Chase Blackmon is CTO and Co-Founder of Immersion Systems. After 16 years of many successful ventures, he decided to refocus his efforts away from field work and more towards his true passion, technology. Nathan Nichols is the VP & Head of Business Development at the company. During this time, Nathan has brokered multi-million dollar mining infrastructure deals, built meaningful relationships with the executives of hardware manufacturers, and advised multi-billion dollar private equity funds involved in bitcoin mining. Using this first-hand experience, Nathan created the investment thesis of becoming the lowest-cost producer in bitcoin mining. Chase & Nathan will discuss their work with immersion cooling and how this technology can reduce costs while increasing the hash rate of miners efficiently, resulting in a longer equipment life-span as well.
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1mnGeQvDlaEGX https://www.facebook.com/groups/crypto.mining.tools/permalink/559753054938667/ https://www.facebook.com/cryptominingtoolspodcast/videos/220619742540090/ https://www.facebook.com/scott.offord.milwaukee.seo/videos/10163344638130024/
Transcription
Live here. All right, everybody, show us your guns. Come on.
All right, everybody. Welcome to the crypto mining tools podcast and we’re here today with our cohost
Ethan. Hi everybody. Ethan here.
And today our special guests are chase and Nathan from emergency
Systems. What’s up guys? You guys?
Yeah, so we have a, a great episode today to bring to you and we’re going to be talking a little bit about everything, but a immersion is definitely one of the central topics. These guys are great. I met them in Texas actually and visited their facility. I don’t know, was it like maybe over a year ago and
Like early 2018? Yeah.
Yeah. I think you guys were you kind of had some immersion and some air. But you’ve definitely expanded since then and I know it’s been really exciting a year for you guys.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s been a lot, but it’s been fun. Yeah. So can you tell our audience like how, how did immersion come about? Like what’s, what’s the backstory there? You want the long version or the short version? Yes. Yeah. The short version for this podcast. It’s short version. Okay. Short version. We got hacked and the hacker, and this was like 2016, the, the hacker said, Hey, you got to pay me in Bitcoin. We didn’t know what it was. We had to figure out that that whole thing bought some on the Coinbase pay the hacker. He was a legitimate Acker and he sent us the keys to unlock all of our, like legal files and stuff. That’s a story. So that’s what I’m saying. [inaudible] We can go with this a deep rabbit hole if we can get on if you want. I’m really glad you guys got hacked. Yeah. Yeah, me too. I mean, it’s changed your life in a lot of ways and I think it’s kind of amazing that you know, something nefarious like hacking is what got you to, you know, be, you know, center stage. You guys are kind of what I consider the, the leaders in your area. So yeah, that’s a, I mean, that’s just phenomenal how somethings something negative can turn into such a positive. I know it was crazy. What was that most profitable hacking.
Yeah. So whoever that white Knight hacker is out there, thank you for getting me. But so yeah. Why don’t you first tell us a little bit about yourselves personally? You know, chase your the owner or one of the owners and then, and then Nathan. Yeah, sure. So chase Blackman, I’m 35 years old. I have a, a wife and two boys. I call them double trouble, three, three and three and seven that they’re good. But you know how boys can get when they’re locked up at home in quarantine for a couple of months. Oh yeah. Like all us boys here. Yeah. And then so my brother and I started immersion systems with our other business partner, Chris Jacobs. He’s our COO. We started that back in, Oh, I want to say emergencies. I’m started like early 2018 or late 2017. And it was just, it was just a side project while we had our, our main focus was on our, our family business black Memorial and BMS cat.
And then, yeah, that’s I’d said about me now it’s, it’s my understanding that the backstory here is, is you guys considered the, the reason why you came up with the idea of immersion is because of your location. Your location has, you know, some, some pretty hot weather. And you guys were in investigating, you know, alternative ways to regulate the temperature of these miners. And, and you know, that’s when you really considered emerging. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, but what about Nathan? You forgot about him. Nathan’s personal story. Oh, okay. Chase is more interesting anymore.
So 2017 you know, got into a theory. EUM actually my, one of my friends in college, we’ve done a lot of like trading together and stuff. And he told me that I needed to look into a theory IOM at $4, and I said that, that’s gambling. I don’t understand it. So you put in 10 grand at $4, and then I got in at $35. And so he’s a multimillionaire, tens of millions of dollars because of this. And I would, I’m upset about that for my own sake. But so I, you know, I got pretty in depth, you know, dove down the rabbit hole and started a crypto company for tax and compliance and my senior year of college, raise a couple million and then sold it a couple of years later. Then I joined a company that did B2B under the exact same thing, but basically it was businesses instead of consumers.
So that was called blocks. Phenomenal company. Chasing Cameron was a client because I explored the mining vertical. I thought it was the most tangible, real use case for the product and for that. And then I just got obsessed with mine and I was like, there’s all these inefficiencies. And like, there’s so many ways to control these inputs that can make it super profitable. We, you know, I, I just really loved it. And then Jason came and were like, Oh, well, you know, we’re exiting from our company. And actually at the time they didn’t even tell me that yet. They were just like, Hey are, you know, are you interested in really going into mining? And I was like yeah I am. So, you know, we had a couple drinks and talked down at mining disrupt and you know, just hit it off culturally and backgrounds and all that stuff. And you know, we just kind of hit the ground. Moved to Texas. Yeah.
My name disrupt. Yeah. That’s a, it’s a great place to meet people
For sure. Yeah that was kind of like a pivotal time for us to have done it disrupt cause we were in serious negotiations to sell, to sell BMS and Kim and I were kind of in this place where like, well you know, I’m not really sure if we want to like do immersion system does a business. So we didn’t know if there was, the market was going to be very accepting of it. Cause I’m sure you all know the stigma about immersion has been it’s too expensive and or it doesn’t work or whatever. And so we were going to have to try to change this sentiment about the, what do we do as a business, you know, really give it a go before people would even start to take it seriously and said, ah, I don’t know if I want to do that or not.
But sure enough like disrupt, Oh, sorry. Disrupt, disrupt was rotted. It obeys his commands. Sorry, wifey. I love you. I’ll call you back in a minute. But at mining disrupt, that’s when, you know, we, we didn’t have a booth, we didn’t really do anything. We just kind of walked around and talked to people and shook hands and handed out cards. And that’s where we saw a ton of interest from, from, from people. I think it was like the last night of we were like up on the rooftop kind of bar thing or whatever. There was literally a line of people like waiting to talk to us. We were like, okay, maybe, maybe this is actually a business we can do something with.
Hey, I, I remember that day very clearly. That’s, that’s the day when my blood sugar crashed and I was, I was getting real mad at people. And if we go back to that episode where we had crypto Nando on our podcast, yeah. He, he told the story. Yeah. So that’s anyway, talking about blood sugar, we were talking about blood sugar you know, before we went live here today. Yeah. So so yeah. That’s awesome. To, to hear your story. And then, well, okay, before we continue Nathan, what now what do you do for emergent systems?
Me the money guy.
Yeah, so it was
Yeah, you’re a point of contact, right?
Yeah. He’s the face, do a business and sales. It was super simple like chasing gamma and were like, I dunno if we should do this project. And I don’t know if he should really go into it. And I was like, you’re telling me that your product just makes people more money? And they’re like, yep. And I was like, I need to see a spreadsheet out. And I like broke it all out. And I was like, Oh, these numbers totally work. You just, you can’t talk to the small guys. You need to go to the multibillion dollar private equity funds. You need to go to like the industry leaders and then you just need to extrapolate out and you need to be talking to the CFOs of the company and discuss the free cashflow versus, you know, just Hey, it make sense? Does it cool? Like what is the extrapolated out financial benefit?
So it’s a completely different conversation at that level than your typical, you know, smaller, minor that might have 10 minors or a hundred minors. Like, like, yeah, you’re talking. Okay. So, so one thing you were saying about immersion definitely is that it makes sense and scale them.
Okay. I think it makes sense only only at scale to be, if you’re talking about you know, the, the, the large financial benefit and there’s a lot of constraints, whether it’s the dry coolers or any other like you know, economically sound piece that needs to be on a megawatt by megawatt basis. But in general we realized very quickly that it wasn’t, we only want to sell a product that actually benefits people. And so we you know, decided very quickly that we could not do anything lower than one megalot. And as we got busier, that went really up to about 2.5 megawatts. Right. That was the constraint of the dry cooler. And so definitely makes sense. Break evens everything. You actually are making your money back before the inner mind because it’s that much more efficient and the effectiveness of the increased hash rate. But you know, there’s larger companies that don’t have that free cashflow balance. We’ll tell you right now from like day one that it costs more money to start, but six months, seven months out, all the money’s paid back and then from that point it’s just kind of gravy train, you know, you know. Exactly. Just making more money.
Yup. Is that the ROI timeframe that you try to shoot for is six to seven months? Is that kind of your ideal?
Well. So there’s
Very dependent on the Bitcoin price right now. It’s maybe 11, 12 months.
I think that it’s better to say that it’s generally about three to four months faster than air because those things are both moving targets, but the increased efficiency and the increased revenue in the form of like, you know, like firmware pass rate increase, those things are moving alongside and dancing with air versus immersion. So no matter what, we’re always going to be better than air. You’re always going to also have the levers to pull up. Like when crypto is going real hard, you can prank everything to the moon and not worry about the efficiency when cryptos going down, you have the ability to, you know, put it into low power mode, right? Need your cost to produce Bitcoins. So it allows a lot of like financial flexibility that also, you know, the larger funds really appreciate it.
And then, you know, a lot of times like we don’t, sometimes we take this into consideration when you’re pricing out a project and sometimes not. But if you’re able to overclock your machines, you know, anywhere from 30 to 50 to 60%, like overclock, depending on what type of machine it is, that basically directly correlates to how much power
That the miner uses, right? Because the clock is double the power roughly, right? So if you can get to your, your max capacity, let’s say that you have 10 megawatts and you know, normally you would need however many S 17 w we’ll, we’ll call it a thousand seventeens for easy math. Well, all of a sudden if you can overclock you know, all of those miners, you, you don’t need a thousand anymore. You only need 600 of them to get to your max total capacity. And so as everyone knows, the number one line on the, on the mining budget are the actual miners themselves. It’s not the, the, the cooling system or any of that. It’s the miners. So when you take that into account, the fact that you need 30 to 40% fewer minors, like an upfront cap X, you almost reached like pure co cost parody.
Funny for a bit mane and a couple of the other hardware manufacturers to realize that too, because we flew down Jeff June, we came to Texas for the first time and we were like sitting literally in Chase’s office and you know, there’s a little bit of a language barrier, but basically it was like, so what you’re telling me is you need less minors. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can buy our new patients that you couldn’t mind before, so we’re opening the globe for you. And he was like, okay, that’s fine. That I can work with. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it really makes sense when you think about the capital expense of, you know, maybe setting up and installing 2000 miners versus setup and installing 1000 and getting the same capacity or the same hash ability. That’s just phenomenal.
That’s a real word. Density, right. Or hash density or hash capacity.
Yeah. I gotcha. Yeah. No, that’s cool. Yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s what we ran into all the time, right? Like, so if you over clock your, your minors on the same infrastructure, you know, you got a 30 amp breaker, you know, overclock then boom, you know, you blow the breaker, so you gotta make sure that you’re taking that into account that I should lock them. They will absolutely consume more power.
So yeah, obviously one thing you guys have to think about a lot in immersion is the firmware. And I know you, you guys have been tinkering a lot with that just because, you know, one of the first things people ask is, well, I need to be able to control the fans so that, that’s like the biggest thing with immersion. Right? Yeah. So yeah. Can you guys just speak to that a little bit about what you’ve done with firmware and what your thoughts are on that?
Okay, sure. So we, I don’t know if anybody this, but we have our own custom firmwares for the, for the S nine S 15 S 17 S 17 plus what’s minor in 10 and 20 and 30 S and that all of our clients basically get all that, that they get that for free. That’s actually why we have all these firmwares in the first place is because we need them for immersion, right? Like putting little emulators on each of the miners is just not like a great solution to move forward. But you know, the, when you can, when you control the firmware, you can control the frequency and the voltage and you can overclock them and stuff like that. So it’s a dual dual purpose, both for the fans and for overclocking we’re under caulking given the situation, but so yeah, we, we do have our own firmwares and it’s, it’s been an interesting ride.
The, you know, back in the day, the [inaudible] firmware was relatively easy to to get into. And then Scott, I know you were involved with the SM S 15, the James and a white rabbit and all that. They, they did all the testing here at my facility. And you know, I can’t really claim any I didn’t do any coding legwork on that other than that like, Hey, hackers here have sacrificed this unit to the wind to eat the feed, the SSH API blocking or whatever, whenever the bit more Bittman was trying to do. And that worked out, you know, so that allowed the work that James and white rabbit did allowed folks like Venecian ms Kay and all those other guys to actually do their job, you know, to go out and make new firmwares and stuff like that. So you know, I’m, I’m very, very grateful to that group for, for doing that. Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure you had a question in there somewhere that I didn’t answer that
Like a camera non answer answer. That was two minutes ago. I can’t remember anymore. I’ve got a question for you guys. So, I mean, we obviously know that immersion cooling evacuated T far more efficiently than air. So there’s, there’s a benefit there by having to use, you know, the emergency system you’ve had to come up with lots of other secondary solutions such as the ability to get in and regulate the, the fans and you know, control the firmware and the clocking frequencies. W you know, what other things do you guys do to like, just totally maximize your, your profit?
Yeah, well so one of the super cool things as we’ve grown, it’s gotten easier to work with the hardware manufacturers because we’ve purchased thousands of machines, some of those thousands with you, Scott. So you know, we,
We haven’t gotten to the point where Hey, this is a, you know, a routine buyer of business you know, doing the larger orders across different manufacturers for different reasons. And that’s allowed us to have a communication link of just like, Hey, you guys want, you know, millions to tens of millions of dollars of business. You need to work with us on a solution. And it’s gotten also to the point now where directly from the assembly line, you know, we can work with these manufacturers to take the fans off or to make things specific for immersion. And it’s really hard to convince, you know, a bit main or what’s minor entity, the big guys if you’re like, Hey, you know, this is very serious. So we had to go through the grunt work of, you know, taking off thousands of fans and multimillion dollar deals, that hoop first for them to believe that we actually are doing what we said we did or would do.
But as far as like the maximization of profit and everything, I mean we are a white glove service, a very professional service that is allowing end to end solutions to minimize costs and provide, you know, the most benefit to the client. Immersion is one of those things. But you know, we also are working with the hardware manufacturers to ensure that, you know, they have direct touch points to their sales associates and you know, get exactly what they need in order to make their mind optimal. The firmware that we’ve done internally needs simply because what the frequency and voltage specs are for immersion are different than air. And we have both of them that we’ve been opined to both of those. We can distribute both of those, however we need it specifically for immersion. So whether it’s, you know, the site locations itself, we help people find those so we can build it into the model.
We have, you know, a bunch of different sites that we allow people for, you know, genuinely like sub 3 cent power, all in costs because we want our clients to be returning to us. Right. You know, that’s how you build an empire and that’s how you build, you know, year over year business. And we believe that this is a 10, 15 year business at minimum. And so whether it’s the site location or the hardware itself, the infrastructure chase literally, you know, goes out and flies to Canada or you know, survey sites for people, making sure that everything is up to standard and you know, so we have a consulting arm there. It’s really, you know, and we love doing what we do. It’s fun. I mean making money’s awesome, but we have a blast when we do it, when we play to win. And you know, when I joined the team with chase, that was one of the first things he said. He was like, no matter what man, we played a win. And so you know, money. Second number one is making sure the customer’s taken care of. Number two is we’re going to beat everybody else at this game.
I’m wondering is there anything like after you’ve got everything set up, what about like what pools you connect to or, or how do you guys manage that end of it? Because you know, just setting everything up is, is one aspect to it, but then you’ve got to manage the other aspect, right? Yeah.
Okay. Well, so with the, I’m just going to touch on relationship that we have specifically with Novablock, which is our pool of choice. And then I think that, and I have no idea, but chase can go directly into all of the reasons why he loves it so much. She talks about it on a, on a basically weekly basis. So, but from our experience Novablock’s our partner, they’ve always been extremely transparent and I’ve actually worked on building out some minds with them. Yuki as well as her team specifically been sent from Novablock and then a breath of fresh air when it comes to, you know, just radical transparency and understanding also implementation of different tools that chase has asked for. So we have nothing but good things to say about that team. Okay.
Yeah. Chase, can you tell us more? I’m interested when, when we were first talking to Novablock about, you know, some of the projects that they’re working on their own mining projects. You know, they were saying, Hey, we’d really like for you guys to mine in our pool. And so I, you know, I connected to it and tried it for a little bit. Okay, that’s pretty good. But if y’all did, you know, this, that and the other, that’d make it a lot more more valuable for me. So I’m like merged mining, what was was one thing, so they implemented merged mining, so you can not mine name, coin and MC and I think they’re still working on Cisco and, and some of the other ones, but it’s just one of those little added added value benefits that’s just kinda nice. Like, you know, your, your your same hash power isn’t getting you something more than you would anywhere else.
Sure. They’re also PPS plus meaning that there’s like not many folks are on PPL and S anymore, but the Novablock actually assumes the risk in paying you because if the level blocks not hitting the blocks, they’re paying you anyway. And that they have a very low fee. You know, compared to a lot of the other PPS plus pools, you know, it’s usually 3% and higher for PBS pool, a PBL and AST means that the pool assumes no risk. They only pay you if if, if they hit blocks. And so, you know, sometimes you can win a lose. But for most folks who are expecting us steady stream of income from mining PPS or PBS pluses is the way to go. And I tried to remember off the top of my head, I think Novablock does not charge you for the transactions. The transaction fees. Don’t hold me to that. I’ll have to double check it, but I think that’s true. Let me take a look at their website here.
Yeah, let’s a big shout out. Shout out to our sponsor. Novablock. And you know, you heard it from these guys down here. Novablock‘s all about transparency and they are moving hash rate from China to North America. And you know, this is how in such a short time they’ve become so big and you know, you heard it from chase mean the,
The P P what does it P P S paper share. Yep. Yeah, the paper share and, and they do it, you know, paper share plus meaning that it’s, it’s based off of just mathematics. It’s not [inaudible],
You know, random luck, you know, which pool can, can break which blocks or whatever. So yeah, Scott’s gonna appear, he’s going to show you guys how to get a good deal with them. Yeah. So yeah, we just thank you Novablock for sponsoring our podcast. It really helps us to be able to produce this kind of content and put it out there. Yeah. And just to say, you know this wasn’t planned. Novablock was our sponsor and emergency systems is a, a guest on this podcast. So you have any way you really do use Novablock for all of our, I swear
Our our clients’ minds as well as our, our minds we own as well. Yeah. Yeah.
So at Novablock.com if you register you just have to type in OFFORD18 in the invitation code, and that will give you a permanent reduction in your pool fees down to 1.8%. And we always like to also say that, Hey, you know, if you do have a lot of hash power that you want to move over, you give it a try. You might even be able to get a little bit lower than 1.8%. I’m sure you guys probably have a little lower
Yeah. A bunch of clients and we’re all, you know, offering the, this hash to the pools. Yeah. If you have more hash power, you have more negotiating room. So it’s just you know, something at all. It all works together. So yeah, that’s one of the many things that that miners can do to optimize their, their, their operation, like to minimize their costs. Like, you know, the, your, your pool fees. A lot of folks don’t even think about that like that. Well that’s a couple of percent right there that you can save by doing things differently. Or a lot of folks just point to a pool cause they liked the philosophy of I like a lot of people. And I have nothing against them but they’re still using slushpool back in the day I was a finished slushpool too. But not anymore for other reasons.
You don’t have to get into w we don’t do your own research. But there’s other things you can do to like the, I mean they think talk more intelligently about this than I can, but like that the cost of capital, you know, if you need to borrow money, there’s, there is very clever ways to structure getting that money. Your, your electrical your electrical rate, you know, at what scale does it make sense to where you can actually start going and negotiating with these power companies for, for lower, cheaper electricity.
It definitely seen a industrialization of mining that I mean you have to be sorry for everybody that’s a, you know, consumer miner out there, you know, post happening. You have to be, I think sub three and a half cent power to really have a competitive edge. And that’s not really possible unless you’re putting millions of dollars into cap ex and infrastructure. And so, I mean, I think that we’re seeing right now just to consult or we will see from the capitulation, the consolidation of all of the minors and you’re just going to see the industry leaders you know, push further and people with really strong balance sheets are, are going to be the ones that can weather the storm.
Yeah. So yeah, talking about that cheap power I mean you guys are obvious talking to, talking about finding locations in different places that have cheap power. What kind of power are you guys working with?
So it, it depends, right? We look for reliability, uptime. We also look at geopolitical risk and landscape. We also look at you know, what the open forward market prices on the, you know, the, the landscape of energy itself, like oil and gas went to negative 36 bucks WTI yesterday for oil. If you literally could go and, you know, grab the oil, the barrels of oil, they would pay you $31 or whatever it was per their grab to take them because they don’t have the inventory and stuff. And so it’s a, it’s very movable. It’s very flexible. I will say specifically Texas
And it’s own a grid that it has, allows for power that can scale. And I’m not just talking specifically flare gas, that’s all cool and stuff, but we’re talking about scalable, you know, 10, 20, 50, a hundred megawatt plus you know, power that can happen in Texas and that can happen reliably and cheaply. There’s also some places in Canada that can do that too. Obviously Texas is a primarily oil and gas, but it’s also shifting to wind and solar. A lot people don’t know how big wind and solar is in Texas. So the overall grid and landscape of, of Texas, there’s a lot of sun, there’s wind there’s oil and gas and that’s all connected in a forward market. So we think it’s, there’s a reason why you just see more and more and more people coming to Texas. He across continents as well.
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s all connected. I dunno if folks really know that or understand that. But like Texas is its own isolated grid. They have their own like governing body that the managers like the real power consumption. It’s called ERCOT, E. R. C. O. T. And it’s very interesting, you know, like when California has brownouts and stuff like that, Texas can actually sell California power if they want to, you know, at increased rates and stuff like that. But there is a ton of like excess energy in Texas. And the biggest problem in Texas for, for mining folks is that it’s, it’s too darn hot, you know, four or five months of the year it is just scalding hot and that’s where, you know, immersion systems comes and comes into play. So able to weather whatever, you know, though, in the middle of the Sahara, we complied for getaway to mine there too.
So so then it’s fair to say that you guys as a company aren’t really exploring the, the flare gas at this point. We’ve looked at it. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say that we’re not exploring it. There’s a lot more to it. I would say there’s a lot more to it than just pull up a generator and start mining with flare gas. Right. You know working through that is a bit of a headache, but there are folks that we’re talking to that are currently navigating that landscape and we’re, we’re always open for, you know, hearing what people got. So it’s fine
If people are in short and maybe too transparent here, but if people are willing to put their cap X in the form of R and D into it, we’re happy to help them and work together and a joint venture. However, if you’re looking at the opportunity costs, which, you know, we luckily get a lot of opportunities because of the heat and you know, where we can go that other miners can’t. It was just not the right opportunity at the time for us. However, you know, you have these very large oil and gas companies that get a negative, you know, rates that they get it costs them to flare for them. It makes sense. And I think that we’re going to see that happening further and further along in the years to come because they don’t care about Bitcoin. I hate to say it, it’s not a big enough market for them, but they care about the fact that they can decrease their bottom line expenses by converting it to Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is just a kicker right
Now. I’ve got a question for you guys. You know, obviously emergent systems help out in, in very harsh environments, very hot environments, a sea salt, you know, water environments where it’s not ideal to blow air through machines. How does it perform or can you tell us a bit about how it performs in very cold environments? Because especially when talking about stranded gas, sometimes, you know, these containers go out in places that are so cold, they literally have to be preheated before they can even turn the miners on. So what do you guys know about that?
Yeah, it’s a similar situation with with immersion and being in like a very frigid climate. So the fluid itself, we use bit cool by the guys engineered fluids. Gary Testa and David send in their good friends and we’ve known them for a long time and they’re, they’re awesome, awesome guys. If, if anyone has any interest in just learning about, you know, what, what they’re up to, I’d recommend you reach out to reach out to him. But so the fluid itself that cool is a non-Newtonian fluid, meaning that it is not crystallized. So unlike water, it will not freeze up in pipes and blow up and you know, the pipe expands, stuff like that. Now that being said, it will slow down a lot. It will get, it’ll congeal basically. Yeah, it’ll get real. It’ll get real thick honey, honey being pushed past your mind.
So in order to fire up a completely cold system you know, where it’s negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit outside or you know, negative 20 Celsius or something, then you, you have to preheat it. And that’s really not that big of a deal cause there’s plenty of plumbing. You just run you know, electrical heaters down. It warms it up and as soon as there’s enough heat in the system to basically not have the pump freak out and die on you, when you turn it on EV, everything’s fine. So and it’s really pretty easy to do, cause if you just turn the miners on, they’re going to generate their own heat. That kind of starts, starts everything moving and then you just have those electrical Oh thermal thingys yeah, the thermal stoma, what I’m talking about more about that. I want to call it thermal couple, but that’s not, that’s the sensor flux capacitor. I’ll think it, sorry, I sometimes forget words. So
You can utilize emergent systems in cold environments with just a little bit more preparation is basically what you’re saying. Just make sure that it’s at a,
You know
Yeah, a certain temperature before you turn on the minors. You know, I’ve also heard that miners tend not to perform as well in the cold. They kind of like to be in a very specific temperature range to get the maximum performance out of them.
Correct. So that’s very true. So one of the things that we quickly learned when we started immersion systems was that, you know, our, our goal was to try and get the minors as cold as possible because in my entire life, all of my experience with building computers, I’ve been building computers since I was like 10 has been the colder I can get my computer, the better perform, the less energy it will consume. And if you look up what a semiconductor is and like the natural properties and how it interacts with heat and the electricity in the Gates and all that stuff, it’ll, it’ll make sense. But as semiconductors heat up, they just use more power. That’s what it is. The short version of that. So we were trying to make sure that we were getting in as cold as possible. Well, come to find out that they don’t like being that cold.
So we had to loosen the, the cooling system up a little bit. Give it a little bit of wiggle room to where it could heat up because these chips are tested, you know, at a certain, in tuned at a certain temperature. And like for, for the Bitmain machines, for the most part, it’s 80 Celsius. I believe there’s about 86 Celsius. And that’s, that’s where they’re most comfortable. So does that mean that you need the whole tank and all that to heat up to 80 Celsius? No, that just means you have to fine tune the, the, the flow like across the tank to make sure that as the, the fluid comes across the, the hash boards, that those chips are able to get up to roughly 80 Celsius. You don’t want the whole thing, you know, cooking at 80 you just want it to be able to go, go across, reach 80 and then exit the exit the tank.
Now w we all kind of consider fluid and electronics, kind of a, a big no-go. Like, you know, a lot of people don’t feel comfortable with that. Can, can you explain to our listeners out there, what kind of safety features do you guys have built in? I know from my research that if I actually had a choice between Aaron and verb immersion, I would choose immersion because it’s much more safer than air. It is. But so, yeah. Can you explain a little bit about that?
Sure. So the fluid is, it’s a dielectric fluid, meaning that it is a, that does not conduct electricity. And that being said, the first time that we poured fluid on one of our sweet baby [inaudible], they were gold back in the day, right? Like, Oh, now we’re going to destroy this thing. The first time we’ve heard, you know, pouring gallons of fluid on this thing. And I was like, this is a terrible idea. What are we doing? But no, it’s, it’s, it’s perfectly fine. So we get like that fear from water because we know that water, the liquid, if you pour it on some, you know, fire and awesome shoes, but it doesn’t conduct electricity. So it has roughly the same density as water. So it’s about 1600 times more dense than, than air. And that pretty much directly correlates to 1600 times more heat capacity. It can, the same amount of the fluid can remove that much more heat. But the that I, what was the question again? Sorry.
I was just talking. I was just talking about how it’s, it’s safer for, you know, for this the sense that you know, it, it doesn’t burn. It’s non-flammable. My understanding is and things in the open air, you know, the, you know, wiring harnesses and, and the, you know, the plastic on the wires itself, that stuff’s flammable and it’ll, it’ll burn. Oh, for sure.
There’s a, there’s a couple things as a material compatibility list, which you can go against the miners. So in our experience, you know, it and what’s minor have been very safe for these things because of their component lists. Secondarily, chase was telling me, which I thought was hysterical. He got a credit from the fire Marshall because as a flame, the insurance company and insurance company and so that was super funny. But there it just a third is it’s just more control with air and not having that density. The same thing too. You know, we’re trying to cool it down. I guarantee you with that density, if you wanted to flip it the other way, you could heat it up a lot harder because there’s so much capacity for that heat. So you have control of your minors, which allows you more control of your finances and more control of your operations.
And that’s kind of like the overarching concept on all of it. Now we have done a ton of R and D over the course of three years and I’m sure that chase says a zap some minors. I also wanted to explain specifically was a transformer fluid or transformer oil is not bit cool and the transformer fluid that people are like, Oh, you know, I put it in here and it’s supposed to be fine and for electrics and in my mind are fried three months later. That is not what it’s for. And so you have all of these people that are trying to DIY it, chase being one of them. When he started, he was like, why the heck didn’t this work? You know, people use their own human mistakes and analysis to come to conclusions that it’s scientifically impossible versus with us. We’ve done, you know, a bunch of projects across many megawatts that shows that things are going great. Our first client is still as happy as ever. And so, you know, we have great relationships with those people and it also allows your hardware actually to live on average, like 50% longer because you’re not having the boards themselves have as much heat in a centralized location. It can disperse easier. So there’s, there’s a bunch of,
Yeah, yeah. But it’s, it’s, it’s a lot safer too. So there hasn’t been a lot of talk about this yet. I’m sure it’ll come out in the not too distant future, but some of the, the newer gen Hmm. Can I say their names? The manufacturer? Sure. I’m talking trash. Yeah. And stuff. On, on silicone PCBs that’ll narrow it down. They’re, they’re struggling, they’re struggling. With the smaller nanometre chips are just very fragile, right? So on air there is, you know, these little tiny traces inside of those chips and across the, the PCB as well. The, the printed circuit board for basically, so the, the closer those are together, the, the easier it is for voltage. It’s a jump from trace to trace short out and basically fry your minor. We have been testing side by side both in immersion and air these, these units and we’ll, we’ll basically, this is what we, this is part of what my job is all the time.
I’m constantly pushing things to the limit as far as I can it. And then I have a subset of those that I also run that normal conditions. I have a subset that I run with no firmware on them to just what, what the, what it comes with emulators on the immersion side and just, you know, dust filters on the, on the air side. And what we’ve seen is that on the seven enemy’s water chips, the, the air side is just struggling. I mean, we are there, they are dropping like they’re dropping like flies and on the emergent side they’re perfectly happy. So like, you know, their boards aren’t dying and stuff like that. So the, I’ve, I might be incorrect here, but my, my, my assumption is that because the dielectric fluid prevents any of those little short jumps in, you know, from, from trace to trace in shorts. And just overall keeps the temperature at a certain temperature all the time. Never changes. You know, like they, they night cycle of, you know, the temperature is going up and down with air. That’s, that’s bad for your cause it’s extreme. You can track killed, killed. Many of my machines wake up in the morning and three would be down and I’d be like, ah, no, no. Yeah.
Well somebody would have to pool says enjoying listening to chase and Nathan. Nice, nice and emergency. Okay, cool.
Oh, it was a great, by the way, after pool a is a, is a great pool as well. Thomas is there a head of business development have only had good things to say about them too. There is a small part of us that is, you know, like go team North America, but but, but besides that fact we use them for a myriad of different reasons and also in specific risk tolerance perspectives of different firms that we work with. We make sure to split hash rate. So our, our top two choices are no block enough to cool.
Awesome. Well, Hey we’re at the end of our time here and I think why don’t you guys just tell us how our listeners can contact you, how they could find you.
Yeah, sure. So first off, let me just say just for a little bit of time that we are at capacity for all of our future developments. Right now. We, we are working on a larger projects and it’s hard to keep chase it in with all of the different work that he’s doing. So we’re, we’re calling it right here for right now because we first and foremost care about our partners and our relationships and want to make sure that we’re giving an a plus effort on everything. And so we can’t spread ourselves too thin. However, yeah, very blessed. But I’m so, but besides that, both me and Scott want to have this problem. But besides that fact there’s a, there’s a contact form on the immersionsystems.io website. You can talk on, contact me on telegram also LinkedIn or anything like that. I’m generally pretty easy to look up. I think my name on telegram is @Nathan_ImperiumPartners. And Chase, what about you? So on, on telegram, I’m @Anamoorphic old gamer, gamer handle. And then email you can always get me there or on our website as well. Don’t think about it. But my personal email out there though, no more noise for J. I am drowning, toe contact. Chase. Nathan is your gatekeeper. Right. Well, Hey guys, I really enjoy talking with you and learning with you today. Thanks for coming on the show. Absolutely. Thanks a lot guys. Appreciate it. Have a lot of fun. How much time do we have left? 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Oh man. I was going to say if y’all had anything y’all want up, update us on things going on. Drama, drama. Yes. Well there, there is a lot of drama going on right now on telegram. Actually telegram is where Ethan and I do most of our business.
It’s, it’s interesting. For some reason a lot of crypto people hang out there, but yeah, the, so there’s been some drama about the different firmware developers, you know, and people making her hours. So visit t.me/firmwarz and you can kind of get a little bit on that juicy gossip. It’s like watching a blood in slow motion. Try not to try not to take it too personally and turn off your notifications on your phone, chase. Otherwise, I’m going to go over there and try to strangle you. All right guys, thank you for having us. I appreciate it. Take care guys. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye.