THE MINING POD: Block’s Proto ASIC With Max Guise

For today’s show, we speak with Max Guise about Block’s ASIC miner, and we even get a sneak peak of the new miner! 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!  👉Enjoying the show? Check out our newsletter at miningpod.blockspace.media! 👉 Check out Bitcoin Season 2 and The Gwart Show! Follow our hosts on Twitter: @wsfoxley, @cbspears, @AsILayHodling, @MatthewKimmell - Thank you to our sponsor, CleanSpark, America’s Bitcoin miner! "The Mining Pod" is produced by Sunnyside Honey Inc. with Senior Producer Damien Somerset. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.