My interview with @Econoalchemist, the #Bitcoin home mining wizard ⛏️⚡️🧙♂️
A long overdue transcription from the Guns & Bitcoin Conference, Miami, Florida, April's 9th & 10th, 2022 🔫🎙️
CriptoLuis: Econoalchemist, nice to meet you. Thank you for giving me this interview and congratulations for the JStark Award you won today.
Econoalchemist: Thank you, thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.
CriptoLuis: Well, talk to us a little bit more about you. What are you dedicated to, what are you focused on in the Bitcoin space.
Econoalchemist: I focus primarily on Bitcoin. I focus on how to use Bitcoin in a censorpship resistant way and how to self-custody Bitcoin and one of the main areas I’ve been focusing on recently is mining Bitcoin at home which kinda is the intersection of self-custody and censorship resistance.
CriptoLuis: How are things going in that regard? Is mining from home widely expanded in the US now?
Econoalchemist: Yeah, there’s been a lot of interest that has grown specially in the home mining area and over the last year and a half there seems to be this renaissance of creativity where these home miners are coming up with very creative ways to integrate these mining machines into their homes and they’re doing amazing things with the emerging technology and they’re like capturing the heat byproduct that’s produced by the miners and using it to heat their homes and reduce energy cost in other areas like natural gas. And you know with situations that we have with the Freedom Convoy in Canada I think a lot of people have really opened their eyes recently on how important self custody is and the dangers of KYC.
CriptoLuis: What would be your advice on the things to take into account for a person that wants to get into home mining and doesn’t know anything about mining at all?
Econoalchemist: There’s a lot of really good resources now. There’s a guide on my website that a lot of people have found useful, so my website is econoalchemist. com, on there you can find my home mining for non kyc bitcoin guide and in there I kinda outline how a person would start from zero and how they would ? an ASIC machine and the kinds of electrical ? had to make to their house and the of considerations that they should make for dealing with the heat, for dealing with the noise and the kind of tools they can use for calculate their returns and figure out what’s profitable or when they should shut their miner off or how long can they expect to continue running it and then also how to connect to the mining pool so you can earn more rewards instead of trying to mine solo all on their own.
CriptoLuis: Do you think that sometime in the future the government will take some measure against the people that are mining from home?
Econoalchemist: Yeah I do. We’ve already seen governments do it. China is an example, they have banned Bitcoin mining. recently we saw the government of Kazakhstan steal 200 million dollars of mining equipment from people taht were quote on quote unregistered miners, and then we’re seeing pushes in places like the european union were they’re trying to say that only Proof-Of-Work mining needs to be banned and that they allow Proof-Of-Stake to continue. So I think the attacks on Bitcoin mining are just going to continue to get more elaborated and more sophisticated and I think people really do need to be prepared for handling situations were they may find themselves being labeled as a criminal and you don’t know when that pendulum is going to swing but imagine the people who are standing up for bodily autonomy during the canadian trucker convoy, just with the struck of a pen overnight they’re were suddenly criminalized and labeled as a extremist and it was easy for the government to disregard their rights and to discredit them and to start going afther them and punishing them by shutting down their access to basic financial services and I do think that in some parts of the world you’ll see situations like that unfold involving Proof of Work mining under the guise of ESG initiative or green initiative or some sort to push to help climate change, so I really think people should be prepared and make serious considerations about their network level privacy, how their machines talk to the Internet, and also their on-chain privacy, what they’re doing with the rewards they earn from mining.
CriptoLuis: I don’t know if you know anything about other countries in regard of mining Bitcoin besides the US, but do you think that this model of mining bitcoin from home it’s sustainable and reproducible outside of the US?
Econoalchemist: It’s definitely difficult for me to speak to the situation that people have in other countries because I’ve never lived in another country, I’ve visited them, but I live in the United States, so I can only speak from my experience, but based on the conversations I had, some of the problems I helped people solve from around the world -I help people in Kuwait, I help people in Paraguay, all around the world people have been reaching out to me to try and get some help and guidance to solve their unique problems and they share their stories with me, and they share pictures and videos of their unique setups with me, so I’ve seen a lot of variations of home mining, and you know, these people are out there making it work. I think anywhere you have a problem that mining bitcoin can solve no matter what the situation is, people are going to figure out a way to solve that problem. So yeah I want to say that it is possible. That doesn’t mean that I can come up with a step by step guide to tell you exactly how to do it, but I can give people the basic tools and the basic understanding of the concepts and then they can kinda use their own knowledge and their own Do It Yourself (DIY) skills to put everything together and figure out how to make it work for them. In my opinion all governments are trending towards tiranny and they’re trying to restrict the movements of people, they’re trying to take away bodily autonomy, they’re trying to weaponize money and so the more that people can take that power back into their own hands and do that thorugh mining bitcoin at home they’re going to figure out ways to do that because that solves very real world problems for them, so no matter what sort of situations they have they’re going to figure it out.
CriptoLuis: We’re at the Guns n Bitcoin conference and culturally weapons acceptance is not too much widespread throughout the world, you know, it’s like a very particular thing in the US, the weapons acceptance. We have Bitcoin and Guns in the same space and it’s not like a common thing to do, it tends to be like different crowds. What do you think they have in common?
Econoalchemist: I think the intersection here is freedom technology so you use your cryptographic keys to protect your coins and you use your guns to protect your keys. So it’s all about being able to draw that line and deffensively guard the things that you value, wether that is your privacy or your values, you need to be able to defend yourself or guard yourself because I guarantee you at some point your government senses that you’re a threat or they feel that somehow the sovereignty of the nation is at stake, there’s nothing they won’t to isolate that threat and at a certain point they will kill you, they will come after you and this is happening all around the world, it’s been happening for centuries is a universal problem, but luckily there are now universal solutions that are coming up to help empower the individual and some of those solutions are things like these 3D printed guns, that brings the access of fire power into the hands of anyone in the world and there’s great tools like DEFCAD is putting together to help people understand how to built that themselves in their own homes, so that they don’t have to ask permission, so that they don’t have to provide their personal information and wind up on a government watchlist and you’re seeing the same thing happening with Bitcoin. The guns is the fire power piece of it and the Bitcoin is the financial soverignty piece of it and when you combine both of those things you have an enpowered individual that can defensively guard the things that they value and when you have several individual that are able to guard the things that they value in life what do they do with that? They put a roof over their heads, they provide food for their family, they take care of their community, people just want to be able of live their lives. None of these people are extremists that are trying to make other people do other things. They’re just trying guard what they hold
CriptoLuis: What I like about this event the most is that there’s no political issues involved. I mean, its political because you’re defending your freedom and you take a stance about your life and everything but it’s not like being part of some extremist movement or something like that.
So you’re gonna be here tomorrow and what are you going to talk about?
Econoalchemist: Actually I gave my talk these morning and it was on self custody so I was talking about -I highlighted some of the reasons why self custody is important and at a high level it’s because you’re going to be able to mitigate censorship, you’re going to be able to mitigate counterparty risk with the centralized exchanges and you’re goning to be able to mitigate the state’s monopoly on violence because they’re weaponizing the money against you, and then I talked about some of the tools that you can use to get the Bitcoin off of the exchanges and put it into either a mobile wallet like Samourai Wallet or a desktop wallet like Sparrow Wallet, or a hardware wallet like Coldcard or the Foundation Devices’s Passport and I talked a little bit about what you can do to backup the information you need to make sure that you always have access to that bitcoin even if you lose those devices or don’t have access to the same computer or mobile phone any longer.
CriptoLuis: I don’t know if this is a silly question but would you consider yourself like a bitcoin maximalist or something?
Econoalchemist: No, I don’t consider myself a maximalist I say I’m more a like freedom maximalist, I’ll just cut to the chase here, I do not think that monero (XMR) is a shitcoin, I think that it solves a problem where there is privacy blindspot in Bitcoin and because it solves a problem I think it’s a valuable tool and when we’re talking about every government trending towards tiranny and the rights of the individuals being eroded away a little by little, people need to use every tool they have access to to defend what they value and to defend their freedoms and so if Monero can help me engage digital currency more privately, then I’m going to use that tool to do it because I guarantee the state is not going to hesitate to use any tool that they have at their disposal so I think people should be a little bit smarter and a little bit more open about the tools that are available today that they can start using to defend their freedom.
CriptoLuis: Well thank you Econoalchemist for this interview and this wholesome explanation, congratulations on the JStark award as an honorable mention for your work and we will be in touch following you and everything you have to offer to us.
Econoalchemist: Thank you.
📸 Luis Esparragoza, for @CriptoNoticias
Special thanks to @RagnarLif for his trust in me & allowing us to shoot photos & record audio in a privacy focused event.
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