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Last Notes

2026-02-27 17:45:34 CET

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2026-02-27 17:43:59 CET

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Open Source Bitcoin Mining Aims to Break Hardware Stranglehold
Bitcoin mining's dependence on two dominant manufacturers has created what developers call an "extremely antagonistic" relationship with end users, and the 256 Foundation believes the solution lies in reverse engineering the entire industry from the ground up. Their approach starts small by necessity, but its leaders argue that's a feature, not a bug, with building an alternative to a multi-billion dollar proprietary empire.
"The manufacturers of 80% of the Bitcoin mining hardware that runs the network has been extremely antagonistic toward the end users," said Econoalchemist, project lead for the 256 Foundation, at the Nashville Energy & Mining Summit. The foundation operates with "no documentation, no help, no assistance," from major manufacturers, forcing developers to reverse engineer solutions down to individual ASIC chips. Critics often dismiss early results, but Econoalchemist frames the modest scale differently: "We are literally memeing into reality something that has never existed before."
The foundation's strategy centers on four open-source building blocks rather than finished products. Ember One hash boards, Libreboard control systems, Mujina firmware, and HydraPool mining software are designed as reference implementations, or recipes other engineers can adapt rather than ready-to-deploy equipment. "We're not making a product, we're making a demonstration and a reference," explained Ryan Kuester, Mujina's lead developer, comparing the approach to how chip manufacturers provide reference boards to customers designing products.
That philosophy extends to solving problems proprietary systems create even when functioning as intended. Tyler Stevens, CEO of Exergy and incoming foundation board member, noted how closed-source firmware improvements often generate downstream complications because developers lack visibility into the full stack. Michael Schmid, lead engineer on the Libreboard project for the 256 Foundation, offered a concrete example: miners currently have no standardized way to verify pools received all their shares. "If I'm your internet provider, I can steal your shares," he said, noting that skimming even 1% would likely go undetected. The foundation is developing HashScope, a verification proxy tool, specifically because proprietary systems leave that gap unaddressed.
The hardware inflexibility problem runs deeper than share accounting, according to Schmid. Mining data centers must design around fixed equipment dimensions from manufacturers who don't know, or particularly care about, individual operator needs. "Imagine what is the crazy world we're living in that you can actually go to somebody and saying, hey, I want a miner that is this wide, this deep," he said.
When manufacturers release larger miners, the infrastructure investments become partially obsolete. Open hardware specifications could theoretically enable custom designs optimized for specific use cases, from grid stabilization to heat recovery applications.
Stevens sees particular potential in heating applications, noting that half the world's energy consumption goes toward heat, with half of that serving comfort purposes. "There's a zeta hash of energy out there that we could get online," he estimated. But current industrial miners, increasingly designed for data center blade form factors with 380-volt power, prove impractical for residential or commercial heating integration.
Whether open-source alternatives can reach industrial scale remains uncertain.
The foundation successfully solo-mined a block last year to bootstrap funding, and recent demonstrations show working hardware running custom software after eight months of development. The foundation's next telehash fundraising event on May 19 aims for 10,000 participating workers, up from roughly 1,000 in the previous event. Kuester set the long-term aspiration for Mujina firmware: "The ultimate goal is that it becomes the Linux kernel project of Bitcoin mining."
That vision requires not just technical achievement but a shift in how miners evaluate solutions. "A lot of people look at that and they kind of laugh it off as a toy," Econoalchemist acknowledged of early implementations. The foundation's bet is that reverse engineering from first principles, though slower initially, creates a foundation others can build on, what Stevens called "a commoditized layer, an open source layer of building blocks."

2026-02-26 17:35:31 CET

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2026-02-26 17:33:24 CET

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Bitcoin Takeover 26: Bitcoin Doesn’t Build Itself
André Neves had the job most developers dream of. Engineering director at Big Human, a respected New York digital product studio, where he led teams of 20 developers shipping polished software for companies like TD Ameritrade, Time Warner, and Michael Kors. Good money. Interesting problems. Zero complaints. And zero stakes. Most people learn to live with that last part. Neves couldn't. In 2018, he walked into a room that changed everything.
Chaincode Labs' first Lightning residency. A two-week intensive in New York, run by one of the most respected Bitcoin research organizations in the world. Ten engineers, hand-selected, brought together to go deep on the Lightning Network before most of the industry had taken it seriously. The cohort included builders like Jack Mallers and Pierre Rochard. Engineers like Alex Bosworth and Christian Decker were in the room, people actively writing the first real implementations of Lightning. The technical caliber was unlike anything Neves had encountered in his career. But what he couldn't shake was simpler: Bitcoin was still his side project. "What am I doing just building stuff on the side?"
The residency didn't hand him a plan. It just made staying impossible. He quit. Then in 2019 he co-founded ZBD with two people he’d barely met. Chris Moss in Tokyo. Simon Cowell in London. He'd met Simon, the CEO, exactly once. None of that stopped them from committing to something serious: building a native payment service provider for the gaming industry, powering real economies inside virtual worlds, on Bitcoin's Lightning Network. Only six years later, ZBD would close a $40 million Series C led by Blockstream Capital.
Every line of code ZBD ships runs on a foundation someone else built for free: Linux servers, open-source tooling, protocols nobody got paid to write. Neves took that debt seriously from day one. In 2020, ZBD brought on Fiatjaf as a full-time open-source developer, funding his work on Bitcoin and Lightning infrastructure. Nostr, the decentralized social protocol that took over the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, emerged while he was there, enabled in part by the runway ZBD provided. ZBD engineers contributed to LNURL standards, and Neves himself created the Lightning Address, the human-readable payment identifier now used across the industry. "If you're choosing to spend 100% of your capital and treasury on closed-source stuff," Neves explained, "I think you're taking advantage more than you are supporting the mission." ZBD decided early that they would help foot the bill.
For Neves, the obligation isn't abstract. He grew up in Brazil, where his parents lived through five different national currencies. In 1992, one dollar equaled one real. Today it buys six. "Explaining Bitcoin to them wasn't hard," he reflected. His family doesn't need monetary theory. They carry instability in memory. That's the root of Vinteum, the Brazilian non-profit he co-founded with Lucas Ferreira to support Bitcoin Core and Lightning developers, modeled after Brink and Chaincode Labs, providing grants and running residency programs to train the next generation of builders. "I'm outside. I can bring capital, interest, and network so that Brazilian developers have a better chance," he said.
That pipeline of builders has paid off. The tools that took years to wrestle into existence: efficient liquidity management, reliable node infrastructure, interoperable payment standards. They're table stakes now. Bitcoin is permissionless. You don't need anyone's blessing to start building on it today. But Neves isn't convinced the outcome is assured. "Everyone's like, Bitcoin is inevitable. No, it's not," he said. "It takes people to build it." The inevitable narrative is dangerous because it breeds passivity. The protocol doesn't care how many believers it has, it cares how many builders it has.

2026-02-25 17:20:27 CET

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2026-02-25 17:19:50 CET

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Bitcoin Miners Face Hedging Paradox: The Risk That Remains Hardest to Manage
The one thing Bitcoin miners theoretically need to hedge most, difficulty adjustments that mechanically reduce their revenue every two weeks, remains the industry's least-developed financial product. That paradox reveals a maturation gap between miners' operational sophistication and the financial tools available to manage their core business risks, according to executives from CleanSpark and OBM at the recent Nashville Energy & Mining Summit.
"It is the most fundamental primitive input to Bitcoin mining," said Rory Murray, Vice President of Digital Asset Management at CleanSpark, "and yet the financial products around it just have not really fit the risk profiles."
The disconnect is particularly striking given how far the industry has evolved in other areas. Energy hedging tools are well-developed, with miners now deploying sophisticated demand response strategies that would have been dismissed as magical thinking during the 2021 bull market. Bitcoin price hedging through CME futures and options has become standard practice for public companies managing treasury risk. But difficulty, the algorithmic adjustment that ensures blocks are mined approximately every 10 minutes regardless of total network hash rate, remains stubbornly resistant to effective hedging products.
Murray pointed to Luxor's hash rate derivatives as one of the few sustainable products in the space, crediting founder Matt Williams' background at the CME for understanding contract design and market participant needs. Yet even with that pedigree, adoption remains limited. "We get pitches all the time, and I've been getting pitches for years about these different products," Murray said. CleanSpark maintains a relationship with Luxor but hasn't been particularly active in the market.
The fundamental problem is structural. "It's really a two-way marketplace right now that's very much about matching buyers and sellers," Murray explained. Unlike standardized agricultural contracts that revolutionized risk management in the 1970s and 1980s, hash rate products lack the depth and liquidity that comes from true exchange-traded standardization. Miners who are structurally long hash rate want to hedge at precisely the moment when their counterparties, typically hedge funds, are least incentivized to take the other side of that transaction.
Jeremy Ellis, Director of Power Strategies at OBM, acknowledged the challenge when moderator, Colin Harper asked about hash rate derivatives evolution. "I was hoping to avoid that question," Ellis admitted, drawing laughs from the audience. His focus remains squarely on the operational side: power contracts, miner management software, and demand response optimization, areas where tools have matured significantly since the 2021 China mining ban.
That operational evolution tells its own story about industry maturation. "The first event that I actually went to," Ellis recalled, "I explained what I did and where I was coming from and it was met with, 'We're Bitcoin miners. We don't shut down. We're going to be running 24/7, ripping Bitcoin and hashing.'" That mentality has given way to sophisticated curtailment strategies as hash price compressed from as high as many hundreds of dollars per petahash per day in 2021 to around $40 currently.
Murray suggested the hash rate hedging gap may persist until markets achieve critical mass. "Until you get a standardization of contracts, which is what the CME solved back in the 70s and 80s, and you get really kind of a lot more of a depth to that marketplace, I think it's gonna be hard." The chicken-and-egg problem requires sufficient liquidity to justify standardization, but standardization is required to attract sufficient liquidity.
What miners can control, meanwhile, is how they monetize the volatility they already face. Murray described CleanSpark's approach as "demand response for the market," using the company's 13,000 Bitcoin treasury, 50-plus exahash of capacity, and structural position as a Bitcoin supplier to capitalize on basis spreads between spot and futures prices. "When you see that price continue to rise, the difference between the spot price of Bitcoin and that forward contract increases," he explained, noting current annualized spreads around 5% that can spike to 12-15% in bull markets.
The strategic question for the industry is whether the difficulty hedging gap represents a solvable market design problem or a fundamental mismatch between miner needs and counterparty availability. Murray predicted a "Cambrian explosion" of structured Bitcoin products in 2026-2027 that could help decompose risk into investable components.
Whether those products finally crack the difficulty hedging puzzle remains to be seen.
"I don't think credit is a bad word - I think mispriced credit is a bad word," Murray said, pushing back on Bitcoin purist skepticism of financial engineering. "And I think the promise of what Bitcoin is, is it's a forcing function to price credit correctly." For now, that forcing function hasn't yet produced the difficulty hedge miners say they need most.

2026-02-24 19:01:10 CET

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2026-02-24 18:59:03 CET

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From Travel Nurse to Bitcoin Builder: How Payments Experiments Shaped Oshi
The room at Austin Bitcoin Club wanted an answer. They just didn't know Michael Atwood already had it.
Atwood sat in a Bitcoin payments meetup listening to business owners describe their ideal product, a Bitcoin rewards program where customers simply shop and earn sats. His face dropped, they were describing Oshi, the platform Atwood built after years of failed experiments in Bitcoin payments adoption.
"They were describing Oshi to a tea," Atwood recalled, "and I'm like, man, nobody even knows about it." The moment crystallized something he had learned the hard way: in Bitcoin, building the right product matters less than making sure anyone knows it exists. That gap between what the market needs and what it finds has defined his journey as a builder.
Atwood’s path to Oshi began in Northern California, in a blue-collar town of 100,000 people where very few residents knew anything about Bitcoin. Around 2020, as El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach experiment was inspiring people globally, Atwood decided to take action locally. Using the right toolkit and a personable approach, he convinced nearly 20 local businesses to accept Bitcoin payments. Surprisingly, the effort wasn’t as difficult as many would assume, and the town quickly became the highest concentration of Bitcoin-accepting businesses per capita outside of Bitcoin Beach, an almost unheard-of achievement in the United States at the time.
No one else was doing it, so Atwood did.
After proving the model in Northern California, he brought it to Austin. He had already quit his job as a travel nurse before making the move. He visited PlebLab, joined its first cohort late 2021, and began working with the community there. By December 2021, he had onboarded 25 to 30 businesses in the city and even organized a Bitcoin block party on Rainey Street, drawing hundreds of people.
The numbers were explosive — briefly.
“We went from something like 400 unique user Bitcoin payments in a single evening,” Atwood said, “to one or two a day. After a few weeks, it was basically zero. It just dropped off a cliff.”
The events created hype. But once the hype wore off, the payments stopped. Even when incentives were still in place, 10%, 20%, sometimes even 30% back for paying in Bitcoin, it wasn’t enough. People wouldn't to go out of their way to pay with Bitcoin. That collapse exposed the primary issue, behavioral friction. Even generous rebates couldn’t overcome the extra effort required to change how people paid.
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Today, Atwood points to a local restaurant as a case study. The Austin chain enabled Bitcoin payments across multiple locations, and even received a quote tweet from Jack Dorsey during launch week. The result: one to three Bitcoin payments per day across all stores. Comparatively, Cash App Pay on Square terminals, which requires no Bitcoin knowledge at all, just dollars to dollars, sees less than a few percent usage. Even Apple Pay, Atwood notes, took over a decade to crack significant adoption despite half the country owning iPhones with payment cards already loaded.
"Human behavior is a real b*tch to change," he explained. "Even if the UX were perfect, even if we're going from dollars to dollars, this is still going to take a long time. And because it's Bitcoin, it's going to take even longer." That conclusion pushed Oshi's pivot. Rather than demanding customers pay in Bitcoin, the platform turns merchants into what Atwood calls a Bitcoin faucet, distributing sats as loyalty rewards to every customer, whether they pay in dollars or Bitcoin. No app download required. Customers enter a phone number or email and receive rewards automatically.
This new model produced a moment Atwood recalls fondly. An 80-year-old man emailed asking how to redeem his Bitcoin. He had accumulated roughly $80 in sats from shopping, and wanted to know how to use them, eventually deciding to purchase grass-fed beef sticks from Farmer Bill's Provisions online. "I'm 80 and I never thought I'd figure this out!" he told Atwood. Without Oshi's passive distribution, Atwood suspects, that customer would likely never have touched Bitcoin in his lifetime.
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For Atwood, who estimates Bitcoin payments may need until 2035 for deep adoption, the lesson is patience laced with pragmatism. "Question all of your assumptions," he said. "Bitcoiners are really good at questioning their assumptions, but then once they land on the Bitcoin thing, sometimes we're really bad about questioning some of the assumptions we have about Bitcoin." An 80-year-old buying beef sticks with sats may not be the payments revolution anyone imagined, but Atwood thinks it might be how that revolution actually starts.

2026-02-23 17:05:22 CET

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2026-02-23 17:01:42 CET

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Pushing the Open Source Revolution in Bitcoin Mining
Four developers gathered at the Nashville Energy & Mining Summit with a unified message: the industry's proprietary software era must end. Their solution, open source tools that put control back in miners' hands, challenges how the world's largest mining operations manage billions of dollars in equipment.
Skot9000, board member of the 256 Foundation and creator of the Bitaxe project, opened the panel with a stark reminder. "Had Bitcoin not been an open source project, we just wouldn't be here talking about it." Mining followed Bitcoin's open source roots initially, but the advent of specialized ASIC chips pushed the industry toward proprietary, closed systems. Now, a growing movement aims to reverse that trend.
Brett Rowan, who develops control systems at Upstream Data, builds open source mining management tools used everywhere from single home miners to 10,000-machine farms. His projects, ASIC RS and PyASIC, eliminate the need for third-party devices or complicated setups. "You contribute a little bit and you get a whole lot out of it," Rowan explained. "There's like a multiple on what you put in is what you're getting out."
The panel's most provocative voice came from Dylan Seib, co-founder at Exergy. When asked about Bitcoin miners generating waste heat, Seib fired back: "Your framing is totally backwards. Heat is the product. Bitcoin's the cherry on top." His company transforms miners into revenue generating heating appliances. Making good on their open source ethos, Seib announced Exergy will donate 5% of its hash rate to the 256 Foundation. "That's the easiest thing someone can do," Seib said. "You can just split it and send it wherever you want."
Gio, Bitcoin mining analyst at Tether, described the company's approach to building MOS, a mining operating system. After two years of development, Tether plans to open source the tool. But, Gio emphasized the real goal isn't providing one solution, it's creating a toolkit. "Mining facilities are very customized and very peculiar," he explained. "What is really needed is a framework that people can use to fit their needs."
The technical benefits of open standards emerged as a recurring theme. Rowan describes how open source enables the industry to build unified data standards, then push manufacturers to implement them. "As more and more people make use of the open source back end, it makes it much more efficient to push back on the manufacturers," he said.
The result: customers who make more money drive manufacturers to adopt better standards.
Gio drew parallels to Meta's React framework, which became an industry standard because it was built in the open. "If you really want quality in software development, we need open source approach," he said. Speakers addressed how companies should support open source development beyond building tools internally. Gio outlined Tether's grants for open source developers, bug bounty programs, and funding for foundations like OpenSats. Rowan suggested a simpler principle: "Contribute to what you're using and try to generally improve the tools that you're already making use of."
As mining becomes more competitive, the panel argued that customization and efficiency separate winners from losers. Open source frameworks let operators build specialized solutions for their unique power contracts, locations, and demand response strategies. "You have to study your specific case and work on that," Gio said, "not work on the solution that is for everybody."
The message to ASIC manufacturers was clear: focus on efficient chips and an open software ecosystem. "Sell the chips, sell the parts, open your firmware," Seib urged. "You'll make so much money just selling chips."

2026-02-18 20:20:22 CET

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2026-02-18 20:04:08 CET

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Small Bitcoin Mining Sites Beat Massive Facilities—In the Right Context
Conventional wisdom says bigger is always better when it comes to industrial energy loads. A panel of Bitcoin mining executives at Bitcoin Park challenged that assumption, arguing that 100 one-megawatt sites can deliver more economic value than a single 100-megawatt facility, if you're targeting the right energy sources.
The debate centers on a fundamental tension in energy infrastructure: pure capex efficiency versus the ability to monetize stranded or underutilized assets. While large-scale facilities drive down per-kilowatt costs through economies of scale, distributed operations unlock revenue from energy that would otherwise have no buyer.
"If you're looking at it from a power generation perspective, absolutely a 100-megawatt site is far more economically efficient," acknowledged Taras Kulyk, a digital compute industry veteran. But he immediately added an asterisk: existing underutilized assets scattered across industrial facilities represent untapped economic opportunity that only distributed loads can capture.
Philip Walton of Gridless Compute framed the distributed approach as strategic gap-filling rather than inferior economics. "Bitcoin mining just gives us an incredible ability to fill in the gaps," he explained. "It's almost like putting paste on a wall to fill in all the little holes. And the truth is that's where you get the best economics." His company operates sites in remote Africa locations requiring two-day trips to reach, places where centralized infrastructure makes no economic sense.
Steve Barbour of Upstream Energy pointed to massive embedded capacity in existing infrastructure that large facilities can't access. He estimated 100,000 natural gas generators across oil and gas facilities currently run underutilized. "Engineers oversize microgrids because you don't want to run out of power," he said. Adding Bitcoin mining loads to these existing generators improves their heat rates and dilutes maintenance costs per kilowatt-hour, economic gains that don't appear on a clean-sheet facility comparison.
The counterargument isn't purely about capex. Large facilities offer advantages in power quality, thermal management, and operational complexity. Kulyk noted that developing 100 separate one-megawatt sites creates exponentially more logistical and management overhead compared to a single large installation. For companies optimizing around traditional metrics like return on capital, consolidation makes.
Yet, the participants argued that framework misses Bitcoin mining's unique value proposition as what Kulyk called a "buyer of first resort," a load that creates economic offtake where none existed before. Walton emphasized this point through the lens of zero-marginal-cost energy sources like hydro or geothermal. "When you have an energy asset and you've invested in the capex and you're not having to pay a direct cost for the fuel, then why would you not sell it almost no matter what the price to a buyer that's willing to pay you today, no questions asked?" he asked.
The distributed versus centralized question becomes even more complex when extended to AI and high-performance computing loads now competing for the same power infrastructure. Barbour expresses skepticism about replicating distributed Bitcoin mining approaches with HPC, citing bandwidth and uptime requirements. But Walton suggested inference workloads, as opposed to training, which could eventually work in distributed, off-grid contexts where low latency to end users matters.
Whether the industry moves toward consolidation or distribution likely depends on which energy sources dominate future growth. If new power generation comes primarily from large-scale nuclear or utility-scale renewables, centralized facilities win. If growth comes from monetizing stranded assets embedded in existing industrial infrastructure, the distributed model proves more valuable.
"Bitcoin mining is about getting the cheapest source of energy possible," Walton concluded. "And a lot of times those cheap sources of energy are not going to be 'here's 100 megawatts that nobody's using.' It's going to be 'here's 100 sites with one megawatt that's not being utilized.'" The question isn't which approach is superior in the abstract, but which energy sources each model can unlock.

2026-02-18 19:25:37 CET

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2026-02-18 19:24:55 CET

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Bitcoin Miners Face Hedging Paradox: Most Critical Risk Remains Hardest to Manage
The one thing Bitcoin miners theoretically need to hedge most—difficulty adjustments that mechanically reduce their revenue every two weeks—remains the industry's least-developed financial product. That paradox reveals a maturation gap between miners' operational sophistication and the financial tools available to manage their core business risks, according to executives from CleanSpark and OBM.
"It is the most fundamental primitive input to Bitcoin mining," said Rory Murray, Vice President of Digital Asset Management at CleanSpark, speaking at Bitcoin Park in Nashville. "And yet the financial products around it just have not really fit the risk profiles."
The disconnect is particularly striking given how far the industry has evolved in other areas. Energy hedging tools are well-developed, with miners now deploying sophisticated demand response strategies that would have been dismissed as heresy during the 2021 bull market. Bitcoin price hedging through CME futures and options has become standard practice for public companies managing treasury risk. But difficulty—the algorithmic adjustment that ensures blocks are mined approximately every 10 minutes regardless of total network hash rate—remains stubbornly resistant to effective hedging products.
Murray pointed to Luxor's hash rate derivatives as one of the few sustainable products in the space, crediting founder Matt Williams' background at the CME for understanding contract design and market participant needs. Yet even with that pedigree, adoption remains limited. "We get pitches all the time, and I've been getting pitches for years about these different products," Murray said. CleanSpark maintains a relationship with Luxor but hasn't been particularly active in the market.
The fundamental problem is structural. "It's really a two-way marketplace right now that's very much about matching buyers and sellers," Murray explained. Unlike standardized agricultural contracts that revolutionized risk management in the 1970s and 1980s, hash rate products lack the depth and liquidity that comes from true exchange-traded standardization. Miners who are structurally long hash rate want to hedge at precisely the moment when their counterparties—typically hedge funds—also want long exposure, creating a one-sided market.
Jeremy Ellis, Director of Power Strategies at OBM, acknowledged the challenge when moderator Colin Harper asked about hash rate derivatives evolution. "I was hoping to avoid that question," Ellis admitted, drawing laughs from the audience. His focus remains squarely on the operational side: power contracts, miner management software, and demand response optimization—areas where tools have matured significantly since the 2021 China mining ban.
That operational evolution tells its own story about industry maturation. "The first event that I actually went to," Ellis recalled, "I explained what I did and where I was coming from and it was met with, 'We're Bitcoin miners. We don't shut down. We're going to be running 24/7, ripping Bitcoin and hashing.'" That mentality has given way to sophisticated curtailment strategies as hash price compressed from $420 per petahash per day in 2021 to around $40 currently.
Murray suggested the hash rate hedging gap may persist until markets achieve critical mass. "Until you get a standardization of contracts, which is what the CME solved back in the 70s and 80s, and you get really kind of a lot more of a depth to that marketplace, I think it's gonna be hard." The chicken-and-egg problem requires sufficient liquidity to justify standardization, but standardization is required to attract sufficient liquidity.
What miners can control, meanwhile, is how they monetize the volatility they already face. Murray described CleanSpark's approach as "demand response for the market"—using the company's 13,000 Bitcoin treasury, 50-plus exahash of capacity, and structural position as a Bitcoin supplier to capitalize on basis spreads between spot and futures prices. "When you see that price continue to rise, the difference between the spot price of Bitcoin and that forward contract increases," he explained, noting current annualized spreads around 5% that can spike to 12-15% in bull markets.
The strategic question for the industry is whether the difficulty hedging gap represents a solvable market design problem or a fundamental mismatch between miner needs and counterparty availability. Murray predicted a "Cambrian explosion" of structured Bitcoin products in 2026-2027 that could help decompose risk into investable components. Whether those products finally crack the difficulty hedging puzzle remains to be seen.
"I think mispriced credit is a bad word," Murray said, pushing back on Bitcoin purist skepticism of financial engineering. "And I think the promise of what Bitcoin is, is it's a forcing function to price credit correctly." For now, that forcing function hasn't yet produced the difficulty hedge miners say they need most.

2026-02-17 18:39:00 CET

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Announcing
Winners. Congrats to:
@nprofile…uu4x 1st Place - 25,000 sats
@nprofile…qjep 2nd Place -10,000 sats
@nprofile…rk30 3rd Place - 5,000 sats
Zaps have been sent and the meetup page is updated. See all hashers 3/16
#nevent1q…kjqv

2026-02-16 18:12:08 CET

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2026-02-16 18:11:25 CET

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Bitcoin Miners Urged to Take Direct Action on Energy Policy Education
Bitcoin mining industry leaders are calling on operators nationwide to proactively engage with policymakers as the sector positions itself as a critical infrastructure solution for America's energy grid and artificial intelligence buildout, according to discussions at Bitcoin Park's recent Nashville Energy & Mining Summit.
The push comes as the industry faces mounting questions about supply chain security, grid reliability, and national competitiveness, particularly as China's total AI computing capacity has grown 30% since 2020 while U.S. capacity increased just 5% over the same period. Industry advocates say direct education efforts by mining operators themselves, rather than waiting for regulation, could determine whether the sector becomes viewed as essential infrastructure or faces restrictive oversight.
"It's really a lot of it still all comes down to education and being upfront with policymakers," said Michael Sullivan, principal at White Oak Strategies and former senior advisor to Senator Bill Hagerty. "You don't have to orange pill every policymaker. You've just got to be able to assure them that you pose no threat."
Sullivan, whose work helped arrange the notable Mar-a-Lago roundtable where President Trump declared he wanted "all of the Bitcoin to be mined in America," emphasized that operators must address varying concerns across government levels. Local officials focus on noise and infrastructure impacts, while federal policymakers examine grid resilience, supply chain origins, and cybersecurity threats.
Will Paul, who heads payments and hardware policy for Block, noted the regulatory landscape has shifted dramatically from environmental concerns in 2021-2022 toward questions about what he called "verifiability"—policymakers now want detailed information about hardware supply chains, firmware security and operational procedures for grid management.
"The complexity now is that when you say we're critical to the grids and we're critical to the build out and we co-locate AI, policymakers and regulators are talking to us and saying, okay, what's in that box? It's time for the industry to get ahead of that before you're regulated."
During the panel, moderated by Zack Cohen of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, both Sullivan and Paul emphasized that successful policy engagement doesn't require sophisticated lobbying operations. Sullivan's practical advice: "Pick up the phone and make the call. It's just really that easy to get a hold of a Senate office."
Paul recommended mining operators bring tangible hardware to meetings, noting that showing policymakers physical mining chips consistently breaks through abstract blockchain confusion. He stressed focusing on concrete benefits, jobs created, community investments made, grid support provided, rather than cryptocurrency philosophy.
The speakers also highlighted a strategic advantage for Bitcoin mining: its unique ability to power down within minutes during grid emergencies, contrasting sharply with traditional data centers that run continuously. This load flexibility, they argued, positions mining as enabling rather than competing with AI infrastructure development.
"It's way easier to convert a Bitcoin mining facility into an AI data center, than it is to build an AI data center."
Sullivan noted how mining operations establish the power infrastructure AI requires.
For operators concerned about resource constraints, Paul and Sullivan recommended joining state and national trade associations like the Texas Blockchain Council to coordinate messaging and share logistical burden. They emphasized that even small operators can make meaningful impact by focusing on their immediate congressional representatives rather than only high-profile Bitcoin advocates.
Cohen framed the discussion around the intersection of Bitcoin mining with AI development and national security concerns, noting that roughly half of U.S. GDP growth last year came from AI-related activity, making the conversation increasingly urgent for policymakers weighing America's technological competitiveness.
The fundamental message from the panel: operators should approach policymakers with transparency about their operations, evidence of community benefit, and willingness to demonstrate how their hardware and software actually work before regulations force such disclosures under less favorable terms.

2026-02-13 16:50:07 CET

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From Hyperinflation to Hash Rate—Lessons from Mining CEOs
Attendees were treated to an intimate conversation at the recent Nashville Energy & Mining Summit between CEOs Rapha Zagury and Mike Colyer.
Growing up in Brazil during the country's hyperinflation crisis of the 1980s and 90s, Rapha watched his father cry as the government confiscated their family's savings. Now, as founder of Elektron Energy, one of the world's largest Bitcoin mining operations, Zagury is applying those hard-learned lessons about sound money to secure a decentralized financial future.
"My mom would tell me, 'take this money to school for your lunch, don't bring anything back, spend everything because if you bring the money back, it's gonna be worthless by the end of the week,'" he recalled during a fireside chat with Mike Colyer, CEO of Foundry Digital the largest Bitcoin mining pool. "That really shapes you."
That childhood trauma primed Zagury to immediately understand Bitcoin's value proposition when he first encountered it years later. Unlike the Brazilian Real that lost value overnight, Bitcoin's fixed supply of 21 million coins cannot be inflated away by government decree or confiscated through economic manipulation.
The conversation between Zagury and Colyer revealed parallel journeys in building Bitcoin mining infrastructure, though from different vantage points. While Zagury operates one of the industry's largest mining operations, Colyer has spent years building the financial and technical infrastructure that enabled Bitcoin mining to flourish in North America after China's dominance of the sector.
"When we started, China dominated the Bitcoin mining scene," Colyer explained.
"They made the machines, they had most of the hash rate, they controlled the pools. Our goal was to bust up that monopoly."
Today, Elektron Energy operates close to 50 exahashes of mining capacity, positioning it among the largest Bitcoin mining operations globally, with ambitious plans for expansion. The company runs one of the industry's leanest operations, with just 33 employees managing this massive computational infrastructure. Backed by cryptocurrency giant Tether since day one, Elektron has remained laser-focused on Bitcoin mining while many competitors pivot to artificial intelligence data centers.
"The Bitcoin protocol doesn't care if I have the best marketing team and the best logo," Zagury said. "I'm gonna mine the exact same amount of Bitcoin at the end of the day."
This operational philosophy contrasts sharply with publicly traded mining companies that face quarterly earnings pressures. Colyer noted that Foundry's parent company, Digital Currency Group, gave him similar long-term latitude under founder Barry Silbert's leadership.
"Barry was very much like, I don't care what happens month to month, quarter to quarter, think in terms of decades," Colyer said. "How's this gonna play out over the next 10 years?"
Both leaders see the current market environment, with many miners pivoting to AI and machine prices depressed, as an ideal entry point for committed Bitcoin miners. Colyer recalled a similar moment in late 2019, during the depths of the bear market, when Silbert told him to buy every machine available.
"It reminds me of the end of 2019," Colyer said. "Everyone was depressed, there was nobody buying machines, and literally Barry was like, go buy all you can buy."
Zagury confirmed that Elektron is currently one of the only buyers purchasing mining equipment at volume, creating favorable conditions for expansion. He anticipates slower hash rate growth this year as capital flows toward AI infrastructure, which he believes represents a riskier bet than Bitcoin mining.
"Bitcoin is a significantly less risky business than AI HPC because not only it's less capital intensive," Zagury said. "AI HPC...are still in the nascent part of the technology ramp up. You are going to see step functions that are going to wreck a lot of people."
Elektron's strategy involves identifying remote mining sites that will never become AI data centers, acquiring them at discounts, and integrating Bitcoin mining with renewable energy projects. The company recently launched operations in Brazil, where government-subsidized solar and wind projects generate excess power with nowhere to go.
"They're buying batteries to store the energy," Zagury said. "We put containers there with older ASICs. You turn on whenever you want, and you monetize immediately."
The conversation also addressed Bitcoin mining's decentralization, a topic both leaders take seriously. Colyer emphasized Foundry's support for technologies like Stratum V2 that would allow individual miners to construct their own block templates, though he noted most miners don't currently prioritize this capability.
Zagury expressed surprise at this industry apathy.
"It's my hash rate. I want to build a block. I want to have control of the block. Maybe that's why a lot of them are shifting to AI, because they were never Bitcoiners to begin with."
Both leaders predict continued convergence between energy markets and financial markets, with Bitcoin miners serving as controllable loads that help utilities balance grids, with Colyer noting that Foundry can actually observe weather patterns in Texas simply by watching hash rate fluctuations as miners respond to grid conditions.
For Zagury, who watched his father lose everything to government monetary manipulation, securing Bitcoin's decentralized network represents more than business strategy: it's personal mission. The boy who learned to spend money immediately before it became worthless now helps secure a monetary system designed to hold value across generations.
"I grew up in hyperinflation," Zagury said. "When I saw Bitcoin for the first time, it kind of clicked to me. It really made sense."

2026-02-06 19:55:24 CET

NEMS26: Keynote: Monetizing the Megawatt
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Bitcoin Mining—The 21st Century Path to Human Flourishing
Robert Warren, Head of Research and Education at Bitcoin Park, delivered an opening keynote at the recent Nashville Energy & Mining Summit, portraying Bitcoin mining as the fulfillment of industrial-era visions like Henry Ford's assembly lines, now realized through decentralized, flexible energy use that drives human flourishing.
Speaking to an audience of miners, technologists, investors, and energy innovators, Warren argued that energy equals human flourishing, supported by historical and empirical evidence linking power access to progress. He traced the Industrial Revolution from Britain's early innovations to Ford's Highland Park "Crystal Palace," a 130-acre campus that pioneered the moving assembly line, but was limited by location dependency, supply chain interruptions, and the need to sell finished products.
Bitcoin mining, Warren argues, overcomes these constraints. Operations are location-invariant with internet access, fully curtailable without loss, and produce hash rate, a commodity instantly monetized via pools like Braiins or Foundry, enabling continuous production that Ford envisioned but could not achieve.
The presentation spotlighted real-world applications where Bitcoin mining monetizes stranded or wasted energy. In rural Africa, Gridless revives dormant hydroelectric plants, paying owners from day one for full-capacity operation while reducing local electricity costs, directly boosting community access to power.
In the U.S., CleanSpark has deployed hundreds of megawatts, creating hundreds of jobs and enhancing grid stability across states. Other examples include the Cholla Innovation Lab in West Texas, which tests mining's grid-stabilizing role with operators and regulators; Exergy's waste-heat monetization; decentralized nodes from FutureBit in Brooklyn for education; and Midwest operators like Megawatt, which influenced local laws to repurpose infrastructure and now bid into day-ahead markets, stabilizing local energy prices.
"Bitcoin mining isn't just about hash rate," Warren emphasized. "It's about unlocking human flourishing through energy that was previously wasted or underutilized."
He urged the community to share personal stories rather than raw data when explaining Bitcoin's energy dynamics, citing author Michael Lewis: "The truth is like poetry. And most people...hate poetry." He thanked contributors, case study participants, and attendees for decentralizing what Ford centralized, crediting collective efforts over singular visionaries. Bitcoin Park, a collaborative space advancing grassroots freedom technologies, opened with this talk as a framework for ongoing discussions on energy's role in prosperity, particularly in underserved regions.

2026-02-05 15:35:18 CET

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Oil and Gas All in on Remote Bitcoin Mining
Austin, Texas – January 20, 2026
360 Energy, a leading provider of mobile natural gas offtake solutions, is transforming excess and flared natural gas into reliable power for off-grid Bitcoin mining, delivering economic and environmental benefits to upstream oil and gas operators while contributing to decentralized Bitcoin hashrate.
Founded in 2021 by Chris Alfano and headquartered in Austin, Texas, 360 Energy co-locates EPA-certified natural gas generators and modular Bitcoin mining data centers directly at oil and gas well sites. The company captures stranded, uneconomic, or flared gas, often a liability for producers, and converts it into low-cost electricity (sub-2 cents per kWh) to power mining operations. This approach addresses three primary needs for oil and gas companies: maximizing gas value in oversupplied regions like the Permian Basin, reducing emissions through flare capture, and enabling continued oil production by avoiding regulatory shut-ins in areas with limited flaring allowances.
Unlike traditional models that struggled with uptime and incentives, 360 Energy's rental-based service eliminates upfront capital expenditure for operators. Producers pay a monthly fee for the equipment while retaining most revenue from mining rewards, ensuring reliable gas offtake and high operational uptime. The company emphasizes rigorous site diligence, including gas analysis, to deploy tailored infrastructure that handles varying gas compositions and production profiles.
"By listening to oil and gas operators and translating Bitcoin mining into terms they value, such as increased cash flow, lower emissions, and unlocked oil production, we've built a sustainable service model," said Chris Alfano, founder and CEO of 360 Energy. "Our focus remains on Bitcoin as the core application, providing one of the lowest-cost mining operations globally while distributing hashrate across diverse locations and subtly introducing more industry participants to Bitcoin's potential."
360 Energy operates across key U.S. basins and is exploring international expansion, leveraging partnerships like Halliburton for operational support in regions such as Argentina's Vaca Muerta Basin. The company reports strong demand for its Apex Gas Offtake solution as an alternative to flaring or shut-ins, with U.S. flared gas volumes alone offering potential for over 2 gigawatts of computing power.
As Bitcoin mining evolves amid growing energy demands, 360 Energy's model demonstrates how stranded energy resources can drive mutual benefits across traditional energy and freedom technology sectors.

2026-02-05 15:06:37 CET

🔨⚡ MINING MONDAYS POSTER COMPETITION ⚡🔨
We're launching Mining Mondays at Bitcoin Park, a monthly hands-on workshop dedicated to bitcoin mining education, collaboration, and experimentation. And we need YOUR creative vision to represent it!
SUBMIT YOUR GRAPHICS FOR A CHANCE TO WIN 25,000 SATS
The winning design will become the official graphic for Mining Mondays, displayed at Bitcoin Park and promoted across our community.
What is Mining Mondays? A monthly workshop series starting March 16, 2026 (third Monday of each month) where miners, builders, and enthusiasts gather to:
- Build and power bitcoin miners
- Create custom heat solutions
- Connect to mining pools
- Explore Mining DevOps
- Collaborate, tinker, and share ideas
Co-hosted by Bitcoin Park + 256 Foundation, Powered by Proto
SUBMISSION DETAILS:
- Design format: 16 : 9 , PNG or JPG
- Deadline: February 16, 2026
- Submit entries in comments
- Includes design mark for Bitcoin Park, 256 Foundation, and Proto
- Include created by and the artists signature
Think bold. Think bitcoin. Think mining. We're looking for designs that capture the spirit of hands-on building, technical innovation, and the collaborative energy of the mining community.
Prizes:
25,000 sats to the winning artist 🏆
10,000 sats to 2nd place
5,000 sats to 3rd place
See Meetup page where your graphic will be featured here: https://www.meetup.com/bitcoinpark/events/312947772/
Message with any and all questions. Thank you in advance for all your help 🙏

2026-02-01 18:46:21 CET

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Nostr Nights #1 ~ Quarterly Meetup
2/2/2026
https://meetu.ps/e/PJbrj/VqJwr/i
#nevent1q…hvrh

2026-01-26 16:38:46 CET

NEXT WEEK [2/2]
Nostr Nights #1
RSVP Link: https://www.meetup.com/bitcoinpark/events/312318620/
This is the first of many quarterly meetups focused building, growing, and exploring decentralized social technology.
Each session features conversations with people building real projects on Nostr, hands-on onboarding for newcomers, educational deep dives into how the protocol works, and open discussions about emerging tools, use cases, and best practices. It's an opportunity to ask questions, share what you're working on, and collaborate with others pushing the ecosystem forward.
This month we're excited to welcome two special guests: @nprofile…g6z6 , founder of @nprofile…vqwq , a popular, decentralized, and censorship-resistant social network client built on Nostr. Casarin is a key figure in the Bitcoin and Lightning Network community, and co-authored NIP-57 to enable Bitcoin Zaps (tips) directly within the Nostr ecosystem. We'll also be joined by @nprofile…gd9q , founder of @nprofile…ml0t , who is building open-source, scalable Web of Trust engines that turn raw network activity into clear, reliable signals.
Thank you to @nprofile…7dlm @nprofile…0jgp @nprofile…ufxr @nprofile…u66d @nprofile…m4qm for making it happen.

2026-01-22 02:10:28 CET

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https://dash.256f.org

2026-01-22 02:08:23 CET

dash.256f.org
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2025-12-04 16:30:00 CET

“We need leaders, not managers.” – Sen. Marsha Blackburn
From Bitcoin as a strategic reserve to AI governance, we were privileged to be joined by the senator and CEO of CleanSpark, Matt Schultz to kick off Imagine IF diving into why freedom must be at the center of innovation.
Watch the full conversation on our Bitcoin Park YouTube:
https://youtu.be/ZkYSy5y39cE

2025-12-01 19:57:17 CET

“Imagine if your memories could be edited.”
@nprofile…kasv of @nprofile…rncz asked how AI could reshape thought itself, at Bitcoin Park’s recent Imagine IF Summit.
Because AI can already nudge what you see and how you feel, the idea of impacting our very thoughts creates what he calls subconscious censorship.
Marks warns this could come for freedom of thought itself.
His answer: open systems, verifiable code, and sunlight as disinfectant.
Watch the full conversation on our BP YouTube channel:
https://youtu.be/LyBrvnwARlk

2025-10-13 22:14:19 CEST

The internet made us more connected—and less free.
Our lives moved online.
Our freedom didn’t.
At Bitcoin Park’s Imagine IF, @nprofile…qy52 argued that the only way to fix it is to make freedom profitable.
Because open protocols don’t scale on donations. They scale on alignment.
https://blossom.primal.net/4f41b70c509c6212f779f996f059cad21b2b8831848c7222b4fc439482563aeb.mp4

2025-09-11 18:00:00 CEST

The internet was once hailed as the great equalizer, a borderless public square where every voice could be heard.
But today, speech flows through walled gardens, monitored by algorithms, and throttled by unseen gatekeepers. Mass surveillance, platform lock-in, and corporate censorship have transformed conversation into something fragile and conditional.
If Bitcoin gave us financial sovereignty, what would it take to achieve the same for communication? At ImagineIF, @nprofile…qy52 joins @nprofile…9kky and @nprofile…slqw to chart the blueprint for a censorship-proof communication layer.
Together, they reveal how individuals can own their digital identity, move seamlessly across apps, and engage without intermediaries.
Learn more about Imagine IF on Sept. 19-20: https://imagineifnashville.com
https://blossom.primal.net/fb05d55a4c8551b067d736caa994d0eaad5eae16d29299b9900cd6d91ad4b19c.mp4

2025-08-14 01:38:25 CEST

Join our live POD256 from undisclosed location w/ @nprofile…veyj, @nprofile…cg20, @nprofile…6qhv, and Proto Mining https://x.com/bitcoinpark_/status/1955774456930165079

2025-07-31 20:57:08 CEST

Imagine IF is a summit of summits at the convergence of Bitcoin, AI, energy, and freedom tech.
Join us: September 19th and 20th
Where: Fisher Center in Nashville, TN
Learn more: https://www.bitcoinpark.com/imagineif
https://blossom.primal.net/d87282870ee6415a065d2634206579618092b6aa06bd401eb399695cfa8a82f6.mp4

2024-11-06 19:30:58 CET

#nostrville 2.0
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2024-05-31 00:29:58 CEST

Spot the sticker @npub1key…lt3h
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2024-05-23 00:15:37 CEST

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Nice hat!

2024-05-11 17:01:01 CEST

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We miss you too bud!

2024-01-23 21:35:19 CET

Our signed summit posters serve as lasting reminders of all the exceptional individuals that attended our events over the years.
Can you spot any familiar signatures?
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2024-01-20 19:54:33 CET

Our second annual Nashville Energy & Mining summit has come to an end. NEMS24 brought in energy & mining experts from all around the globe to come partake in a 2-day event on our beautiful campus.
Thanks to our attendees for braving the inclement weather. Hope to see both new & old faces at NEMS25!
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2023-05-05 22:54:13 CEST

Next Week at Bitcoin Park 🫡
Tuesday, May 9th - 4p CT - Sparrow Wallet Workshop with Craig Raw: https://www.meetup.com/bitcoinpark/events/292301361/
Tuesday, May 9th - 5p CT - NashBitDevs: https://www.meetup.com/bitcoinpark/events/289663627/
Wednesday May 10th - 10a CT - Mempool Summit: https://www.meetup.com/bitcoinpark/events/291864158/
Wednesday May 10th - 4p CT - Open House: https://www.meetup.com/bitcoinpark/events/289663652/
Join Us! Space is Limited. Please RSVP.