March 29, 2024 · Block Height 836770 · Bitcoin Price $70K!

You made it to Friday, congrats

Even though Charlie said we were talking about Runes, this week we’re talking about the Digital Wildcatter’s event in Houston, Energizing Bitcoin. Runes alpha will now be sent on Monday (we promise!)

Quick Hits

• Bitcoin miner Cleanspark opened up its December ATM, adding $300 million to the original $500 million agreement.

• Marathon Digital flexed its block template prowess with the formation of the capital letter ‘M’ in a block it mined.

• BOB announces $10m raise led by Castle Island Ventures

• Casey Rodarmor publishes documentation on the Runes protocol

Chart of the Week

Data shows that MEV has yet to have a major impact on Bitcoin. The chart below by Domo plots the proportion of daily fees attributed to the incremental fees of transactions whose fee rate is 50% above the median rate.

Marathon’s Big Week

This week, The Mining Pod headed down to Houston for the annual ‘Energizing Bitcoin’ conference hosted by the gang at Digital Wildcatters.

Mostly consisting of energy talks, Marathon Digital stole the show this week by not only creating a block with it’s signature ‘M’ logo in a Bitcoin block, but also releasing both a 2 phase immersion Bitcoin mining setup and a new control board.

2 Phase immersion uses liquids to cool Bitcoin mining ASICs. Heat from the ASIC chips vaporizes the liquid, with the gas then circulated out of the enclosure. Once cooled, the gas re-enters the system as a liquid to cool the ASICs again.

Listen: The Largest Immersion Mine In North America

Between Ordinals infrastructure, new immersion tech, and control boards, we’d say Marathon is living up to its ideal of a completely vertically integrated Bitcoin miner.

What comes next? Likely a lot of Marathon Digital salesman for its mining products (immersion, control boards); perhaps a good revenue diversification play going into halving if they sell units. However, there is a lot of skepticism around 2 Phase immersion mining, not to mention the mining firmware game is fairly dominated by one big operator, Vnish.

For Marathon’s more bespoke mining activities like Ordinals and blocktemplate construction, we’d put our money on Marathon cooking up partnerships with NFT collections, exchange UTXO consolidation, and entertainment similar to the recent French Montana announcement. That part of the market is ripe for picking.

Marathon has all the world to gain by getting celebrities and the like to shill its logo across Instagram.

Links we liked

Article: Bitcoin Optech: Fee Sniping

Tweet: Memes are the future. MEV are the echoes of the past

Tweet: How do Runes Work

Blockspace Podcasts

🎙️Making Energy Markets Efficient With Alan Schroeder

(YouTube) Alan Schroeder of Synota joins The Mining Pod to go through the ins-and-outs of the energy credit system and how the Lightning Network can make it more efficient through real time settlement for energy usage.

🎙️BitPACs on Bitcoin with Tribe

(Youtube) BitPACs are the new DAOs, but on Bitcoin! We chat with Dillon Healy of Tribe, a BitPAC tool that allows users to group custody bitcoin assets, make Bitcoin proposals, and more!

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