Bob Burnett, Tom French and Callum Wheeler on Mining at the Edge of the Grid | 50 Days for Freedom

A mining show, and the Space crashed midway. Bob Burnett, elected chairman of OCEAN two days earlier, joined Tom French and Callum Wheeler of RenewaBlox, with Suze and Swan's Alec on stage.
⭐ Burnett's hashrate taxonomy now has three animals: rabbits (home miners, maybe 1 to 2% of hash), wild horses (miners who produce their own power), and captive elephants (industrial miners on someone else's grid).
His definition of the risk: "captive means you are dependent on somebody else to provide you with the power. Wild means you produce your own energy, and so therefore you have freedom."
⭐⭐ His target, said plainly: if wild horses reach roughly a third of the network, "we have a great deal of resistance to hash centralization." His own read is that the elephants have shrunk as public miners pivoted toward AI.
⭐⭐ Asked whether mining stabilizes the grid, he conceded what the industry rarely does: "we overstate our ability to have impact." Bitcoin uses half a percent of world electricity, and "we cannot stabilize the world's grids. We're not big enough."
The scale he put on it: roughly 160 terawatt-hours a year against about 30,000 globally, and a block-reward industry of "roughly $10 billion" in 2026. Local and regional cooperation, yes. Macro stabilization, no.
Barefoot Mining's own model is the wild horse in practice. The company owns gas wells in Pennsylvania, runs engines Burnett says burn nearly emission-free, and is investing heavily in stranded natural gas over the next six to twelve months.
⭐ RenewaBlox brought the UK version. Callum described two run-of-river hydro projects in Scotland, one roughly a megawatt and fully off-grid after the network operator made a connection uneconomic.
⭐ Tom's small-site example was the one that made the economics concrete: a 200-kilowatt hydro site with export capped at 150, leaving 50 kilowatts of headroom and, by his figures, around 18 to 19 pence per kilowatt-hour on the table.
The Space dropped right there, mid-sentence. The recording picks up with "Are we back?" and the room reassembled within a minute.
The heat lane: a distillery in Annandale is piloting a sand battery, turning excess electricity into stored heat through a resistor. RenewaBlox's first thought was that the resistor could be an ASIC.
Suze relayed a listener's challenge that Burnett had said mining doesn't stabilize the grid. He confirmed it, which is how the concession above got made.
Tom on where efficiency gains come from: today's rooftop solar is bounded by the Shockley-Queisser limit, and stacking perovskite tandem layers could lift panel output roughly 10% per layer, with five or six layers as a plausible ceiling.
Burnett on AI: he uses it daily to run operations and won't put constraints on what it might unlock, but for his lifetime the energy story stays gas and renewables.
The campaign is in its last days. No show Monday. Tomorrow is the last episode of the week, and the final episode is Tuesday, September 8, also the last day for the half-price buy fee.

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Episoder(678)

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31 Aug 1h 11min

Café Bitcoin | The Lightning Fire Drill, Quantum-Proof Transactions, and Defeating the Surveillance State | Day 37 of 50

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28 Aug 1h 22min

Lyn Alden on Café Bitcoin | Bessent vs Druckenmiller, the Bull Market Question, and Why She Writes Science Fiction | Day 35 of 50

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25 Aug 1h 18min

Café Bitcoin | Sticking the Landing, Answering the Maximalism Eulogy, and One Money in a Free Market | Day 34 of 50

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24 Aug 2h 1min

Café Bitcoin | Bitcoin Rips 23% on the Week, Privacy in the AI Era, Palantir and Government Capture | Day 31 of 50

Bitcoin around $77,200, up almost 8% on the day and 23% on the week, and the show opens on the mood rather than the chart. Cory, joining from Istanbul: "the shitposting is just completely off the char...

21 Aug 1h 29min