[00:05:25] Michael Schmid: In the global trade, there are estimations that just because now, I think the last couple of days, more than 300 ships have diverted down to South Africa, and there is estimations that this will reduce the global shipping capacity by 10 to 15%. And for anybody that remembers the Ever Given, that was stuck in the Suez Canal just for six days.

[00:05:45] Michael Schmid: So that was just six days. We’re already almost two months in this whole, all these issues, it caused massive disruptions. And so it’s interesting that not, this is not very widely reported right now. And I think the implication specifically, what we talked about in the background, what is actually going on.

[00:06:03] Michael Schmid: So the U S actually had since 2022, they had this combined task force 153, which is a naval task force. to protect the Red Sea that was literally made for that specific reason. And part of this are 39 nations all over the world who help with that say, Hey, we are interested because like you mentioned, it affects globally.

[00:06:25] Michael Schmid: So through that specific route, there’s a lot of European Asian traffic that goes through, obviously like this big shipping companies like Maersk, Hapag Lloyd and all these, they are not, they’re not us at all. They’re all European. And so it was a good idea to create this task force. Interestingly, what then happened in the beginning of December, when these first, maybe from a timeline point of view, it already, like you said, it started in November already, but just very small.

[00:06:52] Michael Schmid: And actually at the beginning, it was only attacks to ships that have somehow a connection to Israel. So the Houthi clearly say they are supporting of the Hamas. And they said, we will attack or we’ll basically stop Israel from trading. And if an Israeli ship wants to go through, we’re still going to, we’re either going to divert them, hijack them and attack them.

[00:07:15] Michael Schmid: And actually what was crazy in 19th of November, Galaxy Leader, which is a car transport ship that has the owner, it’s partly owned by an Israeli businessman. So it’s not sailing on an Israeli ship. It didn’t go to Israel. It’s not owned only by Israel. It’s just like a tiny connection. It actually got hijacked.

[00:07:34] Michael Schmid: And it’s still hijacked. We still don’t know where all the people are, the crew. And so that’s still going on. Like they, and so during the time in beginning of December, we had more and more attacks again, always connected to Israel. And then suddenly other ships got attacked that had no connection at all to Israel.

[00:07:51] Michael Schmid: And yeah, when we say attacks, yeah, these are either drones, kamikaze drones that are flying into these, but they also have ship missiles. meaning they fly just a little bit over the water or ballistic missiles, which go into the air and fall down. So the Houthis definitely have a lot of different weapons and it’s very clear that they are supported by Iran.

[00:08:11] Michael Schmid: They’re trained by Iran because all the weapons are Iranian. Like you can literally see what types of drones and or our military equipment that they use. And so, around the 12th to 13th of December, when more and more non Israeli ships got attacked, the companies obviously said, hey, we need to do something.

[00:08:28] Michael Schmid: The companies themselves cannot do anything. Ships are not armed in normal, because the problem is, imagine an armed ship from Germany would go to the US. like how do you handle this? Like this would suddenly, so people always say, Oh, just put weapons on these tankers. And that’s not that easy. So if you really need something in terms of protection, like during the Somalia attacks on boats, what companies usually did, they had literally armed guards on the boats, but they went on the boat after they already were in international waters.

[00:09:01] Michael Schmid: They sail through the affected area and then they go off again. In this case though, We’re not talking about people hijacking boats. We’re just talking about like missiles flying through the air. And so can’t really do a lot of guards on, on board. And so they called for help to make sure. And obviously everybody looked at the task force and the U S said, okay, we’re going to do this operation prosperity guardian on the 18th of December.

[00:09:27] Michael Schmid: But it took six days to actually get anything done. And that’s if you think about like, again, if you look at, at Evergiven, the whole thing took six days and it took the US to create the operation, get all the nations on board. And like you say, most big nations like France, Spain, Italy, they said they’re going to help, but they’re not going to be part of the operation itself.

[00:09:51] Michael Schmid: Basically what they’re saying, we don’t want to be commandoed by US command. And France weren’t actually so far that they started to escort their own ships before that operation could actually do something, which by itself is quite the big move. If you understand a little bit of how these operations usually work is that it’s really important that everybody works together.

[00:10:15] Michael Schmid: If individual countries or teams start to do anything, the stuff gets actually more dangerous. Like, it’s like if in a company, like different teams don’t know what they, what they want to do. Yeah, then maybe things are not very efficient, but if we talk about military operations, This could actually go really bad.

[00:10:33] Michael Schmid: And the fact that France went along and said like, look, we’re going to just bring these ships now through because what the operation or what the task force wants to do, it takes way too long. It’s for me with my military background, that’s quite a bold move. And it continues. The U. S. has now started to escort ships.

[00:10:51] Michael Schmid: Interestingly, only from Maersk, which are is, is an American limited. So Maersk, which is actually a Danish company. They have ships that fly under U. S. flags because they transport D. O. D. containers. So the U. S. uses this Maersk Limited, which is registered in the U. S., flies under U. S. flags, and they only escorted the U. S. ships so far, but they started this now many, many days later. And so today we are in a situation that it’s very, very unclear what is actually going on. The attacks have been a little removed, but they were still was one two days ago on the 26th of December and a ship from MSC from Switzerland got attacked again, even though the Americans are there, it doesn’t really seem that we have a really a grasp on what’s going on and every major company, they’re still sending all their ships down through South Africa.

[00:11:45] Michael Schmid: And what is scary for me is really that it seems like, A, we don’t have it under control. That’s one problem. But the fact that these nations and specifically the U. S. all at the front cannot really get these different countries to work together. That’s scary to me, or it’s just, if I think about, like, if you look back into the history of how other events unfolded, that’s usually when these first cracks are happening, that countries don’t work with each other anymore, or they have disagreements, and that’s usually when bad things happen.

[00:12:17] Preston Pysh: I’m going to read something. This is a little long, but I think it’s pertinent to this whole topic that we’re talking about. This was written by Zoltan Polzar. He was a former Credit Suisse analyst, really renowned in the financial circles. And he’s talking about the difference between bailouts and financial security when you’re talking about treasuries versus it actually happening in physical markets.

[00:12:43] Preston Pysh: Like what we were just talking about with trade. So I’m going to read this and then we’ll move on to the next topic Michael. So here it is. Protection is a conceptual counterpart to PAR. When you decide to take money out of a site deposit, you expect the same amount back when you put in PAR. When you sail foreign cargo from port A to port B, you expect to unload the same amount of cargo that you on unloaded.

[00:13:06] Preston Pysh: Banks can deliver PAR on deposits most of the time. When not, central banks step in to help. Commodity traders can deliver foreign cargo from Port A to Port B most of the time. But when not, the state intervenes again. Not the monetary arm, but the military arm of the state. When central banks are to protect the PAR promises, the military branch is the protection of the shipments.

[00:13:31] Preston Pysh: Foreign cargo needs to sail on sea routes and through choke points like the Straits of Hormuz and par in this context. What I think people, what’s lost on so many people in finance is it’s so digital, it’s so separated from physical reality, but in the background of like all economics, you have these very, very physical things taking place around the world.

[00:13:54] Preston Pysh: And a topic and a theme that I’ve tried to really address for the past year is this idea that you have the world that is delivering physical things in surplus to a world that’s consuming these physical things at a net loss. And when you look at the parties that are at each other or battling each other.

[00:14:18] Preston Pysh: What I find so fascinating is those two sides, when you look at what’s happening inside of these countries of these two major battle that are taking place in the world, it almost always comes down to one of them is a net producer and the other is a net consumer. And this is kind of just further, as Luke Roman would say, this is another signpost to pay attention to the world that’s changing right before our eyes and looking, desperately looking for a new settlement layer to adjudicate these, the exchange of physical things.

[00:14:54] Preston Pysh: So that was me talking a lot. Well, let’s move on to the next topic here, Michael, because man, you have such a fascinating story to tell here that I just love. You are taking mining rigs at your house. You’re converting the excess heat to heat water tanks, to use this in a dual purpose kind of way, not only are you making money from mining, but you’re also reducing your heating expenses and things like that.

[00:15:25] Preston Pysh: How in the world did you get into this? Like, what was the year and what drove you to do this? And yeah, just give us the, how it all took place.

[00:15:34] Michael Schmid: How did it all start? Yeah, I’ll have to. Yeah. So actually recently I, I checked when I got the first time in contact with Bitcoin and that was 2011 already. So very early.

[00:15:45] Michael Schmid: But at that point I, I’m actually from Switzerland. I live in the U. S. Now. So I was in the tech scene of Zurich active and actually with a lot of cryptographers and. Cryptography was something interesting. And so we looked into Bitcoin just for the fact that I can send you something and I can, I cannot use it anymore because in the internet, everything was about copying.

[00:16:06] Michael Schmid: So Napster and Kazaa and all these things were about easy copying. And here comes a person and claims, oh, I figured out a way that I can send you something digitally and you cannot use it anymore. And that was fascinating because up until that point, that didn’t really exist. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately at that point, Living in Switzerland, like we didn’t really know how broken the money was because Switzerland is very stable, low inflation, the government cares for you, things like that.

[00:16:31] Michael Schmid: And so while I understood Bitcoin, we looked at, at that point, I was like, Hey, wait, you can do seven transactions a second. That’s the max. And already there are credit cards, it’s way more. And so we like wrote it off and said, like, it’s a nice experiment, but it could never become the subtle layer for the world.

[00:16:51] Michael Schmid: Of course, completely forgetting that things are built in layers, like the internet itself, that’s what I learned, the different layers, so I don’t know why, but I didn’t really know the, the monetary background or the banking background to really connect the dots, like I knew the Bitcoin over there and the money over there, but that they could actually be solved and like layer two and layer three levels.

[00:17:09] Michael Schmid: So for me, Bitcoin was like, was a cool thing. Of course, you actually bought some because at that point, like the only ways to mine is like, you just ran your computer overnight. And the next morning, like, if you were lucky, you had 50 for 50 more Bitcoins. That was literally like, and then we sent them to each other just for fun, but we couldn’t use them.

[00:17:28] Michael Schmid: Like, yes, in the U S at that point, you could start using them a little bit, but in Switzerland, like there was nobody that wanted them. So we just sent each other them for fun. Then Mt. Gox came and Yeah, unfortunately, when Mt. Gox collapsed, it was like, okay, for me, that was like, okay, that was a nice experiment.

[00:17:46] Michael Schmid: Let’s forget about it. And then it came back like in life, everything like it comes back, you meet friends again. And so I met Bitcoin again, actually during the pandemic, because living in the US, And learning about all this helicopter money or the stimulus checks, I started to doubt, like, how is this actually possible?

[00:18:04] Michael Schmid: How do we produce all this money? And your podcast was actually one of the major things that I learned about money and how it all works. And having some time during COVID and doing some side projects, I started to look into mining again. I bought like a very old S3 miner, that’s even before the S9. Found one on Facebook marketplace and started to heat my, my garage because it was cold.

[00:18:29] Michael Schmid: So I then switched to S9s because I, well, the S3 didn’t really make any money. So got the S9s, realized how loud they are. But I didn’t care because like most of the time I’m listening to music while working. So I heated my garage a little bit and yeah, I was, was happy with that. Then my wife and I, we decided to go on an Airstream trip.

[00:18:51] Michael Schmid: So we have an Airstream trailer and we traveled all over Colorado and obviously it’s very cold there. And one of the things is you heat your rigs. They’re all heated with propane. The problem is though, you need to get the propane and they’re not very well insulated. Basically, every two days I had to find a place to fill up propane, you haul the tanks and all that stuff.

[00:19:11] Michael Schmid: But there is electricity on all these RV parks and I can see where this is going and a lot of times there’s 30, 50 amps, so we have a lot of power. So what I did, people can see it on my Twitter feed I took an S9 outside piped it into the airstream, plugged it into the electrical that was already there and it started to heat.

[00:19:34] Michael Schmid: My Airstream trailer with s nines basically for free because in these RV parks you just pay a daily fee and it doesn’t really matter how much electricity you use. Actually one place I tried to offer them part of the Bitcoin, I didn’t want any use. I was like, okay, well then if you don’t want, but that worked.

[00:19:50] Michael Schmid: I was able to delay the amount of propane that I used for like four or five days because during the night. It was still pretty cold, so I still had to use the propane to kick in when it was too cold, so I already had to learn how to measure the temperature inside the Airstream and decide, does just the miner run, or does the propane still run, but basically I was able to extend all of this, and that was something I built, I put it on Twitter and people completely freaked out, because nobody had ever seen this, Already people started to ask me, like, what are you going to do in summer?

[00:20:21] Michael Schmid: Because summer, you don’t need to heat the garage. And so I actually went to Bitcoin Miami. That was 2022. Yes. And I saw all these immersion cooling systems. So the really big, the industrial ones that have like hundreds of thousands of miners. And what I saw there was that you can quite easily take out the heat from the miners, put it into the oil, so the oil flows through the miners, extracts the heat, and then you have the heat in a liquid.

[00:20:50] Michael Schmid: And as soon as you have a heat in a liquid, you can easier transport it, you can confine it, you can run it through heat exchangers. Because if you have it in air, if you have hot air, it’s very hard to transport it or to use it again, because it uses a lot of volume. And, but a liquid like oil or water is a small volume and you can put a lot of heat.

[00:21:09] Michael Schmid: Anybody that ever boiled some water on the stove knows how long it takes. That’s how much heat that the liquid can actually store. So I was looking into, okay, could I actually heat my water in my house for the shower and with some YouTubing and looking into alternative heating solutions, because there are people out there that do this already with wood fire stoves.

[00:21:31] Michael Schmid: So people that live in woods and have a lot of wood, they use the wood to heat up the water instead of electrical or, or gas. And so I used the systems that these people use for these alternative heating solutions. And I connected my miners through Immersion’s, through Immersion’s system and got it running quite well.

[00:21:51] Michael Schmid: Not at the very beginning, like there was a lot of issues like usual, these are completely new things. So yes, I took a shower in Immersion oil that was like a hundred degrees hot and stuff like that. But you learn, you fail and you fix. And yeah, that’s basically it took its turn. I started with the water.

[00:22:10] Michael Schmid: Then I looked into, could I also heat the hot tub? So my wife and I, we have a hot tub outside, looked into that, figured out how it can like build diversion systems to actually send the hot oil or the water to specific places. And last winter, I also started to look into how to actually heat the house because our house luckily is a hydronic system, meaning it pumps hot water through radiators and baseboards.

[00:22:34] Michael Schmid: So that’s already there. There’s a regular oil furnace that heats up the water. So I basically just disabled the oil furnace, plumbed in the heat exchanger, and now I can heat the house as well. And yeah, so that’s what we currently, what I currently do at home is basically I disabled all the other heating systems that I have, and I use my miners to heat the house, the water, and the hot tub.

[00:22:58] Preston Pysh: I love this. As an engineer, I absolutely love this. Where to even start here? First of all, the immersion is way quiet. It’s there’s no sound. So that that’s one of the most beautiful parts of this is for anybody that’s ever heard a minor on that’s, that’s being cooled by air. They are very loud very, very loud.

[00:23:19] Preston Pysh: And so the immersion, I’m curious about the reliability going from air cooled to liquid cooled. Do you get better reliability out of the rig? Is it going to last you more years that way? What’s your thoughts on that?

[00:23:35] Michael Schmid: Yes, it actually does. Because one of the issues with air is dust or particles or even animals, so like bugs and stuff.

[00:23:45] Michael Schmid: When they get caught in the airflow, it can destroy fans. There is like all these cooling systems. And if they get clogged up, the air cannot properly flow over anymore. And your miners are going to die if you cannot properly remove all these things. So you need to make sure that like there’s no light, so no bugs get into the systems and need to monitor the temperatures with the oil.

[00:24:06] Michael Schmid: There’s none of these problems. All you need to do is to make sure that no, nothing goes into the oil, but that’s it. You can just cover it up. That’s very simple. The oil actually has a much better way to remove the heat from the miners than what air does. And so you can actually overclock these miners more than you normally can with air.

[00:24:26] Michael Schmid: That of course is not very good for the hardware, because the more harder they run, their lifespan will go down. But in my specific case, where I actually use second hand or third hand miners anyway, I can run them quite hot to get really get the heat out of the system.

[00:24:46] Preston Pysh: You had mentioned that you went to Bitcoin Miami and you saw some of this, was it the following year that you had an exhibit at Bitcoin Mining?

[00:24:54] Michael Schmid: Yes.

[00:24:55] Preston Pysh: Okay. The next year, you go to Bitcoin Miami and tell people this story, because this story is hilarious.

[00:25:04] Michael Schmid: Yes. On that point, after Bitcoin Miami, I found other people online. We call ourselves the plat miners. And that’s like. use them for heat re usage and stuff like that. And we really went, or there’s a couple of telegram groups where people exchange ideas about that stuff.

[00:25:22] Michael Schmid: And I really started to build this and looked at other people, what they build, like these alternative heating solutions. And I The piece that I was really wondering all the time is like, how can we actually show this to people? Because a lot of times people think miners are really big systems, like they see these big setups, data centers of all the companies like Riot, Marathon, and all these, and they think this is how you mine.

[00:25:50] Michael Schmid: But in the end, a miner, there’s literally for the people that are in the video. There is one behind me. It’s like a shoebox size of device and these big systems, they just have thousands of them. But if you want to start small, you can. And interestingly, in my experience with friends of mine, I always try to orange pill them and some of them get it.

[00:26:11] Michael Schmid: Some of them, they don’t want to know about it. But as soon as I told them that I get paid to shower now because literally every time we take a shower, my wife asked me like, how, how many sets did I make now with the showers? And I can prove that the showers take longer now. So we also wanted to like offer friends to shower in our house, but this is a bit weird.

[00:26:30] Michael Schmid: So we’re still in the US and Europe that would maybe work, but I can see like people that don’t really like Bitcoin now suddenly they’re like, okay, wait, so this reduces money. And can I have this in my house as well? Okay. So I basically reached out to Bitcoin Miami and I saw some people at other conferences to say, hey, why don’t we show people?

[00:26:50] Michael Schmid: Why don’t we bring my system? So I disconnected my complete system from the house. I live in Virginia. So Miami is like 18 hours away. put it all in a car, drove down to Miami and installed it all there again and he did a hot tub. So there are these inflatable hot tubs that has space for like three to four people.

[00:27:11] Michael Schmid: And we were able to convince first the organizers and BTC magazine, which organizes the conference. And then also you got to tell that story.

[00:27:20] Preston Pysh: You got to tell that story.

[00:27:21] Michael Schmid: Yes. So, so upfront, it was always very clear that these conference center for anybody that ever organized a conference. You have a lot of people that need to approve what’s actually happening on the show floor.

[00:27:34] Michael Schmid: Usually you have a production company, but then you also have the fire marshal, and you have maybe police and other stuff. And we started quite early and I sent them pictures. And for people that have seen my system, It’s not polished. Like, it looks like somebody built it in their basement. I always call it the steampunk version.

[00:27:51] Michael Schmid: Like, there’s exposed wood and there’s some exposed cables, but it works. And so I, very cool people from the Bitcoin Magazine started, like, very early to convince the Miami exhibition people to like, to allow that. The end. First they said no and then later on after I showed the video how it works and stuff like that They were like, okay, bring it and we’ll decide there Again, if you hear that, this is actually 94%, 95 percent no, but there’s a 5 percent chance that you can do it.

[00:28:22] Michael Schmid: If they tell you, bring it, we’ll decide there. So I’m driving down there and rolling all this stuff in and where the place is while I’m pushing all these things in there, like six people standing there from production house and other people to the fire marshal, to the head electrician. They’re all there and the first thing I do is I take out my box and inside are the miners with a liquid and there’s an electrical cable that goes in and it’s transparent.

[00:28:47] Michael Schmid: The oil, if you don’t know that it’s oil, it looks like water and the first thing the electrician says, no way you can move it out there right out again. And I was like, okay, so then a long time of just showing these people because again, they, even though they are electricians, even though they have never seen any of this.

[00:29:07] Michael Schmid: So I basically had to explain them how it works, how each system works. They wanted to know what the oil is. Luckily, I brought the original oil containers, which have all the sea, the labels on it that explained that the oil is dielectric, means it does not conduct any electricity. It’s made for that specific purpose.

[00:29:27] Michael Schmid: We talked about like that we have to distance each other because of course there’s a risk if the hot tub would leak and it would leak into the oil or then the oil suddenly becomes conductive and then you have a problem. So we talked a lot about that, but basically it was me trying over three hours to convince the people there that we can run it.

[00:29:48] Michael Schmid: And we went from, okay, you can leave it there and you cannot run it. to you can run it, but you need to use the original heater from the hot tub and not actually the miners because the hot tub itself also has a heater, but we didn’t want this. You gotta fake it. Correct. Yeah. You can fake it to, then I actually just started it and I showed them.

[00:30:06] Michael Schmid: So it was really like, I basically had to do what I usually can do over a long time. We had to do over three hours and after three hours, they were like, Okay, you can run it, but don’t start it because we don’t want the fire marshal to see it while it’s running. So it’s just like all these things. But yes, at the end, we had a hot tub that was heated up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit or 440 degrees Celsius, which is the regular temperature of a hot tub, completely heated by one S19J Pro, which is like the standard today.

[00:30:36] Michael Schmid: It produces around three to 4, 000 watts. And people could not believe that this is it. Like we just had a hot tub there. We ran the bubbles all the time because then steam comes out. So you can actually see it. We had a little display of the temperature and the miners there and people walked up and they’re like, what’s that?

[00:30:53] Michael Schmid: And he said, Oh, there’s a miner over there. And yeah, there is like, I’ve never had like, I do other conferences in other tech stuff, but I never had a line of people standing around the booth. to wait to talk to me. Like that was the craziest. Like I could not eat lunch because I had so many people asking questions, how this works.

[00:31:14] Michael Schmid: They wanted to touch the oil, which they obviously could like, it doesn’t matter. Would never happen. Unfortunately, nobody ever wanted to go into the hot tub. And we then at the last hour of the last day, we a couple of friends of these plat miner community, we then just jumped in and actually during that time, even more people came over and wanted to know what it is, but yeah, we had a minor heated hot tub at Bitcoin Miami, and I’m actually building another version right now for Bitcoin Nashville, because we want to do it again, hopefully a bit, the bigger hot tub and also hopefully if people in it all the time, we’ll see if anybody wants to be in the hot tub, talk to me.

[00:31:54] Preston Pysh: I love it. Okay. So most of the time when people hear Bitcoin mining and they think about this potential to harness the heat that’s coming off of it. A lot of the times people are not thinking that chilling air is possible. So smash that with a sledgehammer for folks.

[00:32:15] Michael Schmid: Yes, so there is a technology called absorption chilling, which basically can take a hot liquid or a heat source, and it can convert it back into cold air or cold water.

[00:32:28] Michael Schmid: This technology is used today mostly where you have a lot of waste heat. So like data centers, for example, they have massive amount of waste heat or like metal contra metal smeltering, like when you melt down metal and the reform it and stuff like that, this creates thousands of degrees of temperatures because the metal is obviously very hard.

[00:32:48] Michael Schmid: It needs to be heated up. I won’t go in this specifically how chemically it all works, but you can basically extract the heat from, let’s say, hot water. And you can use it to cool down water and you can reuse it. And with data centers, what they do is they take out the hot air, run it through absorption chillings and send it back in and use it to cool down the system again.

[00:33:10] Michael Schmid: And what I think should be possible is to use the exact same system also with the miners. And one of the problem is that for these absorption chilling systems, usually the hot side needs to be 90 to 100 degrees Celsius. And with my miners, or at least the miners that we have today, you can get water to 60 degrees Celsius, 70 degrees is usually a problem and not no problem higher than that.

[00:33:38] Michael Schmid: So 80 to 90 is quite hard because the chips are not made for it. What we have to understand is All these chips are usually made to run at 30, 40 degree temperature, room temperature. So that’s normal, or maybe a bit hotter room temperatures. They’re not made Celsius. Yeah. It’s all Celsius. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet.

[00:33:59] Michael Schmid: Now there’s two ways to fix this. One is to actually build chips or build mining rigs that can go much hotter. And I’ve, there are rumors, or I’ve talked to some of the mining companies that are actually working on this. to have systems that can get water that you could use or the oil up to 80 degrees Celsius, which would be very good.

[00:34:19] Michael Schmid: Or there’s also ways that we can actually get it harder. The problem is then suddenly we create specialized rigs for this purpose. And one of the major things that I’m doing and other people are doing that build these systems, we use second or third generation. We can maybe talk about this a bit more why we’re doing that.

[00:34:37] Michael Schmid: So that’s a problem. Like if we, if you build brand new systems, it does not become affordable anymore for houses. or for home miners, or the other ways you could actually use a small heat pump that then can take the 60 degree water Celsius and can put it to 80, 90, or 100. So that’s one thing that I’m looking at right now is how can we use the miners to basically pre warm water, use a heat pump to bring it up to higher temperature, because then we could also cook with it.

[00:35:04] Michael Schmid: Like that would be cool. Or we can then also use it through absorption chilling again. to actually cool down a house or buildings or whatever you like to cool down. And I feel then we would really have an awesome system where you basically have a mining system inside your house and in winter you use it to heat your house and in summer you use it also to cool your house.

[00:35:27] Michael Schmid: Because then We would have efficiencies and we could generate, we could reduce the costs for people’s houses massively.

[00:35:35] Preston Pysh: I want to talk about the challenges that, because what we’re really talking about is just a lot of complexity. When we look at what a normal person can do just with the way their house is today, without any of this, in there.

[00:35:50] Preston Pysh: I would argue most people have to always hire somebody to do any of this work, even though they can watch a YouTube video or whatever and probably do a lot of this themselves. It’s already kind of exceeding what a normal person can kind of handle as far as their technical competence to even fix simple things around the house.

[00:36:09] Preston Pysh: So I want you to tell the story about you were away on a trip, your wife was at home, and there was a major issue with this setup. And I want to do this to illustrate kind of where we go after that story. So tell the people, tell everyone this story. This story is hilarious.

[00:36:28] Michael Schmid: Yeah, so my wife, since she knows me, we’re now 10 years together.

[00:36:33] Michael Schmid: She knows that I’ve always been a tinkerer and when we bought our own house a couple of years ago, one of the exciting things for me was that I actually can work on the house. Because compared to Europe, in the US, you’re actually allowed to do most things you can do by yourself. First, legally you’re allowed.

[00:36:50] Michael Schmid: In Europe, you’re not allowed, for example, to even open like an electrical plug. It’s already like, this is already no go. So first of all, you can, and also legally, and also you actually have access to all the tools and the materials. That’s the other thing. Like a lot of places in Europe, you can. So that was very exciting.

[00:37:06] Michael Schmid: So I do all the stuff in the house that we need ourselves, like we move wiring or my wife wants a lamp somewhere else, or we, whatever, we do all this stuff ourselves. And when I started to initially do all the stuff and build the miners in there, and usually I build everything in the, in my garage, I have a detached garage, so that’s what I’m – my workshop, I built it all there. And then we moved it over. She was skeptical, but one of the things she said is like, I just want to make sure that whenever something happens, we can like, we can redo it to the original state. And I was like, of course, I’m going to build it that way. My Fiat job still brings me to Europe sometimes.

[00:37:42] Michael Schmid: So I went over there and one afternoon, which is Europe afternoon, the US in the morning, I get a text that said, there is no hot water dot, dot, dot. And That was probably the worst case that I was worried about because I’m like six hours at least flying away Like I wasn’t supposed to go back to the US for a couple of days and there’s no hot water at home So what do you do now in my system?

[00:38:08] Michael Schmid: I can actually a lot of things I can the remote control So I can look at all the different stats of minor temperatures when the miners ran the water temperature all the different things I can look at. So I like log into the system and there’s like, I just see like graphs that just go up and they stop and there’s no data anymore.

[00:38:29] Michael Schmid: So something went horribly wrong. And in hindsight, the miners didn’t turn off and I can go a bit into deeper what actually happened, but there was no, it was clearly, I knew that it’s not going to be easy to undo this. But so I basically, I document everything on Twitter of my stuff. So I used pictures that I took off the system.

[00:38:51] Michael Schmid: And I created a documentation of what she has to do for anybody that knew or know how water heater works. They’re connected, they have 240 volts, so it’s dangerous. And I bet she basically had to take the screwdriver, remove some 240 wiring, and put other wires, the original ones, back in. So I sent her pictures of what she had to do, step by step.

[00:39:14] Michael Schmid: We had a FaceTime call and-

[00:39:16] Preston Pysh: She was ready to kill you. She was ready to kill you.

[00:39:19] Michael Schmid: Oh, a hundred percent. Yes. And there was swearing involved. Yes. But we got it done because it’s, I always say like, it’s not very hard when you know what you have to do.

[00:39:31] Preston Pysh: Tell everyone what caused the issue here. I find the issue to be really fascinating.

[00:39:37] Preston Pysh: What caused this? Describe what she saw and then I want people to think about what they think the issue might have been because it’s not what I was expecting when you told me this.

[00:39:48] Michael Schmid: Yes, I told her when she told me like there’s no hot water, I looked online in my system and like I said, I just saw temperatures rising and I told her can you send me a picture of our, we have like a utility room where the water heater and all that stuff is in it.

[00:40:03] Michael Schmid: And she sent me pictures and usually pipes that should be straight. They literally were bent and like bent like, like a lot. And, and the first thing I asked her is like, is there oil on the ground? There was not, but somehow what happened is the oil got much hotter than 200 degrees Fahrenheit. So almost to the boiling point, which is a hundred degrees Celsius of water.

[00:40:26] Michael Schmid: The oil luckily boils way later, but all these tubes that I use, they are packs. It’s like plastic tubing. They’re only made for like a hundred degrees Celsius, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. So they all started to melt and they also start to like sag. So basically it looked like there was a fire first but we couldn’t find a fire.

[00:40:46] Michael Schmid: And yeah, at one point, I realized, okay, we cannot continue with the current system. Let’s redo the old one. And that’s when I did all of this. Turns out in the end, and I only learned this later, and I also learned this with other people that had the same issue, is a miner itself, it consists actually of two parts or two electronic or actually three, let’s say three.

[00:41:08] Michael Schmid: So there’s a power supply. which converts the 240 volts into usually 12 volts DC, because these miners, they run on DC current, not on AC, which we have on the wall. So that’s the, that’s the power supply. And then you have a little computer that runs a Linux on it that actually is the piece that talks to the pool or that receives the, all the stuff to do actually the hashing.

[00:41:30] Michael Schmid: And then there’s the hash boards, which are actually the pieces that do all the hashing and that connected through a wire to that central computer. Now, what happened, what I believe happened in my system. is that because both of it is in oil, so the whole system is in oil, the hashboard, the power supply, and this little control board, that the control board lost the connection to the hashboard because it got too hot.

[00:41:56] Michael Schmid: So all these connections, like these communications protocols, they start to glitch at specific temperatures. And so what happened is that the miner tried to tell the hashboards to stop, but couldn’t anymore, because it was too hot. And so the hashboard just went on, mined more, they used all the electricity, and even though the hashboard tried to tell it to stop, it started to glitch out, I can actually see from my data that my central control system tried to talk to the hashboards to the control boards, to tell them to stop.

[00:42:28] Michael Schmid: And they also didn’t respond anymore. And so basically the system just ended up in a loop and got get harder and harder and harder and harder until they actually completely stopped. So the hashboards at one point luckily also stopped to mine. And yeah, and the solution to the system is today, what I do is I’m actually physically disconnecting the miners if they don’t need to mine anymore.

[00:42:51] Michael Schmid: So the technical term is a contactor or a relay. that is physically able to disconnect the miners. If the central system says, Hey, you have heated enough. We don’t need you anymore. And that’s now I have this newer system with this contactor. And I obviously, like I’m an engineer, so I actually tried to reproduce the same issue and I was able to, and I was able to show that the miners now disconnect physically if something like that happens.

[00:43:19] Michael Schmid: And so this specific case cannot happen anymore. But yeah, these are things that nobody really knows because nobody has ever built these things or used the miners this way. And so, yeah, you have to go through this, you have to learn from it and you have to improve.

[00:43:35] Preston Pysh: One of the things that I find really interesting with, with a lot of this, when I talk to people about the cost for them to get back, because these miners are not cheap, so if you’re going to buy a miner, I mean, there’s a very large upfront cost, so yeah, you’re taking a shower for quote unquote free, or you’re getting paid to take a shower, but like your time to recuperate your upfront cost for the hardware, is actually pretty fast.

[00:43:59] Preston Pysh: Like people that put these solar panels on their house, the repayment period is typically like 20, 25, 30 years for them to recuperate their cost because now they’re not having to pay for an energy bill. But when you’re dealing with this stuff, correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re talking like five years, about three to five years, somewhere in that ballpark.

[00:44:18] Preston Pysh: Is that correct?

[00:44:20] Michael Schmid: Yes, yeah, that is correct. It highly depends, of course, A, what types of miners you’re buying, because there are the brand new models, there are older models. It also depends on how much you actually pay for electricity. Now in the US, luckily, we have an average rate of 0. 12 per kilowatt hours.

[00:44:40] Michael Schmid: In Europe, we have like 30, 40 even in some places. So then your recuperation time just takes like four or five times longer, just because the electricity rate is higher. And it also depends on how long are you running the miners? Because in my system, when I, when the house is hot enough, the hot water is hot enough and the hot tub is hot, I can’t use the heat anymore.

[00:45:05] Michael Schmid: Like I have to literally stop the miners from heating or the whole system will overheat, which was the problem of the system in the beginning. There are ways you could have like a, a force system, let’s say a radiator outside to just vent the heat outside. But depending on what type of miners you have and things like that, you maybe actually pay more for the electricity than the Bitcoin that you generate at the same time, because there are older systems.

[00:45:29] Michael Schmid: And the fourth is the Bitcoin price itself. And then technically also fifth one is how fast you want to actually sell the Bitcoin. Like I, the Bitcoin that I mine, I don’t sell them to pay for the electricity. For me, that’s like DCA ing every second or every hour, so I’m happy to pay the electricity company, I pay them money, and the miners that use the electricity create me sats.

[00:45:53] Michael Schmid: So for me, that’s my DCA. It’s actually pretty much the only way today that you can do KYC bitcoins is to do mining, because nobody knows that you do it, nobody knows the history through all of them. And so, it highly depends on these multiple things, but yes, in my system, what I have with 12 cents, and I right now, sorry, yes, 12 cents per kilowatt hour.

[00:46:15] Michael Schmid: And also I have two S19J pros, so they have like, both each 100 terahashes. And now in winter, where the system runs, yeah, I easily make 10, 15 dollars a day through that system. And. The whole cost of the whole thing is around 10, 000 material only. And so, yeah, you can, you can calculate, we write three to five years. And, but of course, also knowing that Bitcoin will probably go up, it could actually be in half a year, like depending on what the price does, the whole system could be paid off in half a year. No problem at all.

[00:46:50] Preston Pysh: I think the thing that like, we understand all these variables, but we talk about this nonstop, like all day long.

[00:46:56] Preston Pysh: So you know, it was like, Oh yeah, that makes, that makes sense. That variable there, those you’re laying out all these variables, but for somebody who a doesn’t even understand why these crazy people on the internet are trying to collect these magic internet money, Mario coins, let alone all these other very technical engineering type variables.

[00:47:18] Preston Pysh: And introducing all of this complexity into, into their house. Do you see this becoming something that we fast forward five, 10 years into the future? Is this something that eventually makes its way into every household or like, I’m thinking about like the sustainment and the maintenance of like, who do you call when something like this goes down?

[00:47:41] Preston Pysh: And, and let’s just say we’re living 10 years into the future right now. What does that world look like as, as far as you can kind of muster up?

[00:47:49] Michael Schmid: Yeah, so the easy answer is yes, I do believe that in the future, wherever we generate heat, for whatever reason, in industrial or residential areas, that they will be generated through Bitcoin mining.

[00:48:04] Michael Schmid: Because it does not make sense anymore to generate heat with resistive heating, so electrical, because a miner, and maybe that’s the most important thing we have to understand, if you put, let’s say a thousand watts electrical energy, into a computer, any computer, and miners specifically, a thousand watts of heat come out of it.

[00:48:26] Michael Schmid: So the computer, the computing of it does not consume energy. It does not use the energy and store it in the digital code. It uses the energy to run the electrons through the chips, and that is, generates resistive heat. And so it generates heat. So wherever you today generate anything through electricity, let’s say your water kettle, like to heat water in the morning to make a tea or coffee, you and miner would use the exact same amount of electrical energy to generate the same amount of heat than your water kettle or your electrical water heater or your hot tub heater, your pool heater, anything.

[00:49:10] Michael Schmid: Because of that fact, it makes basically no sense anymore to put resistive heating elements into anything, because you should actually use a miner or a computer that also uses the energy for something, in our case, to mine. And the really cool thing about mining is You can turn them on and you will be immediately mining within seconds and then you turn it off and you don’t lose anything like these miners upload their share that they’ve done every multiple times a second.

[00:49:41] Michael Schmid: So if you turn one off, it’s not that like you lost a video processing batch and now you have to start again or things like that. So you can turn them on and off immediately. So yes, I do believe that we’re going to have in the future any type of heating system will be done through mining. What I also agree, though, is that this will take some time, but what I like to do, actually, I like to look into all like I go to YouTube and I look like old videos of like the first phones like people had these massive bricks in their cars, and they had like these videos where somebody was on the phone while driving and making fun, like literally made fun of people that put car phones, that had car phones, like, this will never work.

[00:50:23] Michael Schmid: Why would we ever need this? This is so complex, like all the things that we are now saying about this. It’s all there. But I believe this will be much, much, much easier, because people a will learn how these things work. Nobody knew 20 years ago. Nobody really knew how, what, how, how, how to use a touch screen.

[00:50:43] Michael Schmid: Now you have people that don’t even know anymore how, what, what a regular keyboard is, like, because they’re so used to type on, on mobile phones or dial rotary telephones, like give any kid a dial rotary phone, they have no idea what to do with it anymore. So I think people will learn about all these things anyway, and of course, it needs a lot of engineering to make all of this much, much simpler. Like my system today, yes, there’s exposed things and stuff like that, but that’s what I’m working on also to actually make it nicer looking, to package it in nice systems that plumbers, electricians, HVAC people, also understand all of these things. So they could take a system that I’m building, install it in somebody’s house, and then you can call these people on Sunday morning.

[00:51:31] Michael Schmid: If you don’t have hot water, you could call a plumber, they could come out and they know how this system works, but that’s not something that is going to happen from one day to the other. It’s probably also not going to happen in a year. That’s going to be many, many years. But yeah, if you look at other technologies, how they were adopted by humans, like smartphones, the internet, electricity itself.

[00:51:52] Michael Schmid: It will take time, but it’s going to happen, because it just makes sense. And specifically Also about one of the things that I don’t see a lot of people talking in the Bitcoin community today is that we generate a lot of waste with these miners, like every year new miners are coming out and these big mining systems or mining companies, they always want the newest model because they have to because only then they’re profitable because they only produce Bitcoin.

[00:52:19] Michael Schmid: Like they don’t reuse the heat for anything else. The first one are sort of starting now. They’re talking to black miners like me to actually try to learn about this. So it’s interesting that you talk to like CEOs of big mining companies and you explain them how your system actually works because they realize that they could make even more money with reusing the heat.

[00:52:38] Michael Schmid: But today they just purely mine for Bitcoin. They don’t use anything else. So they always need to use the newest models. And the older models, they may be still used, but the third generation of them, so two generations before, nobody wants them anymore. Because if you just purely mine for Bitcoin, they will not generate enough Bitcoin for the day of the sets you get back every day.

[00:53:02] Michael Schmid: But we as homeowners, that anyway would have spent the electricity. So in my system, if I just heat the water heater with the Bitcoin mining rig. I pay the exact same amount of electricity. There’s no change in my electrical rate. The difference is, is I get Bitcoin back every single day. So I can take a five year old miner, put this in my system, and I can still make free sets.

[00:53:28] Michael Schmid: It’s not going to be as many sets if I would use the newest model. But the newest model is also 10 times more expensive. What I believe is these house systems or these retail residential areas are actually going to be the market for the older minor generations to soak them up like a sponge. Because they are super cheap, like even today, miners are actually very, very cheap compared to the bull run when we had two years ago, like the miners that I use, you paid up to 15, 000 for one device.

[00:54:02] Michael Schmid: I just bought some for 800. Wow. So the price massively dropped because A, of course, we’re not in a bull run anymore, but also there’s newer models that came out and the newer models, yes, they’re still 5, 000. Oh, so there’s tools. five, six times more expensive, but they don’t have five or six times more hash rate.

[00:54:21] Michael Schmid: They maybe have 50 percent more or maybe a hundred percent max. The linear, it’s not linear to the hash they generate to the price. So the older ones that nobody wants anymore, they’re quite cheap. And we as flat miners or residentials, we can use them, we can install them. And so we can give these systems a second or a third life even to use them.

[00:54:42] Michael Schmid: And that’s where I see this whole going so that the big miners, they’re going to always buy the newest models. They’re going to then sell them to the market. And we’re going to install them into people’s houses and generate sets. And of course, also secure the Bitcoin network through that in a very decentralized way, because that’s another risk is as we’re having this consolidation and all these big miners, that’s also a massive risk for Bitcoin itself.

[00:55:07] Michael Schmid: And I believe As we always say that, like not your key’s, not your coin not your key, your coin. So you need to store the Bitcoin yourself. You should also run your own node, but actually you should also mine at home because that’s really the whole way. Then you’re properly using and contributing back to the Bitcoin network when you run your own node and your on your own miners.

[00:55:29] Preston Pysh: I absolutely love this topic. And I think you’re very early in what is going to potentially be just a major change to how people operate their homes. And if people, I know there’s going to be tons of people that listen to this that are going to want to talk to you and interact with you. What’s the best way for them to do that?

[00:55:52] Preston Pysh: Just reach out to you via DM on Twitter or what’s what, how can they get in contact with you?

[00:55:59] Michael Schmid: Yes. So there’s two main ways. Mostly on Twitter. So you’ll find me under the name Schnitzel, like the German dish. My DMs are open. Reach out if you have specific questions, if you want to talk, I’m happy to help.

[00:56:12] Michael Schmid: But I actually started a little company with a friend of mine. We call it Nakamoto Heating Solutions. I love it. You can find it on nakamotoheating. com. And we do have a form there for people to actually fill out that are interested in building such a system. Now, I do want to say is that it, we’re very, very early.

[00:56:32] Michael Schmid: We don’t have these systems built yet. There’s not a warehouse of thousands units that I can ship out. And I have plumbers or installers that in every major city, like we have none of it, but we are at the point. that I have now built my own system. So we are now at iteration three of my own system. I ripped it out twice and rebuilt it completely.

[00:56:54] Michael Schmid: So I feel very comfortable. I’ve went to the major issues. We had now a summer and a winter and I can prove that it works. Plus, I’ve also already helped other people build their own systems at home. So, if there is out there people that know about plumbing, know about electrical systems, this is totally possible.

[00:57:14] Michael Schmid: I actually have a complete parts list of every single piece that I use. I have schemas of my system. I have videos that explains how to connect all of it. We try to do everything as open source as possible because Bitcoin is open source. The whole community is open source. So the knowledge behind of this, I really believe that knowledge should be free.

[00:57:34] Michael Schmid: And so that is completely open source. So if you’re a person that knows around this, You can totally build this and I’m happy to help all along the process. We have done this now twice already. So I have a friend of mine, he now heats a pool in his backyard. It’s like a 30, 000 gallon pool. It’s a massive thing.

[00:57:52] Michael Schmid: And he’s the only one that runs it all winter long that is warm. And so he’s now the best all the kids from all the neighbors, 90 degree pool. In winter, heated through miners again I have other sys, other people that I help.

[00:58:07] Preston Pysh: How many rigs? How many rigs on that?

[00:58:08] Michael Schmid: It’s just one, one S19.

[00:58:10] Preston Pysh: Oh my god.

[00:58:12] Michael Schmid: It’s 4, 000 watts. It’s a lot of electricity. It’s a lot of heat that goes in it. And he closes it during the night, like it has a little like roll over cover. And then they just, yeah, it keeps it at 90 degrees, no problem at all. That’s unreal. If there’s people out there that want to build this, it’s all there. Like I learned everything myself.

[00:58:31] Michael Schmid: Like I said, I’m not from the U. S. I’ve never went to any and I’m a software engineer. Like I, everything that I know, I’ve learned myself through YouTube. I always say people ask me about like, why do you know all these things? I was like, I don’t know anything. I just have a YouTube account and a screwdriver and no fear.

[00:58:47] Michael Schmid: So it’s possible. But of course, and like you say, there is millions of people out there that just want this installed. And that’s what we’re working on now, is to actually find solutions or build systems, kits, also teach plumbers, HVAC people, electricians, how to install such a system. And what we’re looking for is people that are interested in saying, yes, I want to install this in my house.

[00:59:11] Michael Schmid: So they’re willing to pay for it. Like I said, we’re talking just 10, 000, just material. There’s no labor yet. So such an installation will be around 20, 000. to install it. And we’re looking for people that are saying, yes, I’m interested in paying this. I’m interested in opening up and trying this in my house or maybe your second house or wherever.

[00:59:32] Michael Schmid: Right now, we’re also going to look at specific locations. I myself, I’m in Virginia, a friend of mine, he’s in British Columbia. We have other people of the plant mining community that could do other places. So location is also important because the first ones are going to be built by me. I’m going to come to your house.

[00:59:47] Michael Schmid: I’m going to install it. So we’re looking for that, but there is a form on the website that you can fill out where you’re located, what type of house, what type of heating systems, what type of you’re interested in building. And the idea is really to slowly roll this out, build one or two systems. And then use these existing systems, obviously to improve, but also teach more people that can then install these because it’s not like every time that I build it and I look at it afterwards, it’s like it’s no rocket science, like it’s literally just plumbing.

[01:00:19] Michael Schmid: A couple of pumps, a couple of pipes just cleverly connect together and that’s it. And so I believe we can run this. We can create a system that we could do in every house in the U. S. That’s the end goal. I love it.

[01:00:34] Preston Pysh: All right. Well, we’re going to have links in the show notes to all that stuff. So if people do want to check it out, they can.

[01:00:40] Preston Pysh: And Michael, it’s just a pleasure to talk with you as an, like I said, as an engineer, I just, I can’t get enough of these kinds of conversations, so I appreciate your time and coming on the show.

[01:00:52] Michael Schmid: Thank you.

[01:00:53] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm.

[01:01:18] Preston Pysh: So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

[01:01:26] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.