Rob Warren is Head of Research and Education at Bitcoin Park and the author of The Bitcoin Miners Almanac. He brings a unique ability to explain the economic incentives of bitcoin mining in a way that makes sense across industries and expertise. In this episode, Rob joins The Bitcoin Frontier to share how bitcoin’s incentive structure creates resilience, why mining is misunderstood but critical, and how energy markets and bitcoin naturally align. We dig into the history of mining and the difficulty adjustment, the realities of mining pools and decentralization, and the surprising ways bitcoin miners are accelerating global electrification.
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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro & Rob’s role at Bitcoin Park
2:30 – From home mining experiments to Riot Platforms and Bitcoin Park
5:00 – Why Rob wrote The Bitcoin Miners Almanac
8:10 – The three essentials of mining: energy, cooling, and connectivity
9:30 – The brilliance of the difficulty adjustment
13:00 – Satoshi’s hard cap and why it broke economic orthodoxy
20:30 – How incentives keep miners aligned, even without ideology
24:00 – The “security budget” debate and what it misses
29:00 – Mining economics: liabilities, waste energy, and heat as an asset
31:00 – Flare gas, hydro, and turning liabilities into profitable inputs
37:00 – Gridless and bitcoin’s role in electrifying rural Africa
43:00 – AI superclusters and their overlap with bitcoin mining
49:00 – The history of mining pools and how Slush solved variance
56:00 – Difficulty, shares, and how pools account for work
1:02:00 – Centralization risks, hidden white-labeling, and Ocean’s model
1:11:00 – Bitcoin’s anti-fragility and the long-tail theory
1:18:00 – Adoption as a 140-year game, not a 5-year scheme
1:21:40 – Where to find Rob and upcoming Bitcoin Park summits
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