087. Heat, Hash, and Hardware Freedom: Live at Bitcoin Park

Live from Bitcoin Park in Nashville during the Bitcoin Custody & Treasury Summit week, we sat down with Skot, Ryan, and Tyler for a deeply technical, candid, and fun conversation about open-source Bitcoin mining. We covered the buzz around the Park, the upcoming ImagineIF conference, and why decentralizing mining hardware, firmware, and pools matters for freedom tech and real-world heat-reuse applications. From hot-tub hash heaters and floor warming to tobacco curing with miner heat, we dug into the practical uses that demand configurability manufacturers don’t provide.

We traced the journey from reverse‑engineering legacy Antminer chips to today’s open-source Ember One and Bitaxe platforms, discussed the new Mujina firmware architecture, PMBus power monitoring, safety protections, and how USB-connected hashboards (Proto’s approach) reshape maintenance and scalability. We also explored speeding up IBD on Raspberry Pi via hardware crypto acceleration, the pain of buying miners through gray channels, why fans, power supplies, and idle power states must be user-controlled, and the push for auditable pool share accounting via Hydra Pool, Datum/Ocean compatibility efforts, and P2Pool-style accountability. If you care about open, modular, repairable, and verifiable mining at home or in the field this one’s for you.