Behind-the-Scenes Look at How DIY Bitcoiners Make Home Mining Feasible

All right, Anna, you got our last story and it features Will Foxley Take it away. Yeah. And it's also about mining. It's about how you can mine Bitcoin at home, which you know, might, might even not even sound probable uh in, in the current environment. It's now all about big industrial miners, the huge venues with thousands of mining machines because uh Bitcoin mining is so energy. It, it, it's, it's, it's so energy hungry uh and uh requires the expensive machines, but some people including our very own will still uh still wanna do it at home. Uh And uh I talked to some people, some enthusiasts like him about uh why, why are they doing this? How, how are they doing it? Is that pro profitable? Is that expensive uh to uh roll out something like uh like will showed us in this video. So uh maybe uh will um just uh just why don't you tell why, why, why are you excited about that? Despite all the odds, despite all the challenges of home mining, why you still want to do that? Yeah. Home mining is definitely a challenge and uh we're enjoying my great film work here with my iphone. So I hope you're not getting nauseous from, from viewing it. Home mining is basically a way to get Bitcoin in a non custodial decentralized fashion. Right? Typically people go and buy a Bitcoin, they buy a cash app or coin base, or maybe they even go as far as ordering it on something like this, which is more privacy focused, but there's a way of getting Bitcoin nowadays still that is permission less and it's more privacy focus. So I, I just plug in a computer into the Bitcoin network and I start beaming Bitcoin myself just in exchange for energy. That's really what it is. Energy for money in this instance now, like home mining is not very profitable and for most people probably never would be profitable. But the idea is like, maybe this Bitcoin is worth more in the future. So I do become profitable over like a 5 to 10 year span if I can hold that Bitcoin. And then secondarily, I think that I, I do want some Bitcoin that hasn't been touched by anybody else. It just goes directly from the Bitcoin network to my wallet and no one's really aware of it. It's just sitting there by myself. And so that's part of the reason why I did it. The third reason, it's just kind of fun. Right. There's not a lot of tangible stuff in Bitcoin. Like, yes, there's like NFTS on your phone and maybe you can run like a validator on your computer at home. But besides that, like, most of Bitcoin is very intangible. I think that's actually a key deterrent from a lot of people getting into Bitcoin. They want some, like, physical, like cash. I always hear that. Like, well, can I hold a Bitcoin? It's like, no, you can't but mining, you can interact with it. Right. You can go to a Bitcoin mining farm. You can feel the heat on your face from these fans. You can see like the machines themselves rolling around home mining. You have the opportunity to like, really get into the weeds of Bitcoin and learn how it all works. So that's why I took it up for myself and lost a little bit of money along the way. I wonder what you think I was just gonna say, reading the article. It felt like, well, you were glutton for punishment. You weren't making any money. These machines are turning off on you. You had to like, continuously maintain. It sounded like a lot of maintenance. But you make, you make a good argument there. I wonder what advice you have like for people like me? Should I could, I, should I have an, a more minor or is it just too much of a headache? So there are like options for doing it. So if you take an older generation minor, like an S nine, you can probably plug it into most outlets. I, I'm not sure in Canada, pretty sure you'd be ok with this. But if you're in Europe or somewhere else, you might have a hard time getting like the correct plug and those are just going to like a standard home wall outlet. Your energy bill is definitely going to go up. It's not very efficient machine, but you'll get some Satoshi and, you know, they'll be private and they'll be your own. No one else has touched on. They haven't been on an exchange. If you're gonna go like a little bit more hard core like I did. You're gonna be spending a weekend or two designing and building a box, making sure it's like water tight. It's quiet, it's private. I mean, it just kind of looks like a utility shed on the side of the house. Right. And then to get like the electrical work and all that done for these next generation machines requires bring in an electrician because it can be a little bit dangerous and then buying a machine. So it's a little bit of work. But I don't know, I, I enjoy Bitcoin. I want to be in part of it. I want to get my hands all dirty. So that's why I did this. Maybe you could too. I just, I just must say that I love uh stories like that about people uh persisting in their cypherpunk, uh willingness to do it to you do it themselves with their own hands to mind their own Bitcoin and like, not touch, centralized entities just do it by themselves. And like in, in the ideal future of crypto of, of, of my, of my fantasies, um, you know, multiple people around the world are doing just exactly that they're just um mining Bitcoin small scale and like, uh maybe connecting into pools but like, um, they, like, they, the, those little anonymous Satoshi are dominating the network, not big, centralized uh, players, uh, probably never gonna happen. But thank you for keeping that hope alive. All right. Well, I'm gonna hit you up off line, get some instructions and maybe I'll start mining my own Bitcoin. What a, what a fun little take away from today's show. You can read Anna's full story on coindesk dot com as part of Mining Week.