Bitcoin Park

Bitcoin Takeover 2026: Lisa Neigut Shows Up With Solutions Lisa Neigut was a Java backend engineer at Cash App in 2018, maybe five months into learning the Bitcoin protocol for her work, when she spotted something odd in the block header, the data structure containing six pieces of information about every Bitcoin block. The timestamp field, she realized, would eventually run out of room and 'roll over'. It was not an urgent problem. But Neigut wanted to know how to fix it. She went down a rabbit hole Googling developers working on the Bitcoin block header, eventually finding the authors of a related BIP, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, the technical blueprints for changing how the protocol works. Three names came up. One whose contact information she couldn't find online at all. The other two had blogs. She picked the one she liked better. "Don't tell Peter Todd," Neigut said, laughing. She sent an email to Rusty Russell, who happened to be the lead maintainer of core lightning and a longtime contributor to the Linux project. She didn't know any of this at the time. Russell looped in developer Pieter Wuille. The three of them started going back and forth about the timestamp issue. Wuille proposed a fix. Neigut pushed back, citing a constraint from an earlier BIP the two had co-authored. Wuille agreed, she was right. Within five months of that first email, Russell would offer her her a job at Blockstream, working on core lightning. "I was like, well, I don't know anything about C. I don't know anything about lightning and I'm brand new to Bitcoin, but I'm happy to come work with you, you know, as long as you know these things about me," Neigut recalled. He hired her anyway. The willingness to show up before feeling totally ready was a skill learned in her first engineering job. Neigut started her career as an Android developer at Etsy. The company built everything internally, its own payment processing system, its own analytics platform. No plugging into Stripe. No leaning on Google Analytics. "The attitude there is really focused on 'code is craft'," she explained. "We handwrite everything. We don't outsource anything." That culture of doing the work yourself, she said, turned out to be a natural fit for Bitcoin development, where minimizing dependencies and maintaining your own code standard practice. At Cash App, Neigut was approximately the fifth engineer hired to the Bitcoin team. The role gave her proximity to the protocol and an opportunity to develop depth, which came from independent research, reading Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos, pulling apart the block header, cold-emailing strangers. Her path from curious engineer to core lightning developer took less than half a year. After Blockstream, Neigut founded Base58, a nonprofit school that teaches how Bitcoin works at a technical level. She also launched Bitcoin++, the conference series aimed at giving Bitcoin developers a home to present their technical work. The first event ran in Austin in 2022 and Neigut described it as "Bitcoin-only technical counterprogramming." Casey Rodarmor gave his first public talk about what would become Ordinals. Jimmy Song taught a masterclass on Taproot. Adam Back showed up to the afterparty. Bitcoin++ has since expanded globally. Neigut recently returned from Brazil, where the event ran its first "exploits edition," a hackathon track focused on finding bugs in open-source projects. Participants identified at least 10 vulnerabilities in 24 hours using advanced tools and techniques such as fuzzing. The philosophy behind Bitcoin++ conferences mirrors the development culture Neigut absorbed from Russell and Etsy before him. Show up with work, not opinions. In lightning specification meetings, she said, a proposal is not considered complete until the author has both a written spec and a working implementation. "You show up with solutions," she said. "That's maybe the more management way of saying it." Ideas are welcome, but feedback does not arrive until someone builds something that runs. Neigut sees deep alignment between that builder ethos and her home state. She grew up in Houston, the capital of American energy markets, and describes Bitcoin as "natively Texan," a system rooted in self-sovereignty, energy expenditure, and independence from centralized authority. Texas runs its own power grid. Texans, in her telling, understand spending energy as a form of wealth. Bitcoin fits. For builders coming into the protocol now, "Doing hard things is still worth doing," Neigut said. Over a decade of protocol development doesn't mean all Bitcoin problems have been solved. Self-custody, she believes, still has user-experience problems that deserve serious engineering efforts. The next event, Bitcoin++ "Villains Edition" at the Hoover Dam in late April, is built around that premise, exploring contrarian ideas about moving Bitcoin forward where consensus does not yet exist. That engineer who went down a rabbit hole to resolve an odd timestamp bug is still hunting for problems worth solving.

Bitcoin Takeover 2026: The Fraud Investigator Who Decided to Stop Shorting the Past In 2016, Parker Lewis was working as a hedge fund analyst when federal agents raided the headquarters of a real estate company he'd spent two years investigating for fraud. The stock was halted, not for a day or two, but for eight months. It would never trade again. In one stroke, his main project wrapped up, and his schedule suddenly cleared at a pivotal moment. Around the same time, he was asked to evaluate a Canadian gold company, and in the process got connected with Saifedean Ammous, who was then shaping the ideas that became The Bitcoin Standard. Saifedean walked him through the history of money, why gold had served as sound money, and why he was starting to see Bitcoin as the next step. In parallel, Parker was digging into what would happen when the Federal Reserve tried to unwind the massive liquidity it had injected after the great financial crisis. His takeaway: it wouldn't be possible. The fiat system was broken and the Fed would always print money to prevent a credit collapse. His two lines of research converged on one conclusion: Bitcoin was the solution to the printing of money. "From Gold to the Dollar to Bitcoin," he put it. By late 2016, he was staring at a Bloomberg terminal, still a hedge fund analyst but now convinced Bitcoin was the most significant development of his lifetime. He boiled the decision down to a choice: keep shorting the pas by hunting more discrepancies between market perceptions and reality to dismantle broken systems and companies, or build for the future. He picked the latter. That mindset has guided his work in Bitcoin since, first at Unchained Capital and now as Head of Business Development at Zaprite, a company focused on Bitcoin payments infrastructure. His view is straightforward: right now, fewer than one in a thousand businesses accept Bitcoin, but eventually every single one will. Zaprite is creating the practical tools for the earliest adopters—people who already get Bitcoin and are positioned to integrate it first. If not them, then who? Parker has spent much of this journey in Austin, where he was born and raised and credits the city with a hard-to-pin-down influence on his work. When he returns to Texas after time away, he feels a shift, "a sense of home, a sense of freedom but also a decided energy." He ties it to the state being, in many ways, the “last frontier”, with generations having filtered into Texas over a few hundred years for the freedom and opportunity it provides above all else. That independent streak, he says, shapes what gets built here. At Unchained, for example, the team chose multi-signature cold storage setups that require users to hold their own hardware wallets and write down seed phrases by hand—decisions that might be dismissed in Silicon Valley but seemed obvious in a culture that prioritizes self-custody and distrusts middlemen. The Bitcoin scene in Austin is concentrated enough to reinforce those principles through real community culture. It guides what to build and why. He admits the broader Bitcoin community feels more fragmented now than at any point he's seen. But his response is consistent, whether the market is choppy or the discourse is: zoom out. He points to the Fed printing around $5 trillion after the COVID lockdowns, when Bitcoin was trading at $4,000. The trajectory since then is unmistakable. "We're winning. It's working." For someone who once spent years exposing a major fraud before walking away from the legacy financial world, building in Bitcoin has always involved grinding through uncertainty in service of a larger shift already underway. "You're building towards lighthouses in the storm," he says, "still headed in the right direction even if the waters are choppy."

Bitcoin Takeover 2026: How a Loss, a Boat, and a Builder's Instinct Shape Bitcoin Financial Services When Joseph Kelly was fourteen years old, his mother tragically passed away from cancer. Shortly after, his father sat he and his sister down at the kitchen table. The family had always dreamed of a boat journey, something that had never seemed realistic, practical, or anything more than a lofty idea. Now, in the wake of loss, Kelly's father asked his children simple question: What if we just do it? They sold everything. Drove a motor home from Anchorage, Alaska down to Florida. Bought a boat. Named it the Jean, after Kelly's mother. For the next three years, from roughly age fifteen to eighteen, Kelly lived on that boat. His late high school years were spent navigating open water with limited fuel, limited food, limited fresh water, and an unrelenting need to solve tangible problems. "It's really tactile," Kelly recalls, "the problems in front of you when you're attempting a long passage and how you survive or properly equip the boat." His father, in navigating a new family path, gave Kelly more than a simple adolescence on the water. He gave him a model for responding to difficulty, and the wisdom that loss can open a door to new courage while honoring what came before. That new skill, grounding and dreaming, as Kelly puts it, would define everything that followed. Years later, after founding and selling a company with his longtime co-founder Dhruv Bansal, Kelly found himself with rare space to explore. It was 2015 and 2016, and Bitcoin had captured his attention, not as a financial instrument, but rather as an intellectual puzzle. "Bitcoin itself is a really complex kind of hyper modern object," he says, "advanced cryptography, game theory, energy production, all these things that make the system work. And then it's also a portal into understanding finance, new markets," But curiosity alone doesn't build companies. What turned Bitcoin from fascination into a calling was recognizing that a new market was forming, a new cohort of people growing into a shared identity as 'Bitcoiners' who would need real financial services built on principles they could trust. Kelly and Bansal had learned hard lessons from their first venture. They had watched themselves and others prioritize flashy technology over genuine customer understanding. When they looked at the emerging wave of "blockchain, not Bitcoin" companies, they recognized the pattern and refused to repeat it. "That's the inverted way we saw people jump head first into blockchain companies," Kelly explains. "Like, let's use the technology to solve problems that we don't know if or how they exist." Their new venture, Unchained Capital, would instead start with who it served. Today, the company is the premier financial services company for long-term Bitcoin holders. That North Star has remained remarkably consistent even as the products, the market, and Bitcoin itself have evolved. The numbers tell the story of a decade's persistence: more than $10 billion in Bitcoin secured, over $1 billion in loan originations, and upwards of 10,000 clients holding their own keys. "Nobody will hold their own keys, man," Kelly says, paraphrasing the doubt. "Okay — 10,000 clients at Unchained do now. So what does that say?" In an emerging industry where skeptics insisted mainstream users would never accept the complexity and responsibility of self-custody, those figures are a forceful rebuttal. Kelly is candid about the fundamental tension at the center of the work. Bitcoin's core principles run directly into the constraints of commercial financial services, counterparties, surveillance, risk models, hidden leverage. Building a company at that intersection is, in his words, hard. He points to companies like BlockFi, which imported traditional finance playbooks wholesale into Bitcoin without respecting the protocol's ethos or limitations. Those business plans assumed Bitcoin could absorb the same risk structures as legacy finance. It couldn't. Unchained's advantage, Kelly argues, is that he and Bansal didn't come from that world. They came from curiosity, from the school of real mistakes, and from a conviction that knowing your customer matters more than forcing a technology on a user. Unchained has now existed for more than half of Bitcoin's life, a fact that sits in a strange space between pride and responsibility. Kelly is watching the grassroots community evolve, early Bitcoiners aging into new phases of life, showing up less to the gatherings that shaped the culture, the torch needing to pass to a next generation that doesn't always materialize on its own. He sees both fracture and resilience. Debates leave scars, cultural memory accumulates, but Bitcoin, he believes, has enough built-in self-correction to endure. "It's like a cybernetic organism," he says. "It's got enough good feedback loops to survive."

Bitcoin Takeover 2026: Before Bitcoin Had a History, He Set Out to Preserve It Late in 2012 a college student in Austin, Texas was working through Austrian economics texts when he came across Bitcoin. Something locked into place. Michael Goldstein, who in his early education had learned economic theory through the Austrian school, saw immediately what the modern monetary economists missed. More than a decade later, through the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, his 501(c)(3) nonprofit, he is building what he calls the library of Bitcoin: an archive designed to hold the intellectual foundations of the world's first decentralized monetary network. "I became a sort of native Bitcoiner before I entered the real world, so to speak," Goldstein said. He was an internet native who had studied Austrian economics before even encountering Keynesian theory. Bitcoin fit into everything he already knew. There was nothing to unlearn. That formation, heterodox from the start, now shapes how Goldstein runs the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, which he founded in 2013 with Pierre Rochard. They built it originally as a place to share Bitcoin's prehistory: the cypherpunks, the cryptoanarchists, the free and open-source software movement, and the Austrian economists whose ideas run beneath Bitcoin like bedrock. The site sat as a repository for years, accumulating material. Then, as Bitcoin's adoption accelerated, Goldstein felt the weight of what wasn't being done. "I felt more obliged and felt like I had a duty to make something of the Nakamoto Institute beyond just being this kind of old website that just sits there with information," he recalled. The result is a formalized nonprofit now undertaking a comprehensive rethinking of its archive, what Goldstein describes as the 'Library of Congress for Bitcoin', a place that holds not just Bitcoin history, but also the ideas generated by living in a Bitcoin world, and the ideas that made Bitcoin possible in the first place. The metaphor is deliberate. He has spent time researching library science as a serious discipline, learning how archivists manage metadata, verify data integrity, and make information genuinely accessible across time. The institute will implement OpenTimestamps, a protocol that anchors document hashes to the Bitcoin blockchain to verify the provenance of archived material and confirm it has not been altered without disclosure. "I'm not reinventing the wheel," he said. "I'm actually adopting from tradition in a sense." But, Goldstein is also approaching the problem from first principles, free to think independently outside institutional constraints. The Bitcoin mindset, he explained, demands adversarial thinking: anticipating how data can be altered, how stewardship can fail, how centralized institutions accumulate power they were never meant to hold. His obligation is to prove a positive steward, and to build in a way that allows others to fork his work entirely if he falls short. The absence of formal credentials doesn't trouble him. "You don't need a special license to be able to fire up a Bitcoin wallet," Goldstein said. "You just need to be able to generate 256 bits of information." Legitimacy, he argues, comes from doing the work well, not from holding a degree. That logic applies whether you're running a node or building an archive. Goldstein has watched Texas grow into the center of Bitcoin's hash rate, the measure of computational power facilitating transactions and securing the network, in part because of the state's independent electrical grid and abundance of energy resources. He points to the Texas strategic reserve, recent additions to state business code around Bitcoin liens, and the broader mining infrastructure as signs of society integrating Bitcoin into its functions rather than fighting it. His long term concerns, however, run deeper than any political cycle. What troubles him is the quality of Bitcoin's institutional memory. "A lot of the debates that occur are not new debates," Goldstein said. "They are operating off perennial questions and perennial battles." Debates about what belongs on the blockchain, about protocol changes, about what Bitcoin fundamentally is trace back to the very beginning of Bitcoin. Some of them were already well underway by 2012. Without a well-organized archive, each new generation of participants begins the same argument from scratch. His hope is that this work gives the Bitcoin community the ability to build on prior argument rather than having to rediscover it every few years. His advice to others building now is characteristically direct: find the long-range project you can do best, and develop laser focus on it. For Goldstein, the thing is the library. The native Bitcoiner who never needed converting has spent more than a decade tracing the intellectual inheritance that made Bitcoin possible, and is now, systematically and without fanfare, making sure none of it gets lost.

Bitcoin Takeover 2026: The Designer Who Went All In on Bitcoin He didn't quit his Bay Area tech job on principle. He sat down one afternoon, thought about the Pareto principle, the idea that 20% of effort produces 80% of results, and quietly concluded that even a small contribution to fixing money in the world was probably worth more than his current career in enterprise software. Then, he started outreach. That tenacity defines Sahil Chaturvedi, now a product designer at Ark Labs, who has spent years building Bitcoin's most user-facing layer for some of the industry's largest players. "I just realized...the Pareto principle, what's the smallest amount you can do that has the biggest impact?" Chaturvedi reinforced. "And I think a lot of us probably felt that...fixing the money, or at least doing a small part to fix the money, your part, your small little part, probably will have a bigger impact than some enterprise SaaS product." That realization didn't produce a dramatic exit. Instead Chaturvedi produced a how-to guide on multisig, the practice of requiring multiple cryptographic keys to authorize a Bitcoin transaction, written on using Unchained's open-source software around 2019. The guide was a calling card. Chaturvedi had been deep in Bitcoin on Twitter and at conferences, and he kept running into the Unchained team. He reached out to Will Cole, who was leading product at the time, and started a ritual: one email a month, every month, asking if they were ready. Eventually the answer changed from a no, to yes. There was an interview, and Chaturvedi moved to Austin. What came next happened quickly, work at Unchained Capital, then Foundry, and now, Founding Designer at Ark Labs, a small team building protocol infrastructure for institutional clients at an advanced level of complexity—an exciting challenge for a designer who cut his teeth explaining multisig. The throughline across Chaturvedi's work, surprisingly, isn't Bitcoin maximalism. It's design discipline applied to the edge of what Bitcoin can do. At Unchained it was multisig wallet interfaces and the particular challenge of making hardware wallet interactions feel familiar. At Foundry it was mining dashboards for publicly traded companies. At Ark Labs, it is financial infrastructure for the kinds of institutions, think lending platforms and fintech companies, that may not know or care what sits underneath their products. Chaturvedi is, by his own account, a Bitcoin maximalist who holds no dollars, no public equity, anything to acquire more Bitcoin. And yet his sharpest advice to Bitcoin builders is to stop leading with Bitcoin. "Just build the best payment processor," he said. "If it happens to use Bitcoin, then great. If a communication app happens to use Nostr, awesome. But I think you cut off a lot of people when you're just: oh, this is the best Bitcoin escrow system." He points to Stripe as a potential model: technology-agnostic, customer-obsessed, ready to absorb whatever rails prove best. Bitcoin builders who skip that step, he argues, are choosing a ceiling. The counterargument he offers isn't pessimism. It's learned precision. "Relentless customer focus," he said, describing the mindset that lets him hold both things at once, personal conviction and professional pragmatism. "What does my customer actually care about? They don't even know about Bitcoin. So what do they want?" If the best answer to their problem involves Bitcoin, that case gets made. But it gets built second, after the customer problem is fully understood. Austin, he says, is a natural fit for that kind of thinking. He came from San Francisco, where the default is tech monoculture. Austin is something else: hardware startups, energy companies next door, alternative health culture, a blue city inside a red state. "It's a really healthy mix that I find Bitcoin to be a perfect breeding ground to thrive in," Chaturvedi said. He watches the Pleblab cohort, tiny one- and two-person teams experimenting at the intersection of Bitcoin, Nostr, and private AI, as the raw edge of what that culture produces when it's left to run. He now designs entirely in Claude Code, getting more done faster than any prior workflow allowed, while staying deliberate about quality. The pace, the institutional clients, the small team, it's a long way from monthly emails to a company that hadn't opened a position yet. What hasn't changed is the Pareto logic he started with: find the smallest thing with the biggest reach, and be relentless enough to get inside the door and make meaningful change.

Bitcoin Mining Emerges as Grid Stabilizer while AI Workloads Pose Challenges The electricity grid faces a stark choice: build 300 to 600 gigawatts of new generation capacity by 2030, or deploy massive amounts of flexible load to prevent widespread brownouts. That sobering forecast comes from industry operators who, while conservatively modeling, even stripped AI and Bitcoin from their models and projected only residential and electric vehicle growth, a 3% increase that existing infrastructure cannot handle without fundamental changes to grid management. The tension centers on load growth capacity and two radically different 21st-century energy consumers. Bitcoin mining has evolved into what grid operators increasingly view as essential infrastructure, a flexible load that can ramp down 210 megawatts in 90 seconds to stabilize frequency. AI data centers, by contrast, create volatility grid operators have never encountered: 20 to 30 megawatt power swings in milliseconds that may threaten system stability. "AI data centers are unlike anything we've ever seen on the grid ever before," said Nima Amir of LoD, who co-wrote the handbook on managed load and analyzed hundreds of datasets on energy generation and consumption patterns. The load profiles emerging from hyperscale AI facilities show sub-second oscillations, drops and spikes of 20 to 30 megawatts occurring in milliseconds. For context, federal regulations cap grid-connected load changes at 100 megawatts per minute on high-voltage transmission lines designed to move 1,200 megawatts. AI workloads are changing at rates hundreds of times faster. Joe Dillon, CEO of Adakon Energy, which owns a North Dakota mining facility co-located with a 1.2 gigawatt coal plant, explained the infrastructure implications. "You have to overbuild the infrastructure by 200% if you're going to have that much volatility," he said. Current site designs allocate at least 20% of baseplate capacity just for voltage regulation batteries, an extraordinary overhead that makes these facilities enormously capital-intensive. The federal ramp limit exists precisely because grids cannot absorb rapid power changes without destabilizing frequency, which all generation sources must maintain synchronously at 60 hertz in the United States. Bitcoin mining's flexibility derives from its geographical agnosticism and instant curtailment capability. Javier Hermosa, who began mining at home in 2013 and now analyzes grid dynamics for Braiins, pointed to Texas as proof of concept. "Since the blackout of 2021, the introduction of Bitcoin mining and the participation of miners into demand response programs has led to that never happening again," he said. Spain experienced the opposite trajectory last year when a large solar farm went offline and inverters failed. Without flexible load or sufficient battery storage, frequency dropped uncontrollably. "There was no Bitcoin mining to stop," Hermosa noted. The contrast reflects a fundamental engineering reality about renewable energy penetration. Solar and wind lack the massive flywheels that coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants use to maintain grid inertia, the angular momentum that buffers against sudden load changes. "When you have a drop in frequency, that drop will be much more significant when you don't have enough inertial energy sources," Hermosa explained. Bitcoin mining acts as what he terms a "virtual power plant," not generating electricity but providing the flexibility traditional spinning mass once offered through mechanical inertia. The emerging architecture combines three load types in microgrids: firm load from AI training, flexible load from Bitcoin mining, and fast-acting batteries to smooth sub-second volatility. Dillon's North Dakota facility demonstrates this model at scale, automatically integrating with the MISO grid to provide instantaneous response. "Instead of having to ramp that power plant at two and a half megawatts a minute, you ramped it at 200 megawatts in 90 seconds," he said. The result: a coal plant that functions like a battery for grid operators. Regulatory frameworks haven't caught up to these realities. Nuclear co-location faces particular challenges from legacy Department of Defense requirements and complex grid regulations, though Dillon believes small modular reactors may provide clearer pathways. European grids show varying sophistication. Finland's Fingrid and the Nordic region generally understand flexibility needs, while Spain is "waking up to this necessity" and asking demand response aggregators to return after years of absence, according to Hermosa. Technology may partially address AI's volatility problem. Solid-state batteries entering the market from companies like Finnish startup Donut promise capacitor-like discharge rates with greater capacity than traditional lithium-ion systems. "When you combine these solid-state batteries with flexible generation with Bitcoin mining inside a microgrid, then you're basically able to flatten out those waves," Hermosa said. He predicts regulators will mandate such flexibility requirements before permitting new AI data centers on grids already straining under renewable penetration. Whether innovation arrives fast enough remains uncertain. The 2030 timeline for 300 to 600 gigawatts of flexibility assumes no AI load growth—an increasingly unrealistic scenario as companies race to build training infrastructure. Batteries currently provide the only response fast enough to buffer AI's millisecond swings, but Amir questioned their long-term viability at such scales. The answer likely involves co-location strategies, hybrid architectures, and flexible loads that turn what seemed like a problem, Bitcoin's massive energy appetite, into infrastructure that makes an AI-powered grid possible.

Bitcoin Takeover 2026: The Uber Wars Taught one Entrepreneur How to Build an Agent Network Christopher David kept driving after Uber got banned in New Hampshire in 2015. He went on television. He got arrested. A documentary crew followed the fallout. That defiance, the self-taught developer insisting peer-to-peer commerce didn't need government permission, now fuels OpenAgents, his Austin-based company building an AI agent marketplace on Bitcoin and Lightning. The arrest was a prelude. In April 2016, Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin with 48 hours' notice, stranding 10,000 drivers. David drove down from New Hampshire for what he expected to be a two-week stay, only to bootstrap, Arcade City, a rideshare network with local drivers that grew to 10,000 users within a week. "We were a peer-to-peer network. We don't fit any of this stuff," he recalled of his refusal to negotiate with city regulators the way competitors did. That stubbornness paid off in ways no one predicted. Arcade City became the first of 10 companies rushing to fill Austin's rideshare gap. It outlasted nearly all of them. Operating largely out of a Facebook group on a shoestring budget, the network generated more than $10 million in peer-to-peer revenue. Drivers earned two to three times what other services paid. The operation logged near-zero safety incidents. Eight academic researchers even contacted David to study the network, producing case studies on decentralized commerce in practice. But David kept bumping into a ceiling. His driver groups would swell to around 160 members, fracture socially, then prune back to 140, oscillating around Dunbar's number, the cognitive limit on how many relationships a human brain can maintain. "I came to realize that I need to be multiplying this 150-person network," he explained. The problem wasn't his model. The problem was human psychology. That constraint vanished when David turned to AI agents. Agents carry no cognitive load. They form and dissolve coalitions instantly. David saw that Reed's law, which holds that a group-forming network's value scales exponentially, at two to the nth power, could finally apply without the asterisk that human limitations had always imposed. The most powerful AI network, he reasoned, would look like millions of agents freely forming groups, developing specializations, and settling payments in a sovereign money, bitcoin, through micropayment streams like lightning payments. This was the birth of OpenAgents. The vision is an interface David describes as deliberately dead simple: a single text box. Users type a request, fund it through Lightning or a credit card, and agents assemble on the back end to deliver the outcome. Developers who build agent plugins, reusable modules called skills, earn bitcoin proportional to their contribution. Another of David's earlier ventures, a decentralized GPU compute marketplace called GPU Topia, is being rebooted to supply the processing power agents need for the backend of this system. The result is a free, open, and decentralized agentic marketplace. David, who was accepted into a Draper Network bitcoin accelerator, frames the opportunity through the same lens that got him arrested a decade ago. "Agents are not going to be in the jurisdiction of any of you people," he said of regulators, so the voluntaryist rideshare leader, who refused to stop driving, now builds networks designed to never need permission in the first place.

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."

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.

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.

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. - 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. - 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.

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."

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.

Announcing Winners. Congrats to: @Dune Messias 1st Place - 25,000 sats @awayslice 2nd Place -10,000 sats @abitmore 3rd Place - 5,000 sats Zaps have been sent and the meetup page is updated. See all hashers 3/16 📝 719dc661…

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.

One day remaining. Submissions will close 3pm CT on 2/16. Winner Announced on 2/17 📝 719dc661…

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."

https://blossom.primal.net/62959fd847b166992235e04a7f8b7a… Mining Gets a Design Overhaul Block's hardware engineering veteran Thomas Templeton is bringing Silicon Valley's design philosophy to Bitcoin mining, and early miners say it's overdue. Templeton, who spent a decade in semiconductors before helping Apple design the original iPhone's camera system and later leading Square's product development, expanded his scope to also lead Block's Bitcoin initiatives, rethinking how mining hardware is built. His approach: ask miners what actually hurts, not what they think they want. "The people who live and breathe this every day are the experts," Templeton explained at the recent Nashville Energy & Mining Summit. "Going in with preconceived notions about how it should be, you're not going to arrive at the best solution." The result is Proto, Block's new Bitcoin mining initiative that challenges fundamental assumptions about hardware design. Rather than viewing miners as monolithic devices, Proto reconceptualizes mining equipment as modular infrastructure where individual components, power supplies, cooling systems, and other elements, can be upgraded independently as chip technology advances. This shifts the industry paradigm from disposable hardware to sustainable, repairable systems. Templeton's methodology with Proto and Bitkey mirrors his earlier successes at Apple and Square: extensive customer interviews across diverse segments. His team consulted with large-scale operations, small miners, technicians in East Africa and West Texas, and fleet managers. Common themes emerged immediately: quality, durability, repairability, and a fundamental lack of understanding about why mining hardware was designed the way it was. "Why does it have to be shaped like a shoebox? Why do you have to throw out perfectly good components when upgrading? Why do you have to take it off the rack to repair it?" Templeton asked, applying first-principles thinking to an industry that had accepted these constraints as inevitable. Block's approach includes releasing open-source software, reference designs, and comprehensive documentation, tools Templeton views as essential to decentralizing Bitcoin mining. "The biggest way we help with decentralization is open source, talking to community, giving tools and access," he said. Rather than prescribing mining's future, Templeton emphasizes Block's role as an enabler. "If we try to decide what's going to happen, we're going to be wrong. The community will find those uses," he noted. For those interested in contributing, Templeton's advice is straightforward: identify your expertise and passion, dive in, and recognize that Bitcoin's developer community is smaller and more welcoming than most expect. As Bitcoin adoption accelerates, the infrastructure supporting it requires the same user-centered design rigor that transformed consumer electronics.

NEMS26: Keynote: Monetizing the Megawatt 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.

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.