3 Levels of Bitcoin Mining: Learn–Earn–Scale | Hashpower Academy

Video Transcript:

there and welcome to the hash power academy fun fact of the 100% of the world barely 1% have probably got into Bitcoin now if you zoom into that 1% and zoom it out barely 1% of that 1% are into Bitcoin mining and it is to say that if you look back in history the pioneers if you look today the pioneers and if you look into tomorrow the pioneers of the future tend to be the rewarded the most but they take the most upside risk so the first thing to understand about the progressional steps into Bitcoin mining is that mining is the uh the forefront of energy and technology innovation and it takes no prisoners but if you are here to learn that is always going to be the first stage because you can make these two progressional steps less painful in terms of finance your time and energy if you learn all of the absolute fundamentals and everything that can go wrong that’s the key thing if you learn what can go wrong you can understand and move through what’s going right so let’s dive into this very interesting video but first let me introduce myself hello there and welcome to the Hash Power Academy my name is Jake Scandlin i’m the lead educator here and this is a place for you to delve into anything and everything to do with Bitcoin and its underlying network of technologies and commodities you can learn everything to do with how we produce energy transfer it over time how we produce compute power and transfer it over time and how we produce Bitcoin blocks and you can guess the last one last but not least how we produce Bitcoin and transfer it over time all these different components are all interconnected through maths and physics to make the finance component last now let’s dive in so the three progressional steps into Bitcoin mining boil down to what I like to call learn earn and scale before you make the painful mistakes here and here you better learn the basics now the most key important thing is you need to start small start with something that allows you to understand how it all connects together this little guy allows me to understand how much energy it consumes how much hash rate that it produces and how much that earns in terms of a quantity of Bitcoin representative to the entire network i’m going to put it over there so uh the first thing to understand is you are not buying a mini miner to make a profit this is an educational tool and yes they are one chip with a load of components so they are more expensive versus hundreds of chips with fewer components shall we say and so what you need to understand that you are buying something to learn and what you’ll understand is okay I plug it in I consume electricity it produces hash rate ah I need to connect it to the Wi-Fi and connect that to either a pool or solo mining so let’s write pool a mining pool or you are taking the risk of going solo now the problem with going solo is unless you find a block you are not going to earn any bitcoin and the reason for this is well right now if you spent $100 million uh at scale and divided that by $20 per terash you would have 500 no sorry you would have 5 million terraash now the network is $800 million so divide 5 million divided by 800 million and then multiply it by your 144 opportunities per day to find a block you will get an answer of 0.9 so to find barely one block per day you need a hundred million dollars worth of mining hardware so the chances of getting one in a day very very expensive very slim to none in a week month year decade thousands of years even the the chance to find a block with a bit is very very low so the alternative to playing the game of lottery because that’s what it is which is fine you do that the other chance is to use a layer two for payouts now the reason why you would want to use a layer 2 is because a mini miner is going to earn such a small quantity of Bitcoin relative to anything at scale that you would want to well still be paid out but here’s the thing that a lot of the uh the layer one payout I’m going to just use or uh red orange layer one payouts they require you to earn relatively 100 $200 $300 worth of Bitcoin at this moment in time and with a mini miner you were not going to earn that much so the key takeaway here for this entire entire learn chain and everything on hashp power academy YouTube is delving into all these different pieces is you are interconnecting and learning about okay it consumes energy to produce compute to produce bitcoin and I can be paid out or I can play the lottery of trying to find a a block of 3.2 to Bitcoin all the option the optionality is run it into a pool and connect it to a pool that has lightning payouts such as brains uh it goes off to Antpool but anyway that’s a topic for another day um and then when we’re looking at the earn side of things this is this is key and fundamental you could have gone through stage one and bought a mini minor but now you’re looking at the economics this is the important part everything to do with here is learning the technicals with the stage two we’re going into the financials and then with this you’re going more into the electricals so with this you’re understanding okay I want to economically mine which is I want to understand a quantity of bitcoin I could have purchased versus a terraash for example okay how much bitcoin do I want it to earn i want it to earn more uh bitcoin than I could have just purchased in the first place so economic mining is buying the power cheap and producing uh the amount of bitcoin per kilowatt in greater quantity so I can recommend if if your energy is less than 7 cent you have the potential to self mine but you would want to get an efficient machine a low jewels per terahash if you’ve got power at home greater than seven cents it hosting hosting is your your opportunity there but the key thing with with hosting or self let’s just write these in self you might have a solar setup at home here’s the thing this is going to be uh this is going to have different optionalities in all different places but it’s truly down to you the individual if you have your own solar setup already you’ve got excess power and I do invite you if you have a battery solar or net metering setup with the grid anywhere that you have excess electricity available to you mining is an opportunity to visualize that kilowatt hour as a quantity of money an ability to store the money in excess so self or hosted right now the next piece of this is um the type of payouts so this is going to be out of scope for this video but mining pools have different payout types so you’re understanding the economics of if you’ve got cheap power at home yes you could selfmine but the sensible thing is most people don’t have access to power and that’s why most people don’t get into mining and so if you have a hosted setup well you almost also have the option to probably decide which uh payout method you’re going to use the typical ones are F PPP yeah I always have to remember these fps is this is what the network is earning and the mining pool is just paying you on those theoretical profits so it’s not what the actual pool finds itself in terms of blocks and then distributing out to those miners connecting to their pool but actually just what the network is earning and there’s some issues with oh if fees spike and your pool captures those fees but pays you what the network earned which wasn’t that fee average then you’re missing out in certain places but again this is out of scope for this video and the other one would be say P LNS again out of scope this is the pool finds a block distributes that block in layman’s terms but the overall approach here is this is you’re trying to understand the basics here of I’m consuming energy running it through my computer i paid this amount which is not great but it’s an educational tool i could so solo mine and lottery mine or run it into a pool connecting to the pool and getting payouts on layer 2 lightning and then with with a machine you’re looking at the electrical decision under sends seven cents or six cent 5 cent if you’ve got a less efficient machine available to buy and if your if your energy at home is more than seven cent which the majority of people it will yeah it’s uh hosting is your opportunity and then with the price of the machine this is the thing let’s say you bought one a one terraash uh machine for $200 but what if you bought a 200 terraash machine for $20 combine that together you spend a total amount of 200 time 20 that’s $4,000 plus the $200 for this so a total spend with one machine and one Bitax Mini miner you’ve spent two $4,200 and the total amount of hash rate you’ve got is one plus 200 so you do your $4,200 divided by 201 and your average your dollar per terahash average when you’ve gone from this step to that step which is one machine you’ve lowered the cost of this machine by 90% almost by being by lowering it to $20.89 per terahash so yeah just by taking that step from buying a mini miner to buying a whole machine at $20 a terraash you’ve lowered your average price total in in total per terahash to $20.89 $89 per terahash so that’s just a way to move from the oh I pay overpaid per terahash to I’ve lowered it by by going into the financial aspects so just to recap you’re either mining at home because you’ve got cheap power or you’ve got expensive power obviously your only option is host one machine as this example but typical hosting setups yes there’s platforms to buy one machine but with with these computers the more you buy in bulk you’re going to get better prices and so yeah there’s there’s typical sites that’ll offer minimums of you know 10 machine purchase or even 100 machine or even a one megawatt minimum but we’ll uh we’ll go through that in a second your different payout options at the mining pool so you’re sending and exporting your energy onto the internet and you can be paid out on the layer one side of things a couple of transactions per per month there’s different pools that define uh you want to be paid in a certain amount of time uh like say once a month or once a week um or in certain quantity a certain quantity is mined and then they pay it out to which wallet of choosing and typically just about every pool doesn’t charge you for fees so you can be accumulating Bitcoin without fees through the electricity bill that’s another interesting angle now this is where it all gets interesting you you’ve learned the technicals of how it all connects together you’ve learned the financials of how the input cost and output Bitcoin and the machine in the middle that you’re paying off over time and you want to obviously get a cheap uh dollar per terahash rate but the the pricing of machines the less efficient they are the less Bitcoin per kilowatt they earn they’ll be cheaper the more expensive machines the more Bitcoin per kilowatt they produce but you’ve still got to think of that input cost output Bitcoin your profit and how many how many cycles of uh earning profit is it going to take to pay that machine off in in time your payback period so to speak and if you get that far you’ve learned lots and most people will probably just make it to this stage of maybe one machine or a couple of machines or running them at home using it as an electric heater to heat your house or a pool or something like that there’s all different things that can take a lot of time and a lot of interesting directions that you can go with the earn side of this um but this is where it gets interesting the scale how big can this scale well um the basic parts and I think they get more expensive as they go down basically is you could essentially getting those payouts to your own hardware wallet wallet you’re getting payout pays out getting payouts to your own hardware wallet so you’re you’re sovereign in your private key so to speakish um your own node so that’s the data side of things if you are solo mining at this scale which we’ll discuss um you’re going to be storing the data solo mining requires you essentially to store that entire transaction file so this is where you’re delving into nodes so you could be having your own wallet to store the the data money storing the data which verifies your data money and adding those Bitcoin blocks which is you’ve you’re producing enough compute at enough scale to potentially add Bitcoin blocks to the chain in relative periods of time that align to your energy bill because you’ve got to think of this as input energy bill output Bitcoin if you lottery mine one of these you’ll just about never mine a block with this it would take forever but you’d essentially be just constantly paying an energy bill with no economic return this is why we have mining pools and their different payout options and different payout uh levels in in terms of the chain and in terms of the Bitcoin side of things yeah this is uh well hang on I’m going to write solo here and data here i’ve written this the wrong way around so solo node so everything to do with the data um that’s that’s the most important aspect here if you’re verifying uh your transactions your trades your issuance all these sorts of things with your own node your own information and you could be solo mining but this is where it gets interesting because this is more focused on the uh compute side of things that if you’re scaling from hosted to I just want to continue to host there is benefits to scaled hosting and these sorts of benefits are demand response when you’re when you have enough mining machines uh over say one megawatt of energy consumption a thousand kilowatts that’s when you can be exploring the option of doing demand response which is which I’ve discussed on this channel as that opportunity that you have the bitcoin price your production cost and the electrical grid rate sort of in the middle and when the energy price goes above the rate of revenue you you switch off and sell power or underclock and when the price of energy drops below your contractual rate of uh u electricity dollars per kilowatt or megawatt uh when when your when the energy price drops below or goes negative because there’s a load of wind a load of solar but no one’s using power or the prices go negative you will be paid to consume the power on top of that revenue rate of Bitcoin per kilowatt hour and so demand response is is the other side of the trade you’ve got buying energy to produce Bitcoin and then demand response is that the hurdle for this is to be producing about a megawatt where is demand response so demand response is being able to energy trade so with Bitcoin you’re sort of doing financial trade of consume energy in fiat and pay out in Bitcoin and energy trading is you’re selling energy to buy Bitcoin because you can sell the energy in a greater quantity u sorry you can sell the energy to produce or earn or buy a greater quantity of Bitcoin um it’s the other way round and the other side of that is well yeah this is this is the option of being on the grid grid power the other option and this is the fully stacked vertical option is you’re producing your own power could be as small as a single solar panel battery if you want uh cons producing that excess energy running it into your own machine producing your own bitcoin storing that information in your own node and that money in your own wallet that is you vertically integrated from watts to sats so demand response is the grid side but what would be the production side i think it should be micro grids the long-term path is if you producing your own power why not have a community built around that where you are selling power at the rate in which you can turn that energy into Bitcoin so that’s electricity defined on a Bitcoin unit of account and as we scale all different sorts of um micro grids that consume Bitcoin um consume Bitcoin well yes that’s correct the micro grids that uh consume energy to produce compute to produce Bitcoin that defines a price for those kilowatt hours why would that miner want to switch the machine off to sell the power to his local micro grid he would sell it at the rate in which he can earn the quantity of Bitcoin per kilowatt and the more he sells the power the the more efficient the machine gets so he can earn at that even higher rate so the miner is incentivized to earn even more Bitcoin by providing energy abundance at that local level that is so powerful to me but the main thing here is produce your own energy produce your own electricity sell it locally at the rate of revenue of Bitcoin and then that choice between uh using the grid demand response hosting the machines potentially uh that’s a minimum of about a megawatt say 50 pahash which is 50,000 terraash divide it all down that’s 20 jewels per terahash efficiency roughly and so the other option is you’re producing your own power maybe building out your own micro grid uh citadel mini uh off-grid community uh you’re self mining you’re running your own machines and you’re getting these uh machines at a cheaper price this is the other thing this would be the this would be spot buying buying your machine spot or a hardware reseller this is you’re buying at the scale of buying directly from manufacturer which can be uh futures and this is important uh if you’re continually buying over time because if you buy a machine and it’s to be delivered in five six months and you lock in a certain price per terahash let’s say 14 let’s say over the six months that you’re waiting to get your machines because you’re still building out your energy production side and your land and your whatever else uh let’s say the price of machines dropped to $10 a terraash there are manufacturers such as Bitmain that will uh essentially let you hedge the downside price of machine devaluation and they will give you credits essentially to buy more machines from them of course um but it it gives you a hedge if you know you’re going to continually buy more machines into the future you have you have that opportunity to to obviously lock in downside risk mitigation um yeah that’s that’s the overall gist you that might have been a little bit too much but oh well so it’s you produce your own energy run it through your own machine produce some compute connect it to a mining pool or solo mine and pay out in the layer two then you shift to the economics of buying a machine at a great enough volume of hash rate to get that price down earn say you know a decent amount decent payout on the layer 1 blockchain without fees typically and that decision is typically decided by your electrical cost at home or you don’t want to run the machines at home we want to obfiscate the electrical and technical aspects and just put the finance side up which is hosting and then if you want to scale that to producing your own power running your own micro grid to source machines at volume or demand response trade on the grid get uh hedging the downside risk of buying those machines and at a lower price with wholesale purchases and that opportunity to either solo mine or run into a pool and the different options of running your own nodes securing and verifying your transactions and storing that bitcoin in your own wallet uh it can be as optional as optional and simple as something at home that’s small or as big as a city and a uh multi- grid multi- multi micro grids all around the world but they’re all priced at the same quantity of Bitcoin per kilowatt hour i think that’s going to be an amazing future where inefficiencies of trade and logistics are reduced to the point where goods and services trade and money transfers through the internet in the opposite direction thank you for listening i hope this was a very insightful video uh if you have questions drop them down below if you want to get a mini miner I think I have a link in the description of course and if you want to get into hosted mining drop me a call drop me a call drop me a message or an email and I will um address the scale of investment that you’re looking for at those sorts of quantities and give you some form of insight um into what’s available but again not financial advice i’m not a financial adviser and if you want to build a Bitcoin citadel definitely drop me a message because I’m finding I’m finding people all around the world that seem to have this sort of dream in their minds of this energy abundant world and I think that’s what we should strive for because the cheaper energy gets the well everything just gets easier and more abundant and that combination of energy and technology allows us to just operate in a world that is just so much more advanced and progressive towards the future and all the parallels with AI and cloud computing as well thank you for listening i hope you enjoy and I’ll see you in the next one goodbye