code OCTOBER to get 25% off at check out! Timestamps: 00:00 S...
Oct 29, 2024•42 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! Will, Colin, and Matt are back with another news roundup. It’s election season, so naturally, headlines about Russia have weaseled their way into the news cycle – only this time, the news is about how Russia allegedly wants to encourage trade in bitcoin to bypass sanctions. The gang also talks about Coinmint’s partnership with NYDIG to expand its Massena, NY facility, and our friends at Compass give us an update on the bitcoin mining hosting market. The show wraps...
Oct 25, 2024•42 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! For this week’s stock show, Colin interviews Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon and Senior Vice President of Global Mining Operations Alex Brammer. Bitfarms made a name for itself as one of the first publicly traded bitcoin miners to expand into South America, first with its operations in Argentina and then in Paraguay. Now, Bitfarms is planning to house 50% of its future hashrate in Pennsylvania with its acquisition of Stronghold Digital. They discuss how their new portfoli...
Oct 24, 2024•48 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! We’re joined by Ethan Vera of Luxor Tech and Kal Kassa of BitcoinBrr to discuss mining Bitcoin in Ethiopia! Earlier this summer we heard reports of mining picking up in the Eastern side of Africa, particularly with well connected Chinese Bitcoin miners sourcing hydro-powered contracts. Ethan recently visited so we brought him on with Kal to discuss what’s actually happening, the costs versus North American mining and how to invest in the area (if you’re willing to...
Oct 22, 2024•40 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! For this week’s news roundup, Colin and Matt discuss how US public bitcoin miners are growing their share of Bitcoin's hashrate. Plus, Marathon is leveraging its trove of 26,000+ BTC and Cipher is going bigly with three pending mining site acquisitions for a total of 1.5 GW of capacity, some of which the miner may allocate toward AI/HPC compute. They also touch on some AI updates from Crusoe and Bit Digital, and in this week’s cry corner, why grown men are getting...
Oct 18, 2024•39 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! For this week’s Bitcoin Stock Show, we sit down with Jeff LaBerge, the head of capital markets and strategic investments at Bitdeer. Bursting onto the scene last year with its IPO, Bitdeer quickly became one of the public bitcoin miners to watch, and now, the company is designing its own ASIC miner, the SEALMINER. How did Bitdeer secure TSMC chip allocation for the series, and will Bitdeer sell this ASIC on the open market or keep it for itself? We answer these qu...
Oct 16, 2024•43 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! Today we’re joined by Skot, the creator of the open source Bitcoin mining project Bitaxe! Launched a bit over a year ago, Bitaxe is a simple way to bring mining back to the household by taking a chip from state of the art Bitcoin miners like the Bitmain S21 and gluing it with a bunch of other parts into a mini-home miner! We talk with Skot about the origin of the idea, why he wanted to make something like the Bitaxe, the value of home mining and the future of mega...
Oct 15, 2024•44 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! We’re going through Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining news including a difficulty update after Florida hurricanes, IREN’s lawsuit about HPC, Bitmain releasing another version of the S21 with less efficiency (why?), Marathon’s Anduro platform getting in on tokenized whiskey, Marathon also getting sued for being too loud at its Granbury, Texas site and HBOs new Satoshi Nakamoto documentary uncovering the creator of Bitcoin was none other than Peter Todd, a guest and friend...
Oct 11, 2024•37 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! For this week’s Bitcoin Stock Show, we sit down with Sue Ennis, the head of investor relations at Hut 8, to discuss Hut 8’s AI/HPC business line. The conversation covers Hut 8’s original foray into HPC with its Terago acquisition in 2022, its new GPU-as-a-Service business line, what makes an ideal HPC data center, what has changed with Hut 8 since the merger with US Bitcoin Corporation, and everything in between – including a little teasing about a 1 GW acquisitio...
Oct 09, 2024•31 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! This week we are joined by Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8, one of the larger and older Bitcoin miners! Hut 8 recently entered into a deal with leading Bitcoin mining manufacturer Bitmain to produce a new immersion unit ready for traditional data center builds! In this show we discuss the unit, how the deal got made, how it fits into a data center, parts and repair, the hosting deal with Bitmain and the opportunity cost of entering into investments like this one with B...
Oct 08, 2024•36 min
Welcome back to the Mining Pod! This week, we’re talking about about bullish inflows to the crypto (mostly Bitcoin) ecosystem that could support better asset prices, Ocean launching a new decentralized template program for miners, CleanSpark’s hurricane woes and updates from the recent catastrophe in the Southeast US and Swan’s dramatic lawsuit against its former employees! 👉 Get tickets to OP_NEXT by visiting the website! And use discount code OCTOBER to get 25% off at check out! Timestamps: 0...
Oct 04, 2024•35 min
There’s a ton of new units on the market, including new players like Auradine. But how do these units actually hold up when deployed to the field and under harsh environments? We brought on Brad Cuddy of Cholla Energy to walk us through his experience working with the units. We also discuss alternative units like Bitmain and MicroBT, dry cooling, hydro vs. immersion and various other topics relating to technical Bitcoin mining. Lastly, we finish with a conversation on the Texas Bitcoin mining la...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! For this week’s roundup, Will, Colin, and Matt discuss the bombshell news that Swan Bitcoin is suing its former employees and contractors, alleging that the cabal stole proprietary aspects of Swan’s bitcoin mining business. Speaking of corporate sparring, the gang also covers the news that Riot and Bitfarms have settled (for now, at least) their dispute over Riot’s attempts to acquire its rival. They also discuss Bitdeer’s new SEAL02 ASIC chip, which Bitdeer claim...
Sep 27, 2024•50 min
For this week's Bitcoin Mining Stock Show, Colin sits down with Taras Kulyk, the CEO and co-founder of Synteq Digital. The fellas open the show by talking about the differences between the AI/HPC and ASIC hardware markets, why its (much) easier for traditional data center operators to access capital markets than bitcoin miners, and whether or not Core Scientific can capitalize on its AI promises. For the second half of the show, Taras dives into what has changed in the ASIC market since the Apri...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! For this week’s show, Colin interviews Rob Warren, the author of The Bitcoin Miner’s Almanac. Standing up a bitcoin mining operation is a herculean task. From managing ASICs, to standing up infrastructure, to navigating power contracts, bitcoin miners have to learn everything from IT management to hardware maintenance – and everything in between. That’s why Rob wrote The Bitcoin Miner’s Almanac , to help newcomer and veteran miners alike easily navigate the daunti...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 18 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! For this week’s news roundup, the crew dives into Hut 8’s partnership with Bitmain on the manufacturer’s new hydro-cooled ASIC model, the U3S21EXPH. Matt also gives everyone a geography lesson with his overview of Bhutan and its hoard of 13,011 BTC worth $780 million, the fourth largest BTC reserve of any nation, and Colin covers Rober F. Kennedy Jr.’s letter to the editor in the Economist in which he defends Bitcoin mining for its utility as a flexible load for r...
Sep 20, 2024•36 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Pow.re Co-founder and CTO Ian Descoteaux joins us today to talk about all things ASIC miners. In the conversation, we speak at length about the Antminer S21, including his experience deploying this model, its quirks / failure rates, and its performance. We also touch on ASIC prices and manufacturer competition, including why MicroBT’s Whatsminers are more expensive than other models, and whether or not Auradine and Canaan will be competitive in the near-future.Fin...
Sep 17, 2024•29 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Will and Colin hop on for another duo pod this week for one of the most eclectic roundups yet. The numbers are in for August for the public bitcoin mining world, and these companies are slowly (but steadily) expanding their hashrate, while also collectively selling more than 1,200 BTC over the month. In a testament to bitcoin mining’s utility for utilities, Japan’s largest power company, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), is mining bitcoin with a portion of its...
Sep 13, 2024•31 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Sam Tabar, CEO of NASDAQ-listed Bit Digital, joins us today to talk about Bit Digital’s post-Halving mining strategy and (more importantly) what the company is doing to scale its AI business line. Bit Digital earned $12.5 million with its HPC services in Q2-2024, the most of any AI-focused public bitcoin miner. During the show, Tabar discusses how they executed to reach this milestone, their aspirations to book $700 million in AI revenue over the next five years, ...
Sep 12, 2024•30 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Today we are joined by Adam Back, cryptographer and CEO of Blockstream. Well known for its sidechain software Liquid, among other projects, Blockstream is actually a large private Bitcoin miner. In today’s show, we go through Blockstream mining with Back, including its profile as a miner (energy, locations, fleet). Then we dive into the BMN2, a new financial instrument to help people mine Bitcoin without ever touching a Bitcoin miner! Note, this podcast is for edu...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Rhodium is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and they’re going to need cash to get through the restructuring. So in comes Galaxy Digital, which is offering a $30m (or 500 BTC!) loan, in a move that could be a savvy attempt to acquire Rhodium assets. Turning to the ASIC market, bitcoin miner prices are down – a lot – and Bitmain could have a hand in the sluggish demand given how quickly it is releasing new versions of the S21. For a bit of lighthearted news, the gu...
Sep 06, 2024•39 min
Before 2023, most folks probably associated AI with the far-off dystopias of The Terminator , The Matrix , or other depictions in pop culture. Now, AI is permeating every corner of our culture and economy as applications like Chat-GPT have taken a place alongside Google as the habitual tools of the internet’s citizenry. At the core of all of these applications – as with every facet of the Internet – is computing power, and bitcoin miners are betting big on becoming key producers of this compute....
Sep 05, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! This week we are joined by Brandon Bailey (a.k.a. Bitcoin Beezy), a co-founder of Second Gate advisory and a former VP of mining at Galaxy Digital, to discuss his recent research note on Bitdeer. He argues that the public miner, which is sometimes overlooked for some combination of language barriers and the team’s geographic distance from North America, is massively undervalued. He digs into Bitdeer’s bitcoin mining business and its burgeoning ASIC miner manufactu...
Sep 03, 2024•54 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Blockspace broke news this weekend that Texas-based bitcoin miner Rhodium is going bankrupt, and we follow up in today’s show about what we do and don’t know regarding the incipient restructuring. As Rhodium starts restructuring its debt, other bitcoin miners have been expanding, with mergers and acquisitions becoming the second hottest trend this summer in the mining sector. The hottest trend, though, is AI, and we’ve got the straight skinny on how public bitcoin...
Aug 30, 2024•33 min
Welcome back to the show! We’re sitting down with film maker and documentarian Alana Mediavilla to discuss her new film “Dirty Coin,” which premiered on the Bitcoin Halving this year and will go to market in late 2024! In this sit-down interview at Bitcoin Nashville, we discuss film work in Bitcoin, various locations filmed and the stories behind them and how Bitcoin mining is the “hands and feet” of Bitcoin compared to the ‘Number Go Up’ strategy most people consider. If you enjoyed the show, k...
Aug 27, 2024•45 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! On Thursday, Bitcoin transaction fees soared to their highest levels since April, but it has nothing to do with runes or inscriptions. This go around, it was all thanks to the launch of Babylon Chain, a new off-chain BTC staking platform. We also tackle Bitfarms’ merger with Stronghold and what it could mean (or not mean) for Riot’s ongoing attempt at a hostile share takeover of Bitfarms. Finally, we close on the latest Q2 figures and operational updates from publ...
Aug 23, 2024•37 min
Welcome back to the show! This week, we’re joined by ‘The Coin Dad,’ one of the familiar faces around Bitcoin mining conferences (and mines!) with an extensive history in the small, young sector. The Coin Dad takes us through his personal life–including an overseas deployment to the Middle East–to his time entering Bitcoin mining, including deploying tens of thousands of machines for some of the largest mining companies and fabricating entire container designs. We fininish with a conversation ab...
Aug 20, 2024•51 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! How much have public miners raised since Q2? A lot – like, $2.2 billion kind of a lot. The majority of this liquidity flows from at-the-market (and other) stock offerings in Q2, while a handful of miners have also turned toward convertible notes for financing in Q3. In addition to that news, we also cover a story that Blockspace broke regarding CleanSpark’s desire to launch its own mining pool, and we finish the feel good underdog story that yes, solo miners are s...
Aug 16, 2024•30 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! This week we are joined by Zach Bradford, CEO of Cleanspark, to discuss Cleanspark’s exlplosive 2024 growth. From purchasing peer miner Griid to new sites in multiple states, Bradford goes through Cleanspark’s last twelve months, why the company is focused on Bitcoin and Bitcoin only, why Cleanspark is focused on building in the US (but maybe not forever!), comparative strategies like MARA’s new HODL and possibly some tech developments worth listening to the end o...
Aug 13, 2024•41 min
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! This week we’re in studio talking about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining news! Colin Harper, our new Editor-in-Chief, walks us through important updates including mining revenue bottoming to historic lows, Iris Energy (IRENE) struggling after a failed hedging strategy this summer in Texas, a flopped narrative violation on China banning (or not banning, depending on the quality of your research) Bitcoin mining and Paraguay trying to bring more Bitcoin mining down south! ...
Aug 09, 2024•35 min
