I‘ve been pondering this question as well. Where I end up is that in contrast to email marketing (which is free and infinitely scalable) zapvertising requires proof of work and brilliantly showcases the spam prevention concept from HashCash. So the marketer must target potential customers that are more likely to gain value from an ad to not waste money. Feels more like a win-win scenario to me than current marketing models.

What's your cal.com page?

Is it KYC?

Traditional cloud mining is a terrible model and the results kind of demonstrate that. So many things can and do go wrong. It's a fully trusted setup in a very tough business with customers who don't really know what they're getting into.

In the worst case you have someone like Compass Mining brazenly steal their customer's money. This is no better than a shitcoin pump and dump scheme. They just added an extra step of spending their victim's money on ASICs.

Even in the best case where the company is run well by honest people the customer still loses because of the underlying economics of mining that I described in the opening post. So not only is the customer acquiring bitcoin more slowly and at a higher price than a spot market purchase but you have also added trusted intermediaries to purchase, host, and maintain the hardware. When the hardware breaks the customer bleeds profit, hoping the hosting provider will fix it quickly and cheaply. Customers have very little transparency into this process and are utterly at the mercy of their hosting provider. It's just a terrible investment model, all things considered.

Purchasing hashrate from a proxy is a slightly better model because you abstract away the owning and operating of the hardware and just buy the end product: hashrate. It's still pretty inefficient, though, because you need to maintain an always-on proxy to shuttle those packets across the network. You have the trust the hasher to keep up their end of the bargain, which requires auditing the hashrate. The end user needs to have a pool account, which is probably KYC'd. The whole arrangement is complex, centralized and prone to disruption.

I worked at a mining startup building a really cool virtual cloud mining product. It would dynamically adjust the hashrate at the proxy to ensure precise delivery of the contracted amount of hash. And it worked! The tech stack was awesome but we got sunk by regulatory risk. There was no product market fit because A) mining is not profitable and B) regulatory barriers were too high. Only "accredited investors" were allowed to purchase contracts.

The Hashpool model is radically simplified from the customer's perspective. All of the mining hardware, hosting requirements, network traffic, and KYC risk is abstracted away from the end user. When you buy ehash, the shares have already been mined, packets delivered, and identities have been anonymized. You are literally just buying an anonymous contract with the mining pool to deliver bitcoin rewards. It is still a trusted system, but there is really only one thing that can go wrong: the pool doesn't deliver your payout. So find a pool you trust with a good track record and hash away.

And it will be self-hostable! If you can't find a pool you can trust, run it yourself! Be the KYC-free onramp you wish to see in the world. 🤙

Its coming. 100%

I bet you will see many robust options available in 2025.

low-interest fiat loans, with on-chain bitcoin as collateral

help the plebs get out of debt

thoughts?

I just finished reading Bitcoin Mining Economics by Daniel Frumkin. It's a good read! My biggest takeaway is that large mining farms are the Ghost of Bitcoin Past. Convertible debt offerings to buy bitcoin are the Ghost of Bitcoin Present. Smaller, more distributed mining is the Ghost of Bitcoin Future. Here's why.

Large mining operations are simply not profitable to run on a bitcoin standard. They never have been. After you spend all the capital to buy machines, site hosting, cooling infrastructure, and power purchase agreements (PPAs) you start your business of accumulating bitcoin deep in the red. In order to reach net positive profits you have to dig out of this debt hole AND earn a profit on top of it.

But ASICs depreciate rapidly and network difficulty continually explodes upward so mining farms are working against a very significant headwind. They are racing to accumulate a bitcoin stockpile before their investment depreciates. Frumkin runs the numbers, it almost never works out in real terms. You pretty much always get to keep more bitcoin in the long run by simply buying and holding with that upfront capital.

So why are there so many large mining farms? Because of fiat debt financing models. If you can get someone else to loan you the dollars to build out a farm you can win in the long run thanks to Gresham's Law.

It's the same fiat game every intelligent investor with an appetite for risk is playing. Get as much fiat denominated debt at the best terms possible that you can service without defaulting. Use that money to accumulate assets that increase in value. Denominate your liabilities in a depreciating unit of account and transfer all your wealth into appreciating assets. This is how the Cantillionaires benefit from the money printer. It's a story older than bitcoin, but the strategy is turbocharged with bitcoin's unbelievably rapid price appreciation.

This model has worked for 10 years with mining farms because the big money was too stupid to just buy and hold bitcoin. They weren't comfortable with this risky new asset. They wanted to see a business model with cashflow, financial prospectus, and, most importantly, assets to hold as collateral.

That's all changing now. Saylor has upended the model. Now, even mining farms are skipping the mining part and jumping straight to the Saylor strategy. Today Riot, operator of the largest mining farm in the world, announced they are raising half a billion dollars. Are they investing in ASICs? More mining sites? Research and development? lol not a chance. They are buying bitcoin. The dumb money phase is over. Smart money wins from here on out.

What does this mean for the mining industry? I don't have a crystal ball but I think a good educated guess is that the largest bitcoin mining farms will stop getting larger. The business of paying for electricity solely to mine bitcoin is going away. Bitcoin mining will enter an era where the only profitable way to mine is to make use of it's positive externalities: exhaust heat, demand response, and stranded energy.

The future is putting an ASIC in every water heater and HVAC unit. ASICs in every windmill and solar panel. ASICs on every oil well flare stack. ASICs on every new nuclear plant, but only until demand ramps up and a higher paying customer displaces them.

The declining block subsidy will reinforce this trend. As mining becomes less profitable, only the miners who don't rely on mining profits will survive.

In a nutshell: decentralization is coming. I am so fucking here for it.

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This place is ours. Bsky isn't.

What's clunky about it in Listr right now? Just too many steps?

AFAIK, you can add to lists quickly with Coracle and can't in Nostrudel.