Lumerin launches Bitcoin mining hashpower marketplace

0:00I'm ashon adderson from blockwest capital for investment pitch media today on the cryptocoin show we have Ryan condrin founder of Lumin Ryan welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time yeah thanks for having me on you're very welcome excited to dive into Larin Bitcoin mining hash power um you know I I know a lot about blockchain but the mining aspect of it and the hash rates

0:23it's very important piece of it um but I don't think I know one knows so I'm excited to dive into that today I'd love to start off by just learning a little bit more about what you and your team have built at Lumin and then we'll dive into all the details all right cool uh where where uh where would you like to start uh I mean we've been uh building the the Lumin protocol for the

0:44last two years now and uh we just actually launched the the proxy router on mainnet um back uh Tuesday so it's only just been a few days now so um you know I can start at the very beginning kind of what it is and how it functions and I guess we just go from there yeah that would be great you know just sort of a high level on what exactly is Lumin and how does it

1:05work cool so you know the the vision with Lumin is it's it's a very easy data pattern um it is uh meant to be a decentralized uh data stream routing system through smart contract engagements uh and the way we achieve that is by the Lumin node which is a peer-to-peer routing system um so what we've been building over the past two years is that ual proxy node that takes

1:31its uh commands from the smart contracts um and we've uh officially launched it on mainnet which is uh arbitrum one that is on Tuesday uh so what you can effectively do now is go to the Luman Marketplace uh which is all in kind of the the Lumin UI and you can select a hash power contract you can click purchase and once that uh purchase actually gets uh included in a block on

1:58the Chain uh the the sellers node will pick up the order and Route real hash power directly to your buyer's node um and you can mine with it so you can be anywhere in the world you don't need specialized hardware and you can uh buy real hash power in real time and you can mine with it so uh we're really decoupling the the location of the hardware and the control um in a very

2:23decentralized way M very cool and I know many people understand that trying to mine yourself is unfeasible and and costs a lot to try and do it competitively when you're when you're facing warehouses full of as6 trying to compete with something in your garage um but from what I understand Cloud mining is a a good alternative but there's also this decentralized uh Marketplace which

2:48which Luman is can you talk about the difference in in that in are you how are you providing Extra Value into uh purchasing hash power to do mining yeah so I mean you know I I I've done it in my garage you know in 2012 I originally was uh building GPU rigs in my garage and then eventually started buying as6 and running extension cords all over my house to to reach every

3:16single circuit and uh you know plug in as6 I think at one point uh I I went in the addition of my house and it was 130 degrees fahit in there um so I I've been through the the ringer with trying to build uh you know mines in my house and then working with miners at scale in facilities um and I've seen the infrastructure and the Opex um associated with all of it and it's

3:43substantial so it's not a an a reasonable or accessible thing to a lot of people in this world to be able to do that um you know we will have hot beds of Mining and you whether it be in Texas or Upstate New York or you know we we've heard uh area of South America and the Middle East now having really large mining facilities um and you just can't compete with that cheap power um but

4:09what you can do is you can build a a virtual mining Farm where you can spin up now virtual miners anywhere in the world um and that that's really the vision of Lumin is providing a virtualized environment so just as AWS revolutionized uh the the server and hosting industry by having a virtualized servers and uh tools and scaling mechanisms around that we want to

4:34provide the same thing U for mining incredible and yeah AWS did really revolutionize being able to spin up servers and and hosting your site but the one thing that makes this better is that it's more decentralized maybe you can talk about you know the decentralized nature and I know there's a lot of problems with web hosting with AWS that they control the internet and

4:55they sort of say and can do whatever they want um but that's not what blockch chain and web 3 is about um so I'm curious on you know sort of the decentralized nature of Lumar yeah so everything is uh brokered through smart contracts um so everything is fully open sourced and auditable uh when you interact with a seller uh through the Lumin Marketplace you can

5:21review the code yourself you can go in and you can look at the solidity contract and you can see exactly U what you're paying what you're paying for how it's going to be um enacted with the the Luman proxy router so um it's fully auditable uh it's very different uh than a centralized service that as you said can uh you know pull the plug at any point they can freeze assets they can um

5:46they they can uh do dispute resolution on behalf of a buyer or a seller um this is all governed by code so it's a a predetermined engagement um and that's it's very very different um and it it provides a lot of great freedoms and sovereignty in controlling of your data and your and your finances when you do a peer-to-peer system like this but it also provides a lot of uh complexities

6:12in trust and uh and then aspects of what happens when you have a bad actor or uh you know someone that is trying to uh manipulate the system or take advantage of the system um so you know be because of this you know you have a lot of very similar problems that you know say like someone like eBay actually solved um when they first launched you know where

6:38you have a buyer and a seller that don't necessarily trust each other and you might have a buyer saying that they bought something never received it or seller saying that they shipped something but they never really shipped it um you know and all these different engagements you know eBay has created a lot of different rules around um how they do resolution and some of is

6:58through PayPal now um but what's really interesting is we're kind of discovering the same uh type of engagements but now in a decentralized fashion so we're having to think through all the same you know uh engagement factors of a centralized Market but solve it in a decentralized trustless way which is not easy no it's not and it definitely is better to not have extra trusted parties

7:25but it can also make it more complicated you know I personally uh for some people it's a daunting task to uh unless they're very interested in it to try and figure out the inner workings of how the hash rate works and the profitability of it and such and then tackling on top of that the decentralized nature you know what if I don't know code or smart

7:44contracts how is Lumin making it easy to make it you know breaking down the barriers to entry to be able to start using this and and getting the hash power without having to go through a million hoops and to understand all the technical nature of it yeah now that's that's a great question because this this is a a big part of onboarding people into the mining

8:07ecosystem is you have to make it easy um and Mining historically has not been easy even for uh Tech veterans and people that know what they're doing it's it's still very difficult uh in a lot of regards um it's one thing to you know get the devices online it's another thing to even keep them online and hashing um so uh with Lumin the the goal was to make a very userfriendly

8:30interface um that was very intuitive um and even that was you know very difficult because there's things that we as a team um assume are very intuitive but it's because we've been mining and in industry for a long time so we really had to take a step back and uh start having uh people on the you know different marketing team and uh you know friends and family playing around with

8:55it that haven't been you know mining for the last decade so they can really give us honest feedback of what makes sense what doesn't make sense what are some of the terms and even uh messaging that we give inside the UI that doesn't make sense so that was the the first challenge um the Second Challenge is uh we're we're routing realtime data streams and a lot of computers come with

9:19firewalls and are sitting behind Wi-Fi routers and um so there there's port forwarding issues um that's actually been the biggest one to navigate um so we we've worked through it we have a lot of um you know how-to videos and guides on on how to you know set up port forwarding on your router or use enro or a similar service to do a VPN tunnel um as the Lumin uh proxy matures we want to

9:47start baking some of that software into the install um so you don't have to set up that stuff manually and I think that will be kind of a natural progression um of the ecosystem is having all that built in um for now I say that's one of the largest hurdles um and then lastly um the team at Titan has uh actually launched a lightning pool which is uh we haven't

10:11actually uh seen that anywhere before and I thought you know what like how do we make this as easy as possible for people to mine and another sticking point was uh people would have to point their hash rate at a mining pool and a lot of people have never set up a mining pool account before um and that can be a little intimidating if you've never done

10:29that and you don't really understand that you know all of a sudden you're in a you're in a decentralized ecosystem buying hash power and now you're being asked to set up a username and password at some thirdparty service to actually um use that hash power somewhere um so the the team of Titan Titan um launched a lightning mining pool which is at lightning. titan. and all you do is you

10:53enter your lightning address um and we baked that into the the Luman proxy so when you're setting it up if you simply give the lummer proxy your lightning address it will forward the hash rate onto the Titan lightning pool and you will actually real time stream SATs um as you uh stream the hash power um so the end result was uh was actually a very cool effect where it's it's almost

11:19instantaneous where you you load the Lumin wallet you purchase a contract you see incoming sockets on your lumer and wallet and then all of a sudden you see see Satoshi hitting your lightning wallet um and it's all within you know minutes so it's it's a it's a very cool effect you're you're not waiting for Bitcoin payouts you're not waiting for you know contracts to resolve it's you

11:43know it gets picked up on the Chain within 15 seconds you see contracts or incoming sockets hitting your your wallet shortly after and then you see Satoshi hitting your wallet shortly after that um the the instantaneousness of it is is almost like magic uh you know almost it's there still some some technical sticking points but we're working on those yeah and know it

12:06definitely all pays off when you see you know SATs coming into your wallet and you're like just satoshi's coming in quickly and I think that's part of the beauty of lightning wallet that a lot of people have yet to discover yet so that's a cool integration there uh Ryan and now now that we've sort of explained quite a bit I want to go back to the major announcement that lumr made both

12:26the arbitrum network and the launch can you just talk a little bit more about that yeah so you we we've been building and testing on ethereum test net um for well over a year now uh we released the ethereum test net to the community back in March so the community has been playing with it uh we have you know over 8,000 people in our telegram Channel um

12:50we have lots of people in the Discord and we've had over 16,000 people sign up for the test net um testing um that that's great uh we only have so much capacity um so unfortunately even though you have 16,000 people uh jostling to to play with it there's only only so much hash power we could actually give away uh During the testnet period um it gave us

13:12a lot of really important insights uh into scaling and the load that these proxies could handle uh which is actually uh far better than what we were initially um anticipating so uh the software is incredibly sound incredibly well tested um but it doesn't mean there there aren't bugs you know we we still have some um engagement issues with uh the way the validator system works and

13:36the Fulfillment system works um but we're working through those um one at a time with a lot of great feedback from the community and uh a big part of that and what's what's made this possible is by moving from ethereum test net and ethereum Main net onto arbitrum one uh so if you've played with arbitrum one at all you you'll quickly see that it's far

13:58cheaper to transact on the network and it's far faster to transact on the network so um we we found it to be incredibly useful and we think it's going to be a really great move for our community uh to be able to buy you know smaller amounts of hash power in in smaller time allotments um because the economics are just more sound that you know with with uh lower gas fees um so

14:24you know that that's that's in short uh we launched last Tuesday on arpm one that's our first main net release um because it's all written in solidity we can actually really release a Marketplace on any evm um there have been some talks on doing a binance release and some other uh Network releases uh for now we're just focused on the arbitrum build but it doesn't

14:46mean that members of the community can't uh Fork it and launch it wherever they want wow that's very exciting congratulations and uh it's it's always fun when you have so many people joining in on the test net phase that you realize that this is something that people want you know we need to SCA we need to be able to scale and make sure know the sites aren't going down because

15:06it's too much traffic it's it's a good problem to have so uh that's great to hear for the team at Lumin and you know I wanted to touch back on uh just Mining and you know we talked at the beginning about how you went through the tedious process of setting up all the hardware and stuff and it's not just that of actually getting Hardware it's just like

15:27the investment that you have to make in purchasing Hardware to understand you know the break even level and the profitability of mining um there's different factors that can affect profitability of mining whether it's like the price of Bitcoin or the competitiveness of the hash power can you talk a little bit about you know the profitability in without obviously with

15:49this decentralized way you don't have to go purchase Hardware yourself uh so that's great you know that lowers a lot of initial costs but what are sort of some of the things that affect the profitability of how profitable you can be using a hash power Marketplace yeah so so profitability is um tricky on resale right because if uh the hash power is is profitable to the

16:15the minor itself then they they wouldn't sell it uh on the marketplace right um so there there's two reasons why a minor might sell their hash power uh one is they want to hedge their risk so they're going to forward sell their hash power um to someone that wants to buy out into the future um that you know that would be worthwhile to a minor and they might

16:37sell at a discount um the other reason why they would want to sell is um at a premium uh so they might want to sell in smaller chunks uh if someone's willing to pay a five or 10% premium on the hash power uh the the buyers in this case we would see um you know someone that wants to transition their um web 3 tokens or erc20 tokens out of an evm system and

17:05they want to move it into a Bitcoin system or Bitcoin Network in a seamless way right um and this might be in a decentralized way an anonymous way there's currently no other way that I know of uh to acquire Bitcoin an truly anonymously uh than through mining um everything else has to go through some type of central system you have to receive the Bitcoin from someone or from

17:30somewhere um the only truly Anonymous way of receiving Bitcoin is through the block reward um so because of that um you know if there's if there's people that truly want to do a a seamless transition or Anonymous transition out of a web 3 defi ecosystem into real Bitcoin uh Lumin currently is the only path for that um and that would be sold at a premium um from miners so these are

17:59these are the the two sides of it um what we really what we really see is uh there's going to be most likely several hash power marketplaces launch um and they could all be on top of Lumin uh it's really an open proxy um it so it can be pointed at um any set of marketplaces um but we we foresee that there would be a kyc AML uh Marketplace maybe even for North America um where

18:27more publicly traded miners would buy and sell hash power in in a more trusted type environment um we see more Global uh unregulated Market that would be more Anonymous more of the Wild West um that's a little trickier because it's uh um you would have to limit the scope of each of the contracts to limit the amount of trust between the buyer and the seller um but the the game mechanics

18:53around a open Global Marketplace are going to be a lot uh more complicated than a a more trust kyc AML Marketplace um but we do really see in the near future we'll most likely have uh different types of marketplaces um popping up on top of the Luman protocol uh depending on the the different groups of users that want to use it very interesting Ryan and and

19:17what is the best way for people to learn more about uh these kinds of marketplaces and to try out the new Luman arbitrum update yeah so you can uh check it out at lin. that's l m r i n. um it's an easy download um you can Bridge your tokens over to arbitrum send them to your wallet and play around with the marketplace um all inide a easy to use un uh interface so it's all kind of

19:47baked in in one install um the team works really really hard to to uh make it a a very intuitive interface um would love for you guys to join the telegram uh to reach out to us with feedback um and definitely get involved in the project um you know I often say that it doesn't matter how good the technology is if there's no Community um you can have the the best technology on Earth

20:10and if no one's using it then it's not going to go anywhere likewise you could have the worst technology on Earth and a ton of people using it and a very vivacious community and uh it will it will last um you know a lot of people will will point at Dogecoin as the the leading indicator of this right at the end of the day we're we're making decentralized networks and a network is

20:34people um so you are going to have uh the the most success in your project if you can engage a community and keep uh the community involved and that's really what we're working on is we want the community to get involved we want the community to give us feedback to get involved in the marketing and the development and the spreading of the word that um hash power equals freedom

20:58and and uh if if uh if you want to truly uh interact with the Bitcoin ecosystem if you truly um believe in uh freedom in finance and sovereignty and wealth uh then please come join us at Luman get involved um and help us keep uh hash power decentralized and free awesome wise words Ryan and thank you so much I will leave the link to the Lumin platform in the notes below as

21:26well as the telegram and the other socials that mentioned uh thank you for you know keeping the principles of decentralization in the marketplace uh I'm excited to go check it out again after this new arbitrum update all the best with everything lummer in moving forward and let's follow up in the near future cool thanks