Show Notes
***"Our little home controller, building controller, it knows our electric rate, it knows the way that electric rate changes based on the time of day. It knows the PV flux, the solar flux from the solar panels. So it knows if there's excess power that the building's not using.
It also knows our natural gas rate. It also knows the Bitcoin price and the network difficulty. This is all just in our software.
And in real time, our building can choose, it can flip between heating with gas or with hashrate to save you the most money."***
~ Tyler Stevens
I am constantly shocked by how much of our everyday infrastructure is basically begging for a Bitcoin upgrade. Almost half of the world's energy is used for heat, and a quarter of it is just "comfort heat" to keep our homes and water warm. What if we generated all of that with bitcoin miners instead?
I sat down with Tyler Stevens, a former aerospace thermal engineer who is currently helping spearhead the Hashrate Heatpunks movement. I’ve been running my own hacky miner-heater setup downstairs to survive the winter, but Tyler and the guys at the 256 Foundation are taking this to an entirely different scale. We talked about stripping away our reliance on monopolistic giants like Bitmain and finally building a fully open-source mining stack.
The stakes here are high. If even a fraction of normal households swap their standard electric heating elements for ASIC chips, we're looking at a huge decentralization shift for the grid and an explosion in Bitcoin's security budget. We also get into the reality of sovereign smart homes, avoiding creepy cloud-connected thermostats, and why the "energy waste" critics are entirely blind to how thermodynamics actually works. This was an incredibly fun conversation and it proves we are still incredibly early to what home mining will eventually look like.
Guest Links
Tyler on X (Link: https://twitter.com/tylerkstevens)
Exergy's Website (Link: https://exergyheat.com/)
256 Foundation's Website (Link: https://www.256foundation.org/)
Hashrate Heatpunks' Website (Link: https://heatpunks.org/)
The Space's Website (Link: https://denver.space/)
Affiliate Links
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(Under construction) Check out the list of products and services I use and recommend on BitcoinAudible.com (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
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In this Take, I break down why the biggest AI labs, while deeply unprofitable sitting on massive future compute obligations, are racing toward trillion-dollar valuations. I explore how open-source competition, especially from China, is crushing their moat, and why that pushes them toward lobbying for fear-driven regulation, immunity, and government partnerships. Ultimately, I argue that the AI panic is about preserving a failing business model and building a centralized surveillance infrastructure, and why we shouldn’t be the ones paying their bill.
***"The dollar is going to continue to lose purchasing power. Bitcoin is going to continue to gain purchasing power. It's going to keep on happening over the rest of the century. We will at some point have enough people that have most of their wealth in bitcoin that they don't have anything else to spend and they will start to spend their bitcoin. And when they start to encounter more people like them on the other side of the transaction, they will no longer convert to some other currency on the merchant side for that transaction."