"Confessions of a Crypto Miner" - Tishampati Dhar (LCA 2022 Online)

(Tishampati Dhar) This presentation covers the personal journey of an individual in mining and contributing to the Bitcoin open-source community.

It was a sunny morning in 2011 when I first became aware of the existence of Bitcoin. I was strolling down Salamanca in Hobart, doom scrolling twitter, one of the folks in the OSGi community I was part of back then posted something along the lines of "Don't believe the naysayers, Bitcoin will be back to $1".

I wanted to figure out what to this Bitcoin thing was and got nerd sniped straight into the abyss. I installed a CPU miner, it was very slow, so I got myself a few GPU's (may be 20). Then some FPGA's and brushed off my university VHDL. I joined a mining pool, eligius, both from the mining client, bfgminer, and in person on Freenode. Something in the name and my Catholic boys school upbringing resonated. I went onto meet Luke-jr who was checking in Bible verses on the blockchain and persisting it everywhere. I also met a whole cabal of people writing software, firmware, gateware and designing PCB's and ASIC's to make all this work. I was there for the ASIC boom and the first batch of antminers I ordered were delivered to the right street name and number, but the wrong postcode. DHL probably owes me a house now for the lost revenue.

I stopped mining when the energy costs became too high. My interests pivoted to energy monitoring. When all is said and done Bitcoin is perhaps the most successful open source project other than Linux itself. I made good friends and acquaintances along the way, learnt more than I cared about regarding cryptography, financial systems, hardware manufacturing and supply chains. Hope others can approach this with the same curiosity, rather than greed and build their knowledge.

https://lca2022.linux.org.au/schedule...

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Sun Jan 16 16:40:00 2022 at Kia Ora Theatre