[Music]
hi i am tishamdar i come to you today
from the land of the ghana people of the
adelaide plains and i pay my respects to
their elders past present and emerging i
acknowledge their deep connection to the
land and the value they place on the
environment perhaps the values of this
ancient culture can tell us something
about one of the newest value systems we
have created as the human society we
have chosen to record this talk in a
motorsports garage full of performance
cars
i chose to do this because motorsports
is accused of being wasteful burning up
a lot of energy same acquisitions that
are leveled towards bitcoin motorsports
has led to many innovations in the motor
vehicle in safety in performance in
efficiency of the engines in the road
construction so i believe this
energy hungry experiment we are doing
with bitcoin is some there is there is
something we will learn from it and we
will make the world a better place
today's talk is called confessions of a
crypto miner it talks about my journey
becoming aware of this new value system
we are discussing particularly
bitcoin initially and others
and
delving into them and then delving out
of them while still retaining uh
observers interest in these systems
the byline for this talk is why
scientists become or became interested
in money why even today scientists are
studying economics
i will start with a small historical
note
one of the scientists that i really
admire and has perhaps changed our
understanding of the universe is sir
isaac newton
towards the end of his career after he
had wrapped up writing principia and
doing all of the great maths and physics
that we value and know him for he became
master of the royal mint of england and
operated out of the tower of london
he became famous for putting
counterfeiters to the death
another famous scientist earlier than
newton who became interest in currency
is nicolas copernicus from poland he
wrote a treatise after writing about the
orbits of the planets about money supply
and how that creates value and how
increasing money supply can create
inflation one of our earliest
understandings of this phenomena
today we have nobel prize winnings like
winners like elia peregrine discussing
thermodynamics in context of economics
the journey for me i consider myself
somewhat of a scientist but even though
i am an engineer by profession
my journey go through the stage of
inception becoming aware of this concept
exploring the concept
and then interacting with the community
which is what this conference is all
about is about interactions
conversations and learnings from each
other
so what many currencies do you need in
the world what currencies have you got
in your wallet perhaps only one and a
few cards
the gold used to be the base currency
for many years until it was replaced by
the petrodollar on the 15th of august
1971.
some conspiracy theories said this led
to the demise of the then american
president richard nixon
my answer for the currencies we really
need is we just need one we just need
time we value each other's time and i
will talk about how bitcoin captures
time or gold does capture the passage of
time in the universe
one of the catchphrases i have is
currency is currency something that is
time recent is what we value
the inception part of this story
i became aware of bitcoin while
walking around in salamanca markets in
hobart i was doomed scrolling through my
social media i'm mostly active on
twitter
i
looked at some post about someone saying
oh don't worry about the price dropping
below a dollar from 250 cents it will
come back up i was like what is this
thing we are talking about as i paid for
my coffee and volunteered at the
wilderness society stall and sat on the
floor selling
soft penguins
i bought myself some gpus this was the
exploration phase i plugged them in
created a small fire hazard in my spare
room
and
heard lots of noisy things going on in
there
i went on to some fpgas
i went on to
some asics
i learned a lot being an electronics
engineer a tinkerer a maker this was fun
for me
i also started interacting with people
other than speaking to computers which
is what i do i'm i'm an introvert this
talk is a forced exercise but i'm having
a lot of help
i joined a mining pool uh mining pools
are what you join because your gpus
however many you have unless you have a
whole warehouse full of them
are never enough to get you one
bitcoin so i joined a mining pool uh
well the one i joined perhaps
surreptitiously was influenced by my
upbringing and
i was born in a family that of
goldsmiths
i still buy some custom jewelry
uh the the
the
mining pool was called allegiance
eligius is in the catholic faith is the
patron scent of goldsmiths
uh i also went to a catholic boys school
maybe maybe somehow resonated in my mind
it bought me brought me also into
contact with one of the bitcoin core
developers luke dash
i learned a lot from them and the
community on how these things functioned
and
delved even deeper and
started continued my exploration with
the support of the community
after this initial phase i had to
keep going i felt like i had invested a
lot of time i i wanted to do my the
mining seriously
this section talks about the section of
my talk talks about this in the frame of
three different things
what did i mine which currency to mine
which going to buy is the question these
days not many people are mining they are
looking at this as a speculative
investment option so the first question
is which
how did i do it in the early days before
we had
the exchanges where you could uh replace
fiat with a crypto how did i do it in
the early days about cpu miners gpu
miners fpgas asic miners
and how long did i do it for why did i
start when did i start how did i why did
i pull out when did i pull out
the first is a brief timeline so i
discussed my inception of these ideas
and i became aware and i started working
with some cpu miners
in hobart i came to adelaide after after
my stint in hobart i filled up my
apartment with
gpus and jalapenos
i continued in that line until i got
married and had a son and received a
very big electricity bill around 2015 i
started winding back down on this hobby
and sort of the electricity bill sent me
down another path which i will talk
about around energy
so how did i mine so
uh meet the jalapeno the jalapeno is
instead of being a very hot chili is
also a very hot gets very hot bitcoin
miner these were ended nearing the end
of their lifetime and were quite cheap
on ebay but being an electronics
engineer and tinkerer i could get more
heat out of them or yeah make them run
hotter by overclocking them so i bought
a bunch of them took them apart and
changed their firmware and overclocked
them and
ran them myself for a while and then
started selling them back on ebay and
you can also meet one of the latest ones
which my friend has recently got rid of
the eisen
the eisen he bought for around 200 on
aliexpress and sold because it became
too noisy again
for around 2000 on ebay it's one of the
few pieces of hardware that has
appreciated in value over time which is
the next question you're addressing here
which coins to mine the bitcoin the big
time coin is obviously the first one you
could merge mine uh at the same time
something that would give you dns
entries name entries in a system called
namecoin i did that for a little while i
became aware of alts the the bitcoin
maximalists don't like them but you know
they are around something that exists
because the society has a need for them
due to different algorithms different uh
work uh
different algorithms for creating them
different algorithms for distributing
them
so litecoin bitcoin variants uh and then
other other ones that are coming along
i only really mind bitcoin litecoin and
other script-based and sha based ones
this sort of is another historical note
the
existence of multiple currencies is not
a new phenomenon every country has their
own but we have a reference currency in
the crypto world the bitcoin is the
reference currency being the oldest
prime mover
the alts are like local currencies of
other countries and over time they come
into an equilibrium based on the value
people put
not on the country but on the ideas
behind which
which led to the creation of these alts
the you should have a look at the
research by leon walrus a french
economist mathematician famous for
writing a book in french full of
equations which some
nobel prize winners say would have had a
bigger impact had he written it in
english
alts and btc similarly will reach an
equilibrium the landscape of oils meet
meme coins bitcoin forks are like
countries and we will come to a
reasonable point where we value each of
these ideas and they will come to a
stable exchange rate between themselves
the next which is how do i move between
the real world in which
countries states entities nation states
are issuing currencies and this
alternative financial world which is
emerging is seeded
and that is typically through an
exchange
the story of a bitcoin pizza is famous
in the crypto community one of the first
real world transactions was for a
bitcoin pizza so it's called it was
actually two pizzas i believe and
someone paid 10 000 or so bitcoins to
buy a couple of pizzas and there is a
website which tracks the current price
of the bitcoin pizza and that would be
in millions now
my equivalent of a bitcoin pizza is a
laptop i bought a big laptop and i take
it around and say this is my house
and the choosing of an exchange lets us
not do barter in this way we can
exchange crypto for a
fiat in a particular exchange i had
several false starts here some of the
exchanges i participated in got hacked
like mount cox in japan got possessed by
federal authorities like ptce in which
you had direct servers in america or was
shut down by country currency control
measures in a very controlling
government i.e communist regimes in hong
kong which was anx btc
i have a very clear memory of my wife
rani and i
going to a friend's wedding in hong kong
and walking down the streets of langkwa
fong to a little hole in the wall where
we exchanged 500 for some crypto
the
exchange person walked up into the attic
and came back with a receipt saying yes
your 500 have now been exchanged into
bitcoin on our exchange
so
the last piece of when i talked about
the brief timeline and this is sort of
the wind down of the timeline why and
when did i stop in 2015
some of the energy prices in south
australia where i was physically i am
physically still reached some of the
highest in the world and i received a
big build shock because i was not
keeping an eye on the energy lightning
ball while looking at the crypto crystal
ball
so my wife being an econometrics looked
at this and said this is not working out
tish you should sell these things so i
got rid of them and we needed the room
for our newly born
son the lessons that i learned from this
experiment adventure
craziness some would say
is what we need to value in the world
i have in my slides the cover of the
wealth of nations by adam smith
what we should value and what i saw
being valued in creating the cryptos was
essentially engineering new electronics
engineering power engineering energy
generation engineering to create asics
the cryptography and the military
strength which i saw being exercised by
countries like china to stop exchanges
and also energy the flow of energy from
the environment into the miner our
ability to tap and trap energy and
channel it through power lines into into
creating a currency
it's no surprise the world is awash with
multiple types of cryptos now and miners
and asics we have sort of reached the
peaks of physical growth in our world
and the
exchange the exchanges are changing
between fiat and crypto
if you look at some of the talks during
kovid
nation states have removed the limiters
on their treasuries and are creating
unlimited number amounts of fiat
currency
so there is at peak 500 billion us
dollars of bitcoin traded per day
it's not going anywhere quickly you'll
see news of a crash i have having come
from a time when bitcoin was 50 cents
this is
sounds like noise to me
bitcoin also has a huge energy burden on
the world biscoin is estimated to burn
in a year that about the same energy
consumption of a small country
us
uh so malaysia which is pretty populous
country and sweden uh which is a pretty
cold country and spends a lot on hitting
uh so this amount of energy being burned
also
grates me
and
sort of led to my choice in not
continuing to mine for myself
i put out these questions and i have
friends on either side of the crypto
debate some of my friends love it some
of my friends hate it some of my friends
don't really understand it
i have a few quotes in my slides one of
them is from a couple of
colleagues
bo gibson who is starting up a 25
megawatt power plant some of the energy
from which will be used for mining
his line is power is power your ability
to generate power gives you power
uh another of my previous boss
had this line where when he came to
understand crypto was essentially
our world is rooted in systems put in
place by force in the past and he would
like to find a way to use crypto to what
he says to hack poverty
one of my recent most recent colleagues
in the government had this line to put
in twitter is
proof of work is one of the biggest
mistakes in tech history if only bitcoin
was doing something useful with all that
compute
to all this i have
my line
which says
state clearly what is useful to our
society come to the understanding as
with each other what is it useful from
individual bit behavior hypothesis that
leads what that leads us to choose
mining bitcoin over spending that
compute on the set useful
how can useful activities be properly
rewarded in our financial rewards system
so that people choose to do them instead
of spending their efforts and energies
mining cryptos
so this was an ending of my crypto
journey i have not completely exited
whenever you do something it becomes
part of you it scars your body and mind
in some way it's
so
it wasn't one ending and a new beginning
i have done talks in the past at this
conference about the things i moved on
to energy monitoring i became very
interested or reinvigorated my interest
in energy i'm an electrical and
electronics engineer the electrical part
of it is very concerned with energy
the electronics part of me started going
back to the disciplines i had learned in
university and not practiced around pcb
design gateway for fpgas and so on
and the new thing that i picked up
finance economics the mechanisms of debt
money supplies treasury functioning and
so on
if you understand any of those this is a
call to action to make global
transactions between countries nations
and each other
a better place by doing building
something
don't get carried away by how much money
you will get out of building it build it
for something that you consider useful
something that your friends and groups
of people consider useful will improve
their lives
and good luck on your journey uh i got
lucky in being exposed to the crypto
through my scanning of the environment
and i learned a lot
and i can recommend a final final book
on this depth debt by david graber uh it
talks about how
crypto is a form of bullying how
bullying and debt interplay and have
swapped places in our society over over
history
and i learned a lot from this and gave
me newer understanding on why crypto has
taken so much mind share in our society
thank you