Mise en open source de l’écosystème du minage Bitcoin | Bitcoin 2026

Thank you for the kind introduction. Yeah, this is going to be exciting. We're here to talk about open sourcing the Bitcoin mining stack. A little bit different than what you may see walking around the trade show here today. But without further ado, why don't we start at the end and just let everyone introduce themselves? Michael, I'll start with you. What you're working on? Well, first, should I actually mention what the 256 Foundation is probably? >> Go ahead. >> Yeah. Okay. So, the 256 Foundation, there's a lot of supporters in the audience. Thank you all for being here. is a 501c3 nonprofit organization doiciled in Nashville, Tennessee with a sole mission of open sourcing the Bitcoin mining stack. So for anyone who's unfamiliar, these Bitcoin miners, these the last panel they were talking about how power hungry they are, how hot they are managing all this stuff. I mean really inside that shoe box, most people don't know what's going on and it's a closed black box um per the analogy. And so this foundation, these core developers we have up here on stage with me today are are working on the core pillars that make up a Bitcoin miner and how we can open source that bring it back to Bitcoin mining or Bitcoin's open source don't trust verify ethos. So I'm excited to dive into it. Schnitle, tee us up with what you got, what you're working on with the foundation and why it's important. >> Yeah, so my name is Michael or most people know me under the name Schnitzle. Um, I'm building the Libra board, an open- source control board that allows you to connect all kind of hashboards to a Bitcoin miner. And, um, as I've built a lot of systems where I want to heat a house, I want to heat a pool. One of the major issues with the existing control boards is you can't really connect any additional temperature sensors or pumps and so stuff on it. So, what I'm building with the Libra board is a control board that allows you to do that. So you can connect temperature um sensors, flow sensors to really control the miner for what you really need because in the PL mining scene or like in the heat reuse the main product is actually the heat. We just heard before the main heat is a byproduct. In our world, heat is a main product and so we need to control the miners. We need to change the wattage. We need to do all of this and and only an open source control board allows you to do that. Scott, I think most people know who you are because of the Bitax project. Why don't you talk about BitAx and then what you're working on with 256 and how for the new the newcomer how those are different projects, right? Is one just a bigger version than the other. >> Sure. Yeah. Thank you. My name is Scott. I I'm the instigator of the Bitax project. Started that a few years ago. It's a For those who don't know, it's a open source home miner. Uh you can just get it, build it, run it. uh the first uh ever open- source ASIC minor which came like a decade after uh AS6 were introduced which is kind of ridiculous but it's an open source minor um the first minor that you can truly own uh you can own all of it you can be a self- sovereign Bitcoin minor uh which is you know pretty important in Bitcoin but when I when I heard about the 256 Foundation started by uh Rod an econo alchemist at a Bitcoin park I was like, oh my gosh, this is my jam. This is my jam. I I I'm incredibly passionate about um open source and and the freedom that it provides. And so to have a foundation that is dedicated to advancing that very cause allin. So I I've joined the board of the 256 Foundation now with with Tyler and um I'm also working on a project for the 256 Foundation uh called Ember 1. It's a an open source hashboard. And so you're asking about the differences. So Bitax is a small, you know, relatively low hash rate minor. Uh just has a single chip. There's new models that have multiple chips, but it's it's a it's a a self-contained minor, right? It runs the firmware. It connects over Wi-Fi. You just kind of plug it in and it goes. Uh Ember One is is a hashboard, right? So this is just a component in a bigger minor. Uh it's a part of a system that makes a minor. It it has it has higher hash rate. It uses more power. But more importantly, what this the goal with Ember one is to be a uh reference design, right? So people can take this design and change it and and build it into the form factor that they need like to make, you know, a water heater or a space heater or whatever you can dream up, right? So this is a fully open- source uh hashboard with you know how to interface with these AS6 electrically, mechanically and meant to be a springboard to design uh bigger and better systems that are going to you know properly decentralize Bitcoin mining. >> Yeah. I think the analogy that comes to mind for me as you were explaining is okay imagine no one knew how to build a car um and there were RC cars, little toys like in a little little electric RC car. Maybe that's the Bitax. It's an RC car. It works. It does the thing. It drives around. But then there's these really awesome hobbyist RC cars that will have a tiny little 40 CIC centimeter V8 engine and run off gasoline and have a transmission and have a steering column. All they have all the parts a real car has. And that's kind of the analogy that I'm viewing here for the core pillar parts of the 256 fixation, which is we're not building a mining product. We're not building a system that's intended to go into Rackspace, right? We're building reference designs to say these are all the pieces of the puzzle that make up a Bitcoin miner. They're open source. Have at it, use it, reference it, as Scott said, so that you can go hack it, build it, work on the stuff like Michael was talking about at the start of the panel. But to control all of this, we need software. And I'm excited to have Ryan here, who is a core developer of Moja. Why don't you talk to us about that? >> Sure. I am Ryan. I'm the lead developer for Mujina, which is the open-source Bitcoin mining firmware that runs in the 256 Foundation stack. So, over the last year, we've been building out the core of the software um and hardware support. First, for Bitax boards, you can put Bitaxes into a special pass through mode where they don't they're no longer self-contained. They just act like dumb hash boards. We use those as development boards for for software developers. And then uh hardware support for all the for the 256 foundation hardware. So running on the Libre board control board and driving the Ember 1 hashboards. Um but our ambitions for Mojina are actually quite big. Uh it is the one piece of the stack that's not entirely meant just to be a reference design. Uh we intend for Mjina to be the Linux kernel project of Bitcoin mining. So right now we're working on support for the S19 um being able to drive S19 hashboards and be installed on the stock S19 control board. And uh our goal is to see Mujina running everywhere we can possibly port it to and to be the open- source alternative to firmware that comes from the vendors themselves and also the third party firmwares because we believe everyone should be running open source software on their hardware. >> Yeah, let's double click on this. This is something that I thought was funny when I was brainstorming with the founder of one of the co-founders of the 256 Foundation, Econo Alchemist, and we were talking about how 99.9% of miners on Earth are closed source black boxes. You can't verify your shares are actually going to the pool. You can't verify no one's scraping off the top through the firmware, some of your your hash rate, all this stuff. And then on the flip side at the home scale, the Bitax, you've got these open source miners and it's it's actually like 180 degrees the opposite of the computing space in general where my MacBook Pro is closed source, right, and proprietary in the consumer computing space, but all of AWS runs on Linux and it's backwards. Why is it such um an important problem challenge to overcome for enterprise hash rate? Let's talk about the bigger guys because I think a lot of folks think that we're just tinkering little desktop toys, right? No, we view this as a necessary step for the future of Bitcoin mining in its entirety across all scales. Anyone jump in on this wherever? I think it's important to discuss more. Yeah, it it it you know it's great. It's great for hobbyists, right? You can just build things. I think you'll talk about what's going on here, right? You can just build things at the hobbyist scale. You know, we got some rad builders out here who are just taking this stuff and and building it. you know what they want to see. But I think that it also scales all the way up to the largest miners. To me, it seems absolutely ridiculous that you would have a company mining uh millions of dollars in Bitcoin a month entirely dependent on closed source firmware from a proven sketchy vendor that you just don't have any control over. Like how can you how can you justify that you get all of your revenue from a tool that you don't have control over? That to me is absolutely ridiculous. Um, and you can't improve on it, right? You a minor, you know, they know their operation the best. And so to have, you know, like, you know, like a an F1 team, right? And it's like they have to race these cars, but they can't change them. They don't know how they work. That's absolutely ridiculous. No, they need to know how to adjust these things to to get their advantage to win. That's a very similar situation with a Bitcoin miner. And so uh yeah I think I think Mina and all the all the products from the 256 foundation all the projects can provide immense value to miners of all sizes and uh you know all scales plus there are examples like if you look in the software world you mentioned AWS um Microsoft is actually the biggest open-source contributor to Linux in terms of money because they realized that they depend now so much on Linux like their Azure data centers which is one of their main revenue source. They run 70 to 80% Linux. So they decided to invest a lot of money or donate money to the Linux Foundation. Um the same with Facebook, they had a problem that the hardware in the data centers was a massive issue. Like every provider, every vendor that doesn't fit together. So they decided on a standard that was open source and said if you want to have your hardware inside the Facebook data center, you need to base it on this open source spec. And now there's an open hardware foundation where Facebook started, but now all these companies are all working together to make open source data centers. And like Scott said, there's all these examples out there. And somehow in the Bitcoin mining, we decided to not do any of this, right? Bitcoin is open source. It works because it is open source. Without that, Bitcoin would have never taken off. But somehow in the mining world, we ended up listening to two companies. And that's what we're trying to fix. And it's literally happening everywhere else except in gift Bitcoin. And I think it's just a matter of time. >> This is super interesting because you could everyone's very aware like there is a standard for Bitcoin the protocol running in the node. But the standard the status quo in mining. How did we get here? >> I mean I I think the reason why we're here and why a lot of Bitcoin mining is proprietary is is just because we're early. A lot of these things start off proprietary. um you know the initial mining as6 that were built is incredibly expensive and a lot of capital had to be invested in it and so it sort of it became a proprietary thing but it it is inevitable for these things to go open source we've seen it you know across the internet you know Microsoft used to make the entire web stack right web servers databases all of that stuff and once viable open source alternatives come like people just drop the proprietary stuff really quick once they see the power they're Okay, I can actually understand how this works. I'm free to make the changes that I want to see to start and you know run my profitable business on top of this with full control over how it works. So I think you know the the sort of proprietary landscape that we're in with mining right now it's it's just because we're early. It's just because we're early and once once these you know like real concrete examples of this of what can be done of the exponential progress that can be made on top of open source once that becomes you know obvious to everyone it is is we're going to look back on this and be like what were we thinking if we even remember it. >> It's the same arc the computer industry took. We're on that same arc, just shifted, delayed. Like you say, we're early, >> which is should be exciting because it means you have an opportunity to make a crapload of money if you're early. Um, yeah, right. Your monopoly is my opportunity is how it feels a little bit, which is exciting big time. Um, >> Michael, I want you to talk through what you got on stage and and building off that comment of showing what you can do with an open source stack. I I would like some insight as to how quickly you could put some of that stuff together, AI and vibe coding and how that's impacted what you're able to do, something you can't really do with closed source firmware, for example. Um, and and how we could extrapolate maybe this little desktop toy that is demonstrating the open source mining stack to say what a a mega miner might be interested in integrating into the setup. >> Yeah. Yeah. So the what we have here is we call it the Doomax. Um in the whole Bitcoin open source mining world we come like we spend a lot of time in naming things. Um it will become clear why it's called that but the history is that like I build hardware so and this hardware needs to be validated. So I sit hours in front of a computer create a PCB. We send it off. A manufacturer builds it. We put all these chips on. And there is this time that you're just going to have to power it on and hope that there's no magic smoke coming out. Luckily, it didn't. But the the Libra board has a lot of connectors, right? Like I mentioned, you can connect a display, you can connect temperature sensors, fans, there are different inputs and outputs. So, I have to test all of these. So, I have at my home, I have like all these different connections and and I tested it all and I showed it off. We have like a group chat and um I was like, it shouldn't be possible to actually show all four projects on that we have, right? Because we have two hardware projects. There's the hashboard and the control board. There's the firmware and there's the pool. >> Yeah. Talk about Hydropool. We have >> Yeah. So, the fourth project of 256 Foundation is an open-source mining pool. Um, an SV1 SV2 pool and um it's called Hydropool. And so, I was like, wait, if I have a control board that has Linux, I should be able to run and install everything on it. So, what this is is basically all four projects. So there's the control board, there's a bit as the hashboard. There's an bitcoin node. It's it own bitcoin node running on it that talks to the pool and the pool talks to machina and machina talks to the bidex.ex. So it's all four projects in one. And because we're walking around like and I cannot carry a cable with me. I also put a battery in it. So um it's a fully Bitcoin miner, completely autonomous with batteries. All it needs is Wi-Fi. It has its own Bitcoin node and pool and everything. Um, I added some displays to it. And one of the things on front here is I have like um I'm going to get there to the AI part, but there's like a display that shows me like different stats in terms of how much it's m um how much is mining? And as usual for a person that grew up playing Doom, the question is whenever you see a small display somewhere on a device, you have this question, does it play Doom? And so if you press the middle button six times, which is hard to do here, um it's probably hard from see from the stage, but you can see it later. I will be back there. You can literally play Doom on a Bitcoin node now. So while you're waiting for the block to be mined, you can play Doom and that's why it's called the Doomx. So, but Doom Doom obviously is awesome. You can run it on anything. It's an example though that you can modify anything to your liking for this setup. >> So what is awesome right because this is all open source. So we have open source hardware, open source software. I literally pointed this to cloud code or I point a cloud code to it and said hey here is a Bitcoin miner. It runs this open source software and this hardware. Here's a display. Can you please install Doom on it? And it took 3 minutes and later on I played Doom. Like that's literally how long it took. And that was only possible because like everything is open source. It can see the software, the hardware, it can figure out how to talk to it and all these things. Now, obviously in a big mining institute, yes, you don't want to play Doom. I mean, even would be cool though, but imagine, right, like um the the electrical grid company launches a new API for load demand or like some kind of thing and today in a closed source, you literally have to talk to your mining firmware or your pool or your fleet manager, >> call your rep. >> Yes. and hope that they're going to implement it and then like it just takes weeks, months or sometimes years to integrate into these systems. When everything is open source, you just point your agents to it and saying, "Hey, here is an open source hardware. There's the API. I want you whenever the price of the energy is below so much or whatever. I want you to turn on the minor and turn them off and an agent can literally build this." And that's I proved it here, right? It took me 3 minutes to run Doom. It will probably take you maybe an hour to deploy over a fleet of thousand miners, automated new integrations into new APIs, the weather systems, whatever. And that's only possible because it's open source because this AI needs to understand, right, how this is built. And in a closed source environment, it will not be it doesn't have access to the source. And yeah, that was when this happened the first time and I literally just like said, "Hey, how about Doom?" And he built it in 3 minutes. That's where like the spark went off or the light bulb went off. like this is incredible. >> If you if you've used miners for, you know, more than just a little bit, it it becomes very uh apparent very quickly that there's some things that could change, right? Depends on how you're running them, whether you're in a a massive data center or you've got a small operation where you're getting your electricity from. I feel like there's always, you know, matter what level you're at, there's always something like, man, it it would be cool to to do it like this or to try this out. Like, I've got this idea. like I wish I could just try it out and see if that improves my operation, if that improves my profitability, if that improves the uptime. These things always come up and I think what's so cool about this and you know having it be open source, having it be something you can point AI at is like you can just do those things and the time to like get a proof of concept and try it out and test your idea is getting shorter and shorter now. And it's this this is what leads to exponential progress, right? is you you do that maybe you tell some people about it someone sees how you did that they're like oh I got a new idea I want to do it like that the rate of of the acceleration is going to just get you know face melting >> and that was specifically right we see all these big miners trying to integrate the AI and Bitcoin like it used to be that they just ran Bitcoin miners now they run AI data centers but you the AI is not using the same amount of energy so you literally like you need to do um adapt your Bitcoin mining usage to offload basically the energy that the AI is not using and that needs a lot of algorithms analyzing things like that and that's only going to be possible with like automated AI systems that analyze how much like all the LLMs the GPS are using and automatically modulating this on top of the Bitcoin miner. So yeah, as this transition is going on where the Bitcoin miners now not only run Bitcoin but also other stuff, the fact that they can run open source and modify it and automate it is going to allow what like you said, it's going to go exponentially faster and that's good for the network. That's good for Bitcoin. Like we want to be the last resort of energy use, right? That's what Bitcoin is so good about. So integrating with AI and who else who knows what else, right? We're talking about solar panels that use too much energy that you need automatically change the v the wattage of the miner based on how much the sun is shining like all these systems where we want to integrate Bitcoin in it. It's going to only be possible with open source. >> Welcome to predict the world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual bits. Predict where everything is a market. The freedom and the accessibility is super interesting right now. I think it's why it's brought a lot of us non-traditional miners like myself. I see some others in the audience that don't have a thousand machines. Maybe they're just trying to build a space heater or a water heater or whatever. And we really had to build these open source building blocks or we were reliant on them so that we can turn the minor into what we need, right? The four core pillars being the hashboard, the control board, the firmware and the pool. Um, once you unlock those four pieces of the puzzle, you can kind of craft them and massage them to a different size or use case or application than you need. But I want to hear Ryan, you talk about the fact that aside from the freedom and the accessibility and the new ideas, open- source also turns into inevitably like better quality, better performing software. I I imagine that has largely to do with the fact that you basically get the whole world to be your developer base for free. Um, can you talk a little bit about that? Like where we're at now with Mojino, for example, and the long-term vision for it, it it's just going to be selective because it's going to be the best firmware is I think the goal. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of people there are a lot of reasons people prefer or like open source over closed source. Um it's generally, you know, are you paying a dev fee for your box over there? No. So it is free in sort of that sense. Free as in beer sense. Um a lot of people come for the the freedom to do whatever you want. Uh to not have it be owned by a corporate and controlled by a corporation. Um, and that that has some tangents like, you know, do you want your business to be dependent on software that's written by somebody else that you don't have control over? What if they what if they have different priorities than you? What if they go out of business? Um, but also open source is just tends to be a superior development model for software. Um, and that's why we call it the Linux kernel of Bitcoin mining. I mean that's that's that's what has happened with the Linux kernel. You've got companies that are fierce competitors in the marketplace in their area of specialization. you know, uh, Samsung versus Qualcomm, you know, are rivals in the chip industry, but they're collaborators on the layer of their stack that, you know, the Linux kernel layer, you know, they're they get together at conferences, they share ideas, they share code, um, because they view that as the common base commodity layer substrate of the industry and then they go off and build their special verticals on top of it. So there's no reason that that is what we foresee happening with mining uh mining firmware. You know, the core pieces of this should be shared. And you know, you get people that are uh competitors today out on this floor contributing their specialties, you know, their driver for their chip or their special cooling thing. And we, as we mentioned before, you know, it starts to kind of snowball into standards, you know. So now if you if you show up with a a power supply solution that you want to be able to sell into these different things, well you want to make sure it works with everything else. So you build a driver for it for Mujina, you know, unless you have that common software layer. You can't get all of those those feedback loops uh working in your favor. But that once you have open source software that's sort of becoming the standard, then you have a place for everyone to show up, plug in, and uh it just accelerates the industry. That's what we want to do. >> Yeah, Scott, you you speak of this. Well, open source does not mean you can't make money, right? Why don't you talk on that for a minute and then we'll talk about the very exciting competition going on here with the 256 Foundation, but let's close out and remind folks that open source does not mean nonprofit. >> Yeah, that that's a really important point. And I think people get this misconception that because you know we're giving away everything that we've developed free as in beer that uh you know you can't start a business around this. I mean we've seen this you know on top of the the Linux stack uh with AWS shown that that's not true. But you know open source is not a vow of poverty. You can make money working on open source software. You can make money deploying open source software improving on it committing back to it. um you know it it just because the software is free it it doesn't imply that you can't make money on it. Um because the software you know itself it needs to run on something right it needs to run on hardware which will always have a price right you can always take hardware and combine it into a a product and and you know mark that up and sell that but the the software is just a component of that too right so you can build products you can build services you can make tons of money and you know you don't have to uh necessarily start from the ground developing it right so your time to market becomes significantly shorter with open source. I mean, think about if you if you were going to make a computer, you know, if you had to make the chip, the CPU, and the OS, and the kernel and stuff, it's just an insane insane level of development that basically only Apple has pulled off. So, you know, it it takes an an absurd amount of capital, time, and money to get to that place. And so, I think this this is a springboard for very profitable endeavors is absolutely a reality. And just think about how exciting the computing space has become because Intel sells their chips. AMD sells their chips. Nvidia makes graphics cards. AMD has their own graphics cards. They end up in all these different front form factors from desktops to laptops to tablets, etc. Right? You pick up the pieces and you build what you want. And it's going to be really exciting to see what changes, what comes out of the mining industry, what the status quo becomes. I think the current lay of the land is about to change drastically. But I want to finish here in the last minute talking about a very exciting competition that was announced this morning by Fred Teal from MEA. Mea >> largest solo miner. Yeah. >> Oh yeah. >> Largest solo miner. So they don't run a pool. They just solo mine. Big um publicly traded mining company. They started the MEA Foundation. Their booth is actually just a little bit um behind the stage here. And it's a an or an organization aimed to promote open source software, Bitcoin education, funding developers, the whole like. and they're kickstarting this foundation with a competition where three organizations are in competition depending votes from you conference attendees and those voting online to win $100,000. So whichever organization gets the most votes in the next 2 days will be gifted this $100,000 to support their initiative and the 256 Foundation is one of the three in competition. So we'll kind of be hanging out there throughout the rest of the conference hit or miss. You can come find us there or around the conference. Is there anything you guys want to say about this competition? >> Foundation.mra.com/vote. >> Yes, got the URL. Um, so go in there and vote. It's one per email, so use all your emails. Um, or get your agent to spin up a bunch of emails. Um, no, we're not doing that. >> Vote early, vote often, >> and and be excited and see what you can come check out. Definitely come check out the Doomax that Schnitzel's carrying around this week, right? Yep, it's around. Yeah, >> I have enough batteries for the whole week. >> All our stuff's on GitHub. Check it out. The word. Yes. So, that that's actually worth noting. It's all this stuff works and it exists. >> It all works. Like, it's coming together. All the projects work. 256foundation.org. We got a brand new website. >> Yep. New website. Um, >> sharp. >> We solo mined a block during a Teaash event January of 2025. So, that's actually how we a little bit of lore how we kickstarted the funding of these developers and the organization. Um, so go check out the website, find us on offstage, uh, and definitely check out the mayor booth and and make sure to vote to support us in the competition. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville. July 2027.