Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Max Guise, a team member from Block’s Proto division, joins to talk about the company’s new ASIC chip. A veteran of Block, Guise has worked on everything from the Proto mining ASIC, to Square’s point-of-sale, and its hardware wallet Bitkey. During the discussion, Guise gives us a brief history of Proto’s origins, discusses the challenges of designing (and manufacturing and marketing!) a bitcoin mining ASIC, provides a timeline for the Proto ASIC rollout, and even graces us with a demo of the chip!
Timestamps:
00:00 Start
03:21 Max bio
03:56 Working at Square & CashApp
04:58 Building the point of sale product
06:20 Building hardware
09:48 Genesis of Proto
12:33 Open development
13:37 The team
14:59 What is Proto
16:59 Selling chips
19:56 Closed sourced firmware
21:38 Lifecycle examination
23:32 Market strategy
24:33 Financing
25:05 Hashrate as payment
26:16 Deployment
28:29 When new rig?
28:59 Ecosystem of products
30:13 Other components
30:58 Working with competing miners
Published twice weekly, "The Mining Pod" interviews the best builders and operators in the Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining landscape. Subscribe to get notifications when we publish interviews on Tuesday and a news show on Friday!
