On this week’s episode we speak to Josiah Spackman who started mining BTC in late 2013. He moved on to mining LTC, DGB and DOGE. Josiah sold his house in early 2017 to start a GPU mining farm and eventually learned how to scale it. He worked on the Odocrypt FPGA and is a driving force behind ProgPoW and RandomX implementations for DigiByte.
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Transcription
Bitcoin at 9,100 again, again, all night tonight. So welcome everybody to the 13th episode of crypto mining tools podcast. Today we have Josiah Spackman of the the Digibyte foundation. Right.
Did you mind teams? So technically, technically I run a business myself called Digibyte foundation in New Zealand. But technically, yeah, just Digibyte.
All right, we’ve got Josiah from Digibyte. Yeah. All right. And we got, we got Ethan, our co-host here. Hey everybody. I’m here.
So I’ve known about Digibyte for quite some time. I mean, gosh, at least three years. And I would like to, I would like to ask you this question, tell me something I wouldn’t know about Digibyte, tell me some, some knowledge about Digibyte that everybody would know.
Like insider trading knowledge or no, no, no, no, not, not anything like that, but maybe, maybe a funny story from its origins. Like, you know, something that only you would know and your experience.
There are definitely some things that I can say and there’s definitely some other things that I, that I wouldn’t say not because it’s, like security or risk or anything like that, but just because it’s probably not my place to say. Why didn’t I tell you something then perhaps about this back in the day are you familiar with mine for mud?
No, Vermont was one of the original reasons that I actually found out about, Digibyte myself was because it was like philanthropic, I suppose. And so it basically, Jared Tate knew some people that were affected by, I think it was the Washington mudslides. And in order to try and raise some money for them, he got together with Bitcoin people and doge coin people as well as did you might mining pools. And they raised a whole bunch of money that they were then able to donate to a particular entity to go towards relief for the families of Washington mudslide victims. That was back in Oh, February, 2014. And that was actually how I heard about did you buy it was through that kind of a philanthropic venture I suppose. Okay. That is definitely something that I, I’ve never, I would never know about Digibyte. And that’s a really awesome story of, of how you got into it. Can you give us some more information as to, you know, there’s so many different altcoins out there. What, you know, what separates, did you buy it in your mind, you know, from your perspective other than it’s altruistic, there are some other coins. Yeah. And do you consider it?
Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately if actually say so. Okay. Let’s, let’s go back a little bit. How, how much have you kind of followed Bitcoin cash in terms of what Roger Ver was about when they were, they were going through the forks and things like that?
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, there’s, there’s basically two versions. There’s Bitcoin Cash, ABC, and then there’s Bitcoin Cash SV. And I forget what the ABC stands for. I know SV supposedly stands for Satoshi’s vision, which if Craig Wright who claims claims to be Satoshi is, it’s purely his vision. And I suppose in those regards it’s absolutely on point. It’s correct vision, right?
Call it like iMovie from my vision, like this is well so, so yes, yes it is. I was still considered as an altcoin, but ironically back in the day what he did was he put up like a spreadsheet and he’s like, this is what I would classify as Bitcoin. It must have like one CPU, one vote and low fees, peer-to-peer cash. And he listed out all of these things. They weighted them against each other. I went back and I added Digibyte to the list as well, just to be a like a smartass, why not? And we came out on top. Whereas when you weighted it all of a sudden be cash gets pushed all the way down. So I think Bitcoin was like 5% Bitcoin cash was like 30% and Digi byte was 65% of the waiting metrics. So I was like, we’re Bitcoin, we’re not, I’m not calling any more big coins. But no, no. So I still consider us an altcoin and, and I’m sorry I’ve forgotten the first half of that question there. The important part. Ethan’s question.
Yeah. I just wanted you to explain to our audience, you know, what you feel separates, did you buy a apart from I guess the spectrum of coins we’ll just say, right.
Well I mean that’s if everybody willingly knowing it or not starts off comparing themselves against Bitcoin and basically because they are effectively the de facto standard. You even measure your currency in it based in snowshoes for the most part. We might be 80 Satoshis for example. And that’s how the value is measured. Not in us dollars for the most part, but what sets us apart, I suppose a whole lot of things and one of them is going to be the focus on security. But I think a lot of that comes down to the mining aspect and the forward thinking nature. And this is obviously something that is not just appealing both to the developers who are involved, but also to the community as well because they’ve almost grown to expect this kind of thing. So for example, we’re looking at Schnorr signatures, taproot at the moment, things like that.
Especially now there are [inaudible] even if Bitcoin doesn’t implement them because they have their own reasons, right? Same for with genuine, we have this amazing technology that an independent party has come out with NIF put together a whole research paper and all this suite of information and they’ve gone here, Bitcoin, how awesome is this? You can protect the cinder IP addresses and things like that. If people with a more than reasonable degree of certainty have it and Bitcoin is going on, it’s going to miss with RBF. So sorry. No, thank you. We’re we’re, whereas we’re like, yes, this is for thinking, this is security, this is us in a nutshell. Implemented, done. So, and that was, that was implemented a year ago now. 18 months. Yeah. And that’s, that is what separates us from a lot of these other projects is both the focus on security as well as the, it sounds really cliche, like the true embodiment of de-centralization, like none of these other like cutting corners that you see a lot of people doing in the name of decentralization. Like we’re, we’re mostly de-centralized but we’re run on 20 validator nodes. We’re mostly decentralized, but yeah. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. So I like to think at least, I mean, no, obviously I’m pretty biased. I’m here representing did you buy six anniversary t-shirt? That we are the embodiment of that kind of a spirit. So, yeah.
so, so would you say it’s, it’s fair to say that, you know, there’s less politics and bureaucracy than with, you know, the stable out there. You know, that, that you guys are kind of purest in the sense that you are trying to create the best currency, the best virtual currency, you know, by, you know, adopting all of these different and latest and greatest ideas and strategies and technologies.
Yes and no. So I think a lot of people immediately presume that you are a blockchain. You’re going to compete with Bitcoin. Now I’m not going to go so far as the really shitty cliche of we are silver to the gold, like I hate that. I think it’s terrible. I think that Bitcoin and in all of itself, I think if people want to be able to run their own node, you need to maintain 10 minute block timings with one megabyte blocks or even go as far as Luke dash junior and reduce it to 300 kilobytes. It sounds mad, but if that’s what you want, then that’s what you might have to do. Whereas we’re not so much just about the having the ultimate proof of work for you to be able to do $100 billion transaction for an $80 fee. You know, that kind of thing.
But to be able to use, did you buy it more for digital assets, for example, which is why we’re called Digibyte for a bite of information rather than Digi coin being just as a currency. Sure we can be a currency and I pay people on the regular, I send money around the world and things with Digibyte, but we’re not going to so much pigeonhole ourselves down that pathway, you know, and go, we are, we’re just a currency. We’re just a coin. And that’s all that we can do when there are so much more really freaking cool uses for block-chain. So, yeah, I think, I think absolutely. I, I, I foresee a future like 2030 years from now where Bitcoin is still out there, we might even also have BSV with their gig and blocks for all I know, like fucking try. Why not? Sure.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. It’s, it is kind of a, you know, it’s, it’s an ecosystem that’s starting to create itself and things are going to either survive and find their place and, and fit well in that ecosystem or they’re going to die and weather out. And so I agree. Like who are we to try to stop, you know, one person from, from trying to be a part of that. I don’t, I don’t think there’s like a right or wrong, you know, just if it doesn’t work it won’t.
Yeah. Well rock and a hard place though because on the one hand, yes, I want to see, I want to see 300 kilobyte blocks. I actually think that would be amazing. I think that’d be really cool because then everybody, you buy yourself a one terabyte hard drive or it’s SD because hard drives are always gone. Right, but but you and then you run your own node and you can run it for forever off a raspberry PI and then we have literally the polar opposite of gigging mega blocks where, what are they actually I think it’s like it’s a hard cap of two gigs in a soft cap of 500 mics. Give or take. Yeah, polar opposite. I’m not a fan of all these like minor tinkering around the edges. Like we’ll, we’ll have a equipment coin for example with just to change hashing algorithm that’s kind of pointless and I want to personally see either things like flourish and succeed or let’s just die really quickly. Like sure. Great. And improve really rapidly and see how well this, let’s let the chips fall as they may. Why not? But at the same time, I also worry this is people’s money on the line for the most part. Sure. People buy into it goes to zero. That sucks. That leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I hate that. But so, what kind of people right now are mining Digibyte? Or is it a lot of institutional, you know, large farms, small home miners?
So have at the moment, a lot of it. So because we have our five different mining algorithms, we have SHA256, we have eScript, we have equipment, we have skin, and we have Odo crypt, our own in house development algorithm for FPGA mining. We’ve, we’ve got a decent variety here. We want to improve. That’s the problem is that at the moment we look at it and we go, this could be bitter. We know it could be bitter. It was, yeah. Basically it could be bitter. And I suppose this is part of the forward thinking nature of striving for that bitter mint. So what we’re looking to do is we’re looking at replacing SHA256 probably and Qubit is almost a guaranteed I think throughout the community and even with the miners and the mining pools I’ve spoken with, the support for that is almost universal and I mean this is obviously very anecdotal because we don’t have any kind of say or if we do a Twitter poll, it’s obviously very limited to Twitter and not, you know, our Chinese miners for example who use Weebo for so but it’s almost universal.
Prague power’s the way to go. Bring back GPU mining, allow mining farms as well as the home user to basically just sign up, fire up a minor and get going. We’re looking at random mix. There is other work looking at staking in the likes as well. So I don’t know his word. That’ll go really excited to see what happens over this year though. Okay.
We have a user here, a crypto Nando says, is there more activity from specific countries than others, or is there a better adoption? Hey, we know who it is.
In terms of, I mean, so it’s, we’re, we’re, we’re specifically mining, but in terms of actual, broader use, oddly enough, there’s actually a huge support around Europe. We have a lot of support from FPGA for example, in China. Black minor makes some amazing FPGA and, and as part of that, they have really gotten their ear to the ground there in China and they constantly send us back messages, or at least me through telegram and some of the other people and basically say, look, there’s actually a huge growing amount of support in China for Ditu by, and same for even in Japan. They, they basically say, yeah, like it’s, it’s very, very rapidly growing. Like the kind of the fervor with it. We have a lot of both mining and general nodes and transactions and on top of services happening in Europe. So, funnily enough, I mean America’s probably then our third, third place, but poor little old New Zealand in Australia down here in the corner of the globe. It’s not quite as popular as I’d like it to be, but yeah. Yeah, very, very broad, very broad distribution. Even in Venezuela where we were recently helping out there and we again, back to philanthropic work. Yeah. Like, like everywhere. It’s great. It’s so encouraging to see.
Yeah. I’m curious, tell me a little bit more about mining in New Zealand. What kind of challenge, like does mining even happen? Is it, is, is it even a worthwhile venture? And if people are doing it there, how are they doing it?
Ah, so I actually, I originally took my, when I sold a house that I had a few years back, this was an early 2017, ended up having a very small amount of money because unfortunately it was a bad investment. Didn’t go too well for me. What can you do? But I bought a truckload of GTX 1060s. I got into the GPU mining. I was like, yeah, this is going to be right. It was and was not you know, I pay for my honeymoon and a pay for my wedding, so I can’t, yeah, it was so worked out in that aspect. The mining, if you are starting off as like just a home user for example, power pirates is over here, can both be insanely cheap and insanely expensive. So it compared to a us dollar amount, I pay an average of, what are we talking 12 cents US for my power, a hundred percent renewable through solar and wind, which is pretty cool.
So I’m, I know though that if I look at my brother, he’s currently paying 18 or 19 us cents per kilowatt for power, so he’s not going to have a good time if it fires up and GTX 1080 and then leaves that mining 24/7. That’s not like a rule for him at all. So yeah. Yeah. But, but there is actually a staunch amount of people here, potentially even more so in Australia because we have our different climate. It’s not always like deathly hot over here. So we have a bit of GPU and a ASIC mining. Not so much FPGAs there’s simply not enough, like four and a half million of us. There’s not enough for a large volume of FPGAs to come into the country. So it is predominantly GPU or a ASIC mining.
Okay, that’s fantastic. I’d like to take this moment right here to do a shout out to Novablock. Our sponsor, they came to North America, I think it’s August of 2019 and in this short time, just between then and now, they’re now one of the top fine mining pools in the world. They believe in transparency and they think that as you know, the hash rate from China is going to shift over to North America. They want to be a big part of that and they want you to be a big part of that too. So go to Novablock and check them out and Scott will give you the details on how to get a great rate.
Yeah, yeah. So when you sign up, make sure you use the invitation code offered, 18OFFORD and that will give you a reduction in your pool fees down to 1.8%. So awesome. Let’s get back to Josiah. So yeah, just say what questions do you have for us?
Oh, that’s right. In terms of mining, what are your thoughts around around these? Well, let’s do a two pronged question here. So around these larger polls and things that have, or much mining capital behind them, the hash rate as well. And then what are your thoughts on what’s going on with the, I don’t really want to call it a hostile takeover, but it is almost a hostile taker of BCH mining with their threats to start orphaning off blocks.
Good questions. Yeah. So I’ll let Scott go first. There’s obviously a lot of, like you’re saying, a lot of capital, you’re talking about different organizations or people with a lot of money that might have a lot of sway over how things go. Is that kind of what you’re talking about?
Yeah. Well, I mean it is, yeah, because it is centralized. Is there any danger of a, like we saw with CZ basically come out last year when they lost like $40 million going, let’s just rewrite the blockchain and some back of the napkin math. Even with a 12 hour head start, if he’d taken the top three pools at the time, he would’ve been able to roll it back in. I think it was like five or six days. If they, if they went back and started redoing it and those pools who did it would be up a metric truckload from the transaction fees and the Coinbase rewards or, yeah. What are your thoughts around the vulnerabilities there? Yeah,
yeah. I mean that’s, that’s definitely interesting, to bring up, you know, I know right now, BCH they’re talking about, there’s some conversation about, you know what, what does it, the 12.5%, you know, and that, that’s supposedly what’s, what’s the word for it? Not a conglomerate, but like the mafia behind a BCH. I can’t think of the right word but, but yeah, it’s, it’s definitely interesting to, to think about that. You know, what do you think Ethan?
Well, I mean it just seems to me from my perspective, you know, looking at this, that it’s cryptocurrency in general is becoming more and more difficult for your, your average and everyday person to get into it. I think there are some, some really heavy hitters that are into it now and it’s, it’s now just a race. It’s a game of go big or go home and everybody is kind of in this arms race of spending money and, and kind of hedging bets against each other. And, you know, it’s too early to tell how that’s going to happen. I mean, there are some clear possibilities, you know, one is, you know, somebody’s going to get an advantage that no one else gets and they’re going to end up, you know, coming out on top. But you know, as I’ve explained to many, many people who are new into Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, that this is kind of a bad thing because then you become master of your own universe and once you become mastered that universe, then everything is dependent on how much everyone else trusts you.
So if no one trusts you, you might have the greatest hash power in the universe. You know, you might have 70, 80% of the hash rate, but if no one no longer trust you, they’re going to go to something more decentralized. So it’s going to be really interesting to see how all this plays out, you know, to see, you know, cause it is, it’s, it’s almost like a nuclear arms race, you know, where each side is trying to get more and more power. And you know, I think if there’s enough players that can come into the situation where they can kind of divide each other out. So, even though they have large chunks of the pie, if you will, they’re, they’re still kind of enough at, at odds with each other to keep it decentralized enough to keep that trust. The worst thing that I think can possibly happen is just for one, you know, huge conglomerate, and I’m not going to say their name, but we all know who they are cause they manufacture most of the miners in the world. But, but for them to kind of become, you know, emperor of the crypto universe and then nobody has any confidence anymore because they basically know that every time they’re contributing into the system, they’re just paying, you know, that one entity. And I think that would be very unhealthy for the space.
Yeah. Well, all we have to do is look at the employee vulnerability. Like that was a very real problem. What could you imagine if someone exploited that all of a sudden, poof, let’s just shut down 60, 70% of the mining. Wow. Yep. That’s not good.
Right? Yeah. It was actually exploited, wasn’t it? In some places I actually, yeah, I don’t know.
Well were weren’t they? I can’t remember more about it. Mane said that it was more of a, of a feature than a bug. It was supposed to be a feature. I mean that’s this, you then got the flip side of this as well. So it was not just that we don’t trust like the one big guy, but then if your Bitcoin cash or Bitcoin SV and you don’t have enough hash rate, you could look at slush pool alone could come along with 4% and go, we know owned BSV like sure it would cost them to do that based on the power and things like that. But they have the hash rate. It’s there.
You know, like I said, it’s, it’s a real danger, because you know, there, there, there’s power displacement power is being given into, you know, smaller and smaller entities that are controlling more and more of the power and it’s really going to be critical what they do with that power to ensure that it’s not abused. Because I’m sure as soon as any kind of abuse or scandal or corruption comes out about it, it’s going to be a tough time. For all of us.
So, just are you getting at something? Is there, is there something that that Digibyte solves?
I’m just fueling the flames. Yeah. Well, I mean because the flip side of this is like let’s say hypothetically, there is something similar to end bleed and 60 to 70% of the hash rate goes offline. That’s terrible. They still have by far the majority of the hash rate. But what are your thoughts around the idea of there then being like, especially if we did go to a 300 kilobyte block size, a kind of a, what do they call it, a despiteful for mining and things like that, given a take how many blocks? 2000 something, whatever for two weeks worth for it to then readjust as difficulty.
Yeah. I don’t know.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think you have a really valid point there is that you know and again, the way, the way things were designed is it was really designed to go in one direction, you know, and it was designed, you know, to incrementally, you know, handle or, or compensate in one direction. It really wasn’t designed very well. Backtrack. And so it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens in that and you know, to that degree, that’s why I’m glad we have no alternate coins that, you know, these heavy hitters, the big players, the main players throwing all this energy, all this resource, you know, in into one or two things. You know, hoping hopefully to do something responsible with their end game. If they don’t, we do have fallbacks. You know, we do have fallbacks and that’s, that’s a good thing. And so it’s going to be really interesting to see how that plays out.
I’m really, what? What’s what? I’m excited partially because I’m sitting on the sidelines here, you know, with with, with my marshmallow is ready and waiting to to roast it over the campfires that where to see what happens come the next having when we’re dropping down the number of BTC and the amount, I mean I’m well aware at the moment I think what’s, what’s the average block reward based on like transaction fees? It’s like one point is the 1.3 1.6 Bitcoin. It’s decent.
Really the block reward right now is 12 and a half Bitcoin.
Oh sorry. I mean for the, for transaction fees. Oh for transactional fees. I don’t know. Right off the top of my head. So let’s, let’s say we’ll, we’ll, we’ll play with some round math here and say it’s 10% that’s not too bad. We are then going to have, and so we’re going to go from 12 and a half down to 6.25 now all of a sudden your coin a, sorry, your Coinbase fees are going down while your transaction fees are going up and up. You know, and I’m really excited to see the point and it’s probably not going to be any time over the next four years for example, but we are transaction fees go up over the Coinbase fees. I think that’s kind of that like I’m excited about that. Is that going to cause problems with mining though, given that all of a sudden now instead of XYZ, millions of dollars per day flooding into Bitcoin as they are minted that’s now going to be harmed. Yup. Yup. That could be, that could be really interesting to watch unfold like the, you know, six to eight weeks, especially following a having yeah, that could be really juicy. [inaudible]
yeah, I think it’s definitely dependent on adoption, you know, there, there has to be more transactions. There have to be more people using it and that, that demand really does have to be there. So I think there’s a lot of companies working really hard on producing more use cases, more, you know, more things to make Bitcoin more widely used, used in general.
I just got an email today. You know, I used to be in an it company before I became partners with Scott here and they were asking me if I could install Bitcoin machines around this area, Bitcoin ATM machines around this area. And I was looking at their spreadsheet and literally, within I guess 150 mile radius of, I live in Cincinnati, but 150 mile radius of where I live, there were over 300 machines they want to install on various places. And I think it’s putting an infrastructure like that that’s going to be a critical component to the adoption. I was just in the Quickie Mart, I think two days ago and I saw a guy that was actually at the beach, the Bitcoin ATM at that Quickie Mart. And I went over and I just kind of asked him because I had never used it. And the first thing that I notice is that they were charging $1,000 over Bitcoin was worth. And so I had to go into the whole spiel like, you know, here’s going base, here’s what you can actually buy a Bitcoin for. And then on the screen in big letters, it was like $1,000 more. I was like, you’re paying way too much. And then I gave him the card and I said, Hey, if you want to learn how to make Bitcoin, you know, cheap, let me know. Let me and Scott will take care of you.
Just say I want to talk to you a little bit more about FPGA and, and Prague POW. But before that I just want to talk a little bit about my disrupt. Yes. Yeah. I’m so pumped for this. So I just got back from Miami for January conference and I love Miami. Miami was awesome except for all the homeless people that were like rushing at me all the time. If you can avoid them, then Miami is great, but I’m so excited to go back. What is it? July, right. July of this year we’re going to go back. Scott and I are both going to be there and we’re going to be at the money disrupt Miami and we’re going to have our own booth and we’re going to be doing really cool and amazing things, hopefully things that have not been done at this conference before because we want to make it kind of our, our premiere, you know, get together for everybody in the mining industry. It is called mining disrupt for a reason. So we hope that all you minors, anybody that’s even curious about mining come here attended. You will not be disappointed.
Yeah, it’s going to be crazy. Last year, I went there and I had a little booth, this year we have, you know, two or three times the amount of space. But yeah, all of my customers and all of my competitors, everybody, everybody was there that I wanted to be talking with in this space. So yeah, July 22nd to 23rd, we’ll be there. You can meet us in person and we’d love to have you. But yeah, so anyway, if you use this special link that we have here on, let me see. There it is there. Okay. to.tools/mining-disrupt, you get 10% off of your ticket price if you use that score. So yeah. Awesome stuff. All right, so Josiah, why don’t you tell us a little bit about more about yourself and more about FPGA and Prague POW and whatnot.
So, so we, last year in 2020, 19, I should know this, we, we implemented Odor crypt, which is an FPGA friendly mining algorithm. The idea being that we’ve got a certain hardware types that can take advantage of certain mining algorithms and things like that. The idea with odor crypto is that we want to be as close to a, a slick as possible and then just dial it back just a little bit so that you can then only mine it on an FPGA to utilize effectively that type of hardware. So we still, we’re not going completely anti-ASIC. We’ve still got the likes of SHA256 script and the likes which are amenable using an ASIC. That’s cool. There’s merit to keeping those there. There’s also a lot of merit to these additional OnRamps. Say for example, with GPU mining, and this is something I think back in the day especially really helped Bitcoin to take off a lot in popularity was the idea that you could see view minor, you just fired up your known and that was, that was literally, you just fire it up in a way she goes. So, so to have that kind of thing back is a really great way to onboard users. And I think that’s something that a theory in themselves have capitalized on greatly. Like really, really well. You want to mind most people hear about mining Ethereum to start with using their GPU. That’s, that’s certainly the way it is now, unfortunately. Yeah. There are now a six on the Ethereum, it hash mining algorithm.
Are they going to change the prog pow? Should they though? Even before staking, I would argue yes. Like that was their initial, I think Christy Manahan has talked about this as their social contract that they have with your users. You mine ETH with your graphics card. We make ETH so you can mind it with your graphics card. Then you can no longer do it while do we need to then dial it back so you can or do we simply benefit from the additional security, the ASICs. I don’t have the answer for a theory but for Digibyte I think, yeah, hell yeah. We want an algorithm like that would you can mind on your PC, you can certainly say to a friend, do you want to get into booster? Yeah. Rather than going to a Bitcoin ATM and paying $1,000 above market price, which is what, 15% over in the bar, go mine that shit at home.
Just sit down for a little bit, go to you know mine that crypto currency.com download a one-click miner and away you go. Sure. You’re only going to be making like one or two bucks worth a day on your graphics card. Especially if it’s like an older generation. But that’s cool. And you’re not paying way above the market rates. You’re getting into these what are effectively clean coins. So there’s that fungibility with them. There’s a whole lot of benefits. You don’t have to go through KYC or AML. The permission-less nature plays into an all of these huge list of benefits. I think that’s really cool. I think that’s something that I miss a lot about Bitcoin. I started mining originally in 2014 with two 290X graphics cards. Unfortunate. It was right as butterfly labs were shipping orders and things, what few they did ship. So I made over the course of like a week, I’m at like 0.1 of a Bitcoin or something and I left it. I actually left it on the mining and forgot about it until like three or four years later. I was just like, it’s two bucks worth the waste. Why would I bother doing that? Right. Like, Oh 0.1 Bitcoin now.
Yeah. Yeah. I’ll, I’ll take, you know, half a Bitcoin every six weeks. Yeah. Could you imagine going back to that? Like with, with just the power cost of a GPU? Oh man, I’m all in. Yeah.
Well those things were, were freaking energy like whores. It was 250 Watts times two of them. So 500 was 24/7 but whatever, whatever. It was great fun. And that’s how I got into it was through that mining. I can’t do that with Bitcoin now. I’m not, I’m not willing to go out and what’s, what’s the S17+ go for these days?
We have a special price.
Like what? Like I, I genuinely don’t know.
I mean I I think, I think realistically, yeah, I think realistically US 2000 is fair. Yeah.
2000 was still not too bad given that that’s roughly what me buying two brand new GPU is cost. So in fairness 2000 bucks is actually still pretty damn affordable. Yeah. Where am I going to kill you though? Is, is your power like you can’t, like you can run those GPU is just, you know, in your office at home. Like you don’t have to create special wiring or infrastructure or any kind of PDU or anything like that to run them before. That shit’s not fun. Yeah. Now with the S17s, you’re going to have to do something like that. You’re going to have to do something to that effect. So what, what’s the, the power drawn with the S17s. That’s a few thousand isn’t it? It’s like 20 to nine, something like that split split between two cables. Yeah. Split between two cables. That’s impressive. Yeah. That’s like most multi boards at 2000 Watts are going to go. No. Yeah.
But, but yeah. So, okay. Yeah. Two, two, nine 20 Watts. I’m just looking at up 29 or 20. I had it reversed there. That’s, that’s, that’s, yeah. I mean that’s pretty decent. In New Zealand, most most house wiring I think is, what are we talking like 20 amps, give or take, so you can still run a few of them. I, I remember scaling up my graphics cards when I bought a hundred GTX 1060s and I couldn’t even handle half of that on my home wiring and things popping left. Right. And center and Donna, we’ve lost power in the living room again. I’ll go flip the switch on off one of them. But that, like at that kind of a price, it’s still appealing. Right? Like so, so what brands, not bad. You can still go out and do it. You’ve gotta be dedicated though.
It’s not the sort of thing that you’d want to go and try. Like on a whim, if you’ve never done it before, you’re not, you’re not going to go, I’m going to go and invest $2,000 in this just to have a crack at mining. Whereas if it’s a graphics card, I’m an enthusiast. I play a bit of video games, you know, computer 12 months ago that has a, you know, a GTX 1660 or something in it, you know, or I do video rendering and make podcasts. Exactly. That’s, I mean, that’s what I’m trying to tell my wife. I’m like, I’ve got a 10 ADTI on here, honey, but that 2080TI, I really need that. So I can do this in 4K at 60 FPS in real time. Right. I have to honey, I promise. Like, no, I don’t, I don’t think it’s a business expense. Business expense. Yeah. She knows better than that. Unfortunately. I think I’ve used that line one too many times. But, but that’s the thing, right? You can still, you can game on it. You can do video way to team. You can game on it again.
But, but so for a lot of people though, your computer has one already. So the barrier to entry is the smallest it’s likely to be, unless you’re talking about CPU mining with randoms. This is where I’m really excited about random mix. The requirements to actually run the mining software in and of itself uses over two gigs of Ram. So you’re immediately gonna knock off all of the attempts at doing it on IOT devices, which traditionally have sub five, 12 megs worth of Ram. If you do happen to get infected on those smaller pieces that let’s say have four gigs of Ram, you’re getting like your PC is going to come to a crawl pretty much instantly and you’re going to know about it. So there’s, there’s definitely concerns around obviously what happened with botnets, like vert Klein with their Libre to Ari version, like the original version that’s obviously less than ideal, but with what they’ve done with random X and it’s been independently verified, I think they’ve had four different audits and things which came back with a lot of good productive feedback. The idea is that yes, you, you should be able to CPU mine to tweak it enough. If another generation comes out like AMD are killing it with their three refers and things like that at the moment. Rising series four I think is coming out. It’s four isn’t it? Yeah. Fourth gen and things like that. So that will stay CPU minimal or at the very least have minor tweaks required.
I, I’m so excited for that lower barrier to entry. And I think it’s a really beautiful way for us to get more people into the cryptocurrency. Go hear some stuff. Get started. Give it a whirl. Yes. Number. Go up real slowly. So what you, you get a dollar’s worth a day. You get 50 cents a day. You didn’t have to do anything. You were sleeping in the other room while your computer was working away, making you money. It printed you money, you slept, you woke up, you’ve got to borrow money. Yes. Everybody wants that.
Definitely. Hey, so yeah, we’re gonna end the podcast here. But before we do that on right printing, printing free money, why don’t you tell us, how people can get a hold of you and where they can find you online?
Yeah. Cool. So if you want to catch up with me, I’m on Twitter at DGB underscore, chilling. I’m on telegram, chilling, underscore, silence or otherwise. Go check out the likes of, Digibyte.io and DGB wiki.com for example, and have Digibytewallets.com is another great resource for getting started. Go down on the wall. Let’s give it a whirl. Try it out. That really pretty, hopefully, hopefully home mining’s coming later on this year. Again, this requires consensus. We want the network to move together and not have this kind of Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin sort of scenario. We want a reorientation of the whole entire ship. We want to explain to people that this is in their best interest and show them why and prove it to them. So we don’t have this split. So yeah, we’ve got to obtain consensus, obviously, but hopefully later on this year we might have PraguePOW might even have random mixed as well. Who knows?
Awesome. All right, so anyone who hasn’t had a nosy yet, Digibyte? Give it a nosy. Yeah. Check it out. All right, man. Thank you so much for having me on your show. Really appreciate it. Take care. Bye. Bye.