100. Dismantling the Black Box: Hydra Pool, Libre Board, and a Fully Open Miner Demo

In our 100th episode, we celebrate three years of POD256 and almost two years of building the open-source Bitcoin mining stack. We share behind‑the‑scenes stories from our first Telehash block find and chart what’s coming for 2026. We walk through how the 256 Foundation allocated over $400k in grants across Ember One (open hashboard design), Libre Board (open control board), Mujina (open miner firmware), and Hydra Pool (self‑hosted pool), and how these projects are already flipping the closed “black box” mining model on its head. We dive into progress updates: Mujina running on Bitaxe Gamma, early Ember One integrations and cooling, Hydra Pool one‑command spin‑ups, plus community contributions like Stratum v2 support and Home Assistant control; and preview our plan to run Telehash #3 on a fully open stack live. We also invite miners and devs to point hashrate, contribute code, and join us at Telehash and NEMS as we turn this momentum into a product-style demo of open mining in action.

We revisit the wild Telehash night when an Apollo-powered solo pool briefly wrangled an exahash and struck block 881423 (shout-out to Megawatt!), reflect on building the 256 Foundation and this pod from the early “Hash Cast” days, and outline how anyone from heatpunks to large farms can plug into the stack. Finally, we highlight community calls to action: spin up Hydra Pool, hack on Mujina, help us evangelize at meetups and campuses, and support free and open-source mining. Last but certainly not least: Code is not crime, support the Samourai devs’ families and sign the pardon petition here: https://billandkeonne.org