Chat_168 – Hashing for Heat with Tyler Stevens
“Our little home controller, building controller, it knows our electric rate, it knows the way that electric rate changes based on the time of day. It knows the PV flux, the solar flux from the solar panels. So it knows if there’s excess power that the building’s not using.It also knows our natural gas rate. It also knows the Bitcoin price and the network difficulty. This is all just in our software.And in real time, our building can choose, it can flip between heating with gas or with hashrate to save you the most money.”
~ Tyler Stevens
I am constantly shocked by how much of our everyday infrastructure is basically begging for a Bitcoin upgrade. Almost half of the world’s energy is used for heat, and a quarter of it is just “comfort heat” to keep our homes and water warm. What if we generated all of that with bitcoin miners instead?
I sat down with Tyler Stevens, a former aerospace thermal engineer who is currently helping spearhead the Hashrate Heatpunks movement. I’ve been running my own hacky miner-heater setup downstairs to survive the winter, but Tyler and the guys at the 256 Foundation are taking this to an entirely different scale. We talked about stripping away our reliance on monopolistic giants like Bitmain and finally building a fully open-source mining stack.
The stakes here are high. If even a fraction of normal households swap their standard electric heating elements for ASIC chips, we’re looking at a huge decentralization shift for the grid and an explosion in Bitcoin’s security budget. We also get into the reality of sovereign smart homes, avoiding creepy cloud-connected thermostats, and why the “energy waste” critics are entirely blind to how thermodynamics actually works. This was an incredibly fun conversation and it proves we are still incredibly early to what home mining will eventually look like.
Guest Links
Tyler on X (Link: https://twitter.com/tylerkstevens)
Exergy’s Website (Link: https://exergyheat.com/)
256 Foundation’s Website (Link: https://www.256foundation.org/)
Hashrate Heatpunks’ Website (Link: https://heatpunks.org/)
The Space’s Website (Link: https://denver.space/)
Affiliate Links
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Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Chat_167 – Why Your Keys Matter with Seed
“If you think of River or Gemini or Coinbase or whatever, think of all of those as silos and how people custody Bitcoin. If some sort of compromise were to come into the Bitcoin ecosystem at the private key generation level, that could create an incident that could set Bitcoin back by 10 or more years because it would be almost indistinguishable from a protocol compromise and that we would be talking about Bitcoin being hacked again and not individual custodians being hacked. So I think we need to decentralise how people do Bitcoin custody as much as possible and what better way by leveraging private freedom preserving open source software.”
~ Seed
In today’s chat, I sat down with Seed, the creator of the SeedSigner project, and his backstory is completely wild.
He told the story of how he got pulled into Bitcoin through a forensic case tied to a local Silk Road user, why he panic sold in 2017, and how that path eventually led him back to the basics and into building one of the most respected DIY signers in the space. But the real tension in this episode is the part most people skip over: what actually keeps your coins safe when things get messy in the real world.
We talk about the grim reality of wrench attacks, what actually happens when law enforcement flips a house upside down with a search warrant, and how a former forensics cop secures his own wealth. If you think a standard hardware wallet hidden in a sock drawer is enough, hearing his threat models might completely rewrite your long-term storage plans. And yes, we got into a few stories that made me think about my own setup a lot differently.
Guest Links
Seed on X (Link: https://x.com/sesi_the_man)
SeedSigner on X (Link: https://x.com/SeedSigner)
Today in Bitcoin History on X (Link: https://x.com/daily_btc_lore)
SeedSigner’s Website (Link: https://seedsigner.com/)
Affiliate Links
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
(Under construction) Check out the list of products and services I use and recommend on BitcoinAudible.com (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
<…
Guy’s Take_107 – Free Rent for the Rich
“It’s often discussed that arbitrarily lowering interest rates and the zero interest rate policy era leads to massive recklessness and unethical and irresponsible behavior. But there’s something even more sinister that actually occurs. A lot of people notice how massive corporations are just buying up all of the hard assets and then renting it back to us. […] Zero interest rate policy isn’t merely something that leads to reckless investments. It essentially amounts to free rent for the rich for everything in the economy. If you can rent anything for free, what do you do? You lease everything and then rent it back to the public for a profit.”
~ Guy Swann
Why do massive corporations own everything, while the rest of us are stuck renting our lives back from them? Most people see the trend, but very few understand the actual mechanism driving it. In this episode, I break down how zero interest rate policy isn’t just “reckless investment” – it’s a fraud machine that hands the rich free rent on every productive asset in the economy. What happens when you can borrow anything for less than it’s worth? You buy everything.
References from the episode
Read_944 – Proof of Work in the Real Economy: Wyatt’s chapter from The Bitcoinization of Finance (Link: https://fountain.fm/episode/4v4LrOxS12vM15dE3tHT)
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841) (Link: https://ia800405.us.archive.org/28/items/memoirsofextraor01mack/memoirsofextraor01mack.pdf)
Affiliate Links
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
~ Charles MacKa…
Read_943 – The Fabric of Desires
“It is not markets that made money possible. It is collectibles, which we now call money, that make markets possible.”
~ Nick Szabo
What if everything we’ve been told about how money emerged is backwards? Nick Szabo’s first article in nearly a decade tells the story of a stolen canoe, a tribal feud, and a string of shells – and uses it to challenge one of the most repeated ideas in economics. Did money come from barter, or did it come from something far older and far more human?
Check out the original article: The Fabric of Desires by Nick Szabo (Link: https://jan3.com/blog/the-fabric-of-desires)
References from the episode
Nick Szabo’s blog, Unenumerated – where so much of his foundational writing lives (Link: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/)
Aqua Wallet, the superapp by Jan3: Bitcoin, Lightning, and Liquid all in one, with USDT on Liquid too (Link: https://aqua.net/)
The Nakamoto Institute: the best archive there is for Szabo’s work and early Bitcoin thought (Link: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/)
Carl Menger’s On the Origins of Money – worth reading even where I think it falls short (Link: https://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/menger/money.txt)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
Check out our awesome partners!
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in i…
PSA – Farewell Nodeless
Nodeless is dead. Long live Nodeless. Unfortunately the Nodeless payment service has had to shut down, but for anyone who needs to get in touch for any issues then feel free to contact me or UTXO. Nodeless is also open source, so if you wish to setup an instance for yourself, the project is available on github:
https://github.com/nodeless-io/nodeless-monolith
Follow UTXO on Nostr for surely other great things to come:
npub1utx00neqgqln72j22kej3ux7803c2k986henvvha4thuwfkper4s7r50e8
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FEATURING AI Unchained #008 – Ecash and Ai with Obi Nwosu
Obi Nwosu, co-founder and CEO of Fedi, joins us today to talk about the new innovations and challenges in decentralising the web and how both Bitcoin and Ai are at the core of making it possible.
This conversation was recorded for the AI Unchained podcast, but I decided to cross post it here since a lot of the conversation is themed around Bitcoin.
Guest Links: Follow Obi on X: https://x.com/obi
Follow Fedi on X: https://twitter.com/fedimint
A huge thanks to our sponsors, and don’t forget to check out the offers for the listeners of this show!
9% off the Coldcard with code BITCOINAUDIBLE, bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard
Check out the KYC Free, simple, no management, Bitcoin merchant solution, Nodeless.io/guy. Use my link to go to bitcoinaudible.com/nodeless and setup your donation page for free, then share it out on Nostr or Twitter and tag me, and I’ll throw 10,000 sats your way!
Get 50,000 free sats, plus sats back on everything you buy by signing up with Fold and the Spin+ Debit Card. bitcoinaudible.com/fold
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FEATURING – AI Unchained_001 – A New Frontier, with Jeff Booth
Welcome to the first episode of AI Unchained, a new show exploring how AI technology can be a means of empowering the individual, rather than a system of control, and all the tools and perspectives that enlighten that journey.
Our first guest is none other than Jeff Booth, the author of “The Price of Tomorrow” on the incredible deflationary force of technology and why our only choice is to embrace it, not fight it. If you are trying to make sense out of the change that is being unleashed, you do not want to miss this show. Welcome to AI Unchained.
Check out Jeff Booth’s incredible book here:
Amazon.com: The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
Guy’s Nostr Pubkey: npub1h8nk2346qezka5cpm8jjh3yl5j88pf4ly2ptu7s6uu55wcfqy0wq36rpev
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Keet AMA – Twitter Spaces on January 30th
Mathias and Paolo join us for a Twitter Spaces AMA to answer all of your questions about this cutting-edge technology. Plus, don’t forget to check out KEET’s mobile release! The app is available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Tune in now for a thrilling Q&A on the future of privacy, secure communication, data sovereignty, & the nascent P2P economy.
Everything to check out to dive into the P2P revolution:
keet.io
holepunch.to
synonym.to
slashtags.to
Don’t forget to leave any feedback at the links below and/or boost and comment on the Fountain app at fountain.fm
…
Follow the white rabbit
…
Don’t forget to check out our amazing sponsors:
• Dive into the Bitcoin only wallet, the cypherpunk calculator, and a company that has built secure Bitcoin products for nearly a decade. Code BITCOINAUDIBLE gets 9% off everything in your cart! (https://guyswann.com/coldcard)
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• The best place to onboard a true Bitcoiner – Stack sats automatically, withdraw automatically, and learn or get help from the best team of Bitcoiners out there with Swan Bitcoin. (https://swanbitcoin.com/guy)
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“Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.”
― Bruce Coville
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Green Eggs and Ham – Decentralized Finance, the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
“This is the root of our cultural concern for crypto DeFi. The cultural, and arguably even structural, commitment to financialization is extremely difficult to reconcile with this core purpose of securities. In a sense, none of this is surprising given the foundations of crypto DeFi. If you jump straight to “decentralized securities” without first nailing down decentralized money and peer-to-peer technology, the urge to financialize is obvious, because what other value or utility can you even attempt to provide?” – Allen & Anders
Check out the full write up with numerous links and references for digging deeper into the ideas discussed:
https://www.uncerto.com/green-eggs-and-ham
Don’t forget to check out our amazing sponsors:
• Dive into the Bitcoin only wallet, the cypherpunk calculator, and a company that has built secure Bitcoin products for nearly a decade. Code BITCOINAUDIBLE gets 10% off everything in the store until Christmas! (https://guyswann.com/coldcard)
• Gets sats back every time you dump fiat at a store, to pay your bills, everything in your fiat life pays you sats with the Fold Debit Card and FoldApp. 5,000 FREE SATS at (https://guyswann.com/fold)
• The best place to onboard a true Bitcoiner – Stack sats automatically, withdraw automatically, and learn or get help from the best team of Bitcoiners out there with Swan Bitcoin. (https://swanbitcoin.com/guy)
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Structural Adjustment: How the IMF and World Bank Repress Poor Countries [Alex Gladstein]
This is the full, unabridged reading of Alex Gladstein’s work, “STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT: HOW THE IMF AND WORLD BANK REPRESS POOR COUNTRIES AND FUNNEL THEIR RESOURCES TO RICH ONES” published with Bitcoin Magazine.
Link to the original read for the plethora of links and references to dig further into this incredible story.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/imf-world-bank-repress-poor-countries
Don’t forget to check out our amazing sponsors:
• Dive into the Bitcoin only wallet, the cypherpunk calculator, and a company that has built secure Bitcoin products for nearly a decade. Code BITCOINAUDIBLE gets 10% off everything in the store until Christmas! (https://guyswann.com/coldcard)
• Gets sats back every time you dump fiat at a store, to pay your bills, everything in your fiat life pays you sats with the Fold Debit Card and FoldApp. 5,000 FREE SATS at (https://guyswann.com/fold)
• The best place to onboard a true Bitcoiner – Stack sats automatically, withdraw automatically, and learn or get help from the best team of Bitcoiners out there with Swan Bitcoin. (https://swanbitcoin.com/guy)
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A Look at the Lightning Network [Lyn Alden]
“I think too many people in those early years interpreted “e-cash” to mean quick-and-easy payments for everyday goods using the base layer, when a better way to think of cash today is as a private censorship-resistant final settlement transaction method. Physical cash, after all, is not necessarily the easiest payment type, or a medium of exchange that we need to use for everything, but it’s the most private and the hardest to prevent from occurring.” – Lyn Alden
The full, uninterrupted reading of Lyn Alden’s incredible piece detailing the philosophy of engineering that informed the layered approach, how the lightning network works, what the future of the lightning network may hold, and answering some common criticisms of the Lightning protocol. If you haven’t heard or read this one, it is not to be missed. Enjoy.
Check out the original article plus the incredible library of material authored by Lyn on her blog below: https://www.lynalden.com/lightning-network/#layers
Check out our amazing sponsors and the products that Guy uses most in the space:
• The best place to onboard a true Bitcoiner – Stack sats automatically, withdraw automatically, and learn or get help from the best team of Bitcoiners out there with Swan Bitcoin. (swanbitcoin.com/guy)
COME HANG OUT! Join us and the Swan Bitcoin team at the Pacific Bitcoin Conference in November! Get your tickets now, 10% off with code BITOCINAUDIBLE (https://www.pacificbitcoin.com/)
• Gets sats back every time you dump fiat at a store, to pay your bills, everything in your fiat life pays you sats with the Fold Debit Card and FoldApp. 20% OFF with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (guyswann.com/fold)
• Dive into the Bitcoin only wallet, the cypherpunk calculator, and a company that has built secure Bitcoin products for nearly a decade. Code BITCOINAUDIBLE gets 5% off everything in the store! Coinkite.com
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What is Money, Anyway? [Lyn Alden]
“If a money (the most salable good) is easy to create more of, then any rational economic actor would just go out and create more money for herself, diluting the whole supply of it. If an asset has a monetary premium on top of its pure utility value, then it’s strongly incentivizing market participants to try to make more of it, and so only the forms of money that are the most resistant to debasement can withstand this challenge.” – Lyn Alden
The full, unabridged reading of Lyn Alden’s excellent breakdown of the question that marks the beginning of the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole, “What is Money, Anyway?”
Link to Lyn Alden’s piece and the incredible other work she has on her blog:
https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/
Check out our amazing sponsors and the products that Guy uses most in the space:
• The best place to onboard a true Bitcoiner – Stack sats automatically, withdraw automatically, and learn or get help from the best team of Bitcoiners out there with Swan Bitcoin. (swanbitcoin.com/guy)
• Gets sats back every time you dump fiat at a store, to pay your bills, everything in your fiat life pays you sats with the Fold Debit Card and FoldApp. 20% OFF with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (guyswann.com/fold)
• Dive into the Bitcoin only wallet, the cypherpunk calculator, and a company that has built secure Bitcoin products for nearly a decade. Coinkite.com
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